Hades Developers React to 25 Minute 'Fresh File' Speedrun

[Music] hello everybody i am amir rao i'm the studio director of supergiant games and i work on uh some of the design aspects of our games and tune them and i'm here with greg cassaven the creative director for supergiant games hello i work on the narrative design and collaborate with amir on a bunch of other stuff yeah and so we're here to watch a speedrun of our game and not just any speed run a fresh file speed run yeah and that it's going to this is this is for irene playing right so someone someone uh for whom this is not their first rodeo so we will see what we can expect uh here but yeah starting starting from a fresh save means uh the the character zagreus here is as weak as he can possibly be right you're you're pretty limited uh in what you can do um and and chance cesar you won't get all the way through um on the very first try no and uh you know our our experience is uh the game is much much harder when you don't have some of those key mirror upgrades like uh the double dash or the death defiance or or uh health healthy yeah the starting gold um so um the ovals you need at the beginning so there's like a lot of ways in which he's kind of playing behind uh yeah and even even some of the key systems right like you uh you know the the the daedalus hammer which upgrades your your various weapons uh i don't believe is available right from the beginning so you're you're really uh you really don't have a whole a whole lot going for you no he's you know he hasn't taken a single single look at damage so far yeah i i we um we've always really appreciated the speedrunning community around hades all through our early access and sometimes when i talk to these guys i say my favorite runs or when they almost die uh and they just talk about that like that's not even particularly fun for them because it just causes them to have to go slower so so they just they they price speed and aggressiveness above all and that's uh that's like the main priority you could see um basically uh zagreus's health total is down there in the lower left corner he's he's got just 50 life uh to start with so we'll see if and when uh he takes any damage here uh so you know oh he did take a little hit yeah just now yeah so a few more like that you know it doesn't take too much in at the very beginning and these lots here uh these are you know for many players they're like the run enders uh early on they're of course one you've been playing as long as foreign has they're they're a cinch but it can be tricky yeah so my understanding is there are a bunch of different speed running categories there's um people who like to run any heat get the fastest possible time with max weapon aspect you know max keepsakes max everything um and then there's uh all weapons where you play with every weapon and try and get the fastest time across all six weapons and then there's fresh file which is what rheem's doing which is super rare actually um because of the restrictions you're describing both on the mirror the types of things that can actually drop in a run it and the part where you have to do it all with the stygian blade um it's it's like a i don't know it's a particular taste i think even in the speed running community to want to do it so he's got you know considering it's his very first run oh that was a big hit um he's he's got a very key uh boon here which is the athena the divine dash yeah that's that's like you know it makes it makes it so that your dash is even more powerful and deflects some like a lot of the attacks coming at you and that is uh considered a pretty key um kind of power up in the early going let's see what he gets here if you're ever struggling with with hades and you you want some more space and survivability to learn the mechanics uh the athena boons in general give you uh give you that um and the divine dash is especially strong at kind of keeping you alive and allowing you to play aggressively uh helpfully she is the very first that you that you're into it's really cool that we could see uh the the inputs on the screen by the way you see like kind of exactly yeah um what what the player is doing they're in the corner playing it playing on pc looks like with the with the controller xbox controller um it's interesting the the speed running community also i i would have thought there would be you know because on our team there's people who play with both mouse and keyboard and gamepad and we know in our early access community there was those people as well and then our community testers but all the speed runners uh play with gamepad which i found interesting i was i was surprised there wasn't any any real mouse and keyboard uh people uh in that list yeah because there are some trade-offs right like with mouse and keyboard you know although your your movement is maybe a little less um precise yeah a little less precise because you're using the the keyboard to move you you have more precise aim um and because it kind of you can aim exactly at your cursor but i guess the auto aim on on gamepad can compensate for that too yeah the way it was described to me is a lot of them just prize the positioning and movement fidelity yeah so that's why they do that um even though oh yeah just full of this one making pretty short work of [ __ ] right here yeah if your first run-up against megarat does not look like this don't feel bad you are in the vast majority of human beings who are not able to do this and he's zapping her he's got the um the the the aries curse on his on his attack right so you see this big red blade yeah and it just finished her off so every time he kind of pokes her with that dashing strike it it creates a big kind of additional burst of damage thanks to the good old god of war there yeah the blood probably won't need that for a while yeah the the flat damage is is usually quite a large number and especially in fresh file where you're you know you're not gonna find a dayless hammer you're not going to find these big multipliers on your damage the flat damage is probably really really useful but i have a different suspicion about why