Thumb on the Scales: When to Toss Game Balance Aside

When I worked at Ensemble, the studio was fortunate to have a dedicated balance team. The team included some of the best competitive real-time strategy players around; their full-time job was to balance the real-time strategy games that made the studio famous.

No matter the genre, developers talk about balancing their game a lot. It’s a helpful shorthand for a critical bucket of work that needs to be done before a game goes out the door.

For a multiplayer real-time strategy game, balance is primarily about fairness – ensuring that different factions are equally competitive, that if a unit is designed to beat another unit it does, or that a random map layout doesn’t give one player an unfair advantage.

The balance team was a tight-knit group and extremely good. They could reel off unit stats, describe to the second-by-second the best strategies for early-game choices, and ferret out how seemingly innocent design changes broke balance at the highest levels of play.

Having the balance team around paid off. Ensemble games have the great reputation they have in part due to their work. The diverse factions in Age of Empires, Age of Kings, and Age of Mythology were all competitive at launch.

Though none of us were nearly at the level of play of the balance team, the rest of the design department was also pretty good at our games. But the balance team’s feedback played a role in every decision we made. We had to walk hand-in-hand with them throughout the development process. 

If we were building single-player scenarios, a balance change might make one of our levels impossible to win. If we were adjusting an AI’s script, we had to take into account that berries were now worth less food than they had been the week before.

At times, keeping up the constant stream of iterative suggestions coming out of the balance group was exhausting for the rest of the team. Still, we all understood the value that was being added to Ensemble’s games through their work.

A strong multiplayer element helps many real-time strategy games stay relevant for years after launch. Multiplayer is a great way to make a game engaging for the fans – it builds community and provides an unpredictable level of challenge and variety that the best AI adversaries can’t.

That said, I’ve also seen game developers get overly hung up on the idea that all the systems in their game need to be “balanced” regardless of genre, at every stage of development. 

Many developers invest tons of time and energy, even for purely single-player experiences, making sure that all the weapons, gear, enemies, and levels are tuned properly – sometimes even long before the game’s core systems are fully solidified.

But it’s worth considering that perfect balance is a goal that a team can overinvest in. Indeed, purposely playing to the power fantasy of players who like to break systems over their knees with unbalanced gear and skills can be a valid design choice – especially for a single-player game.

Breaking (Morrowind) Bad

My teenage son is now on his third playthrough of Morrowind. I’ve written before about how he fell in love with a game that’s seven years older than he is. Since then, Morrowind has become a gaming comfort food for him, something that he feels like he’s mastered enough to probe at the edges of the systems.

Any fan of Morrowind will tell you that the game has several highly unbalanced mechanics, especially for magically-inclined characters. By the time his third character had rolled around, my son was making full use of the spellmaker for custom abilities. 

Instead of slowly trudging around the ashen gray landscape, he was bounding across hilltops with a custom jump spell, then putting the brakes on an otherwise deadly fall with a split-second levitate spell. He exploited selling stolen loot to the infamous mudcrab merchant so many times that he racked up over a million gold. 

And despite beating the game three times, he still isn’t done with it. He just made a list of all the most powerful artifacts hidden in the corners of the game and his new self-imposed mission is to collect them all. He recently murdered Vivec himself and captured his soul in Azura’s Star. 

At this point, my son has “broken” Morrowind’s mechanics and systems entirely. He’s transformed the game into a fantasy playground that he fully controls, a master of all the content and mechanics – and he’s had a blast doing it.

Subsequent Elder Scrolls titles, like Oblivion and Skyrim, also embraced this “player’s playground” philosophy, though not to Morrowind’s extent. Many players remember the overpowered feeling of playing a stealth archer in Skyrim – play sessions punctuated by cinematic kill after cinematic kill for ridiculous amounts of damage.

Morrowind is, overall, still pretty balanced. The average player experiences a slowly ramping accumulation of power throughout the game – the typical solid RPG progression of skills and gear. 

But the Morrowind team didn’t spend precious development time sanding off every last rough edge of every piece of gear in pursuit of “perfect balance.” Once expert players know the game inside and out, they can quickly lay their hands on gear and craft spell combinations that allow them to completely bypass large portions of the content.

Overpowered = Fun

Morrowind’s design selectively plays with unbalanced items and spells at the fringes of its overall experience. But the roguelike Path of Achra places its “broken balance” front and center – making broken builds the centerpiece of the design.

Under the hood, Path of Achra has a simple action vocabulary. Abilities trigger when the character moves, waits in place, attacks, enters a new location, or triggers a resource-limited “prayer.” But each of these abilities might trigger other abilities – or the abilities of summoned minions.

With some experience, a player will learn to design a character that – once the right selected skills are leveled up and the recursive magic of the game kicks in – wipes out an entire room full of enemies before they can take a single action. Indeed, to defeat some enemies in the game, such overpowered builds are not only possible but mandatory. 

Path of Achra is partially won or lost in character creation, though it still takes smart tactical roguelike play to get to the end even with a solid starting build. It’s a clever hook and a design that has an odd kind of balance all its own. How many of the unbalanced builds are viable enough to take a player to the final boss?

Path of Achra was built on a shoestring by a tiny developer, and I’m sure our crack balance team from Ensemble would have a lot to say if they spent a week analyzing it. 

They’d no doubt figure out whether a summoning build was viable at all, or the optimum selection of abilities to get to the end game. They’d quickly build a comprehensive list of which abilities were a complete waste.

Yet for average players, there’s a lot of fun to be had at Path of Achra’s low price before they reach that level of familiarity. Along the journey through the content, they’ll have had plenty of moments where they felt like an unstoppable god on their best runs – destroying hordes of monsters with single button presses and chuckling at the cleverness of their build that sprays blood everywhere, then forces the blood to explode, then lights the blood on fire.

Move Fast, Break Stuff

The balance lessons to be learned from Morrowind and Path of Achra are common sense, but they’re still worth stating.

First, don’t get too hung up on “game balance” too early in the process. It’s not an efficient use of time. Aiming for perfect balance throughout development while you’re still trying to figure out what the mechanics are going to be will result in your team redoing the work down the road.

Second, depending on genre and audience, games are not always made better by “perfect balance.” In the pursuit of balance, a team will frequently soften or remove some of the more creative mechanics in a game.

Good designers know how much fun players have when they get a piece of gear that’s overpowered and proceed to quickly blow through encounters for a while. Provided that the gear was a satisfying challenge to get (and at some point, they feel that challenge again) it’s okay for balance to be “spiky” rather than a smooth, gentle curve of perfect numbers.

Don’t get me wrong – by the time any game ships, you’ll have spent a lot of time balancing the mechanics. You don’t want players to be able to trivialize the experience you’ve worked so hard to build. But exactly how much time you spend is going to vary a lot based on your product’s genre.

Balance is going to be a key pillar of your design if you’re building a competitive MOBA designed for an esports audience. But you probably won’t put the same amount of effort into balancing a single-player RPG where the intent is for the player to go from a low-level prisoner in chains to an unstoppable god.

Again, I’m not saying the designers of Morrowind ignored balance. And I’m sure the creator of Path of Achra put a lot of thought into how the library of overpowered abilities would interact in different builds against different enemies.

I’m simply saying this: match the time and effort put into balance to the genre, design, and phase of the development cycle of the game you’re making. 

If you approach balance with the proper perspective of its value to your game, rather than chasing “perfection according to balance math,” you’re more likely to spend your precious development points on the right things.

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