Perfectly Balanced, Not Everything Should Be

Balance.

It's something people lose when they drink too much, and it's something people lose their minds over when discussing game-design. Go to any multiplayer game's reddit page and every third post is likely related to a Weapon, Character, or Map being over or underpowered.

The reasoning why makes perfect sense. Multiplayer games by their nature repeat content far more often than Singleplayer, meaning even the average player can hold up a magnifying glass to weapons fired, maps selected, and battles lost. The topic I think is also encouraged by no matter how demonstrably overpowered something is in a video-game, there will always be those who defend it due to selfish attachment to victories "achieved" with it.

I'll never forget someone tried to me that Lion in Rainbow Six Siege wasn't broken at launch, and people just weren't good enough to deal with his ability, to which I explained how Pros won matches with the character by telling their alley using him when to press the G key, an alley who had no monitor and was playing completely blind.

However, as much as I roll my eyes at fools defending such indefensible designs, I'm honestly more irritated by how much balance is put up on a pedestal as the end all be all of game-design.

Games will come out and the thing I see reviews and impressions emphasize isn't the quality of encounters, unique feature sets, or content, but how the game is balanced, which to me isn't a priority.

If your movie is boring, I don't care how airtight the plot is. If a car can't handle your average intersection turn, I don't care how reliable the engine is. And if your game lacks satisfaction, originality, consistency, or all three, then I don't care how perfectly equal Gun A vs Gun B is.

I also question how far developers are committing to reaching this goal. I haven't played Siege in a year, so I can't claim to accurately portray where it's currently at, only the Bosak's deserved losing their passives. However, from the reports I've seen and have previous experience with, Ubisoft focuses heavily on pushing and pulling characters towards a hypothetical perfect 50/50 ratio of win/losses, going as far as to totally rework characters from the ground up who aren't hitting that target.

Personally, I think it's a really bad idea.

Fighting games have been some of the purest competitions out there. Mono e Mono. One on One. No distractions, no extra abilities, no bonuses. All just down to who can maximize the character's move-set with the controller in their hand.

As far as I'm aware, I've never heard of a fighting game (Casual or Pro) that didn't have a tier list. They're always divided up into the fastest, deadliest, most devastating fighters revealing themselves within days, that will proceed to dominate the duration of its competition.

You're not going to solve what fighting games have been unable to solve in thirty years. Especially not when your game has far more variables in its inputs, movement, maps, characters, and reactivity, that also features ten people at a time not two, and it's naïve to believe you can do that.

And lets say you do.

What's been accomplished?

You've still got to worry about graphics, sound, art style, clarity, connection, input, servers, match duration, competitive rankings, post-launch support, and last but not least, making sure your game has a compelling core in the first place.

Infinity Ward's co-design director was quoted saying "I think somewhere along the lines these games have tried to get so balanced, maybe it was esports, it kind of just boiled the fun out of the things when you try to super-balance everything. We’re just having fun. We want to just be able to climb around and have fun interactions."

It's not a coincidence I think that Modern Warfare is the Call of Duty game that exploded. The one which didn't tell people before it launched that they will want to compete on it. The one led by people who see the problems with trying to super-balance everything, and chose not to repeat them.

I've heard many people who work in Esports say that games should be balanced exclusively for the highest level of competitions.

I violently disagree.

When you do that, you get the coma-inducing map selection of Halo 5. You get low damage weapons in Reflex that are paired with such a high skill-ceiling they become worthless. You get people on iRacing telling actual racing drivers how their cars should handle.

I understand you're trying to make the game interesting for the people who are best at it, but those people will represent such a hysterically tiny number of your overall install-base that if your game's enjoyment is sacrificed for everyone else, it's not worth it.