First Impressions from a drunk

I spent maybe 50 hours deciding what my first character would be. I created the perfect passives tree, my equipment was solid but affordable; there was a plan. I didn't know anything. It's been a month since then, I think. There was a week where I literally did not speak to my girlfriend.

Starting the game, I played a fireball elementalist: determined to relive my character from Diablo 2. I was immediately surprised by the graphics and music, not something I was expecting from this type of game. Maybe that's just the D2 speaking. Some of the environments though are really pretty, and most are at least distinct enough. I guess one critique would be that I wish it was easier to enjoy them. I don't mean like a change in genre, maybe small tweaks to existing mechanics?

For instance, the mini-map serves a vital role in keeping the player oriented but is often a "one or the other" experience with the actual scenery. The minimap opacity setting is a workaround to some degree but the tilesets can vary pretty intensely requiring you to change it frequently to keep it relevant. I was wondering if your tileset objects are programmed in a way that you could add a "darkness" property that could describe the overall darkness of that tileset. Then the user's chosen minimap opacity could be a function of that, allowing players that wanted a scenery first, minimap second experience to have that seamlessly

And then there's the labyrinth... I looove the labyrinth. It's like a combination of Dark Souls and Platforming (specifically, like Warcraft III Mazing for my homies out there), what more could I ask for. Well, since you ask, as much as I love the challenge of the lab, I enjoy playing with my brother more. He on the other hand hates how unforgiving the lab is. I wish there was like a map variant of the lab that allowed us to platform more for fun -- with less punishing penalties -- than for game changing rewards
One other comment about the lab is that even though it's so friggan cool you brought that somewhat separate genre into your game, I think maybe you're trying to underplay the significance of that a bit too much

As a developer aside, I'm really impressed with how well your labyrinth generation comes out. I once tried to make a game that procedurally generated essentially a maze type layout with all traps and very little buffer areas and could only occasionally get interesting and fun results.

Wow how did this get so long? Okay last thing: Maps. I also really like maps (have I mentioned I love your game?) -- particularly the sense of exploration I have with them. The first mention of maps was in a prophecy and I've since jumped from world to world conquering as I come. Well sorta, every once in awhile I just flat get my ass beat. Some of this is the bitterness talking, but sometimes it feels like I'm getting punished for exploring without doing online research or w/e prep. I get that it should feel dangerous, but to me it kinda feels more specifically like Russian Roulette

No good suggestions here... maybe if all maps had flavor text that hinted at what the boss' strength was, but it'd be hard to think of that many blurbs and still have them hit your quality (oh yeah, and whoever you have writing your quips is on goddamn point) and be helpful... maybe if you only focused on making the dangerous ones helpful and the others could just sound pretty / be thematic... as long as it wasn't obvious which was which
Last bumped on Jun 26, 2016, 1:58:50 PM
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Your post is more lucid than most sober people here.
Git R Dun!
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As a developer aside, I'm really impressed with how well your labyrinth generation comes out. I once tried to make a game that procedurally generated essentially a maze type layout with all traps and very little buffer areas and could only occasionally get interesting and fun results.


The first labyrinth I ever ran had an impossible layout and I was stuck for a few hours thinking it was a "puzzle" I had to solve. And many maps still have the same layout problems they had 2 years ago it's just that most aren't really problematic but more like a glitch. But over time they fixed most and I haven't seen a problem with the labyrinth (related to layout) anymore since. But the lab still has a handful of bugs and also has massive balance problems.

I understand that new players look differently at the mapping system compared to older players (I personally hate it). The maps are insanely imbalanced and have been for years. After 500 hours of play or so you will see the many problems with the mapping system. I don't see them as "different worlds" I just see them as "runnable" or "not runnable" due to the huge difference in xp/hour and return values that are mostly unrelated to map-tier. And of course that unsatisfied feeling you get when you lose currency while running maps if you do not apply the mathematics required to run maps.

But it is interesting to see how new players experience this game. I hope you will keep enjoying it.
Last edited by silverdash on Jun 25, 2016, 7:31:04 AM
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The first labyrinth I ever ran had an impossible layout and I was stuck for a few hours thinking it was a "puzzle" I had to solve. And many maps still have the same layout problems they had 2 years ago it's just that most aren't really problematic but more like a glitch. But over time they fixed most and I haven't seen a problem with the labyrinth (related to layout) anymore since. But the lab still has a handful of bugs and also has massive balance problems.