he's picking up berries oh yeah i i think i know where you're going all right did he sell off a boon at the pool of purging did i miss that i don't know i think he might have sold something um if he's going for i that seemed odd to me though i it was so fast that that i that i missed it but he but he opened up the pool at all which seems like something you wouldn't do unless you intended to use it yeah i'm not sure so now he's all the way in uh aspedale the game's the second region and he's uh oh he took he took another little hit there you know he's sucked he's close to yeah i wonder why he's so okay with taking damage or if i mean i just assume everything a speedrunner does is not a mistake and it's right but maybe maybe he's not he's uh he's not always hitting those hits like he wants because you won't even get the um the fountain chambers in your very first run either like later in the game there are sometimes healing fountains that you could run into in these regions that that kind of boost you back up normally there's no you know you don't have like healing potions or anything so the damage you take is is semi-permanent um so yeah he's gonna have trouble kind of getting that health back yeah even the mid the sort of mid biome chambers those fountains are actually weaker until you upgrade them with a contractor um so you won't have that centaur heart was big though that gave him 25 more health and that's that's going to be a pretty substantial difference he was already going for the the duo boon wasn't he yeah so basically one of the most uh powerful synergies you can get in hades are these duo boons which are boons that are offered by olympians once you have prerequisites from from two other ones so in this case he's looking for the the duo boon that combines the power of aries and athena i'm pretty sure that's what he's fishing for there's an item in the game you can purchase from the contractor later that shows you what all the requirements to unlock each of the duo bones are but merciful end is one of those really powerful duo boons if you're going for this intense uh athena aries dash strike build which he is um and so there is a chance that he's fishing for that the way you proc it if you if you if you have the perfect setup is you set the curse on the enemy and then you dash into them to trigger merciful end which means the curse does even more damage did you see that he dashed right through the gate at the end of the barge of death i actually haven't uh done that either that's really it's really clever technology yeah just to get like an extra you know it's all about the the marginal like fractions of a second here and there right yeah it's part of the reason too like the room reward timing at the end and stuff they try and make their way towards the exit so they can maximize um they can maximize the the sort of time between picking up the chamber award and getting out of there yeah he's grabbing every chamber award basically like on the that one you know maybe a little bit slower on the draw that time but most of the time he's grabbing them like on the frame that they appear yeah it's interesting you know one of the things that happens with speed runs too is um they make this distinction between the the sort of real time and the in-game timer our in-game timer in hades is actually quite polite right it stops for you when you make boon decisions uh when you're opening the codex and all these other uh these other areas and of course the real timer stops for no one um so uh sometimes you see speed runs marked for in-game time which is often much lower than the real time involved yeah you see the um the the gameplay timer is there in the top right corner that's at about seven minutes so far yeah but uh that is pretty good progress for being most of the way through um asphodel yeah second region on the very first escape attempt so now now he's uh approaching the second boss's knee yeah you know see if he actually buys anything here greg do you know around what your fastest hades time is um you know right the pre 1.0 playthroughs that we were doing yeah like geez i i think like i want to say like 18 minutes or something like that um where i got just some you know like the stars aligned for me and i got some some really high damage thing i don't remember exactly i want to say like sub 20 minutes though yeah i i once in development got a sub 15 on team something the fastest player i think is darren who um who is sort of uh yeah who's been there from from the very beginning he darren corb is our audio director he's a composer he directs vocal performances does the sound effects and he's also the voice of zagreus and hades uh sorry zacharias and skelly and uh his i think he got a sub 12 or something crazy on on 1.0 um yeah so he is an amazing hades gamer yeah darren uh quite literally does it all yeah um and though man this uh this is not going well for the learning bone height right here i would say this is some real short work can i tell you though what i like about the speed run um so you know we worked on this game so long in early access and sometimes so we find ourselves watching a lot of gameplay videos um and man it's hard to fight the urge to want to change stuff always all the time when you worked on a game in early access for a long time um but what i like about this run just from like a pure kind of tuning gameplay perspective is he's using everything yeah he really is he's he's um he's using the blade rips to maximize damage from his cast he's um he's using the secondary and the primary uh he's he's dashing both to survive and for the dash attacks um it's like in terms of like uh i don't know what we would say just like a spectation standpoint it's cool that he has to make work he has to make use of everything yeah because that was one of our goals right like we we want there to be like a huge variety of different like viable builds and different ways to play the game but we we don't want uh too many of them to be totally like autopilot where you just kind of ride one button and you know are able to succeed without really doing much of anything else because it's just