NZGDC 2016 Developer Presentation: Labyrinth Design

Do they explain why it's just not any fun.

Interesting!

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58elrond wrote:

xbox meme

Seriously tho... i Dont get the lever that are right next to gates? Its not a puzzle at all?

Are you speaking of the timed levers? Those play hell on non-meta builds.

Nice to see this presented - in my opinion POE's Labyrinth is the product of an unbelievable combination of brilliant game design, art direction, programming, and writing + voice acting. That does not happen often - the people who worked on it should be incredibly proud.

I still dont like the lab, for many reasons, here are some

- POE is a hack n slash aka kill mobs as fast as you can, then you throw us shitty unkillable traps that not only deal a lot of dps but its a % of ur life

- Enchants are boring, they could have been use to add mechanics to skills rather than just being boring % buffs

- the parcour is boring, when lab was announced i was expecting ambushes of monsters, puzzles with painful result if you fail, choices like decent champion race

- ascendancy should have never been there, it should have been 2 points on lvl 60, 2 on 80 ,2 on 90 and 2 on 100. all gained through an elaborated quest

the lab sucks, remove ascendancy from it

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mlangwor wrote:

the lab sucks, remove ascendancy from it

this

keeping lab in game is fine for people who wanna farm it for loot or enchants but i think it's annoying that such a core aspect of the game (ascendancy) is being gated behind it.

I consider lab a huge failure comprised of lazy game development. Ascendancy in general was probably overall the worst expansion (Atlas is second worst.) Mobile and timed percentage health damage traps in a game with latency and many outstanding performance issues? Terrible, terrible idea you should be collectively ashamed of. It's not "hard," it's not a "challenge," it's just stupid and plays havoc with all the other existing game systems, encouraging the user to use one of a few mechanics that completely trivialize it to the point it may as well NOT EVEN BE THERE. Why exactly should a frail witch survive just as long against a pillar of blades as a bulky marauder wearing full plate? It makes NO SENSE.


Unlink ascendancy classes from lab. Or better yet, drop them altogether. The passive skill tree is vastly better and the ascendancy keystones would be better if moved into the main tree. There's no NEED for class-specific nodes when the start point already provides so much flavor.

Well at least it is acknowledged that the lab is

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Very different from our usual content!

Hmm...

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Player Capabilities: <...> Mitigating damage with three primary defenses and myriad secondary ones

hate to break it to you guys, but evasion is COMPLETELY USELESS in lab (I guess by "three primary defenses" you meant life, es and ev, right? because that's what people think when they look and the centre of passive tree)

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Playtest assuming that all traps can be avoided with simple timing

some uber trials/traps aren't "simple". Except by "simple timing" you meant calculating time needed to run through all trap gauntlet with 600% MS.

For me the lab is still by far the least enjoyable thing ever added to the game, and i think it's ridiculous that it's mandatory to do it again and again.

Some people seem to like it and that's great, but don't make all the other people suffer through it to ascend every time.