How "Bad" Balance Can Be A Good Thing

people who play video games are a diverse bunch these days spread across a huge variety of platforms demographics and genres but let me tell you that there is one thing that unites all gamers and debatably all human beings you lot absolutely love to complain don't get me wrong a lot of this complaining is justified you people complain about nintendo shutting down really cool fan projects you complain about companies putting out unfinished games all the time and you rightfully complain about blizzard somehow managing to outgreed anime stuff in the pay to win department but there's one thing that the gaming public loves to whine about that's a little bit more complicated than you might have imagined and that's the idea of something being overpowered whether it's a particular faction in a strategy game a character in a hero shooter or a card in a card game you can't go five minutes without someone somewhere complaining that it's overpowered and let me tell you i'm sick of it not just because this conversation is seemingly impossible to escape but because i think overpowered as a word has kind of an unfair stigma yes a single strategy in a game being too powerful resulting in you not being able to play the way you want totally sucks but in obsessing over perfect balance ensuring that nothing is overpowered and that everyone's on equal footing i think we often accidentally make games less fun and blind ourselves to the idea that a little bit of imbalance can actually be a good thing i'd argue that not only is something being over or underpowered not always a negative but that a bunch of great games and in fact entire genres actually hinge on having mechanics strategies and characters that are deliberately imbalanced now that might sound like a crazy thing to say for what possible reason could developers want certain strategies or approaches to be objectively more powerful than the alternatives well first and foremost let's be honest with ourselves being overpowered feels awesome there's a certain sick pleasure in absolutely grinding someone into the dirt and while multiplayer games can't completely lean into this thrill single player titles can really make the most of just how awesome being totally overpowered feels including transparently overpowered options can be a shortcut towards creating some great moments of triumph and catharsis as well as giving players a way to experience the game's core fantasy right away without needing to master the mechanics first speaking of fantasies look at final fantasy's limit break mechanic a beloved hallmark of the series despite it being an incredibly shallow and basically overpowered move no matter which game it's in the way limit breaks work is that as you take damage you charge up a character's limit break bar and when it's full you get to unleash a big flashy mega attack that is basically it there's really not that much in the way of strategy to the limit break and there's almost no reason to do anything else if your limit break is available the original implementation in the original final fantasy vii even overwrites your attack when it's charged up or but forcing you to limit break right away but strategy isn't really the point here limit breaks exist as a way for you to perform epic comebacks when you're on the brink or to finish off tough enemies in a stylish way using a character's badass signature move which is fun in of itself similarly in normally pretty tricky brawlers like bayonetta or jetstream sam's handsomeness adventure moments where the game flips the script and lets you just totally go to town on an enemy could be a great way to reward good play or just to take the edge off for a bit bayonetta's insta-killing torture attacks are pretty straightforward on a tactical level but damn are they fun to pull off and blade time in particular in metal gear rising more often than not just let you go while slashing something up which is both an extremely powerful technique and also feels cool as [ __ ] every single time compare platinum stable to the devil may cry games which are just as empowering when you're playing well and comboing through legions of baddies but lack those easy overpowered hooks into the core fantasy for newer players leading to the dmc games being much harder to get into even if they're about the same difficulty wise leveraging the fun of being overpowered is a little bit harder to do in competitive games for obvious half the people not having fun reasons but it's not impossible in team fortress 2 and titanfall 2 your reward for victory isn't just a pretty you win sign but instead you get to hunt down and butch your enemies from a position of massive advantage or they'll try and run away these little end of round moments don't take long maybe less than a minute so it's not a huge inconvenience to the losing team but they do create some much needed catharsis at the end of a tough match setting you up to start all over again similarly in co-op games like divinity original sin 2 the game lets you smash any semblance of fair play apart by working together with your teammates to teleport enemies into deathhold set up elaborate traps to rob people blind or do really impressive combo moves that completely bypass fights of course the fact that most of the really cool and most op stuff in divinity requires multiple players isn't a coincidence being overpowered feels awesome yes but because of this games can actually trick you into playing in a particular way in basically all the best co-op games players are dramatically more effective when synergizing their abilities than when working independently and this is because players like feeling useful and they like winning even more so we're naturally pushed into playing co-op games with synergy in mind not just because it's the most powerful strategy but because the designers intended this to be the case when you get right down to it all games will invariably have a most powerful strategy and when it comes to titles people take seriously the playerbase will work out what that is sooner or later so it makes sense for designers to preemptively balance their games in such a way that the best tactics lead players into playing in a way that's the most fun in doom glory kills insta-killing enemies and restoring precious health pushes you to play much more aggressively