Weapon Balance... What Is It Good For?

[JediMB]

I remember the Quake devs and fans going on and on about the weapon balance in Quake 3, which resulted in a bunch of weapons I had absolutely no desire to shoot. Obliviously, my opinion, but in the great Q3/UT rift, I wasn't alone. The more unbalanced weapons of UT seemed to enjoyed by a different segment of gamer.

I don't really see how the weapons in UT were unbalanced. They just required different play-styles to be used effectively. Even the basic pistol could earn you some good killstreaks if your aim (for their heads) was solid. Some weapons were easier to do a lot of damage with, while others required some skill to get the most damage out of them.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

It's good for making things varied, if things are horribly balanced then everytime you play everyone is going to be fighting with the same weapons and techniques... or to put it more precisely.
"FINAL DESTINATION FOX ONLY NO ITEMS!!!"

In single player though, over powering weapons is fine and awesome. Taking out a group of mooks in a matter of seconds is great fun.

oh god..i had a friend who fucking did that, it was so fucking annoying, but funny as hell to whoop on him with ike or pit, he would rage non stop.

single player = fun stuff

multiplayer = stay the fuck out. i refuse to play multiplayer thats unbalanced, i will sell the game right back/not buy the next game if the multiplayer is awfully unbalanced (mw2)

at my game store by my dorm, they literally have 80 copies of mw2 used because so many people sold back that game. (and we have another 9 game stores in town)

 

[Bullfrog1983]

Doom was my first FPS and I loved the increasingly ridiculous power at your fingertips and it's clear lots of fans loved using that power in MP, too.

Except that Doom actually has a very well balanced arsenal of weapons.......

I know this since I have been playing Doom for almost a decade now, for every monster there are some weapons that work better then others depending on the situation.

It wasn't until Doom 2 came along and introduced the double barreled shotgun that all balance went straight out the window.

I dunno, the double-barrel shotgun wasted a lot more ammo than the regular shotgun, and it wasn't as good as the rocket launcher for long range fighting. Chaingunners would kick your ass if you tried to fight em' long range with the double-barrel shotgun.

 

[freakylarzzy]

if put to effect well in singleplayer, an unbalanced weapon collection or even a few to one weapon can have awsome, gameplay elevating effect's.(in my opinion)
sure multiplayer needs a bit of balancing, but not EVERYTHING needs to be in perfect balance, if you have a desperate race on who gets the better weapons so he/she can devour our very souls, yea, that blows...
if you have a challenging race for a master-weapon only to find that if you have it, people can still make your live misareble, well, that only elevates gameplay in a way to make the battle more interesting, the competition more stimulated to raise their skill to match yours, others or the power of your gained gear.

all i'm tryin to say, chill, play the games, pown some dudes and get shot in the head.(or the buttox, whichever you prefer to display to my "Überüber1337" sniper)

 

[teebeeohh]

i was introduced to multiplayer by RTSs so i value balance over everything else

 

[Anarchemitis]

As long as it can add to the experience.
Imagine if Heavy Weapons Guy could score headshots. No one would ever bother playing anything but Heavy because of his unparalleled damage output capability, defeating the entire purpose of classes.

 

[Netrigan]

I don't really see how the weapons in UT were unbalanced. They just required different play-styles to be used effectively. Even the basic pistol could earn you some good killstreaks if your aim (for their heads) was solid. Some weapons were easier to do a lot of damage with, while others required some skill to get the most damage out of them.

They're a lot more unbalanced weapons than Quake 3. Such as the Flak Cannon is essentially a shotgun that doubles as a rocket launcher. Then there's the Redeemer, a small nuclear weapon.

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 am getting the impression from the OP that someone thinks weapon balance is all weapons being the same in all but appearance. Not really you can still have sniper rifles, which have a low rate of fire and thus become less useful in close range. You can have shotguns, which are powerful, but will not shoot halfway across the map. Etc.

It's less of a problem today since just about everyone has adopted the one or two shot rocket launcher, but I can't tell you how often I got my hands on a really, really shitty rocket launcher in games before that. Shotguns went from super badass to two shots at close range being fairly common.

Then you start getting into situations where sniper scopes have magical powers. Where a scoped shot at long-range is an insta-kill, while it takes several shots from the same gun unscoped to kill someone. Not sure if that's entirely due to weapon balancing, but it's obviously in the mix. Probably equal parts not requiring shooters to get head-shots for the insta-kill (because it's hard), then having to do some weapon balancing after-the-fact to prevent a sniper rifle from being everyone's default gun in MP.

All I know is that when I heard devs bragging about their weapon balance, I get nervous. Mostly because it sounds like they're paying more attention to the MP part of their game and are willing to sacrifice fun in the SP campaign in the process.

