So I4 got me to thinking, how do people balance a game? What's good game balance and what isn't? How do you define game balance?
Let's start with some dichotomies to make things clearer: there are two types of computer games - singleplayer and multiplayer.
Game balance is normally used more often in relation to multiplayer games - something like, no perceived/actual advantage to one player more than another.
For single-player games, stuff is normally fairly balanced, in that it's player versus AI, and the balance is inherent in the difficulty of the gameplay/levels. You are normally given the option to tweak it up or down in action games, while adventure games pretty much let you try stuff again and again until you solve the puzzle (or give up and check a walkthrough), and RPG/strategy/sports games are a mix of both choice and repetition (sometimes manifested in the save/reload option) until you "win."
Ever so rarely we have players making 'hacks' and 'mods' that increase difficulty because they feel the game is too easy, or using 'cheat-codes' or 'trainers' where they simplify it down to god-mode. No one cares what type of game you're playing because it's your game. Your computer. You're alone in your game world.
In multiplayer, that's where the furor starts. Because there's always a certain element of competition in the word "multiplayer."
More often than not, this competition is embraced by the game and given form in PvP and organizational (eg. guilds/supergroups/clans, shortened to 'org' henceforth) rivalries.
But even without it, there's still an element of "comparision" when you play with other people. It's natural. Happens in the natural, biological, real world. So why not the silicon? My E-Peen is bigger than yours.
And that's where the trouble starts. Suddenly, a subset of people bragged to, feel insecure...and shortchanged. Hey, I bought the same game, why is it that the character I started out with - can't play as well, doesn't have this uber-leet power? UNFAIR! Nerf calls start.
Worse if a game design flaw is highlighted in PvP, everyone suddenly plays one class because the rest are too shabby to be used with a chance of winning.
Now what?
What should a developer do in this situation?
It's a situation that is BOUND to happen. You can't close your eyes and pretend it's not gonna occur. How come? Because if you make a multiplayer game, and you offer varied choice, there are bound to be differences in between powers and so on.
Even games like Counterstrike and Deathmatches can have a balance problem, even starting off with the exact same avatar. Because level design can be an issue if it's not totally symmetrical. Weapon placements, spawn points.
So unless you're going for everything exactly symmetrical and the same (which then shortly becomes boring), you will have asymmetry, and you will have the problem of "balancing the game."
So what to do? Let's study a few different philosophies...
1) You can close your eyes and pretend that it's not there. Ignore it.
In the short term, it works. Players will whine that you're not doing anything, but stuff will balance by itself - meaning, players will just pick the classes they think are the best. (Thieves and vampires in RoD, WoW apparently also has some uber classes, GW's warrior/monks.)
In the long term, it won't. Those shortchanged players will start crying foul, while boredom eventually rules in the miniature 'symmetrical' game-within-a-game the players balanced by themselves, by playing identical cookie cutter characters.
2) You can try to balance this skill here and there by adjusting numbers until it reaches some planned level of equality.
Ah. Here's the tricky part. If you bring the level of equality to the worse common denominator, you will have really pissed off players.
If you bring the level of equality up higher, while players are happier, you may eventually reach a point where the game breaks because of unintended design consequences.
A middle ground might end you up with people from both camps unhappy. Hrm.
How did different games do it? Or not, as the case may be.
RoD - Heh. Not a good case study. More a case of, hide head under rock, we do not have enough labour/manpower to do any serious game balancing and lack enough PR skills to explain this to our players. So all they did was fix the most awful game system-breakers - excess DR causing BUG reports? Means our glory giveout rate is too high, shut it down. (When one could have tweaked a number and just raised the dr bar somewhat.) Vault system causing too much lag, place limits on stuff in vaults. Leveling on merlin's pet? The swirl of mist? BUG/exploit - fixfixfix. So yea, lesson learned from RoD: You cannot just play at being bug fixers and fix selectively. Either you touch nothing, or you embark on a plan of grand balance.
Starcraft - Now this game is interesting. It carries a reputation of one of the most balanced strategy games around, and is still played to this day. Even more amazingly, it doesn't consist of two identical races with essentially identical men. It contains THREE, with differently powered units.
(Warcraft 3 tried to take it up to four races, but one of their misbalances was allowing the hero unit to gain levels, making the balance of units less important than the leveling of the hero. So I consider Starcraft the greater balanced game.)
