Focusing too heavily on balance in a single-player game is bad.

[Aquillion]

This is going to be long. I was posting about game balance and how I felt about it in another forum, and realized that (coming right on the heels of the Esper and Short Blade nerfs) it might be interesting to some people here, too. I should mention that I'm not going to specifically talk about those changes here (I've already weighed on them elsewhere, and the Esper patch is of course also a content patch, so I recognize that it's much more complicated and was intended to preserve a lot of the depth I talk about below) - this is about the more general idea of balance as a game-design focus in a game like this.

Obviously some semblance of balance is needed for the gameplay to hold together. I'll get that out of the way first. That said, I feel that the industry is far, far, faaaar too fixated on it. I feel the vast majority of single-player games (RPG-style ones, anyway) are over-balanced in a way that actively harms their depth and gameplay.

(There are also a lot of really badly balanced games, of course. But even those often have the worst of both worlds - sacrificing depth for balance and then failing to achieve it. I feel that more games would benefit from taking the deliberate, intentional perspective of "we're not going to worry very much about this aspect of balance.")

Balance has gameplay costs. Really, really, big costs. Since every potential interaction adds new ways to break the game, the only way to reliably balance things is to reduce interactions and generally make the game simpler. Beyond that, it's important to realize that players generally like breaking the game. Discovering interesting combinations of powers is part of the fun. Feeling like you're getting away with something is part of the fun. Sometimes that fun wears thin after a while, yes, especially when the game feels "solved" - it's not good for a game to break too easily. But no game (no matter how deep its procedural generation may be) lasts forever. I feel that the players who say that they're bored with a game that they've "broken" would, most of the time, have gotten bored even sooner if they hadn't been able to break it.

Partially I think the problem is that RPGs tend to import things from tabletop games and, more recently, MMORPGs (or Diablo-style multiplayer games), where balance is a more serious concern. But either way, it sucks and IMHO generally hurts the genre by constraining developers behind much more tight balance-limitations, ones that aren't really relevant to a single-player game. (Granted that games inspired by earlier editions of D&D benefit from the fact that older editions of D&D were extremely unbalanced in lots of interesting and exciting ways... but that's something else.)

The fact that Qud is unbalanced is a huge part of what attracts me to it, perhaps the main thing that I like about it. I do not want it balanced. I actively dislike the idea of having it made any more balanced than it is now. (I would like more options - including taking some currently-useless choices and buffing them to make them viable - and I can concede that in a few cases it might be necessary to reduce the power of something overpowered just to make alternatives viable. But even then, I don't like to think of it as balancing, because again - the whole point of having options is to find new ways to break things.)

I can list games and series that have been diminished, in some form or another, by misplaced balance concerns in the past. Just off the top of my head, my favorite examples:

1. The Elder Scrolls series. Overall, Skyrim is a great game, and overall I feel the series has improved over time, but a few parts have clearly gotten worse. The series has steadily weakened its crafting and spell-making over the course of the series, while also removing many interesting things you used to be able to do with spells (some of the latter was for technical reasons, but they said it was also about balance - they didn't like people being able to break intended dungeon progression.) Does anyone think that this has made the series better? For me, at least, a major aspect of it that I liked was lost, and I don't feel it really improved things at all.

2. The Puzzle Quest series. No game in that series has ever come anywhere remotely close to the first. And it's entirely because later games have always obsessed over that MMORPG-style balance. The first game was incredibly easy to break in all sorts of bizarre and exciting ways - nearly every new ability did something weird or strange that could be combined with others to accomplish crazy stuff, and you had so many choices and options that you could employ multiple ridiculous strategies at once. Every game in the series since has had more limited options, less character customization, fewer spells and effects and abilities, more on-the-rails progression, and so on, all clearly structured around giving people this balanced, unified experience. And it sucks. The game isn't as deep, isn't as broad, and isn't as fun.

Let players break your game. They'll have fun. Don't worry about it. Most of the time, don't listen to the people who complain about it (there are a lot of people in the community, especially when it comes to roguelikes, IMHO fetishize Difficulty and Challenge a bit too much. It's a game. It should be fun. Worrying too much about balance isn't good for that.)

