Hades 2 was, like its predecessor, released to near-unanimous critical acclaim. However, the more time the game spent in the wild, and the more time people had to unlock all of the secrets hidden in the depths, the more people discovered the now-controversial true ending. Without getting into specifics that might spoil anyone’s first play-through of the game, criticisms ranged from the lack of agency provided to the lead character, to out-of-character moments that robbed the conclusion of its weight.
Supergiant Games has a previous track-record of leaving their narratives intact after release, with updates and patches focusing solely on mechanical tweaks and balances – but that’s now been broken with the latest Hades 2 patch which looks to add depth and clarity to this ending.
Hades 2 Patch
The full patch notes can be found here, and it does include gameplay-based improvements as well as narrative ones. Yet for those who did finish the game and found the ending lacking, it’s worth understanding exactly what is added to the ending here – those hoping for a complete narrative overhaul will be disappointed, but others will argue that it’s better for Supergiant to stick to its artistic vision.
In-keeping with that, these improvements focus on adding context that will look to improve the presentation of the ending, the notes say that the patch “added new events in the lead-up to the True Ending, and some after.”
“As part of this, increased the number of Underworld clears required, and added to and revised parts of the main True Ending scenes before the end credits.”
Why is This Patch Unusual for Supergiant Games?
On the official Discord for Hades 2, the studio asked for suggestions from players on where to improve the game, but they also ask that these improvements be restricted to gameplay-based areas, rather than focused on the narrative.
This, and the fact that they’ve never added large-scale changes to their game stories before, suggested that the ending wouldn’t change – but it could be that the scale of the backlash to what is otherwise considered one of Metacritic’s highest-rated games of the year, caused Supergiant to reconsider.
However, there has also been the suggestion that rather than new content which was hastily put together in response to backlash, this is simply the ending as it was always meant to be – forced to wait to arrive in the form of a patch due to a rushed Switch 2 release.
There isn’t much to support this theory, meaning that not much stock should be put in it, but the fact that the new patch features new artwork and new voice lines does show that a considerable amount of work went into it, even though version 1.0 only released a month ago.
In any case, the improvements brought by the patch, which are available to be previewed, seem to have generally been positively received by those in communities like the series’ subreddit, with threads featuring the new true ending seeing comments saying that small adjustments to the protagonist’s role have helped it to land more effectively.
