NZGDC 2016 Developer Presentation: Labyrinth Design

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Johny_Snow wrote:

They gate ascendancy points behind the lab because they are fully aware if they put them outside almost nobody but some enchant farmers will ever bother with it.

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Borgese wrote:

The very first thing that came to my mind when I first encountered the Lab back when it was released was 'why isn't there another way through it?'. For a few minutes I was so sure in my thinking 'there must be two ways through, one shorter with traps, and another, longer, without traps at all'.
Yeah right. Gotta suffer through this 'great design' every bloody league, on every character.

That would be a nice change.
A shortcut with no keys,enchants or rewards at the end,just Izaro and the 2 points,or the normal lab we all love for anyone that wants to farm it.

so nice that you guys share this with us!
i give us a good insight for how hard and how some things are balanced. I really enjoy it!

awesome

I think uber lab is fun as hell. Having the enchants and ascendancy gated is great too. Reason to run it, reason to have runners, yet another player interaction.


Now with that said:

What I absolutely fucking hate about Lab is the trap rooms that magically lag you the fuck out for absolutely no reason. Fire dmg ground hitting you when you are no where near it. The game kicking you out in any of the 27000 loadscreens your forced to endure. Or your client just outright closing out, again for no reason.




I like risk vs reward, I realllllly realllllly do. But if the risk is bullshit errors that no other game I play has, then why in the hell does it happen here? I don't play on a Wi-Fi toaster but this game runs perfectly about 40% of the time, then just defacates on itself.

Was the talk video recorded and is it available in the GDC Vault or anywhere else?

I can make some assumptions with the slides but it would be nice to listen along as well

- Gertz

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josgertz wrote:

Was the talk video recorded and is it available in the GDC Vault or anywhere else?

I can make some assumptions with the slides but it would be nice to listen along as well

- Gertz

If you click the gear icon at the bottom, you can "open speaker notes" and read along some notes about the slides.

Well the design of the labyrynths is very cool, but the mechanic of the labyrinth system is horrific for an online game.

Hardcore mode is optional for a reason, yet GGG somehow decided that introducing a hardcore mechanic to the entire game is a good idea. It is not.

Sure play test may have shown that traps can be avoided with proper timing, but did you guys really forget about this game is being played over the internet??? The labirynth at times takes some precision moving and if the traps moving on your end are not in synch with the server, you are dead. If the server doesn't register your mouse click in the proper place, you get to dance on a trap. Absolutely a lapse in judgement on GGG's part.


Lets see how bad this really is:

Trap damage based on a percentage of life? Really? At first glance it seems a good idea, but it completely overrides the ONLY tactic in hardcore play to safeguard against lag and desync: being over leveled for the content. (It is ridiculous that hardcore play needs to be reigned back from normal play by over leveleing, but that is another rant).

Case and point:

My level 66 witch with with 3000 effective hit points just went to do the NORMAL difficulty labyrynth today because I am not on the best internet connection. Guess how many times she died? 5 or so. Falling over dead from trap damage where the traps were not on me, the character dancing on traps because the mouse clicks weren't registered server side correctly (over shooting destinations, etc), and finally the good old just plain falling over dead from a phantom source of damage for well over 1000hp (packet loss). She took 300 damage at best from Izaro or Argus melee attacks, but deadly damage from traps because of the RIDICULOUS mechanic that they deal percentage based damage. I didn't think my connection was that bad, but then the server started freezing up, and issue was solved connecting to another. Thanks for wasting an hour of my time, GGG. So much for buffing against the perils of internet issues, the traps are just deadly to anyone if the server is messing up.


In short:

Keep hardcore to the hardcore mode. It is a fascinating mechanic in theory, but utterly ridiculous in practice once you introduce latency, packetloss, and the odd person with a slow computer.

Any more recent presentations about future content you want to share ? PS one port maybe ?

I neither love nor hate the lab. It is simply there and to some degree necessary. Kind of like running the difficulties with each new character.

I do not see the ascendency points coming from completing the labyrinths as an issue. You do not need to do them repeatedly unless you are going for enchants. Do it a couple times and they are done for that character if you want.

The one thing that does really annoy me is the helmet enchants. Far to many possibilities to go through to get the one(s) you want if rng hates you. There needs to be a way to narrow down the possibilities, not cut the list as what one person doesn't want another may. Just a way for the player to narrow it down or refine it.

A couple of points that others have raised. I also dislike the randomness of Lords Labyrinth pieces and main appearing in maps. Once you have completed one of the pre-requisites, it needs to never appear again. And there needs to be a way to visit the end game labyrinth without dealing with the random spawning. When coupled with the previously mentioned ridiculously sized helm enchant pool, it is quite frustrating.