There is a never-ending and ever-emotional argument when it comes to many games regarding balance. Balance would be the game being fair and everyone having an even footing when it comes to actually playing the game. It is not an uncommon sight to visit a particular game’s forums and see someone talking about, or dare I say complaining, about how Feature X or Feature Y is unbalanced or favors their opponent.
Balance has become so subjective that unless there’s a significant and obvious difference between two things in a game that should be equal, we, the people playing the games, might have a less-than-objective perspective on balance .
For example: your opponent in a real time strategy game (like Starcraft 2) is beating you rather severely while playing a certain faction. My reaction could be any number of things, but most likely would be either:
- A) “Oh wow this opponent is good/Oh wow I’m awful at Starcraft 2,” or
- B) “Hmm maybe his faction is just overpowered/the faction I’m playing just isn’t very good 1v1 against his.”
Almost any game involving direct competition between at least two players triggers these sorts of reaction, so it’s safe to say everyone deals with balance in one form or the other.
The perception of balance, or lack thereof, might be almost entirely determined by what we think of ourselves. I mostly hear talk of balance from first person shooter games where online multiplayer is involved, particularly about whether or not a particular weapon is “balanced,” or from MMORPGs like World of Warcraft where players often speak of how their chosen class is underpowered. In these scenarios the most vocal parties are the ones who feel that they have done no wrong – it’s clearly the fault of the game developers that they couldn’t beat the opponent.
This, I think, is misplaced blame; when creating a game that will assuredly involve competition between players developers can only do so much to make it fair for everyone so lets give them some slack and not go from calm to raging in 0.5 seconds.
We can look at the genre of shooters and see how balance can be done right and wrong with titles like Halo Reach and Modern Warfare 2. With Halo Reach we see a game offering one of the most balanced multiplayer experiences I’ve played. Weapons all feel just powerful enough to slay the enemy; I’ve never felt like something was just broken. Meanwhile if you look at Modern Warfare 2 where players have killstreaks that chain into each other and culminate in a game-ending nuke.
That seems a bit unfair. If one player can end the game for everyone with a single killstreak chain, something is quite wrong.
Let’s face facts. Gaming, like life, isn’t going to be fair. Each player has different reaction times, or game or map awareness, or reflexes, or tactical skill…and these are going to make you better or worse in a game. Such benefits and hindrances make true balance impossible. Moreover, the only way to make the game purely balanced would be to make everyone’s skill-to-handicap ratio result in a totally even chance of victory…which is the very best way to make a game neither interesting nor exciting.
The totally fair, totally balanced game would be bland and boring. So embrace that not everything will be fair in games. You can’t always win but loss can motivate us to become even better.
Now I can no longer resist playing the Battlefield 3 beta so farewell.