A cool fact about Hades! The Aspects weren’t even part of the game initially.

In the middle of early access we were looking for a way to extend the endgame as well as mix up the combat flow a little bit for players who felt like they had already mastered the base weapons.

Hammers and boons created different builds between runs but also caused people to supercharge one attack and to lean on it for the whole run instead of using their entire kit.

If you played Hades, you know where this is going. Aspects were a really cool way to expand the mythical world of Hades (thanks to @kasavin!) and it provided a way for us to introduce micro-goals during combat

Almost all of the Aspects have a “if X, then Y” construction. If you look at Aspect of Poseidon, for example, it has a “If you use your special, then your attack has a crit bonus”

This is a little reductive -- another goal was to make each aspect feel like an entirely new weapon. For example, the hidden sword aspect is meant to really feel like swinging a huge claymore, while Zeus Aspect on the shield is meant to mimic throwing a swarm of angry bees.

Each aspect required hours of iteration between myself and @amirsrao. While the parameters as laid out above were straightforward, adjusting timings and power curves so each would have unique 'weaponfeel' was much harder.

The Shield aspects took a lot of refining because we felt we already nailed it with the original shield. Was there a way to make the act of throwing/catching the shield more impactful? Was there a way to make the act of blocking with the shield interesting and enjoyable? (no)

We had the opposite issue with the Bow’s hidden aspect. We spent nearly a full week iterating on how to make a ‘slow-charge bow’ feel good before it was punted to another update.

The original version had distinct phases where phase 2 launched a wave shot and phase 3 launched a spinning shot. The special shot would rain down from the sky and pin enemies in place.

In theory, this sounded awesome. In practice it was extremely difficult to make the transition between phases feel good and to make the special feel responsive and effect. We shelved it and @amirsrao came back to it with fresh eyes to make it what it is now!

I can’t talk about my favorite aspects (since some are spoilers), but if anyone is trying to figure out where to spend their Titan Blood, I would really encourage people to experiment! Here’s my personal opinion:

If you haven’t been clicking with the bow I say a point in Aspect of Chiron or Aspect of Hera both change the gameplay immensely. Similarly if you haven’t been clicking with the shield maybe try Aspect of Zeus.

For the gun, Hestia aspect is a fun sniper-rifle style gameplay change, while Aspect of Talos on the fists lets you pull in any units (like Witches or Brimstones) that are trying to play keep-away.

The Achilles Aspect on the spear lets you teleport to the spear for greatly increased mobility, and Poseidon Aspect on the sword can create fun and rapid-fire Cast-focused builds by letting you knock bloodstones out of enemies.

If you crave the same gameplay, but More, Demeter Aspect on the Fists lets you get crazy uppercuts, Hades Aspect on the spear lets you virtually clear an entire room with a charged spin, and Chaos Aspect on the shield lets you shotgun an entire armful of shields into the room.

Thanks for reading along! I hope you all have as much fun playing Hades as I had developing it!

One final fun fact -- when Hades first launched the Ares and Poseidon dash would turn you into a blade rift/let you surf. This proved to be so unpopular that the dashes were changed to what they are now. Eventually the old ‘surges’ became the god ‘calls’ currently in the game.