Weapon Balance... What Is It Good For?

[Guitarmasterx7]

I say the best way to do it is to make everything overpowered in ONE way. Look at TF2. Pretty much every single class has something about them that would normally be considered "broken" but it works great because they ALL have one of these attributes. The engineer has mounted turrets capable of fucking up a whole team, the heavy has rapid fire and a ton of health, the spy can kill anything in one hit if they don't notice him before he gets behind them, etc.

That's also what makes super smash bros so fun. Everyone is jumping 40 feet in the air doing crazy acrobatics and shooting each other with giant fireballs and explosives.

I think the main problem with CoD is that all the guns do pretty much the same thing. You've either got a semi automatic, an automatic (being by far the most prominant), a shotgun, or a sniper, and aside from that everything is just stats. Overpowered in CoD isn't the fun BFG kind of overpowered, it's a very boring kind of "I shot this guy 3 times in the foot and he shot me twice in the foot and i died first" overpowered. I don't like the game anyways, and honestly, the .03 second difference in time it took for you to get killed by what's pretty much the same exact gun you're using isn't that big of a deal, but I would prefer a game like that to be balanced.

As for halo, to be honest I just miss having an "as fast as you can squeeze the trigger" kind of weapon, not really the power of it.

I guess basically what I'm getting at is that the most important factor in making a game fun is variety. It really doesn't have anything to do with balance.

 

[Smooth Operator]

That is just stupid, if you make weapons unbalanced then everyone will simply use that one single weapon and complain about lack of diversity, when one weapon is too powerful the rest does not even appear to exist

How would you like to play games featuring a single weapon?
Well I'm sure most of the casual market wouldn't even complain, but some of us like good game design.

Again, this is what we have ammo scarcity for. I'm currently playing Alan Wake and the flare gun and flash grenades are pretty much all powerful weapons that are pretty much a I WIN button in the middle of a fight... but there's not a ton of ammo around. You either use them when you're backed in a wall or when you know the end of the level is coming up and you might as well enjoy them before you mysterious give up all your cool gear before the next episode starts.

But ammo scarcity is also part of weapon balancing, a rocket launcher with infinite ammo would completely dominate every game, take the ammo away and now you got a reason for using your entire weapon collection.
That is what balancing is all about, not every weapon being the same but every weapon having it's use.

 

[Randomologist]

In singleplayer modes, I love the guns that basically say "Press X to skullfuck everything you can see", they can be a great deal of fun. RYNO 2, anyone?

In multiplayer scenes though, balance is one of the most important characteristics for me. Its only just behind non-linearness and lack of bugs. If someone kills me from 3 miles away with a pistol, eh, lucky shot. Respawn and move on. If it happens over a dozen times and the only way to counter it is to use their weapon, I will quickly find the game boring; and I'll go play something else until it's patched. How dull would TF2 be if everyone played as the Heavy? Or where everyone in RA3 slugged it out with a Shogun Executioner?

 

[Anchupom]

I like balance, but then again overpowered stuff sometimes need to be necessary.

Can you imagine Pokemon without those stupidly powerful legendaries?

 

[JediMB]

They're a lot more unbalanced weapons than Quake 3.

That might be true. While I own Quake 3 on Steam nowadays, I only briefly played it on the Dreamcast back in the day. Didn't really get into multiplayer shooters until I tried Unreal Tournament at school later.

Such as the Flak Cannon is essentially a shotgun that doubles as a rocket launcher. Then there's the Redeemer, a small nuclear weapon.

Well... a shotgun doubling as a grenade launcher. And the Redeemer is really more of a gimmick or temporary power-up than a weapon, since it can only be fired once. Trying to hog the redeemer isn't a very successful combat strategy.

Really, the only weapon I never figured out how to use effectively was the BioRifle. I had an easier time using the Translocator offensively.

I think Epic did a pretty good job of balancing gameplay by making the more powerful weapons harder to get. Most of the guns are fun to use and effective enough until you get your favorite, but it's definitely skewed toward a handful of weapons.

I'm going to have to say that my favorite weapons tended to be... Shock Rifle, Sniper Rifle, Impact Hammer, Flak Cannon and Rocket Launcher. I was basically happy if I had either of those (except the Impact Hammer in most cases, of course), although my preference would depend on what sort of level (and game mode) we were playing.

 

[silver wolf009]

I dissagree with you old bean. Balance is meant to be used to make the game more fun. As an example, I was recently playing a game of SoulCalibur 4 were the opponent used a perk on his character that made it so that you did a sliver of health damage, no matter your attack stat or the move in question, you loose by defualt, not fun in the slighest.

 

[archvile93]

Not me, there's nothing worse than a multiplayer match that boils down to, "he got the death weapon first, he wins, we're screwed, might as well just give up now." In single player poorly balanced weapons discourage you from using other weapons. Why bother thinking your weapon choices through when you can just pick the murder everything one that allows you to breeze through even the hardest difficulty?

I think in single player, you can just balance that by making them overpowered in different ways - say, one weapon recharges your shields on a hit, another knocks down the guys you shoot it with, another floods the area with plasma causing continuous damage, etc. - basically, there would never be a single 'murder weapon' because all of them have limitations while utterly rocking in their area of specialization.

I think that pretty much is weapon balance; limiting the weapons' abilities so one can't do everything better than all the others.