🕤 🕶️ ⛔️ How developers make games honest 🐁 💃🏽 📯

When you lose in multiplayer, the easiest way is to blame the balance - random, gun imba and further down the list. But where is this line between when your own skill was not enough and when the game has real problems?

He translated the material in which game designers analyze the intricacies of the game balance - how to set it up, how the analyst will help, and where does the psychology.

This is one of those things that many people know: the game is broken, everyone uses the same tactics, and there is no point in doing something until the developers fix the balance.

And if everything is in order with the balance? Or is he biased quite a bit? How do you define this? How can anyone even determine this? And what is a game balance?

To understand how the balance is implemented in different genres and how developers customize (or reconfigure) it in their games, I talked with experienced game designers.

Fantasy Strike, Sirlin Games

What is a balance?

It is difficult to define. “Interview ten designers and get ten different answers,” says Ian Schreiber, associate professor at Rochester Institute of Technology and co-founder of Global Game Jam. “This term is overloaded. It can be used in the context of a single-player RPG, 4X game (for example, Civilization), MOBA, MMO, board game, side scroller [and so on]. And each time it will take on a different meaning. ”

According to Schreiber, balance, regardless of context, implies that the game seems fair to the user . It seems. Even when all systems are completely mathematically balanced, the player will still think that this is not so (we will analyze the reasons a bit later). Of course, all titles are dishonest at certain points, so the “honesty” of balance is a general term. Under it there can be identical starting points for all players, an adequate complexity curve or equally successful tracks, character classes, strategies, subject to an equal level of skill and good luck.

Being able to choose among several viable options can be a metric of good balance. “Imagine that there are ten different options for what you can do,” suggests game author David Sirlin, author of the book “Play for Victory,” and. “And one of them is so powerful that it makes no sense to choose some other. People will say that the game is not balanced. ”

A table showing the results of a battle between two characters in Fantasy Strike and the average probability of their victories. Source: sirlin.net

A bit blurry and far from practice, huh? But if you hang out a bit in the game groups of Reddit, Discord or just play an online game, then you will come across people who constantly complain about the balance and argue. Everyone, from ordinary players and noobs, ending with pros, want to speak out.

Everyone wants their favorite characters and tactics to have a chance of success, so balance is so important. But how does it work?

Different games - different metrics

It all depends on the game. An imbalance in single player is normal. If the character jumps a little further or climbs a little higher than the designers wanted, this is unlikely to seriously affect the impression of the game. Rather, it will cause pleasant emotions, give an opportunity to brag to friends or set a speedran record.

Sirlin believes that setting balance in single player or cooperative multiplayer is tied to providing opportunities - to explain how everything works, and to the logic of using certain skills and strategies. To get started, you need to help beginners to form accurate models of the game in their heads so that they do not feel cheated. And give pro-gamers the opportunity to open new horizons for the game.

The standard approach to debugging balance in competitive multiplayer involves adjusting to the top players. “The road always leads to the top,” Sirlin explains. “And people will not want to go through it if they know that in the end the project will be unbalanced. This is a terrible PR. The tournament will look like complete trash. ”

Schreiber agrees with this view. “Most players will remain at a very low level, and only a few will reach the championship level,” he says. “You will want to adjust the balance for the bulk of the players, and not for 32 people in the top. But everyone will watch the streams of these 32 players. Everyone will strive to reach their level. ”

This does not mean that designers do not pay attention to beginners. Most likely in the game there will be both simple tactics, heroes or weapons, and those that are difficult to master. And if there is an imbalance with a low skill, it may be difficult for beginners to use some important key combination. Developers can simplify it to balance the game for users with a low skill level, while for top players there will not be significant changes.

Before you learn the subtleties of balance, you need to learn a few lessons about human thinking.

The Psychology of Game Balance

Honest does not always mean honest. Stop what?

“Talking [about balance] in class, I devote a whole week to cognitive misconceptions. For example, people very often misunderstand math. Or: your game is not as fair as you think, because random number generators are unfair, ”says Schreiber.

In psychology, there are a bunch of terms for such misconceptions. For example, a player’s mistake (the belief that one random event will affect the following random events), a distortion in the perception of the choice made (people attribute more positive features to the opportunities that they chose than they really should), and so on. These features of the psyche affect the perception of balance.

“Some change their games in such a way as to convincingly deceive users and tell them what they want to hear,” Schreiber said. “Sid Meyer made an excellent speech at the GDC in 2010. He talked about Civilization Revolution, and how it was necessary to mask the numbers, because the players do not correctly understand what probability is. ”

If the probability that a unit will win the battle is three to one, the majority believes that he should win, although the opposite will happen with a probability of 25%. And if a unit loses, they feel cheated. To correct such an imaginary imbalance, developers use a mathematical trick - the chance of winning three to one or four to one, which the players see, is actually much higher.

Another approach that allows you to combine the player’s perception and reality is transparency of information, that is, reflection of statistics, which shows that everything was honest.