not as interesting to play that way really um yeah it's it really just comes out of that i mean it's okay i think sometimes if yeah you know you find you you put together a really powerful button press for a biome or two but it is it is more interesting if i think will play at least if you're you have to use all these things it's cool because you're using the dash to deflect yeah he's attracted arrows and also every attack at his disposal yeah we even recently it is true that sometimes you know the occasional autopilot build is um is really entertaining like we we recently saw one where a player like literally didn't have to not only didn't have to attack but didn't even have to move because because the player was so like heavily equipped with kind of revenge style um abilities that that make enemies take damage um that kind of brought to mind weren't there like school you know diablo 2 like thorns builds where enemies just kill themselves um it was that was cool to see i've never seen anything like it in this yeah it's it's so um the the linchpin of that of that do nothing built is a duo boon between zeus and aries called vengeful mood i think it's zeus and aries um uh oh it might be wrong oh he's already the bulma yeah and he's doing like really well actually he's picked up a bunch of centaur hearts look at you know his his health pool now is more oh he took a big hit but he uh he was over twice his starting uh life pool yeah because of picking up some of those centaur heart rewards i think i don't know now yeah if it's confidence on vereem's part or if it's just like that he's okay trading some of that health just to get the hits in for the for the time i'm not sure i guess we'll never know i mean he's certain i wonder if this this fight is probably not what you want to see in a speed run right this this takes longer i think than than uh the alternative mini boss fight here yeah yeah i wonder if remember if you can get the soul catchers on the first run i don't think uh i i don't think that there's a restriction on it you're definitely not because we handle the case like you don't necessarily fight um the minotaur on his own we handle there's like a different event if you meet him for the first time and in the later fight as opposed to this one yeah um what's it gonna take bronze skin sounds well yeah i'd go for the damage right yeah because there was a there was a boon there that would that would mitigate that would add to his damage resistance but if you never take hits then you don't need damage resistance he actually took holy shield there which means if he gets hit he is impervious for a short amount of time yeah that's true i guess they both rely on getting hit but that one can can increase his damage and stuff yeah i think i think he's starting to think about the final or if he he's probably thinking about this from the start but the what he needs to face the final uh boss of a run uh because he he he probably is expecting to take a hit um and yeah but against the final boss with his health total that like a bad a bad combo on him could be a run ender all right so he needs to he's probably thinking about that a bit you know the other thing he picked up was brilliant riposte which is a boon that allows you to do more uh backstab uh damage and he's actually kind of making up for the part where he doesn't have the mirror unlocked which would normally give you the ability to backstab by picking up that boon which is which is pretty interesting i actually didn't know that that was kind of a critical part of of this particular setup and build yeah if he gets a versatile end or if he ends up just rocking what he has now well you got it you gotta go with the flow right yeah part of the fun of it is that um you know it's yeah like a speed runner is gonna go for a particular build but the the randomness may may work against you there not give you exactly what you're what you're looking for still have to kind of adapt to it yeah absolutely and he is the the the divine dash is really helpful here against those um one of the most notorious yeah flames in the game those little exploding chariots the flame wheels they're a much reviled uh foe here in elysium but oh wow yeah that's a lot of them but yeah divine dashes chamber if you have the blade for most right yeah there's some other weapons you know give you more ranged capability to deal with these guys but he is just slamming right into him wow oh there it is so then so then yeah merciful end is a really interesting one right because you you kind of like activate the you see the big glowing aries sword over an enemy and normally it like stabs uh the the foe a second later but um with merciful end you can kind of activate it um and it does even more damage than usual using a one of athena's deflect abilities so he has to dash into a foe right while while they have the aries curse and you're gonna see it in the form of giant red damage numbers which you see are popping up 266 popping up when he procs the merciful end of that so this is what he's been building toward right hoping to get yeah it basically allows you the way to think about it almost is like the attack speed of the curse goes way up you're no longer waiting the full second it's just any turn you can get your dash off once the curse is applied um and he's got the curse on his primary attack so he's not even needing to sort of combo into the rest of the attacks of the story yeah it's actually a really good setup yeah it's crazy he must have he must have felt i mean the other thing about when you watch speed runs just so you know is they never post the runs where they don't get all the stuff right so so uh you know it took many attempts yeah it usually takes a ton of attempts and part of the joy of hades is trying to uh pull it together from a bad run and uh you know you people generally only post about their most most triumphant successes the part where he didn't go and and talk to the friendly shade yeah no not even the support of shade gets it gets to uh yeah it gets the time of day in a speed run yeah in the speed running community uh a big flex is either is either