Game Balancing; Do devs even know what this is?

[4RM3D]

Oh, this was a long time coming... With all doom-sayers talking about EA, Xbone, DRM... Lets look at something else: the complete lack of game balancing.

A lot of (triple-A) games have game balancing issues. I'll write down a few I can remember: Mass Effect Saga, Dragon Age Sage, The Witcher games, Bioshock games, Skyrim, Torchlight.

I am not going to discuss each game individually. Instead I am going to look at 2 different game balancing issues: core mechanics and class balancing.

Class Balancing
All the games I have mentioned above suffer from this issue. Some classes are way to overpowered, while others are just broken. With Mass Effect some classes just sucked, but you could ignore those and just play with a decent class instead. Thus the impact was low. The Mage in Dragon Age was so ridiculously overpowered that it broke the game. This had a bigger impact.

Core Mechanics
Core mechanics is a bit trickier to address. It has to do with how well the gameplay 'flows' and how well the game doesn't work against itself. I can't think of a game that exactly fits this profile, but there are a few that come close. Bioshock Infinite had a 2 weapon limit and wanted you to pick up the guns you find in combat zones on the fly. That was the flow, it felt like that. But the skill system told me otherwise. Those two didn't match up (like the ending ).

The Witcher 2 was about using a combination of skills, magics and traps. But the skills didn't work well together (and magic was severely overpowered) and the combat was too sluggish.

Torchlight was ... I don't even... WTF was that crappy, horrendous skill system. That didn't work on any level. Oh wait, you wanted us to 1-button skill spam the whole game. My bad for misunderstanding how I was not suppose to play the game.

The Release and After
Lets talk about Diablo 3. A lot of negative things can be said about the game, but Blizzard is making every effort to balance out the game. And that made me think. Even though most of the games mentioned above have no excuse to have this crappy game balancing, you really can't have a good balanced game on release date. There are far too many aspects; there will always be issues, like there will always be bugs. But because most issues are related to the core gameplay, which the devs won't fix.

So the game is broken / has issues on release date. Fine, I could understand that. But not fixing the issues afterward is a no-go.

Thoughts?

 

[StriderShinryu]

A lot of what becomes balance in a game isn't set on stone until the game ends up in the wild. No matter how much theory crafting and in house testing a development house does, it literally can't compare to the millions of hours by potential millions of players that occurs after a game gets released. Not to mention that in some genres, like fighting games or MMOs, the playerbase is esentially dedicated to not just playing but also to "breaking" the game in a search for the most power/success/loot/etc.

Also, in some cases, balance isn't really a core design aspect of the game simply because it, more or less, doesn't matter.

Not that I'm saying there's any excuse to truly broken balance issues in games, especially when you're talking a competitive game, but it's a much more complex to diagnose and difficult to resolve issue than it often seems.

 

[skywolfblue]

Balance takes a lot of testers, time and money.

Blizzard spent YEARS balancing Starcraft/2, Warcraft and WoW.

In the days of "Two years per game for maximum productivity!!1one" philosophy of gamemaking, not very many other developers get the chance to do that (either by choice or their publisher forcing them to release at gunpoint).

It's something I wish developers would spend time on, because good balance often improves gameplay dramatically.

 

[Shpongled]

Funny how the games you use as examples are all single-player. I don't really see why balance matters all that much n single player, as long as there aren't extremes in under/over-poweredness. Eg, you say magic is incredibly OP in The Witcher 2, but i played through as full melee and had an enjoyable experience. Personally didn't notice much difference in my mage playthrough either tbh, but even if magic were far more powerful, it didn't stop melee or alchemy runs from also being fun. Just different.

Mages in DA were a problem, but not necessarily because they were OP, more because they were infinitely more fun to play than rogue or warrior. Rogues could put out some obscene damage in that game when optimised properly, and warriors were clearly the best tanks, those classes were just boring to play compared to mages. That was the issue for me.

Either way, multiplayer games are different. Obviously balance is a massive issue in those games, but for the most part i think multiplayer developers (at least the big ones) spend a decent amount of time on balance, it's just incredibly hard to get right if you want any variation between classes/races/characters/weapons etc whatsoever. And if you want to add anything new to the game to keep it fresh and whatnot, your balance problems will never end.

 

[Mordekaien]

See, the thing with game balance is that there is always a player that seeks to break the game (some people just want to play that way) and you can not think of all the things he's going to make.
On the other hand, if we're not talking about multiplayer titles, why fix something when people are having fun with it? I mean, if you don't like that thing being powerful, just don't use it. It's not like it has some impact, other than on your own enjoyment.

That is, unless the whole system is completely broken, of course.

 

[Tom Waits' hat]

I don't want to come off as a bitter snarky gamers. But what make you think the developers haven't thought about what you just listed. Perhaps there are other reasons why it was not implemented.

 

[lechat]

far as i'm concerned if it's not multiplayer it doesn't need to be balanced
if i want to play the over powered WTFBBQPWN mage and 1 hit kill bosses than i'll do that and if i want to play the gimp 1 armed dwarf in a wheel chair then i might enjoy the challenge