12/29/2023 0 Comments 100 rogues steamThis is the type of balance that gets the most attention with most gamers. It's easy for a new player to think that Huntresses are an overly powerful unit in the early game in Warcraft III, but once a player realizes their subtly high costs, subtly high food counts, (and not-so-subtle way they get utterly ruined by Piercing or Ranged damage), they realize that they are paying a big opportunity cost by investing in a large amount of them. Many times, I've seen an extremely powerful element in a game, and initially said to myself, "Wow, that's gotta be over-powered!", only to find out later that there was a weakness to the element that wasn't immediately clear (the opposite happens a lot, too). Sometimes, elements can seem imbalanced in a game when you're not looking at the whole picture. This is the same way that dominant strategy damages or ruins games (although rarely to the same degree).Ĭharacters in Street Fighter II, or weapons in Doom, or units in Civilization are examples of balance at the "elements" level. That's a game that is rendered completely un-playable due to the obviousness of the sole strategy actually available to an aware player. A clear example of dominant strategy would be "blocking the opponent from getting three in a row", in Tic-Tac-Toe. A dominant strategy, in the context of game design, is something that emerges due to game imbalance. Assuming that a player is attempting to win the game, choosing any of the characters besides those "best" characters is simply not a viable option.īefore I go on, I think it's important to be clear about what I mean by "dominant strategy". There are usually three or so tiers of characters, with those characters agreed by the community as being "the best" in the top tier. In an imbalanced game, one or more "dominant strategies" quickly emerge, limiting other strategies useless except for some un-intended purpose (such as getting used as a handicap mechanism, or comedic reasons).Īn example of this would be the "tiers" in competitive fighting games. And this, in a nutshell, is why game balance is so important - it preserves your game elements from irrelevance. Gameplay is all about making choices and in a poorly-balanced game, many of the choices available to the player are essentially rendered useless. In a situation like this - which is by far a more common situation than the first example - all a developer can do is guess and check. These are two abilities that function totally differently there's no way to look at the numbers on paper and know what would be balanced. Another character has an ability that gives him a temporary speed boost. One character has an ability that allows him to fire a rocket to knock another kart out for a second. In this game, there are several characters that each have their own ability. Now, let's say we're making a kart racing game. For example, if you're balancing an RTS, and the only thing that changes is attack damage and price, you could easily scale one up and one down when creating new units, and as long as you scaled them at the same rate, you could count on being pretty close to balanced. A game being "in balance" is like a person being "in shape" there's no strict, defined line at which a game goes from being in balance to out of balance, it's a gradual continuum.Īnother thing that makes the task difficult is when you have to balance elements that function completely differently from each other. No game is truly perfectly balanced - even in chess, one player gets to go first. There aren't always clean-cut, mathematical ways to balance your game at the end of the day, it tends to come down to an educated guess on the part of the designers.Ī game being "balanced" is also always, at best, a rough approximation. That's a major reason that balance in game design is so difficult to achieve - it can be so difficult to perceive. Plenty of counter-arguments have been offered for why the AWP is indeed in balance with the rest of the game, but at the end of the day, it seems like it comes down to my opinion versus yours. While I'm certainly not alone in thinking that (browse some servers on Steam and you'll see about a third of the active servers include a "no AWP" house rule), the debate continues to rage on. My personal opinion is that the gun is overly powerful it's the only gun in the game that seems to be a one-shot kill, no matter where it hit you, whether you're wearing body armor, or behind how thick a wall you were hiding. The previously mentioned "AWP", for those who don't know, is a weapon in the super-popular online first-person shooter Counter-Strike. Balancing a game is a challenge that man has struggled with for thousands of years, and the battle continues in the realm of digital games. But sometimes, it really is just the game's fault. Usually, it is actually a combination of these.
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