in fire emblem story-centric lord characters are much more powerful than everyone else so you'll become attached to them very quickly and in logistics games like satisfactory automation is much faster than crafting things by hand we don't consider these things to be overpowered even though they totally are because their purpose is to encourage us to play the game in a more fun way tempting players into engaging with the game in a particular way through the use of imbalanced systems can be a potent way of controlling their actions but it can also backfire many card games have made the mistake of introducing new archetypes that lie above the existing power curve so as to encourage players to have fun using them however in the case of hearthstone's demon hunter or like 20 different things imagine the gathering's history these overpowered new elements didn't enrich the strategic landscape but completely overshadow everything else no one single part of the demon hunter's core tempo deck or magic the gathering's infamous affinity keyword was the culprit in making them overpowered these strategies as a whole were simply way more powerful than everything else meaning everyone either had to play those exact decks or a tailor-made counter deck if they wanted to stand a hope of competing as you might imagine this was kind of the opposite to the intended goal of encouraging people to experiment with new things to avoid this problem many games push not overarching strategies which often leads to the overpowered strategy becoming overly centralizing but individual mechanics or components of a bigger playstyle allowing players to use them as a jumping off point for a whole variety of different approaches to victory look at halo absolutely no one is going to argue that going up against a rocket launcher or an energy sword when you've only got a crappy plasma pistol is a fair fight it just isn't power weapons in halo are categorically and deliberately op allowing for one-hit kills and sometimes for individuals to go toe-to-toe with vehicles on foot however while these weapons might be imbalanced in an individual skirmish the fact that they spawn in fixed locations and at predictable intervals adds an interesting side goal to the game that both teams have equal access to grabbing a power weapon won't instantly win you the game but it might turn the tide in a stalemate or allow you to break through a fortified defense this means that by their very existence power weapons shift the impetus of the game away from b-lining straight to the objective and more towards map control and coordinated pushes to either make the most of a big rocket launcher or to take out the wielder before they can do too much damage the same goes for battle royale games like apex legends certain guns like the infamous one-hit kill machine kreber sniper which is fairly uncontested as the most powerful weapon in the game can only be found in drop pods which means that teams are going to need to come out into the open and risk getting into fights if they want the best loot playing safe and not going for drop pods is still a perfectly valid strategy but for players who can't live without rare weapons they're gonna have to do the thing that makes the game the most fun i think the best example of this approach in action however is a little video game called dota which owes basically its entire success to the fact that each and every one of its 100 old heroes could be legitimately described as overpowered the way dota heroes work unlike the heroes in other more popular more accessible games with better animes is that basically every hero is oriented around one or two key mechanics that make them completely imbalanced in a way that gives them a totally unique playstyle on the simple end of the scale sniper has a passive ability that allows them to hit heroes from more than a screen away and to safely besiege towers and a legion commander has an infinitely scaling attack buff that goes up whenever she chews someone to death at the more complicated end you got heroes like tinker who can refresh all of his cooldowns at will to teleport around the map and spam her abilities faster than any other hero and meepo who starts off weak but by the end of the game turns into up to five totally separate heroes all running around and acting independently which is exactly as overwhelming and impossible to control as you think it is you might think that each dota hero having such singular focus on an overpowered identity would create massive balance problems and impossible to manage gameplay interactions and don't get me wrong it sometimes does but when dota's balancing philosophy works as intended all those different overpowered heroes can hold each other in a weird sort of equilibrium where the unique strengths can interact in really cool ways that other games simply can't offer take viper a medusa for example two reptilian heroes who both live in the middle lane viper is arguably the strongest hero in the game during the first 10 minutes and will easily butcher just about anyone during this time whereas medusa is basically defenseless until the late game where she can abuse her insane ability to multi-shot the entire enemy team creating this weird sort of cat and mouse game where medusa has to get exp and money for items somehow but without getting owned by viper until she's confident that she can turn the tables later on or what about huskar who attacks and regenerates faster the closer he is to death like a crazy berserker he's super hard to take down because trying to kill him just makes him hit you harder unless you happen to be axe whose special overpowered ability is to instantly kill any enemy below a certain threshold but only in melee range this means that axe has to charge in and try to chop huskar's head off when he's at his most dangerous while this flaming spear-throwing [ __ ] has to play safer than usual or risk entering the decapitation danger zone even more supportive heroes get a bunch of overpowered tools that drastically reshape the game even though they're not the ones getting the kills crystal maiden possibly restores the manner of her entire team meaning that they can spam out spells or game without needing to worry about potions earthshaker can create massive walls out of nothing allowing his team to set up cool ambushes and dazzle