Character through Balance

 Hello again.

    I am in the pleasant position to announce that i have finished my work on a card game i've been making. As such, i have both the time and the mental capacity to bless you once again with an article. This time i would like to talk about a topic near and dear to the internet's hearts, which is balancing. Balancing is, i would wager, the most common topic of discussion when it comes to game design. I would also wager that it is the easiest topic to talk about and one that dominates discussions way too much. People talk too much about balancing and people talk too much about balancing from a flawed point of view, which i would like to tackle by talking about employing balancing to reinforce a game's feeling, something which i believe is more important than a "perfectly balanced" game.

    To get into the meat and potatoes of the article, here is my position: it would be okay in a game for an element to be objectively more powerful and useful than other elements. Which, from a purely balance-wise perspective is ludicrous. Balance's whole point is to create the optimal environment for the game's design elements to thrive in. If a move or a weapon in a game blows everything else out of the water then why would a player use anything else? 

    Examining what works in games reveals a different story. There are many moves in action games for example that have attained a legendary status, which sometimes surpasses the game's reach even. Things like the royal guard from the devil may cry series or the tiger drop from the yakuza series are incredibly powerful moves which summarize the character using them in a single punch or deflection. Kiryu Kazuma would not have been the same without his tiger drop. In this case, a move being "unbalanced" makes the game more enjoyable for players, something which contradicts the community's general consensus on game balancing. What gives?

    Tackling game balance from a game design standpoint, the thing that needs to be addressed is that game balance serves the game's design, and NOT the other way around. Whether an element will be more or less powerful, prevalent or competitively viable depends on its purpose and its place in the grand design. The reverse also applies: elements can be made more powerful, prevalent or competitively viable to manipulate their position in the design. For example, take the AWP in counter-strike. It is an objectively more powerful weapon than most of the other weapons the game offers. As such, the AWP shapes the fate of a round, the nature of a team's strategy and the counterplay the opposing team needs to employ in order to defeat it. If we were to balance it in a way to make it as powerful as other weapons then the AWP would lose its pivotal role in the game. Yes, it is more expensive than other weapons, but the goal of making a weapon more expensive isn't to bring its list of pros and cons down to size to fit with the other weapons; it is purely for pacing. If the AWP costed as much as a glock then the game would've been five AWPs every round for both teams, with maybe a rifle here and there. The AWP is mighty expensive to make it so a team buys one or two of them, on specific rounds (usually after a victory or by manipulating their economy to afford it). Tying it to the buying system serves another purpose as well: teams balance and control their budget in order to afford to buy an AWP. And true to the game, the AWP's influence has pierced through the community to the wider internet. Whenever people think counter-strike, the AWP has a very good chance to be there. It is a representantive of the game. An embassador. Elements of the game seep outside the counter-strike community through cultural osmosis and present themselves to new potential players. In this case, as the game's creator, you would want for those elements to make people want to play the game; and a legendary weapon is a very good contender for that.

    Taking all that into consideration, game designers should be aware of the spectrum of potential "balance points" a game's element can have, and how playing around with that impacts the game. It's fairly simple to understand that a really really powerful parry will shape the game around it, but at what point does the parry lose that position? How much weaker does it need to be specifically? What happens if it is too weak? Does it lose its place as the core of the experience completely at a single point? Or does that role slowly dissipate? What steps in to take its place? Or does nothing at all fit that role, purging it from the game? These are all questions a designer should ask and these are all things to be taken into consideration and manipulated to achieve their design goals as best they can, and to create game elements that stand on their own, encourage people to engage with them and stick with them forever.