How the Dialogue System in Hades Rewards Failure

Supergiant's Hades is a beloved take on the roguelike genre, in no small part thanks to its dialogue system. It's is deeply reactive to actions taken by the player and forwards the story in bite-sized chunks in between escape attempts, creating an incentive to try again even after failure.

The dialogue system is essentially a bucket of possible conversations, filtered by gameplay conditions and weighted by importance and immediacy. I sorted the possible conversations into three categories that I've observed after many hours in the game.

1. Evergreen and not essential. Unrelated to any specific narrative or gameplay conditions and therefore have no particular moment in the game where they’re best used.

2. Specific but not essential. Related to an action the player has taken, such as equipping a certain weapon or making it past a certain point in their last run. These are only triggered if that action is taken, but are not essential to the story. This category includes:

   1. Conversations that are only applicable on the run where the action was taken, such as receiving an Olympian boon.

   2. Conversations that continue to be relevant as long as that action was taken sometime in the past, such as reaching Elysium.

3. Essential story beats. These are triggered by certain actions the player takes or milestones they reach. They override all other options.

   
   

When the player speaks with an NPC, the system weighs all the possible conversations against each other and chooses the best option for that moment.

Once the conversation concludes, the player cannot speak to that NPC again until they next encounter them, which generally involves starting a new run or continuing the run they’re already on. For a player invested in the story (like me) this serves two functions. It tempts the player into doing one more run, bro with the promise of more narrative. It also takes the sting out of the failure at the end of a run; at least you're back in the House of Hades and can talk to Nyx again!

Another benefit of Hades' dialogue system is the flexibility it lends to the overarching story. Players will hit all the same big narrative beats whether it takes them 10 runs to complete the main story or 100. But the conversations that populate your runs in between the big story beats are hardly filler; some flesh out the world and the characters within it, while others react to the player in hyper-specific ways.

For example, after each run, if you speak to Hypnos, he'll remark on the nature of your most recent death. While not being essential, these are fun moments where it feels like the game really sees you, and can create a moment of humor out of your fresh defeat.

You might think that such specific responses require a huge number of dialogue lines, and you'd be right. Hades contains a whopping 21,020 voiced lines! And the system is designed to avoid repeat dialogue until every possible unused option has been expended, which can take tens of hours.

It would have been easy for the devs to create a dialogue system for Hades that included only story beats and filler dialogue. Many games operate this way; you can speak to NPCs outside of moments where they are specifically relevant, but you’ll get the same few lines repeated over and over. The Hades dialogue system obviously makes the world and the characters feel more alive than that alternative, but I also think it does something uniquely suited to this game: it makes you feel important. In a game where you’re literally the prince of the Underworld and the Olympian gods are putting in a lot of effort to help you escape, it makes sense that other characters notice your actions and comment on them.