can cast a shield that renders whoever it's on literally unable to die until it where god dammit axe i could talk about doterra all day but the point is that imbalances on the micro scale can actually even out not just into a fair game but a much more interesting one too on the macro scale but what if we took things a step further what if instead of giving players a bunch of overpowered ways to pursue the same objective we made imbalance a core part of the experience and had some players or a team of players who were literally more powerful than the others well that brings us to the realm of asymmetric games now just a point of clarification here basically every game involving more than one player is asymmetric to a degree from subtle stuff like chess being defined by the fact that white moves first two different races in an rts but in the vast majority of cases all the players are using the same fundamental mechanics just in different ways when i say asymmetrically designed games however i mean that different players are literally playing by different rules and i think the key to making this very finicky genre work is knowing how to leverage overpoweredness to a game's advantage look at hidden role games like ttt the resistance secret hitler or sussy baka moga sorry among us the bad guys have substantially more ability to affect the game than the innocents both in the sense that they can kill people and maybe have other powers but also the fact that they have way more information than everyone else the fact that the traitor team are overpowered is why these sorts of games work at all the only way the good guys can really win is when the more powerful players either make a mistake or get caught in a lie the trick is being able to agree on when exactly that happened this inherent difference in control over the game belies the fundamental problem with asymmetrically designed games if one team or one player is objectively more powerful than everyone else it's very possible to end up in a situation where some people feel like they have no agency because they never get to be powerful the garry's mod custom game murder which sees a disguised knife-wielding murderer going up against an also disguised gun-wielding detective amidst a bunch of civilians has this in spades the problem here is that while the murderer and detective get to play a fun game of sherlock and morality everyone else just sort of has to wait around to die and be used as evidence which isn't very much fun the tragically doomed evolve is also a pretty interesting case of exactly this happening so the way evolve works is that there's a team of four hunters up against just one monster last team standing wins pretty straightforward so far the interesting wrinkle in this setup is that the monster can well evolve going from a tiny little stage 1 baby to a big stage 3 badass by eating other animals and growing stronger at the start of the game the hunters have a clear advantage once the monster reaches stage 2 it's more or less a fair fight and if the monster is allowed to get to stage 3 he'll take the upper hand this seems like a really interesting setup as it allows both teams to feel overpowered the hunters at the start chasing down the monster and the scaling beastie by the end turning the tables however this setup fails to take into account player psychology people want to feel overpowered and have fun being a badass but equally this means they'll seek out that feeling at all costs so what ended up happening was that the monster had neither a tactical nor emotional motivation to ever even try fighting the hunters until it was max level at which point the dynamic reversed and the humans gave up because they'd lost any chance as an equal fight gameplay in evolve mostly revolved around the monster doing nothing but running away until the point that they were either caught but lost because they weren't at max power and didn't want to fight or evaded the hunters for 15 minutes and basically won the game with neither team really seeing much of each other at any point in an attempt to make everyone feel powerful turtle rock the developers accidentally just made everyone feel bored one way around this problem of overpowered players having too much control is to instead give the weaker players ultimate responsibility for the pace of the game in spy party a secret spy is pitted against a nearly omniscient sniper who has to spot the spy and then execute them the sniper has all the power in this relationship it's not like the spy can shoot back or anything all they can do is rearrange statues however the spy is the one who decides when and where to act trying to complete all their objectives before the sniper catches on in this way a legitimate strategy for the spy is to just do nothing suspicious at all and make the sniper paranoid that they've missed something leading to them them making a mistake crawl is another fun example of this four players are attempting to control the same human host and the winner is whoever is human at the end of the game when the final boss falls with whoever slays the current human taking their place however the only way to get gold to buff up your human and to make your human killing minions more powerful is to be a ghost this creates a really interesting dynamic where the technically more powerful human is compelled to rush through to face the final boss because they know the longer they stick around the more tenuous their grip or mortality becomes of course the undisputed king of this approach is left for dead versus ironically made by some of these same people as evolve the survivors in left 4 dead are markedly more powerful than the infected because they you know have guns and can heal and can throw pipe bombs and stuff it's no contest the only advantage the infected have on their side is that they can respawn and the humans can't meaning that the infected often have to work together not to kill the humans outright but to disrupt separate and whittle them down over time eventually leading to the survivors getting picked off one by one left 4 dead versus is so tense because every second the survivors waste dealing with a lone jockey or running back to save a teammate who got smoked is more of their resources wasted and more time for the infected to respawn and regroup for another attack putting them under more