Balance in games

what is the absolute limit of what can be considered balanced in an game?
like where do you draw the line on what is balanced and what isn't?

Its really dependent on the game, but basically for it to be balanced, I'd say something should be equally challenging on both sides. Not overpowered enough to make it the only option, not too pathetic to make hardly worth the effort.

devs shouldnt bother with balance at all

fucking casuals

what about single player games?

and PvE games?

For single player, obviously you should focus on making sure the challenge ramps up as the game goes on. Start off simple with a bit of challenge while making sure the player won't be confronted with too big of a challenge before your game gets running. As the player gets better and gains more tools, you adjust the difficulty so the game gets harder, presenting challenge for the player at all times so it doesn't feel like a cakewalk, but not too much so it doesn't feel like the game is cheating to beat you.

As for PvE, the main thing to keep in mind is to balance it as if multiple people were going to do it. If you're clever, you can make it so the most savvy with the game can solo, but you should make it with the mind set that a player would want to do it with other people and adjust accordingly.

By listening to the amount of whining on the official forums a dev can make informed decisions on what is or is not balanced. The line to be drawn is the amount of whining on the official forums about x and then x will get nerfed unless x is the majority of revenue in which case x will get whatever they want.

Depends. Is it single or multiplayer? Is it supposed to be challenging? Does your balance limit the player's freedom?

For example, Obsidian tried to make Pillars of Eternity balanced and what came out was just a boring shitfest.

That's not a very good example since Obsidian couldn't make a good game if their lives depended on it

Balance is video-game communism. You can never get true balance between skill and difficulty.

People complaining about unbalanced games, are just either really good or too bad and getting their asses kicked.

I would especially in multiplayer-games a really good one should let you be able to win, in multiple ways.

Well fuck you.

No fuck you leatherman

Balance in singleplayer should focus on every element or tool in the game having some kind of use. If it's useless in gameplay terms, or if the situation for that tool to be used rarely arises, then that thing will feel underpowered and useless. If you can rely on one thing for the whole thing because it outclasses everything else in nearly every aspect which matters, then it's clearly overpowered.
A bad approach to balancing is to ensure everything has near-equal pros and cons, which kills creativity and experimentation in favor of developers having more control over your experience.

I honestly don't know what you mean by that

The trick to balance is making sure player choice matters. If the game's balance is skewed so that dominant strategies occur - where a specific sequence of choices greatly outperform any other possible sequence of choices by opposing players - or where useless strategies occur - where certain choices underperform compared to any other possible choices - then the game limits the potential for variety and freedom in playstyles, possibly leading to a very stale and repetitive experience. The game may effectively become "solved".

However, there is a trapping devs fall into where, in their endeavor to make a balanced game, they end up giving players too much freedom in their choice and make the game too balanced. If every possible sequence of choices in a game is just as viable for success as the next, then the decision-making involved in the game becomes completely trivial. Choices lose their meaning, making having them in the first place pointless. To put it in a simple example, if a game was totally balanced so that every possible choice had equal viability for success, a player's inaction (their choice to not make any actions) would be just as viable as any other combination of actions.

Though the above explanation was for multiplayer games, it also rings true for single-player games. Balance shouldn't simply be about making the outcome of every possible choice or strategy equal, it should be about making sure there is a balance between the freedom in choice a player can make and in the importance of these individual choices.

A game being too balanced is also something I've been thinking about. There seems to be a very small sweet spot, where a game is balanced enough so that most choices are viable, but not so balanced that every choice leads to the same outcome.

"Freedom" as in "how hard can I steamroll enemies with a certain combination of "fun" items/characters/mechanics" and in regards to balance "while dwarfing every other option available."
I think that's what he means.

Balance is proportional to accessibility. The problem I see with most games that pride themselves on being difficult, is the "same dumb enemies, they just hit harder" syndrome.

I can't count how many times I've gotten buttmad at plain shitty design choices. The TNT-filled stairway climb in Half-Life to launch the rocket comes to mind. A sequence of jumps in the Tower of Xervah in Valkyrie Profile. Gritting my teeth, mumbling under my breath "Gee, the game sure is prompting me to think critically in order to advance!"

When designers try to "balance" games, they more often than not end up trivializing whatever challenge there was supposed to be. To the point of the player needing to handicap themselves just to re-introduce the same challenge factors. Balance is a matter of design choice in relation to mechanics. Anything that makes the player forget they're playing Space Invaders with a new coat of paint…again.

How useful things are only really matters inasmuch as there is a cost associated with getting it/using it. A super kill-all move could actually be balanced if there were an extreme cost associated with it, while a nigh-useless bubble blowing power that's free isn't screwing the game up.