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Other perceptual errors are more difficult to work with. Sirlin describes the so-called "depth error." The title may seem voluminous due to the fact that when you first met it turned out to be many unobvious aspects or blocked features. “Digging layer by layer, you might think that the game is very deep,” he explains.

Sirlin used to think that too. But once having examined a dozen non-obvious things, he realized that the game became even more superficial than it was at the beginning.

The types of weapons have not changed much over the past 20 years, and there are reasons for that. Unreal Tournament 2004, Epic Games

Instead of giving the player several viable options for the development of events (a key element of the balance in the game), it is filled with a bunch of mechanics, actions or weapons. Sirlin believes that this approach “worsens the game and kills viable options, with the exception of one or two [dominant strategies].”

Founder of Highwire Games and former Bungie lead designer Jamie Griesmer believes that complexity should increase in proportion to the number of roles in the game. Otherwise, the designer will play with the same delusion regarding depth. That is why most shooters have the same set of weapons: it is difficult to find additional ones that bring something important to the game and at the same time do not become dominant.

Balance and enjoyment of the game

The connection of these two concepts is another common misconception. However, some believe that the game should be balanced. Others say too much balance is bad. Both sides are wrong.

“They [the second camp] believe that if everything is balanced, the game becomes uninteresting,” Searlin explained. “For example, if all the characters in Street Fighter are like Ryu, with slight differences, the game will be a lot more boring than a real Street Fighter.”

But balance and diversity are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The game can coexist perfectly with super-powerful weapons and characters that are very different from each other. “Guilty Gear is a good example. The game is so diverse, it seemed to have gathered heroes from different projects, they use completely different mechanics. At the same time, the balance is in perfect order, ”said Sirlin.

The main thing is not to forget about file safes. In the same Guilty Gear, several universal protection mechanics (blocks) are implemented.

Schreiber believes that the delusion “balance = pleasure from the game”, gives rise to deceived expectations: “For example, the game is announced as a high-precision simulation, and then it turns out that AI is acting unfairly. That is why many do not like the effect of "pulling back" in the race. "

By comparison, in Civilization, leaders controlled by artificial intelligence cheat at high levels of difficulty. But the players take it calmly, because it is indicated at the very beginning, in the descriptions for each level of difficulty.

Do not believe this person. Sid Meier's Civilization V, 2K Games

How to balance games

As Grismer said at the GDC in 2010 , difficulties arise because “the game cannot be balanced until it is ready, [and] this process cannot be put off until the very end.” In other words, in order to do everything correctly, you need the final version of the game without bugs. “With every change in core mechanics, the balance flies completely, because numbers and actions take on a completely different weight,” Schreiber explained.

At the same time, balance is a key part of game design. Many developers break this process into separate stages, which are carried out at various stages of development.

“It takes imagination to get started,” says Sirlin. Take fighting game for example. “I keep in mind the whole system, and, thinking up characters, imagine how they will interact with each other. I’m trying to ensure that everyone has the necessary tools to help the heroes fight each other. ”

Halo: The Master Chief Collection, Xbox Game Studios

Balance begins with assumptions. The grismer calls this stage "role definition." In a shooter you need different types of weapons that will shoot at different distances (sniper rifles - at long, guns - at short), apply different damage (small arms and shells with a large area of destruction) and so on. The role should be defined as clearly as possible and should be different from all other roles. Variety makes the game more interesting, and the balance lies between chaos (when everything happens randomly) and certainty (when everything is predictable).

The next step. When all the mechanics are implemented, the designers test the game to make sure that they did not miss anything at the first stage. If everything is fine with the core, the play tests begin: they give the game to a group of people and watch how everything goes. At this stage, the designer is looking for the weakest points. “Surely something will be implemented so badly that it will be impossible to test the game until it is fixed,” Searlin explained.

Playtests will help identify the dominant strategies in the game. Situations in which the player chooses from several options may become more obvious, while only one of them is viable. You can also find places where the strategy works well, but the players deviate too much from it. You may have to remove part of the game or, conversely, supplement it. Or maybe just change some values a little to achieve the desired effect and bring the user experience closer to what you want.

Sirlin calls the next stage "refinement." Iteration “More and more people are playing better, that is, users with a high skill level are playing,” he says.

Would Street Fighter V be so boring if all the characters were like this guy?

It may seem that the gods of numbers won - it all comes down to statistics, for example, the ratio of wins and losses or data on the use of characters / weapons / moves / items. But usually developers do not rely too much on such information, only in cases when it comes, for example, to card games that are based on mathematical modeling.

“From the outside it seems that the design is built on data, but it’s not,” Sirlin says. “Not at all, almost until the very end of development, because there are too many important details to consider.” For example, consider how Chun Li's throwing power is adjusted in Street Fighter. It is necessary to take into account how often she can use this technique. Plus, its effectiveness depends on its speed of movement, as well as on how far it is from the enemy.

