To Bring the Balance Back

Did I say in that comment thread that I’d update tomorrow? Well, truthfully, I didn’t want to start another Starcraft II mission (I’ll post a review for this when I finish it. So far: OH. OHHHHH YEAH.) at 10:30, so I decided to start writing this. I’ve been sitting on the topic for a little while. It’s a pretty far cry from the last post, but I have a screed about my issues with evangelical Christianity that can get us back to philosophy later.

Game balance. Balance carries a lot of weight in discussing a game. But what is it, really? The answer, according to me, is that a game is balanced when none of the players has an undue advantage. That is, in a perfectly balanced game, the player with more skill would consistently win.

Most games come pre-balanced, when you think about it. “Traditional games,” by which I mean card and older board games, are generally mirror matches. Checkers, chess, poker, go fish, Warcraft II…you can’t find an imbalance if you literally play exactly the same as your opponent. (Yeah, yeah, Horde had death knights in WC2 and Alliance had paladins, I know.) Imbalance requires a more complicated game. For example, Dungeons and Dragons. Different character classes in D&D are generally agreed to have different power levels. (The following sentences pertain to 3.5) For example, a wizard is usually said to be more powerful than a fighter, because a fighter hits things really hard while wizards do things like create their own minor universes.  Does this make D&D imbalanced? After all, every character could play a wizard if they liked, right? When everyone sits down at a table, armed with pencils and dice, don’t we have the mirror match we had before? Obviously, this line of thinking would render every game balanced, so what we’re really looking for here is what defines a game that is balanced well. The game should allow players of various playstyles to all compete as they wish and still have a chance. But now we have a tension. If you want your games to showcase skill, you might argue that the players shouldn’t be able to do whatever they want—they have to play smart. I think this contradiction goes away if we further amend our definition to say that, in a well-balanced game, players can “play smart” without necessarily putting themselves into a straitjacket.
With that definition, then, the key idea in game balance is choice. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and formulate this into a superawesome rule: In a well-balanced game, a player may make the maximum number of choices before competition without sacrificing effectiveness.  So for D&D, we have the issue that as soon as you say “I want to play an X” your balance breaks. In (..flamebait…) D&D 4e, classes are better balanced against each other, by which I mean that playing a particular class does not break the balance. Later choices, such as powers or feats, may break the balance, however.  I also want to point out that this definition makes no note of strategies employed within play—I think it’s perfectly fair that a well balanced game has strategies that simply don’t work.

D&D is a bit abstract and hard to talk about because of how broad it is, so let’s switch to World of Warcraft. (Third Blizzard product mentioned tonight…am I shill? Also, my WoW knowledge may be a tad out of date.) When you start playing World of Warcraft, the first question is: What realm and type of realm do you want to play on? In general, this is balanced—you change playstyle based on realm (PvP, RP, both, none) but since the entire game world is the same playstyle, you don’t lose anything. Next choice: Horde or Alliance? With the addition of paladin and shaman to both sides, neither has a clear advantage in PvP or PvE—whatever each faction says. The factions are, therefore, relatively balanced, the only caveat being that Alliance sucks. Next choice: Race and class? Here’s where balance starts to break. Some races have much better racial powes than others. Classes…class balance in World of Warcraft is responsible for 23% of the world’s internet arguments, ranking right next to moral relativism and whether .9999…. = 1. It changes, as balance is wont to do in a game with patches—I remember druids sucking, I remember druids rocking, and I don’t have time to figure out where they are now. Suffice to say that, after choosing a class, the balance in WoW is precarious. Finally, at high levels you’re going to need a talent specialization as well, which perform with different levels of effectiveness at different classes. World of Warcraft is not that badly balanced—D&D 3.5 is arguably worse—largely because it allows the player so many options before the balance really breaks. Eventually, a player is handicapped based on their own reasonable choices.

Starcraft (four) on the other hand, is generally held as pretty balanced, mostly because it has been played since time immemorial. Here, there is only one pregame option: Protoss, Terran, or Zerg? (Screw you, MS Word. Those are all words.)  Whichever option you pick, you’ll be able to compete with whatever other option your opponent picks.

I think I see a pattern here. You get balance in one of two ways: Either you give players few to no choices as to their initial conditions (the “checkers” route, also seen in Starcraft), or you allow them enough options that they can fix themselves (more World-of-Warcrafty). Another assumption I’ve made is that we’re ignoring the crafting of the characters/conditions themselves as part of the game—that is, maybe we should say, “Well, sure, build X can’t beat build Y, but a skilful player is one who knows to pick build Y, so. Balance.” Game designers need to recognize, though, that in the Internet age, gaming, especially competitive gaming, isn’t constrained by such things. If I want a good D&D build, there are dozens of websites where I can find great ones. We can’t rely on player ignorance as a source of balance.

(This didn’t go anywhere but it was fun to write.)