That's where the real balance comes in for single player imo, resource management.
The abilities themselves and their relative power is usually not that big of a deal for gameplay. It's when you've got infinitely regenerating health and items/mana/ammo coming out of your ass that things get dull and I'ld call it poorly balanced.

Example: I tried out atelier iris 2 a couple days ago. Mana is per fight, healing items are infinite, save points are every two screens. Shit balance.
Also been trying out Etrian Odyssey this past week. Finite space for healing items and strapped for cash for them, can only save in town and have to work your way back through the same areas if you mismanage resources and have to bitch out, which you will. Pretty well balanced.

There is no balance, only whine.

Is it balance if a game forces you to play differently at different fixed situations?

What exactly was your problem with that?

The greatest game of all time has literally zero balancing.

In order to combat this type of worst case scenario, design a First Order Optimal Strategy. Simple to perform, and fairly powerful. Enough to elevate the player above button mashing. Then, make sure that there is (for multiplayer) a harder to perform counterplay, or (for single player) a situation/enemy/event where it will not be good enough.
FOOS are about giving the players the confidence to start investing in the game, so that they can begin to learn to be better once they feel comfortable with the first level. If you want to have more depth, you should think not only about FOOS, but also second and third and fourth order optimal strategies. Especially in making multiplayer games accessible, don't think about the skillfloor, because it often limits the skill-cieling. think about how you can keep players learning. as a designer, how can you make people improve at your game faster?

Other than costs there's also usability - some weapon might be really powerful but their attack patterns or requirements make it difficult to use simply because you won't get 100% efficiency with it.

Balance is simply the rate of exchange between Input to Output regardless of whether the game is singleplayer or multiplayer.

Movement is an Essential Element in a beat-em action game because it requires very low input for very high output.

Everything in the game is relative to those Essential Mechanics and the closer a mechanic or item gets to that "Low Input - High Output" area the more essential it becomes.

So if a gun is ridiculously OP it may be considered an "Essential" weapon in ones arsenal. What makes the weapon OP is that it requires little skill, timing, or patience to use (Low Input) and provides an absolutely devastating result (High Output).

Games that rely on doing "ridiculous moves" and making "Everybody OP" typically have to be made to be well balanced since while every move is "High Output" some moves require less input than others.

If your strategy is (Low Input - High Output) versus a strategy that is (High Input - High Output) the former will be more popularly used simply because it produces a near identical result (enemy = dead) for a lower cost.

Good balance requires some form of trade off or asymmetry in play so you have (Low Input - Med Output) strategies fighting against (Med Input - High Output) strats.

The more complex, "hardcore", or skill-based the game is the more equal the input is to the output.

The more simple, "casual", or action-based the game is, the higher the Output is to the Input.

Typically "Broken" games are ones that require higher input for lower output. That is what defines the shitty balance in a game and broken controls.

TL;DR Equivalent exchange muh nigga

Balance is for nerds who can't git gud

Bethesda manages to fuck up in both fronts.

Nice. But what about games with "perfect" balance which are ultimately bland and leave no room to diversity, how do they fit in?

You need to go back.

Kek

you shut your whore mouth

The ass must always be as big as the tits, it can be bigger than the bosom and it's still acceptable but the other way around is no go.

...

as an assman autist myself i agree 100% with this, bottomheavy is alot better looking than top heavy. Thick Thighs Save Lives

today I have learned proper game balance involves the ass being either bigger or equal in size to the tits.

Use your newfound knowledge in your life to make it better

Balance is shit

Asymmetric game play and realism for the win

but whats the point of asymmetry and realism if one side always wins, and the other always loses?

It should depend on the players if the game is balanced or not

Take project reality for example, in some scenarios you have US marines with scopes, air support and heavy weaponry vs talibans with shabby aks, without scopes and they only advantage is element of surprise

And it works out just fine

I checked the hell out of those quadros, bruh

Thanks

seems like taliban were given the element of surprise to compensate for their worse equipment. Players played this game that way because it was deliberately designed that way.

You know a game does it right when even a tool assisted speedrun uses the character's full moveset in a balanced way.

No multiplayer game has ever released without balancing patches ensuing after a few weeks or months. You can theorize, have open betas but when you release the game the number of players will rise dramatically and that is when you can decide on what is not balanced based on statistics such as winrate, success rate or any other relevant data.

Go take a look at the patch history of popular moba's. So many balance patches

A lot of ASSFAGGOTSs deliberately skew the balance to overpower certain characters or cripple others for the sake of "shaking up the meta". It's a tactic to keep players invested in a game - since they haven't figured it out yet - without actually improving on or adding to the game.