 

[blankedboy]

Singleplayer needs no balance. Take DooM for example - on the first two difficulty settings you can pretty much just blast through the entire horde unconcerned, because the risk of dying is just too low to compensate for your massive stocks of uber-ammo.

Multiplayer needs as much balance as possible. Take Team Fortress 2 - they added a weapon called the 'shortstop' to replace the Scout's scattergun. The scattergun holds 6 shots at a time, and each one has to be reloaded manually. The shortstop slows people down on hit and has only 4 shots, but they fire about 2 or 3 times as fast and reload all at the same time. So the shortstop is literally better in every way, making it ridiculously overused and really fuckin' hard to beat. A good Scout can take out pretty much any lone enemy with the shortstop without thinking about it twice, save maybe a spun-up Heavy if they're attacking head-on. One unbalanced weapon ruined about half of all Scout players, it can have a huge impact if you do it wrong.

 

[Void(null)]

With one shot one kill everything is balanced.

More games need to work like Bushido Blade.

 

[Cowabungaa]

They're a lot more unbalanced weapons than Quake 3. Such as the Flak Cannon is essentially a shotgun that doubles as a rocket launcher. Then there's the Redeemer, a small nuclear weapon.

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.

And thanks to that the weapons are balanced, not to mention that every weapon clearly has it's own specific use. Every scenario requires a different weapon.

That's a very important difference with CoD and other modern shooters; it has a lot of weapons that pretty much have the same use. You also don't grab weapons from the floor (usually), you get a load-out at the start and get new weapons as you level. It's important that someone who's higher level and has access to a certain gun doesn't have a tremendous advantage over lower level players because his gun is ridiculously more powerful.

With one shot one kill everything is balanced.

More games need to work like Bushido Blade.

If you haven't played it already, go play UT99 with the Instagib mod. Now that's awesome.

 

[Assassin Xaero]

Unbalanced is ok, but do it like Quake III Arena (and yes I know this isn't the only game like this, there are tons). Everyone starts off with the guns, and you have to find more. You don't get them from ranking up or any of that crap. Plus the extremely overpowered guns (BFG) seemed to lack ammo and be hard to find/get to. I still haven't figured out how to get one of them in one map...

 

[Flac00]

With all the talk of weapon balance in various threads, I sometimes think I'm alone in my belief that weapon balance can get stuffed.

One of my first experiences with unbalanced attacks was Sub-Zero in the original Mortal Kombat. While you might play another character because he was cool, the horribly unbalanced slide-kick and freeze powers of Sub-Zero made him the go-to character more often than not.

Doom was my first FPS and I loved the increasingly ridiculous power at your fingertips and it's clear lots of fans loved using that power in MP, too.

The whole MP experience seemed to have changed a lot of games... and not for the better in my opinion. I remember the Quake devs and fans going on and on about the weapon balance in Quake 3, which resulted in a bunch of weapons I had absolutely no desire to shoot. Obliviously, my opinion, but in the great Q3/UT rift, I wasn't alone. The more unbalanced weapons of UT seemed to enjoyed by a different segment of gamer. And I'll flat out say that "balanced" weapons have absolutely no place in a single player campaign. Balance the weapons with ammo scarcity, not by making the rocket launcher slightly more powerful and slower than a shotgun.

So, when I see people complaining about Call Of Duty's insanely popular MP by pointing out how unbalanced the kill streaks are, I seriously wonder if those unbalanced attacks aren't the reason why it's so popular. People love cheap tactics. Sure, it sucks to be on the receiving end of it, but before long you figure out how to do it and start having fun with it.

The Halo fans love to point out the weapon balance in their MP as making it superior... then a couple of minutes later they're lamenting the nerfing of their beloved over-powered pistol from the first game. WOW fans always complain when their favorite attacks (you know, the horribly unbalanced ones) get nerfed. Hopelessly unbalanced attacks were the only thing that made Prototype a blast to play.

I say long live unbalanced weapons and attacks. Who's with me?

no. Balance is what keeps games fun. Look at modern warfare 2. For me at least, I hated playing the game. Every time I spawned, I would get killed within 2 seconds without getting off a shot. Balance is designed to ensure that EVERYONE has fun, not just the people that abuse that overpowered weapon. True, balance should not exist in singleplayer. But thats because the people you are fighting against in singleplayer are not real, they don't have feelings etc. But in multiplayer, many people will rage quit or just leave the server if they get slaughtered every time they do anything. Unreal Tournament did have balance, did it have some issues, yes, but the game was very well balanced to begin with. Quake wasn't bad because it was balanced, it was because they did not focus on the "fun" and "over the top" aspects that made UT great. Honesty, Black ops is popular because of Call of Duty 4. Anyone who played that game, but never bought it, bought one of the later Call of Duty games because they were similar to 4. Look at a game like Battlefield 2. It is extremely well balanced, and yet it is still a lot of fun. Sure, when you sacrafice fun for balance, the game sucks. But when you sacrifice balance, then everything goes to shit, and NO ONE LIKES YOUR GAME! Finally, sure, people complain when their favorite (unbalanced) attack gets nerfed. But that doesn't suddenly make the game bad, nor does it make them leave. Saying balance should be dropped entirely is wrong. Your grabbing the wrong end of the wrong stick. Games are only made worse by a lack of innovation and a kind of fun, not by balance.

