Game Balance

November 9, 2024 - Published

With the continuing rise of competitive PvP games, there's this sentiment I've seen making the rounds -- "make games more broken, balance is boring!" While I do think the sentiment is coming from the right place, there is a lot to say about game balance, so we'll keep things simple. 

Single-player Games

Nowadays, game balance is mainly in discussions for PvP games, so let's talk about single-player games first. Why do single-player games need balancing at all? Well, the simple answer is to make the game more fun.

Let's say I give you a run-and-gun game. At the end of the first level, there is a boss that takes 10,000 shots to kill. This would be miserable! It doesn't matter how you design the boss -- even if it had like 5 unique phases, having a boss that takes so long to kill so early in the game would kill most players' motivations to continue playing the game. On the opposite end, if it got killed in 1 shot, that wouldn't be very fun either. While there would be some potential for a sort of joke or fake-out boss, generally it would not be interesting or satisfying to fight a boss that was so easy. Neither of these issues come from any part of the game's mechanics or anything else -- this is an issue of fun that's tied directly to the balance of a character's health points.

Balancing isn't just tied to characters, and can be a lot more complicated. For example, if the game has powerups, how powerful should they be? Generally, they should make up for how difficult they are to obtain: the more difficult it is to obtain, the more powerful it should be. If you spend 3 lives trying to get a powerup and it's a barely-noticeable speed boost, the player will be discouraged from getting powerups again, even if they're more meaningful later on. Meanwhile, if they take a risk and get a powerful gun that wipes out enemies but can get lost in a single hit, then this creates an interesting and fun dynamic where the player is given a high amount of power while still having a weakness.

However, the most difficult thing to design around is strategy. This may stray a bit from balance itself depending on the specific case, but when certain options are too powerful, the player will abuse it -- usually without regard for how fun it actually is. While a run-and-gun game is usually more fun when you're, well, running and gunning, some players might find that certain mechanics reward them for staying still and shooting enemies from a distance. This could make the game a lot more slow and boring than it should be, and possibly kill their interest in the process. Issues like these could be solved by nerfing them directly, or by buffing the preferred tactics instead. Sometimes it might require adding or reworking mechanics entirely, but if you want to learn more about the subject of "protecting the player from themselves," do watch this video on the subject (mild blood/etc. warning): https://youtu.be/7L8vAGGitr8 

Multiplayer Games

Balance in multiplayer games are a whole can of worms, but let's first ignore the fact that there's a player on the other end. Imagine a fighting game where your character has an instant full-screen projectile that does a million damage. While it might be fun at first due to how ridiculously powerful it is, it will eventually become monotonous because there is only one strategy to use. It doesn't matter that you have a whole diverse moveset, or if there's a lot of other characters. Using this character and this move is the ultimate strategy, so there is no reason to use anything else. If you ever wanted to grind ranked, you would use this same strategy over and over, and the game wouldn't be fun for you at all. This is not even mentioning the person on the other end, who would definitely not have any fun getting hit by an unbeatable strategy over and over. 

Of course, I'm using hyperbolic examples to make my point more clear, and professional games will rarely have cases that are this black and white. However, it still stands that having 1 character be the clear best will usually make the game relatively stale. Many times, players will come into a game wanting to play a specific character, and it's very discouraging to have to switch characters just to have a fighting chance. Similarly, a game stuck on one strategy will often make the game less interesting. 

In other words, the essence of game balance is to make the game more interesting, and by extension, more fun. It doesn't matter if a game is single-player, multiplayer, or even a game that happens to have a competitive scene with million-dollar tournaments -- balance exists so that games aren't boring. 

So, why do people want games to be less balanced?

The Paradox of Balance

We balance games to not be monotonous. However, the most balanced outcome is for everything to be the same. This is the paradox that people have issues with.

I want to first discuss a rarely-mentioned disclaimer: games CAN lack "variety" and still be fun. The recent trend for competitive games is to have a diverse set of characters in a PvP setting, but this is not the only way to do things. There's a common saying for Smash Bros. where "if everyone was Mario, then the game would be balanced but it wouldn't be fun," but I WOULD argue that it'd be fun. Chess is a game where both players have exactly the same pieces. Rocket League is a game where every car has nearly indistinguishable differences. Tetris games with Versus modes usually give both players the exact same pieces, and all 3 of these games are highly competitive, dynamic games where people will play them for thousands of hours.

However, when a game chooses to have things like different characters, then those characters MUST be different.

If I choose Bowser in Smash, then I want to be a huge hulking beast that can destroy people with a single dropkick. If I play Marth, then I want to be a light-footed swordsman who swings quickly and elegantly. When the game designer doesn't push these differences to the point that they feel tangibly different to the average player, then the player will generally feel disappointed or betrayed by the dissonance, which loses the usual satisfaction in gameplay. However, creating these large differences makes an inherent imbalance.

Generally, what players actually want is to FEEL differences in character power, but for the game to still be relatively balanced. This means that these games can never be truly balanced, but that's OK! In fact, it is the only possible result when making an asymmetrical multiplayer game, but that's a fact that still needs to be realized by a lot more people. Some people will obsess over perfect balance when it almost never actually matters, and some people will want games to be really unbalanced when that will often just make the game less fun, though I suppose that's just how it is.

As a fighting game developer, I imagine some people might be unhappy with my take on balance, so let me clarify a bit: this article is only talking from the perspective of general game design where the only thing that matters is how fun the game is. Personally, I largely prefer PvP games that are balanced so that characters are very close in power -- I don't play many anime fighters, as an example, but love Tekken, where character movesets are much more similar, relatively speaking (even if not all the games are super balanced).

However, people don't realize what "perfectly balanced" would mean. In something like a fighting game, that would mean that EVERY character has a perfect 50-50 matchup with everyone else, but that won't necessarily translate into winrate, for example. Some characters are harder to master than others, so those characters would necessarily have a lower winrate against easier characters, even if they're perfectly balanced at the highest level.  I'll stop myself there though, because there is so much more to say about game balance that I have to save for another time...

• Vecderg