Written by TY 2022 Cohort
One of the aspects of the game development field that make me consider this field hard is balance. I have been working on a top-down space shooter game for five months now, and I realized that balance is a true challenge that can drain time and lead to significant changes within a game, even though it sounded like a faff to me when I heard about it. The game has six types of ships, each of which has its attributes, e.g., speed, damage, abilities, etc.
At first, making variations for different ships would be a matter of creativity. I didn’t realize that this part was taking me further down the rabbit hole than I knew because one of the ships was unplayable, no matter how many times I tweaked its values.
Game studios often have departments explicitly dedicated to tackling this issue. And this is a much more complex issue than numbers. Jeff Kaplan, Overwatch’s game designer, said, “The perception of balance is more powerful than balance itself.” There is no fun in playing a competitive multiplayer game like Brawl Stars, where all the characters are equally effective against each other. At the same time, it’s unfair to render certain characters useless against other certain characters. The solution to this is complicated as these are the only possible options.
Before the game is released, it should undergo heavy testing sessions for many reasons, one of which is to ensure the game is as balanced as it can be. Perfection doesn’t exist in balance because players perceive games in different ways.
A game’s meta – the way players use the game’s mechanics, systems, characters, etc., to progress in a game- is almost unpredictable by the game development team when they release it. Take Warcraft 3 The Frozen Throne, for example; the game has four races with different units for different base upgrades. The game was intentionally built so that a perfect army would consist of different types of units that would complement each other. Still, the game’s meta was that different sets of units are usable against certain groups, and winning is about knowing what strategy to use and when to switch.
As a result of the inevitable imbalances that games have to undergo constantly, game developers release patches that either buff or nerf characters, abilities, or enemies. These patches are based on the overall win rate of a specific speed, unit, or character, its win rate in different match-ups, and its win rates across different skilled players, as professional gamers can exploit features that most other players can.