Hades 2 is already well worth playing in early access, but it's still a game we should expect to change a ton as more features get added and player feedback keeps rolling in. Just over a week after the game's early access launch, we now have our first patch, and it's a big one.
Hades 2 places a big emphasis on gathering resources during each run in order to unlock new features and conversations back at The Crossroads—you don't just get useful stuff as combat rewards or at merchants anymore. Right at launch, you had to equip the appropriate gathering tool to see its respective resource on a run, meaning that you could only acquire one type of resource on any given run. That's a bit of a drag when you're just starting out in the game and practically everything needs upgrading.
«You can now gather at any resource point once you have unlocked the corresponding Gathering Tool,» the patch notes read. «You now can Prioritize any available Tool in the Training Grounds to make its resources appear as often as before, while resources for Tools you do not Prioritize will appear far less often.»
So the rhythm is still largely the same, with players needing to select a tool for the resource they need the most of at the beginning of a run, but this additional passive accumulation of resources should be a big help for anyone starting to work on a nest egg of in-game currency. Perhaps more crucially, we won't get that «oh, come on!» moment of bringing a pickaxe and running into a ton of nodes that require the shovel.
Supergiant noted that almost all of the adjustments in this first update are in response to player feedback, and that's pretty impressive. I'm usually a «wait out early access for the finished game» type of guy, but Supergiant's rapid response here is a great example of when early access works for everyone. You can read the full patch notes (including some hidden spoilers) over on Steam.
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