Increase story progression on victories

[Tinytim]

I feel I'm a good player. Not the best, and will never be one of those who can upload a "BOSS X HITLESS" video, but I've gotten to the point that I've had a 60-70% winrate the last 20 runs. I also don't like to rush the runs, as I like to take breaks between the rooms and check that I've not missed any urns etc (man I feel old writing this). What I've noticed is that this game seems to be built on the assumption of a 30% winrate or so... And as such, I feel the story lags far behind where it should be considering I've "escaped" 35 times I think.

I've actually lost some rounds on purpose right at the start just to progress the dialogue faster in the palace.

Please make it so that story progression tracks better with time spent. I've racked up 80 hours and I feel that I should have unlocked all story elements by now, and only had some easter eggs left. At the very least, add a renovation item that "refreshes" the palace so you can advance the story manually without intentionally losing rounds. That should work as a quick work-around while you experiment with more elegant solutions.

[Tinytim]

Also, please make it so that one can progress heat faster. The game really disincentivizes people from trying to push their own limits. Much of my high winrate is that I normally coast through runs atm. I've found out what combos work and not, and because I only get rewarded for advancing one heat at a time, I only do so. I would have tried 15 heat by now if I had any incentives to do so.

[Zymeth]

The dialogues lagging progression may be definitley caused by game updating on the save with some progression already. I'd see if it will lag after the release. I wouldn't dare to assume that game is built on the assumption of certain winratio, buy it is worth something to signal devs, that it is expected to have dialogues aligned with the progression after the release.

The game does not disincentivizes from taking higher heat - you do get rewarded for advancing at all - advancing by one is bare minimum to get rewards. I think it is a bit too much to expect from already working progression system, if I want more heat, I can take it anyway - it is up to my desire, in-game reward will stay the same, to not inflate progression.

[Tinytim]

Originally posted by Zymeth:

The dialogues lagging progression may be definitley caused by game updating on the save with some progression already. I'd see if it will lag after the release. I wouldn't dare to assume that game is built on the assumption of certain winratio, buy it is worth something to signal devs, that it is expected to have dialogues aligned with the progression after the release.

The game does not disincentivizes from taking higher heat - you do get rewarded for advancing at all - advancing by one is bare minimum to get rewards. I think it is a bit too much to expect from already working progression system, if I want more heat, I can take it anyway - it is up to my desire, in-game reward will stay the same, to not inflate progression.

First: lag is also a normal word, meaning "late" or "delay". To lag behind means that you're quite a bit behind. Story lagging behind means that the story is several steps behind where I feel it should be at this point in the game.

Second: I get nothing extra for advancing faster. I get that they don't want people to take all the heats at once, betting everything on a 20 heat run to succeed. But they could have had 1 heat = 1 progression, 3 heat = 2, 6 heat = 3. That way, if I run on a weapon I feel I do really well with, I can go straight for the +6 heat, and get 3 heat's worth of rewards. That way, players who feel the difficulty isn't scaling fast enough get an incentive to try harder pacts, but the diminishing returns make it so that it's not that appealing a prospect unless you feel secure in your skills.

Also, if I do select higher heat, the game warns me that I'm exceeding the requirement. This is a form of disincentivization, as the game is implying I'm doing it wrong. It's not a hard disincentive, but it still performs the function.

Anyway, back to the story progression. Hades is a darn fun game, but it does not have the depth to justify the apparent expectation of 100 hours gameplay for a full story unlock. I might have delayed it a bit because I didn't give much nectar to the gods until I'd stacked up friendship with the ones I wanted to first, but that is also a problem. The optimal story progression should not happen by chance. One should have to make an effort to avoid the progression, but in this game, it feels more like it's pure chance if your playstyle and skill coincided with the design and you had natural progression throughout your savegame.

[apo]

Basically in the same boat as you and I completely agree.

82 hours according to steam, 76 escape attempts, 29 successful (12 won of the last 20). Can't be bothered to calculate average run length, but I'd say about 30 minutes. Plus obviously reading, decorating, looking up stuff in the wiki, etc.

I've certainly accomplished a lot. I'm done with Orpheus&Euridice, done with all the romances, completed some favors for some of the olympians. But again, that took me 82 hours and I'm still missing some of the major story lines. I JUST got the Nyx favor, still waiting for the Sisyphus and the Achilles storylines to conclude.
And to be honest, kinda getting tired of it. The most infuriating thing is returning to the house of hades and the person I want to talk to isn't even there, because they are on vacation or some ♥♥♥♥.

I think another big part of the problem is that the dialogue queue of people will clog up with different story lines. For example Nyx is involved in basically everything and if you give the wrong person nectar at the wrong time, suddenly you locked her in a 30 runs saga of Orpheus and his various problems and can't progress any other story line in the meantime?
But I don't really know, because even with extensive googling it is still unclear to me how the system works and what the prerequisites for certain events are.

All I can say is that it feels way too slow and it feels like I have too little agency in which story line I'm progressing.

[C4RNIVOR3]

This is primarily a problem with Early Access itself. Each update adds in a lot of new story content (Patty went from about about ~160? to over 400 audio lines in Blood Price update, for instance), so no matter how many hours you've played, you are bound to still be encountering new content each update. It should theoretically balance out in 1.0 if you start a new file and experience narrative content where it's intended to be.

[apo]

That is most definitely not the case for me, as I have started playing after the last major content update.

[Tinytim]

Originally posted by apo:

That is most definitely not the case for me, as I have started playing after the last major content update.

Same, all my gameplay time has been since last content patch (3. July).

And as I said at the end of my original post: at least let us just manually refresh the palace grounds. Just make a free repeatable purchase that lets the player fake die and get a refreshed palace with refreshed dialogues. It shouldn't be much. Do that and just lock it for the few times you are expected to do a full run to advance something.

I started failing runs early on purpose just to get the story elements to progress! This game feels like its story is balanced on people spening 10-20 tries just to get up one more floor, i.e. try 40-70 should be first win, and that they run full speed all the time. Well, sorry devs, I got my first win at 11 runs, and ever since then I've had about 50% winrate.