Rogue-likes are not a genre of video games that are very new to me. Though I do not have much experience playing such games, my minimal experience of playing and watching my peers play, I’ve been able to get a grasp of the excitement behind them. Playing Hades was the first time I’ve actually engaged in rogue-likes and it was quite refreshing. I was able to learn more about the motivation behind working through the different levels and advancing in the game. Though I do feel that other game genres are more interesting to me, I understand why others enjoy games like Hades so much. Expanding more on
During our discussion section on Friday, my group decided that it would be interesting to change Hades into a MOBA game like League of Legends and DOTA 2. And in the process we were able to find many similarities between Hades and the two MOBA games mentioned. We settled on changing the following three aspects of the game: gameplay strategy, game design, and game objective.
While keeping the variety of characters and their respective skill sets, we thought it would be reasonable to allow the player to choose their own set of abilities through an “Ability Draft” just like in DOTA 2. We thought it would create a much more diverse gameplay experience, allowing for more possibilities in the game. Adding to this aspect, for a MOBA is a multiplayer game genre, adding a multiplayer gamemode seemed as a great fit (working through the levels as a team with each member having a different role/specialty (support, melee bruiser, mage, assassin, ranged dealer, etc.).
On this point, we thought that rather than having a large map with different paths that the player could choose it would be interesting to even have a Team vs. Team battle mode, played on a fixed map like Summoner’s Rift in League of Legends. Regarding this idea, someone had asked how the storyline/plot would be transferred to the MOBA version of Hades. To answer this, I immediately thought of League of Legends lore. All champions in League of Legends have a lore/story and are connected to one another in some way (though not all of them are related). Some champions come from the same region/empire and instead have rivalries. We thought this concept could be translated to Hades by adding even more characters to create a broader story. In regards to the idea of having a fixed map, the gameplay reminded me of ‘jungling’ and ‘farming’ in League of Legends. The characters could kill such mobs and earn gold/money to buy the power-ups and items to make themselves stronger.
Thinking more on the idea of fighting a “final boss,” I thought of adding a gamemode like the DOOM bots of DOOM special gamemode in League of Legends, which has the goal of killing The Evil Overlord of the Doom Bots (or Devil Teemo). I thought that this could keep the rogue-like element of defeating/beating a dungeon.
Like so, I felt the game concept behind Hades was quite easy to deal with when brainstorming ideas on how to change it from a rogue-like to a MOBA. Obviously, I would need to learn more about the game by putting in more hours in gameplay and reading different analyses of the game, but on a surface-level perspective, it seems very possible.
Overall, I have found analyzing rogue-likes quite interesting and may potentially look to playing more games in the genre.
Hi Collin! I really loved reading your blog, thinking about Hades as a MOBA is so interesting. Another MOBA that comes to mind for comparison while reading this is SMITE. The “Champions” in SMITE are actually Gods from Greek Mythology, so I think SMITE would really translate well as you can play many of the Gods, including Hades. I have found it so interesting how they fit all the Gods into their respective categories (mage, dps, support, etc.) based on Greek Mythology itself, as it isn’t always clear what they would be best at in terms of MOBA gameplay. I think SMITE would be another awesome game to look into while pondering this concept of Hades as a MOBA. Thank you so much!
I was immediately drawn into this blog post due to the nature of its title and because (I believe) we were in the same discussion group when you presented your remix! I love the idea of Hades being a MOBA. The team aspect of Hades, that being where you can choose what Gods to play, sets the narrative up to be almost stagnant. I think of this comparison as if Arcane and LoL were to be talked about. Each character has intricate lore, and there are multiple characters who would NOT be competent teammates, just like in Hades. Yet, within the proper genre of game, this makes perfect “sense”, as we naturally wouldn’t question the characters cohesiveness and instead focus on the competitive team. I really love thinking about this concept and I’m happy you decided to write on it, it was an enjoyable read!
This idea to turn Hades into a MOBA is really creative and I think with careful consideration could be done successfully but I also think that it would lose the essence of what makes it Hades. MOBAs really struggle to incorporate Roguelike elements (procedural generation, dungeon crawling) and so I think you would have to sacrifice that aspect of Hades to turn it into a MOBA. I do think you could translate the lore to a MOBA quite well (as you mentioned, League has a rich lore) but in terms of character and ability diversity, in order to gain that you would have to use the plethora of npcs in the game and this would lose the narrative given by Hades, which I believe to be one of its central features. Perhaps a Hades inspired spin-off would be the way to go, accepting that you would have a very different game that does not reflect many aspects of Hades.
I do not see how you could accurately translate Hades into a MOBA without losing much of the originally intended design. Much of Hades is about repeated struggles and their consequences. In Hades, your death does not reset anything else. When you die, completed story events stay completed, your relationships with other characters has developed, and the narrative moves forward. MOBA’s do not have anything similar to them. While there are character interactions within the game, they are brief, repeatable, and do not have a lasting effect outside of this “loop”. Furthermore, while League and similar MOBAs do have a lot of lore, not that much of it is in game. Most of the lore comes from documents released outside the game. Compare this to Hades, whose entire lore resides within both the game and the gameplay. In short, I do not see how a MOBA version of Hades could really compare to the original bar visual aspects.