...I mean, I feel that Qud is mostly made from that perspective anyway. Again, that's what first drew me to it. I hope that a lot of this is stuff that people here already knew.

But I realized that the only voices the devs are likely to hear are people reviewing and liking the overall game, or people complaining about specific issues (including, sometimes, balance); there's not likely to be many people saying "no, I like it unbalanced." And when it comes up in the context of a specific proposed nerf or whatever, it's easy to dismiss it as people who are just complacent about wanting their favorite build to keep working or whatever or just knee-jerk resistance to any nerf.

So I wanted to make it clear that there are some people, at least, who are opposed to (excessive) balance as a general principle. Yes, of course I recognize that it can't be completely discarded - nobody would want the early game to regularly kill you with no warning, to become a cakewalk, or for balance to fluctuate too absurdly; the game does have to present some sort of sensible difficulty curve.

But there's another side to the argument, too, which I feel doesn't get presented enough. I feel that a game should be well-balanced enough to not fall apart at a touch; but if it doesn't at least bend severely under pressure, that's a sign that it may have been over-balanced and lack the depth or flexibility I'd want. (And breaking entirely when a player is deliberately trying to do so is, itself, not necessarily a bad thing. It can be fun.)

What I like about Qud is that it is, on the whole, relative to other games in the genre, not very balanced. I do not want to see that change.

[AlphaBeard]

<3

[.//slayer]

Can't say much except that I agree - the most enjoyment I have from role-playing games of any sort is finding broken builds and carefully building towards them while abusing every bit of power I can get. It just feels good. The ways you obliterate your foes as a mage while laughing in their face in Arcanum and most D&D games is nothing short of satisfying. So, I'd much rather see the "Everything is OP" approach in Qud - as in, every build has something broken about it that eventually lets the player dominate the game.

[CHOO CHOO]

I'm also not too big on balance.

Espers may have been kings of the caves for a long time now, but I never play them because of all the fiddling involved.

Swords may be inferior to axes and cudgels but I use them because they provide more flexibility.

Two-handed weapons may not be worth the loss of a shield (especially after the latest 2H-nerf), but I use them because that bit of extra penetration is more reliable than an extra chance to block.

As long as everything is interesting in some way, it needn't be perfectly balanced.

[Epicwindow+-]

tl;dr balance how much the player can break the game

[HunterZ]

Balance is always going to be a thing, though. If one build is vastly superior to all others, then everyone will feel compelled to play it, even if it doesn't suit their playstyle. Then, the developers will feel compelled to tune the game to challenge people playing with that build, making it nearly impossible for other builds to achieve anywhere near the same level of success.

I'm not sure what's fun about any of that.

[zetjintsu]

Qud doesn't have a timer mechanic that forces you to keep moving forward, so weaker builds can always do more exploration for loot and xp until they're strong enough for an area.

This could be a problem if 1) Players feel a weaker build is forced to grind when they don't want to. So far I haven't felt this to be a problem in Qud. I have a lvl 21 unoptimzed Chimera (way too many points in STR as I didn't understand how Penetration Str caps worked) who just finished Raising Indrix quest, and feel way OP.

Qud makes exploration really fun w/ the variety of things you can discover on the map and doing factions stuff, that it doesn't feel like grinding at all for me. I actually get a little annoyed when the XP from an area gets to low and I feel compelled to move on and still have so many unexplored map squares.

It could also become a problem if 2) The monsters being balanced for the strongest build makes full XP challenge appropriate monsters too hard for weaker builds. I haven't noticed this being a problem so far, though experienced players would be able to say more. Qud seems pretty easy to break as you learn it.

This could become a problem as the game gets longer and power levels diverge more. Then the devs would have to decide whether to nerf the strongest build, or make diminishing returns on XP scale differently for different builds (it would make flavor sense that you'd learn more fighting a heated melee rather than casually exploding someones head across the map).

[Spear Deer]

Originally posted by HunterZ:

Balance is always going to be a thing, though. If one build is vastly superior to all others, then everyone will feel compelled to play it, even if it doesn't suit their playstyle. Then, the developers will feel compelled to tune the game to challenge people playing with that build, making it nearly impossible for other builds to achieve anywhere near the same level of success.

I'm not sure what's fun about any of that.