and more pressure until the survivors finally crumble and are forced to make a mad dash for the exit as the zombies gleefully go to town or simply charge the survivors off a goddamn building which seriously that's the most overpowered thing in the whole goddamn game some suspect level design did an otherwise great game aside hopefully now you see why i think the word overpowered has gotten a bit of a bad rap sometimes a bit of imbalance is just what a game needs to unlock its full potential what seems like an over centralizing strategy can actually be encouraging us to play in a fun way what feel like boring overpowered moves can actually be a great excuse for a fun time and what you think are unbeatable enemies might just need for you to figure out your own op solution on a broader level our fear of things not being perfectly balanced at all times often just ends up with games being sanded down into mediocrity mmo rpgs in particular often run into this issue in an attempt to make all classes balanced many developers often end up stripping away unique overpowered tools that make each one so fun to play and either divide them among all the classes or simply remove these tours outright shamans in world of warcraft are the biggest example i can think of where once they had a litany of cool totems and arguably the best raid buff in the game in the form of bloodlust or heroism if you're a boring alliance player now a lot of these things have been taken away because they were difficult to balance ending up with totems being neutered and both mages and hunters getting access to a re-skinned bloodlust removing a lot of the individual appeal and utility of playing a shaman in service of an abstract notion of balance that didn't really make the game more fun for anyone not only that a relentless fixation on balance can actually force some players out of enjoying a game if the call of duty developers removed the glorious noob tube many less skilled players would lack a way to feel like they're able to compete and would probably get bored long before they'd learned that the tube isn't that powerful anyway and imagine if fighting games like street fighter didn't have deliberately terrible joke characters like dan there is no moment more hype than beating an opponent with a character designed to suck and if damn were you know good then those experiences would be lost forever oh wait that's exactly what happened and it sucked now he's just regular bad instead of fun bad we tend to think of video game balance as a goal a platonic ideal to shoot towards at all times but it just isn't like many things video game balance is just a tool one that can be used in a variety of ways for a variety of different aims from encouraging different playstyles to changing the strategic landscape of the game so i think it's worth relaxing a little bit and accepting a few overpowered things because who knows they might actually improve the experience if you give them a chance and for those who disagree might i introduce you to my favorite totally balanced game it's very deep people have actually been playing it for centuries there's a very sophisticated commentary on capitalism and royalty and it's it's just flipping a coin that's the joke i'm just making fun of people now hi hello and welcome to this thing i do after each and every video why did i start doing it uh i've completely forgotten to be honest why do i continue to do it well that's so i can make some excuses about why this video was late it's been very warm over here lately and also i was helping out run the gmtk game jam but mostly it's so i can give some very deserving people some excellent shout outs first up i'd like to celebrate a youtuber who is absolutely fantastic and you really should have already subscribed to and that is classics of game classics of game is uh it's difficult to pin down really but it's a channel all about posting out of context clips from very weird video games sometimes they're terrible sometimes they're obscure and sometimes they're just from japan and sometimes it's all three genuinely the channel is constantly surprising and hilarious i'm very glad it came back from hiatus because it's been on my recommendation list for literally years please go check it out of course the other people i need to shout out are my ever wonderful ever patient patrons who choose to support the channel each and every month freeing me from the possibility of indentured servitude in the nordvpn mines in exchange for kicking a few bucks my way every month my patrons get early access to videos behind the scenes gubbins and even some extra game analysis that i couldn't fit into this video also if you give me money on patreon consider yourself absolved for ad blocking my videos because as far as i'm concerned you've already paid me yourself the most generous patrons of all however they get a personal shout out in the credits from yours truly and those people are alge andrew lebrano asaran auno 94 bjorn karla brennan spalding brian letoriani constantin amend corey gerard cosmetics 360 daniel medjes das kangaroo david setzer dirk jan karen beld dolce diggy dog diglett ekton edward franklin woods eugene bulkin gaskell greta henderson jacob dylan riddle janos faquette joey bruno jordan gear lee berman lucas slack mace window 54 max philippov knox nwdd nate graf patrick romberg peter d thomasack phil with the bilby phoenix thoracas ranchigar reddedx regal regex rey's dad sheldon hearn simon jacobson steve reilly strategy and ultima the forbidden shrimp tin markovic tyler duncan whimsical wisp zach grendel and chow okay thank you for watching stay cool out there it is very hot right now and i will see you around bye

Channel: Adam Millard - The Architect of Games

Views: 234,354

Keywords: Games, Video Games, Gaming, PC Gaming, Adam, Adam Millard, Architect, AoG, Architect of Games, Review, Analysis, Game Design, guide, Level design, New Games, Satisfactory, Tutorial, Dota, Dragon's Blood, League of Legends, Arcane, Left 4 Dead, Valve, Steam, Street Fighter, Evolve, Most overpowered, Overpowered, Most broken, Heroes, Overwatch, Magic the gathering, hearthstone, Apex Legends, Halo, halo infinite, The Cycle: Frontier, World of Warcraft, Dead By Daylight, Metal gear rising

Id: l1WYmHz3hog

Length: 21min 4sec (1264 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 20 2022