 

[Flac00]

It's good for making things varied, if things are horribly balanced then everytime you play everyone is going to be fighting with the same weapons and techniques... or to put it more precisely.
"FINAL DESTINATION FOX ONLY NO ITEMS!!!"

In single player though, over powering weapons is fine and awesome. Taking out a group of mooks in a matter of seconds is great fun.

Wait, in the first part, do you mean "horribly unbalance"? Sorry, just confused.

 

[FightThePower]

No, balance is very important.

It is true that sometimes by making stuff more balanced you can make the game less fun (No Items. Fox Only. Final Destination), and I would bet a lot of money on the fact that if you removed the super-powerful items like the Blue Shell or Bullet Bill from Mario Kart it would be significantly less popular. However, that's a particularly slap-dash approach to balancing - it works for the competitive scene (like how in Left 4 Dead 2 competitive lots of things are removed - Med Packs, Defibs, Grenade Launcher etc.) but real balancing isn't about removing features, it's about tweaking them. You can have a balanced game and a fun game.

Point is, if you don't balance the weapons the game becomes stale and repetitive. When there's no reason to use anything other than one particular gun, it removes variety from the game; in Black Ops, there are 32 different primary weapons, and of those 32, maybe 8 or 9 are used regularly. Think how much better the Call of Duty series would be if all the weapons, killstreaks and perks were equally useful, you'd have an endless amount of combinations to try out and be able to do equally well.

I'll give an example of how weapon balance can really make a difference. In Left 4 Dead, the Autoshotgun was easily the best Tier 2 weapon. There was no reason to pick the M16 or Hunting Rifle over it, so every time you played Versus everyone just picked the Autoshotgun and it became very stale. Fast forward to Left 4 Dead 2 where Valve did some significant weapon tuning, now all the Tier 2 guns are very well balanced - the Hunting Rifle was now useful, and the Autoshotgun was nerfed to the point in no longer dominated. Now if I play Versus I can pick whichever gun I feel like using, because I know that each of them are just as viable, and have their own strengths and weaknesses.

And the last thing is that whilst it's fun to dominate other people with cheap tactics, it's frustrating for the people on the receiving end. You can't just take into account one group of players, you've got to take into account people on both sides of the situation. I might have fun gunning down 20 people in my Chopper Gunner, but I've been equally frustrated when I've died over and over and over to a killstreak I didn't give away.

Tl;dr - Less balanced =/= more fun. Yes, you can make a game more balanced and less fun at the same time, but they're not mutally exclusive. Unbalanced games remove variety and add frustration, and you don't want that.

 

[Netrigan]

As long as it can add to the experience.
Imagine if Heavy Weapons Guy could score headshots. No one would ever bother playing anything but Heavy because of his unparalleled damage output capability, defeating the entire purpose of classes.

The same reason shotguns don't get head-shot damage.

This isn't a rant about not having balance in games. Balancing gameplay is important and having some sort of weapon balance is part of that... but I hate the nerfing of badass weapon stats. It's like admitting you completely failed to balance out the availability of the weapon, so now you're going to gut the very reason why said weapon is so popular in the first place.

Should every game have a 50 rocket capacity rocket launcher like Doom did? Of course not. If you give a player 50 rockets, you pretty much have to require that he *need* that many at some point in the game. There's something unbelievably tense about going up against a tank in Call Of Duty with a one-shot RPG.

But I think unbalanced fun is a part of these games. Everyone bitches about the Killstreaks in Call Of Duty, but (and this is me speaking as someone who generally avoids MP) from the sound of things, I'd much prefer it to the more balanced Halo, because there's a nice tangible unbalanced reward for not sucking.

Which is not to say that Halo should add these sorts of things, because, obviously, a lot of their fans enjoy its balance... but, goddamnit, lack of balance isn't necessarily a flaw. Sometimes having an oddly over-powered pistol with an illogical zooming device on it is just frakkin' fun and you should just run with it.

 

[sulld1]

I love unreal tournament it's ace but i wouldn't say it's weapons are overpowered, they serve different purposes... but as a long time player of DotA balance is so hugely important in multiplayer games that it cannot be ignored, whilst i like COD i find the killstreaks ridiculous and it's a reason why i don't play it half as much they are just stupid... so i'm all for a little bit of balance in games.

