The Importance of Balance

One of my two favorite game genres is the RPG. No other games offer the same level of customization and attention to story. Unfortunately, I find that far too many of them aren't very well balanced. On many of the message boards I frequent, I love to discuss this, and often I get the same disheartening response:

"Why does it have to be balanced? The AI isn't going to complain."

For a while, I didn't have a response to this. Of course games have to be balanced; that's what makes them good. The more I thought about it, the less sense the question made. It was tantamount to asking why games have to have control schemes that are usable - otherwise, you have a bad game.

It wasn't until we were facing down the deadline for the GreatForge system that I found an answer. We had a system called the Perk Grid; every five levels, a player could choose to have more health, more Endurance (the fuel for their abilities), more Initiative (letting them act sooner in the turn order), or a chance to shake off a control effect or a debuff. This was a nightmare to balance; having more Endurance meant you could use your flashier, fun abilities more often. All having more Initiative did was slightly tweak the turn order, and it didn't matter if you rolled well enough anyway.

After much deliberation, we decided that it had to be removed. It just couldn't be salvaged in a satisfactory way. Scott, our beta tester and my devil's advocate, was upset about this. He liked the extra customization that the system added. I told him that we couldn't balance it properly, especially so close to the deadline. He asked why it had to be balanced. Wasn't the extra customization worth the imbalance? And that's when I found my answer.

Games have to balanced so that player choice matters.

An imbalanced game offers the Illusion of Choice. Informed players who are interested in getting maximum efficiency are always going to go after the option that gives them the best returns, making multiple playthroughs pointless. They are always going to build the same maximally efficient character, make the same maximally efficient choices, and have the same exact experience they did the last time. Players who don't have the same information or impulse for efficiency are essentially paying a "not min-maxing tax".

Some players explicitly want to be weaker for extra challenge. I have no problem allowing them to do that, but it should be a conscious choice. Players should make the game harder because they want to, not because I screwed up my design.

A balanced game means meaningful choices. Meaningful choices mean happy players. Happy players keep buying and playing my games, which means I get to keep doing what I love: balancing games.