How did this happen? I'm not familiar with all the details, but I suspect intensive testing and retesting while playing the game. Over and over.
I kinda lost the point of this rant when I skipped over to another browser window to read other game design/balance articles, but Sirlin had a nice point to make. "Checks and balances" designed into the game from the start allow for a large variety of usable options/counters = game balance (from the view of competitive PvPers.)
Guild Wars is seriously taking the Magic: The Gathering strategy. They are not really concerned with balancing every single class. They just want to throw as many possible options on the table - knowing that the players will themselves find the best combinations and counters on their own, and have fun doing it. And they know they will make more money as the competitive players find they need this and that and so on, from this Chapter 2, and Chapter 3, (expansion packs) and yadda yadda.
They've given each class more than one strategy (rangers have pets, traps, wilderness rituals, elementalists have 4 types of hard hitting element-based stuff and increased energy storage, mesmers cast fast and have some different hexes, necromancers do funky stuff with corpses and blood, warriors are big meaty hp absorbers and hackers, monks heal and smite, etc.), and the combination of professions increases the choice options even further. For even further choice - you have to choose 8 skills out of 100's.
The mind boggles at the choices. And there are, naturally, checks and balances from such a limitation. You can choose to push one strategy strongly, and leave yourself exposed from other things. Or you can play the adaptable jack-of-all-trades generalist and possibly be outclassed at a task by a specialist. Who are in term vulnerable when the environment changes.
Sooner or later, they know, someone will come up with a way, a combo, a trick to defeat the presently uber Warrior/Monk, and then that will be the new Flavor of the Month.
It works. It's a wonderfully biological, dynamic, evolutionary system. It's going on, right now, in nature. Why not in an evolving game also? Good game design, I say.
And if they do come up with some game-breaking skill by accident, they can always swiftly alter it on the fly with their streaming system - or create some other skills designed to counteract and nullify it. (Choice again, should I bring this nullifying skill on the assumption that the other guy will bring the uber leet skill? What if he anticipates it and brings another skill? So I should anticipate also and not bring it? - Great stuff for tying yourself in knots second-guessing if that's your cup of tea.)
But let's look at CoH, which is the point of this rant. (One of them, anyway.)
They are tacking on a PvP combat system to something that was intitially designed for team, cooperative PvE play.
Ok, the mind boggles at that assumption already, but let's assume from a marketing perspective that you HAVE to do it, how the heck would you go about designing those same checks and balances into CoH?
Problem 1: You have 5 archetypes. With limited powerset choices.
You can't tweak it like Starcraft that much because you can't play with numbers so well. These are not units that players don't give a shit about. (And I'm sure there are still cries of nerf when some poor zergling gets its hp reduced from 20 to 17. Or something like that.)
These are heroes. The non-PvP specialist player does NOT want to hear that you need to make a special PvP focused character. Especially if they are not altholics. Not when they've invested so much of their identity into one character. They want to have equal opportunity and choice to defeat all other heroes.
Here is where the game design philosophy needs to be out on the table:
You could do like rock, paper, scissors, and make one or two ATs specialist killers of the other ATs. Controller nullifies tank, tank nullifies blaster, blaster nullifies scrapper, scrapers mash controller, oops...forgot defender. They're screwed. Let's try again.
Part of the problem is the variety within the powersets as well. A storm defender is not at all like an empath defender. Nor a dark, nor a kinetic. (As has been liberally forced down our throats every time we visit the defender boards, or some moron calls a def a healer.)
Actually I'd like that design to be part of CoH versus CoV. Pentad Team Combat. Better protect your controller so they can nullify that Mastermind...etc.
CoH PvP is very confused because they've tried to add every possibility. Pentad teams, SG teams, FFAs, team duels. Weight classes by level. How the heck do you even begin to balance it? You can't. All this variety is -naturally- showing the fact that the devs haven't even started thinking this out fully yet. Players immediately pounced on the obvious game-winning strats - which have just been...bug-fixed out of oblivion.
I'm sorry, but I don't feel terribly confident with this, I smell RoD all over. Implementing before proper design has taken place.
All I am feeling in I4 is that they just wanted to see whether all their servers and PvP code could handle mass-player 65-75 characters per side combat. Stablity testing. With the present skill options. Balance? Fun? Nah, worry about that later.
In a later post, I'll address the hypothetical "What Ifs" to CoH PvP, and we'll see what solutions we come up with.
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