visiting shade or in a in a race if you fish can be quite disrespectful of course no no fishing on uh on the very first escape he hasn't unlocked the rod of fishing yet you know what's interesting is since it is the very first run um there is like a more limited pool of gods so so getting this merciful end combo in some ways is easier on the very first run than it would be normally like zeus doesn't appear um until the second escape attempt for example so so that and and uh athena is guaranteed first so you just kind of have to run into aries and you could possibly you know cross your fingers from there yeah no that's a good point um uh as for rerolling in terms of you know we've talked about the our roles on the game greg it's someone who wrote all the dialogue what's it like watching vareem skip it all uh it's it's okay we'll see you know we have a special case uh it's not that different but the yeah the first encounter with the final boss is different um uh if you get to him on the very first escape attempt not because we not because we necessarily expected a lot of players would do it but mostly to handle like a little continuity issue that would be there like the default version of the dialogue kind of refers to how zagreus has tried kind of over and over again it's like wait a minute if it's your first escape attempt that doesn't make any sense so we um so we have to handle a lot of little things like that um in the story and it's we made you know i was talking about this the other day we made that decision at some point because we had to have that conversation of like should it even be possible to to like clear this game on your very first escape attempt and we're like you know what yeah that's fine if someone can go the diff the distance oh wow he got lucky there too yeah yeah the dater chambers give you the sack in run in in a range of chambers so you never know if you're going to find it in your second tunnel or in you know your fifth tunnel or something like that yeah but he got really lucky and found it in this tunnel again the second was at the second tunnel yeah he got it as quickly as possibly do do sticks i think well this is it he cleared the temple of sticks and this is the final boss so yes uh this you know hades is a game that we're hearing people play for like well over 100 hours this makes it look like a rather short video game but i guess that's the nature of speedrunning so here's the final boss um he's he's going to skip over the the special case dialogue you don't have to if you want a speed run for in-game time you don't have to skip the dialogue yeah it does it does pause it pauses for you you don't you don't have to be this way but it probably it probably messes with your flow a lot um in in fairness right like just to i think you're just kind of the your adrenaline is going you like want to go go go um probably oh yeah oh man look at this that's already he's already shaved off a third of his health there so he has to kind of you know depending on like um lord hades here spawns different goons to help and it uh varies you know from one fight to the next um you could get pretty unlucky here i suppose in terms of what he will send after you but yeah kareem is i don't know i'm i'm uh i'm not gonna bet on lord hades in this one at this point he's just got the golden combo he does he also he's also just very um he's like he's very efficient in his in his defense like when you watch a normal person even when you watch a developer play this fight there is a lot of dashing um and he's he's only a he's only using it to proc merciful and and and essentially to avoid evade that move the giant spin attack where uh hades has some motion on it which is what often catches players and he just knows the exact timing relative to the animation and the sound to to basically uh survive the whole spin yeah yeah look at look at uh look at hades's health go yeah this is just like and and you know he for him has yeah none of the kind of permanent upgrades that would normally be um like like boosting your damage yeah substantially so this this same build with like a late game character would be so much stronger um he'd be able to do this like even faster but the fact that this is a fresh save is um it's pretty wild and he's doing doing this old this old trick that one is like as soon as you know that trick that you could just kind of hug hug your dad to win the game um it's okay we address it later in the game yeah we do but that's a that's a terrifying attack but there's a there happens to be a way yeah to defeat it and and while still dealing tons of damage to him well this is it he's got him i think i think he's got him yeah wow 20 25 oh fresh yeah 25 minutes exactly with um just just a little well not exactly but close enough that's yeah yeah that's all she wrote it's amazing massive really impressive yeah it's incredible so i guess we just watched uh hades clear it's a good thing there's a lot more to do in hades after getting your first clip um but yeah there's there's um it's impressive i know foreign has played hundreds of runs to be able to get to the point and it's amazing to see our game honored by people who would put that much sort of uh skill and effort into into being their own best times and so we really appreciate the time our players spent with us in early access and here after 1.0 um thank you so much for um for supporting us yeah thank you very much that was really exciting to watch yeah awesome maybe we can now maybe we can try it [Music]

Channel: IGN

Views: 3,088,911

Rating: 4.9478703 out of 5

Keywords: PC, IGN, ign, RPG, game, hades, Hades, Switch, Action, Feature, gameplay, speedrun, Roguelike, hades game, devs react, hades ending, world record, ign speedrun, hades gameplay, hades speedrun, Supergiant Games, devs react to speedrun, top videos

Id: VKepf4jyn4o

Length: 26min 22sec (1582 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 07 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Ghnami]

Just so people know, they farmed hard for this seed. This godlike build is such a low chance, hundreds of runs were scrapped because they didnt get 1 boon.