 

[Flac00]

I don't really see how the weapons in UT were unbalanced. They just required different play-styles to be used effectively. Even the basic pistol could earn you some good killstreaks if your aim (for their heads) was solid. Some weapons were easier to do a lot of damage with, while others required some skill to get the most damage out of them.

They're a lot more unbalanced weapons than Quake 3. Such as the Flak Cannon is essentially a shotgun that doubles as a rocket launcher. Then there's the Redeemer, a small nuclear weapon.

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 am getting the impression from the OP that someone thinks weapon balance is all weapons being the same in all but appearance. Not really you can still have sniper rifles, which have a low rate of fire and thus become less useful in close range. You can have shotguns, which are powerful, but will not shoot halfway across the map. Etc.

It's less of a problem today since just about everyone has adopted the one or two shot rocket launcher, but I can't tell you how often I got my hands on a really, really shitty rocket launcher in games before that. Shotguns went from super badass to two shots at close range being fairly common.

Then you start getting into situations where sniper scopes have magical powers. Where a scoped shot at long-range is an insta-kill, while it takes several shots from the same gun unscoped to kill someone. Not sure if that's entirely due to weapon balancing, but it's obviously in the mix. Probably equal parts not requiring shooters to get head-shots for the insta-kill (because it's hard), then having to do some weapon balancing after-the-fact to prevent a sniper rifle from being everyone's default gun in MP.

All I know is that when I heard devs bragging about their weapon balance, I get nervous. Mostly because it sounds like they're paying more attention to the MP part of their game and are willing to sacrifice fun in the SP campaign in the process.

For at least the last part. Look at StarCraft 2. Multiplayer is insanely balanced, yet in Singleplayer you get way over powered shit like Medics, super siege tanks, Giant thors, etc.

Also, about snipers. I have always hated snipers, because in many games they are overpowered. And when a map consists only of them it gets boring fast. But the scope rule I have never really seen. Usually it is that if you are unscoped, your shots will not be on target. Other than TF2, which actually charges the gun when scoped, scopes don't do anything more than zoom and accuracy.
The thing about Call of Duty that I hated was quickscoping. Which made the sniper rifle a too powerful weapon. It worked in close quarters, long range, mid range. Pretty much everywhere. Stuff like that really makes the multiplayer more annoying than anything else.

 

[Korolev]

If a game isn't balanced, then I think it's less fun. If there is a clear cut "best" weapon or loadout, then what's the point in having anything else?

A great game will have balanced weapons that encourage different styles of play - for instance, TF2. That game is (or, was) almost perfectly balanced, but the weapons were very different and very fun to play with. For example - the Heavy's Minigun was powerful and could fire a lot, but restricted his movement severely, took a long time to spin up and was inaccurate at long range (but deadly at close range) - this meant that the Heavy was better at defending by himself, but would have to rely on teammates like the medic to attack effectively. But if he did have a team-mate, he could be DEVASTATING. The scout was different - he could do a lot of damage very quickly and move very quickly, but he was extremely brittle and he took a long time to reload. This encouraged pure offense, but defensively made him very weak. The pyro is a class that excels at ambushing, close quarters combat and spy-checking, but sucks at long range combat and will be slaughtered in a direct, open fight against just about any class that can fire from a distance. This is a hallmark of a good game - TF2 has classes that play VERY differently, with VERY DIFFERENT strengths and weaknesses, but all of which are useful in the right hands doing the right things.

A good game will have everything balanced, BUT different. An unbalanced game is no fun, and a balanced but "everything-samey" game is also no fun.

 

[Korolev]

Not to hype on TF2 too much, but they released weapon packs that had different weapons but were also balanced - for instance, the Soldier's standard rocket launcher can hold 4 rockets in its clip and shoots them out relatively quickly, but the reload speed is very slow. The Solider now has 2 different rocket launchers he can use - a Blackbox launcher which heals the soldier 25hp for every hit, but only holds 3 rockets in the clip, meaning that he does far less damage against sentry guns. There's also the "direct hit" rocket launcher, which has the same amount of rockets, but each rocket deals much less "splash" damage, but much MORE direct hit damage (which encourages better aiming, but makes it less effective against crowds).

You see how you can have balanced weapons, that are different and fun to play with? The heavy also has different miniguns - one which slows down any target when hit, giving the heavy more time to hit them, but also does less damage (so great in team play when you want to slow down a retreating enemy), and another that does more damage, but takes far longer to spin up and makes far more noise (which means that you NEED a medic to heal you or you WILL die - but it's great against sentry nests and entrenched positions).