Challenge Accepted: Competitive vs. mechanical balance
We like to think it’s like this, but it’s really more this with a smaller set of scales beneath each hook, and another set there.
When we talk about balance, we’re really talking about two different things, because not all balance is identical.
In one sense, games like Street Fighter II are pretty balanced. A good balancing patch requires going through the game as a whole, evaluating what characters can do, and making sure that moves operate correctly and don’t create too few or too many answers to another. In another sense, games like Mass Effect 3 are pretty balanced, wherein every tactical choice you can make with your character is about as strong as every other choice you can make with your character. But the two don’t line up quite right.
There’s no PvP in Mass Effect 3, but it doesn’t take a lot of work to see how certain classes in multiplayer would be helpless without other classes – yet the whole thing is fairly balanced. Because it’s not balanced the same way as a game like Street Fighter II. That’s what I want to examine and talk about today, the way that the two sorts of balance don’t always play well off of one another and how the style of balance makes a big deal for the game.
Telling Stories: Playception
I do not know why it is that people like the idea of putting on a play in-character. Seriously, couldn’t tell you. It’s kind of ridiculous, you’re already in the midst of a play in the first place. You’re doing the same thing, only another layer down. I suspect that eventually you’d wind up with players roleplaying their characters who are also roleplaying characters who themselves start roleplaying, going four or five levels deep before you start asking what the heck is going on and what series of life choices brought you to this point.
However, I also know that I love the idea, because I totally want to see my characters on stage and hamming it up. Nonsensical? Sure. Also fun as hell.
Of course, if you didn’t already know (and you probably did), putting on an actual play is an activity fraught with pitfalls and problems. Putting on an in-character play is even more problematic. So let’s take a look at what you can use to make it go… well, not smoothly, it’s not going to go smoothly, but at least less poorly.
Telling Stories: Roleplaying is stressful
Here’s the thing about roleplaying – a lot of people who have never done it have very strong ideas about what it entails, which are usually some mixture of well-meaning and wrong. Mostly wrong.
This is not out of malice but out of simple reality. It’s very easy to understand what’s required to get good at PvP in a game; there’s plenty of supplemental material available. Ditto raiding, small-group content, or whatever else your game offers. But one of the reasons that I felt (and still feel) that having a regular roleplaying column is valuable is because no one talks about what that requires. No one mentions how much effort goes into making these things happen.
Mike Mearl, a designer working on Dungeons & Dragons, said at one point that tabletop roleplaying is twenty minutes of fun packed into four hours. Roleplaying online offers a slightly better ratio, but if you’ve never taken part, you don’t realize that there’s a lot of work that goes into it. A lot of the advice I’ve given, both here and in Storyboard, is about trying to minimize that work, or at least make the work as pleasant as possible. But it’s still work just the same.
Challenge Accepted: Do it yourself
This is not an SCC, but it’s a nice shot.
Self-inflicted challenges and I have a long and lengthy relationship, due in no small part to my love of Final Fantasy Tactics. An idle conversation among fans started the Straight Character Challenge – a full group of characters, all the same class, making maximum use of the game’s mechanics and taking down every battle from start to finish. It took a long while, but every single class proved possible, albeit in many cases through abuse of the AI and odd little loopholes in the game’s coding.
I was never a super-active part of the community there, but I was active for a while, and I still admired the challenge a lot from the sidelines. The thing is that self-inflicted challenges both do and do not factor into a game’s difficulty. Sufficiently complex games lead to the creation of more such challenges, and they’re interesting, but they also don’t tie into the actual game at all. And, in some cases, they get co-opted by the developers for just that reason.
Leave this out of your game
You move sixteen tons, whaddya get? Another day older and I’ve made a lot of gil off the Market Boards.
Guys? We need to have a talk. You’ve been making video games for a really long time now, and I’m not going to pretend you aren’t good at it. I wouldn’t have a job or one of my major hobbies if you were. I like video games!
Please stop making me regret liking video games, though, because you thought that in the middle you would be so clever by including these minigames.
Let’s not mince words. These are not clever additions. At best, what you’re accomplishing here is padding out the length of the game through a horrid minigame that no one would ever want to play. At worst, you’re making Animal Crossing, a franchise of games that is literally nothing but these minigames strung together. Or, if you’d rather, it is every tedious part of every MMO ever, but without the part where after all the tedium you get to stab orcs in the head. So when you’re approving your final design documents and such, if these minigames show up? Send that shit back, because it’s not done yet.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 