This scenario is only true if your primary sense of enjoyment comes from winning. That makes you a spike. Many roguelike players I know, and almost all developers and designers I know, are Johnnys. I'm not playing to win, I'm playing to conquer the system. ♥♥♥♥ Balance.

http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/timmy-johnny-and-spike-2002-03-08

[Jarinex]

A game needs to have balance, whether single player or multiplayer. However, It's okay to have some builds a little more powerful than others. I enjoy a little challenge and playing the way I want to, even if it's not considered the strongest build.

[Black Mirror]

Game needs to be balanced and challenging.
I'm already at the point where 98% of enemies don't give me any fun or XP and 1% gives some XP and no fun with last 1% that are enemies that can instantly kill me and I can't do anything to them.
I laready stopped playing cause it got simply boring to kill snapjaws over and over without getting anything in return, mosnter variety around the world really sucks, as a result i don't explore all that much if at all. All that is left is to move to another quest location.
All in all, I dont use any special game braking build and the game is still boring, if I would start using any game braking build or strategy it would get even more boring, I dont want to blast trough everything I want some fun and challnge.

[HunterZ]

Originally posted by Black MIrror:

I laready stopped playing cause it got simply boring to kill snapjaws over and over without getting anything in return, mosnter variety around the world really sucks, as a result i don't explore all that much if at all. All that is left is to move to another quest location.

This. My goal is to experience quality content. If I use an unoptimized build, I end up spending way more time grinding samey procedural content and less time experiencing the real meat of the game.

[pizzasoda]

Originally posted by Jarinex:

A game needs to have balance, whether single player or multiplayer. However, It's okay to have some builds a little more powerful than others. I enjoy a little challenge and playing the way I want to, even if it's not considered the strongest build.

it needs optimizable balance

[Tembies]

Focusing too much on balance also tends to take a hell of a lot of flavor out of the world. There's no real mystery or threat behind balanced powers, items, or enemies. And as far as unoptimized builds go, I mean maybe little tuberculosis timmy with his 2 con and 3 strength shouldn't aspire to be a marathon runner?

[Uboa]

I think 'balance' is a broad category and can be approached in a variety of ways. For a large complex roguelike such as CoQ, a nice approach in my opinion is to try to set it up such that each skill/weapon/build., compared to its peers, will be an ideal option at least occasionally. That way even if something is strictly worse than another (due to being ideal in fewer situations), the player can and will still find themselves in situations where they triumph using that thing, or wish they had chosen that thing, and it feels useful and applicable to the world.

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup does this pretty well in my opinion; some stuff is strictly better than other stuff, but even the worse things will save you better than the better things, some of the time. In this way a roguelike can leverage its procedural nature to create an overall 'sense' of balance across options which are actually not balanced.

[Aquillion]

Originally posted by Uboa:

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup does this pretty well in my opinion; some stuff is strictly better than other stuff, but even the worse things will save you better than the better things, some of the time. In this way a roguelike can leverage its procedural nature to create an overall 'sense' of balance across options which are actually not balanced.

We're going to have to agree to disagree on that. I loathe many of the decisions the DCSS team made, since they've cut features that I loved in Linley's Dungeon Crawl for balance purposes and especially to balance late-game content that few people ever even encounter.

That's exactly the kind of thing I don't thing devs should do.

(Some other parts of the system are decently-balanced, but TBH most of it they inherited from Linley's Dungeon Crawl. I don't feel they've done a good job at all and I wish other people had taken up the game after Linley instead.)

[Spacepeople]

Originally posted by Aquillion:

Originally posted by Uboa:

Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup does this pretty well in my opinion; some stuff is strictly better than other stuff, but even the worse things will save you better than the better things, some of the time. In this way a roguelike can leverage its procedural nature to create an overall 'sense' of balance across options which are actually not balanced.

We're going to have to agree to disagree on that. I loathe many of the decisions the DCSS team made, since they've cut features that I loved in Linley's Dungeon Crawl for balance purposes and especially to balance late-game content that few people ever even encounter.

That's exactly the kind of thing I don't thing devs should do.

(Some other parts of the system are decently-balanced, but TBH most of it they inherited from Linley's Dungeon Crawl. I don't feel they've done a good job at all and I wish other people had taken up the game after Linley instead.)

+1