Honestly, I'm not surprised. With algorithms that complicated, it becomes really hard to debug or even identify what's going "wrong". a disjoint maze, like what you encountered, has some pretty obvious flaws that need fixing but it's not always like that. I'm really interested in what they ended up doing to improve generation. For my game I ended up needing to write a follow up "check this maze" algorithm to look at the maze from a different, more human, angle and make adjustments. I still can't decide if the "more human" part of that is just an excuse for a hack patch

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I understand that new players look differently at the mapping system compared to older players (I personally hate it). The maps are insanely imbalanced and have been for years. After 500 hours of play or so you will see the many problems with the mapping system. I don't see them as "different worlds" I just see them as "runnable" or "not runnable" due to the huge difference in xp/hour and return values that are mostly unrelated to map-tier. And of course that unsatisfied feeling you get when you lose currency while running maps if you do not apply the mathematics required to run maps.

But it is interesting to see how new players experience this game. I hope you will keep enjoying it.

I'd like to just shrug this off as a somewhat bitter comment of someone who's maybe played the game too long, but I kinda already see what you're talking about. The game really rewards a very specific, calculated type of play. My tendency to go slowly through each map enjoying them for scenery, lore, loot and fights, is for sure not pulling in the drops. Something that wouldn't be so notable, but without loot I can't make it in the "next" area. I tend to view what the game rewards as what the game encourages, but, in this case, that just doesn't seem fun to me; and what does seem fun to me is getting increasingly less viable

What about the design of the game do you think encourages its players to be so calculating, to do so much online research? Do you think there are many players with as much experience as you that still play like me (minus the lore, even I'm running out of new pieces of that)?


One more new player observation is that I played the merciless labyrinth once with my brother. It was so much fun working through traps together (we also did a dream trial earlier too and it was even better -- covering each other's back on the totems). But right at the end of the 2nd Izzy fight one of us died. It was such a bummer that it ruined the rest of the run, and probably next time we'll both just reset
Last edited by iAmJacksHigh on Jun 26, 2016, 1:05:35 PM
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My tendency to go slowly through each map enjoying them for scenery, lore, loot and fights, is for sure not pulling in the drops.
Then it will work just fine for you. But I believe that most people just want to clear a map fast&safe and get as much loot/xp out of it as possible. And some maps simply punish you (you statistically lose currency over enough runs or you get 1/5th of the xp that a map several tiers lower gives) and that will not affect you then because your playstyle is different.

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What about the design of the game do you think encourages its players to be so calculating, to do so much online research?

What, I believe, 'forces' players to be so calculating is that the higher tier endgame maps are expensive&semi-rare and require currency to be rolled in order to be less expensive (or for getting more xp/hour). But if done wrong, it will only give less xp/hour and costs only even more currency. Now since you can get level 90 very easily by running low level maps this is not a problem for most. But if you would like to play passed level 94ish, then you are pretty much forced into all sorts of calculations that nobody really wants but.... No choice... And often (actually always) those calculations lead to people finding imbalances or worse.

Now take other hack 'n slash games, there you often just enter some endgame area and you start killing stuff. In PoE you start calculating first.

I personally give up at around lvl90 and never bothered going to lvl100 because... Boring... I don't want to do all those trades&calculations anymore. Did it once several leagues ago I believe (when it was even harder) and the amount of spreadsheet-data people made that we had to use before we could run a map was just insane (some maps required specific mods...). They improved a lot over the the leagues and made the game a lot simpler but it's still there to a lesser extend. This league for example you can mostly just alc a map and run it regardless of mods. You only have to know what maps to run and which ones to sell off to noobs or vendor-recipe. It has been greatly simplified but also created new problems.

With the current mapping system I don't believe I will ever feel the need to continue playing. But I'm probably around 3000 hours of play by now so my particular vision on this all might be totally weird or might belong to a tiny group of people I'm not sure. I just want to enter a map and start killing stuff without worrying about map returns or the xp-hour being down the drain or me facerolling the map because, low-level maps give more xp/hour than difficult maps AND are cheaper or etc.

On top of that there is no incentive to race to lvl100 because the people who play grouped 20h/day will always win and they know all the ins and outs (which is, again, required). If there would be a reward for anyone who reaches level 100 during a league, at least then there would be some kind of incentive. But it would still be boring because of the above, at least for me.
Last edited by silverdash on Jun 26, 2016, 5:31:07 PM

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