“The details accumulate, so it’s better to just watch how people play, and make subjective conclusions that such and such a throwing force works fine in the game, and everything functions honestly.”

Rely on your instinct, the sense of balance that designers develop through practice, observation, and logical thinking.

Trust but verify

This is not to say that analytics is not used to adjust the balance of the game. Sirlin collects a lot of information on matches after the release of the game to make sure everything is balanced. Schreiber says some studios use Big Data Analysis. They collect numbers from hundreds of thousands or millions of online matches, both at the open beta stage and after the release.

Data analysis will not adjust the balance in the game, still have to work. But it helps identify trends, for example, items related to victories, or the most popular tactics. Such moments may indicate a potential imbalance, which means that designers should consider patches for games.

But such a quantitative analysis is not necessary for a good balance in the game. Sirlin emphasizes that much attention needs to be paid to the gaming community. It is necessary to take into account the voice of top players, and those people who find the game unbalanced. This helps to get to the bottom of the truth and work through the essence of the problem, which is often not obvious in such complex genres as a shooter or fighting game.

Yomi, Sirlin Games

When Bungie released Halo 3, the team realized that the sniper rifle was not working properly. Some users used it in the immediate vicinity of the enemy. She quickly took aim, shot and inflicted huge damage, which left no chance.

The obvious solution: implement certain weapons flaws. For example, the error of successful hits (as in an RPG), a decrease in the speed of a player with a rifle in his hands, or an increase in reload time. But such flaws (including damage reduction) would adversely affect the role of these weapons in the game. It would lose its exclusivity, seemingly less powerful. You can limit the number of rounds for a sniper rifle that a hero can carry with him. But, according to Grismere, this “would only affect the average numbers” collected from thousands of matches. The rifle would have been perceived by imbe, just like the players of Civilization Revolution, believed that three-to-one chances mean victory. People do not pay attention to averaged data.

The root of the problem came down to the time between shots: the maximum rate of fire of the weapon. It had to be reduced. It turned out to be enough to increase the time from 0.5 to 0.7 seconds. This significantly reduced the use of the rifle in close combat and its dominant role, while preserving all the advantages of its use in other situations.

Solvability of the problem

Sometimes such problems do not appear after release for years. Until suddenly, someone finds a way that makes him invincible.

According to Searlin, that is why balance is such a vague concept that is difficult to implement correctly. It involves the concept of solvability, which means that finding the optimal strategy should be as complex as possible. The same strategy that allows you to always win.

Consider chess as an example. It is believed that the advantage is on the side of whites. This means that there is an imbalance in the game. But chess does not have a well-known solution, there is no optimal strategy. But this game is already thousands of years old, and for several decades now data can be processed on supercomputers. In terms of solvability, chess is very well implemented.

The most balanced game of all time. Battle Chess, Interplay Entertainment Corp.

“[Solvability] refers not to meditation in hindsight, but to the whole game. It affects all our efforts as a whole. How to create a situation in which certain forces push the player to make X, while other forces suggest that no X is needed. If users think about whether to do X, then I did everything right. And these are only two forces. In reality, I need 20 forces, each of which requires something of its own, all from different angles, in opposite directions, ”Sirlin explains.

Oddly enough, this situation is easier to recreate for games that do not require complex skills, in which it is easy to follow basic strategies (for example, in Fantasy Strike fighting game, turn-based games such as chess or Hearthstone) than in more complex games (for example, in Guilty Gear ) In “simple” titles, more people get access to a real game - a full range of possibilities.

There will be more data (subjective, statistical, or both) on how balanced these forces are. So, it is more likely that the developers will fix all the controversial issues until someone has stumbled upon the optimal strategy.

Overwatch, Activision Blizzard

Complaints are not important

Firstly, the balance in a difficult and interesting game is a very complex aspect that plays an important role in development. However, it is only a small part of the entire process of creating games.

Secondly, the release of patches does not prove that the developers are incompetent or that they hate you. “In fact, that means they care about the balance in the game,” Searlin said. “Overwatch had a lot of iterations, and its creators could hardly release the game from the very beginning in the version in which it exists today. This is not possible, because the necessary changes became apparent only after the release and the gradual evolution of the title. "

Or, as Schreiber said: “In retrospect, it may seem obvious that a certain strategy or any other aspect provides too much advantage. But this was not obvious even to the players for a certain time, until someone discovered this fact. And, perhaps, by chance. But the players think that since you could not do everything perfectly, then you don’t know what you are doing. ”

The third and most important point. Complaints about the balance associated with the loss will not help. “Of course, you can tell us about any changes you would like to make. But give justified reasons, not just words that you lose all the time, ”Schreiber added.

It’s necessary to let developers doubt, Searlin said, “so that they think it over and understand that you know what you are talking about [before you talk about the alleged imbalance].”

“The words that you lost do not really matter,” he continued. “But if there is a certain group of people who share a common opinion and follow the tournaments, this is already something. State how confident you are in your complaint and why. ”

How developers make games honest