I don't know if you'll see this but thank you for these videos. I've been lucky enough to work with the Halo IP and balancing weapons is what I do. It was really refreshing to hear this problem from the angle of an rpg and where points overlap and differ. Keep up the great work
@CainOnGames your description of pins was really familiar. There's a gdc talk by Jaime Griesemer about balancing the sniper rifle. They knew that its long range and 1 hit kill were pins that could not be changed so they reduced the firerate to balance it. I can assume you've done similar with mana costs and rare ammo to keep weapons powerful without being too powerful.
This is similar to how card games design, by designing "baseline" cards that act as templates. Lightning: 1 mana 2 damage spell Bear: 2 mana 2/2 Everything else scales from this as the baseline. It's a great design philosophy and it's nice to hear it in terms of RPGs.
Spreadsheets are great but I can imagine it becoming cumbersome at a certain scale. There's a UA-camr called Vash Cowaii who has built a sql database for the games he plays. He reverse engineers the game's logic and math and makes it so that you can query the DB for things like the highest DPS build. I have to think that a tool like that made by a developer for their own game could be very powerful.
I would start with gameflow at the start of balancing a game: how should the game feel, how fast should the player progress and how long and difficult should encounters be. Then finding values in a prototype that simulate that goal, and balance similar system off of that start.
A great teacher (either in Uni, a book or a UA-cam video!) won't necessarily teach you new things, but will help you make sense of things that you didn't know how to express before. I've recently struggled with a balance and use a similar method that the one you mentioned here, although it was a team effort of many people balancing different things at the same time. Eventually we decided "OK, this part is good enough, now let's move numbers on the next feature". We knew the levers we had to use and had open comm lines to follow weekly and daily goals throughout the process which made the balance process more straightforward and avoided two features moving on opposite directions at the same time. How you express it makes complete sense, and it really helped me to cement that in my head. Also it's always good to know we're not losing all of that game dev knowledge! Thanks Tim!
the first 4 seconds always make me happy and relaxed and I know I'm about to learn something and enjoy it, you're like a walking anti-depressant and I love your content Tim
Thanks for sharing Tim! If anyone is interested, there is a fantastic book called "Game Balance" by Ian Schreiber and Brenda Romero that goes really deep into this topic. Highly recommended!
this is reminiscent of the Expectation-Maximization method, where you find the optimal point in a high-dimensional parameter space by taking an "optimal step" for a subset of the parameters while conditioning on fixed values for the rest, and then alternating their roles
Wow. Just wow. I was blocked struggling with a design for a prototype and this popped up! Thank-you so much! Also if anyone has other references, please do share! Especially sample spreadsheets to guide starting this work would be fabulous!!! p.s. love your channel!
sometimes games have the vagues balancing rules and you get warframe and sometimes its so predictable every weapon is trash like borderlands. I played couple roguelikes and RPGs with gear merge mechanics on android these few months and the total DPS stat approach where weapons just deal damage with different patterns or perks works OK (when you don't have shotguns so inaccurate only one pellet hits at point blank range and makes the whole gun type actually unuseable, looking at you, Idle Breaker). But if you want to avoid boredom and overshooting have a boundary for precentage deviations from the norm. Its not as needed if you only have a few diatinct weapons.
I came to this intuitively, somehow through my experience as a game designer. Extrapolating this idea to a combat system in an action game, you can balance the difficulty either from the player's and weapon's side or from the AI's side. If you tweak both things at the same time, you can go crazy and end up in an endless loop of tweaking. So I agree 100% you have to balance one system agent to the point you are happy with it, lock it and then proceed to balancing the next thing around the first one, but not both of them simultaneously.
There are a number of games out there that seem to not balance their combat, or if they do it's a broader level "was this fun" or "what stopped players from having fun here?" And they may tweak some knobs but they certainly weren't diving into the mathematics. Then there are some games that are mathematically sound but don't deliver on the expected experience. It's truly fascinating. Almost makes me want to hear from Larian or a similar studio what their process is.
IMO game balance in single-player games only matters insofar as it keeps all (or at least most) skills & gear useful, and thereby interesting. Conversely, it matters to avoid a skill being SO useful that it essentially becomes mandatory. E.g. In Fallout 1, the Barter skill is incredibly unbalanced: at high levels you can walk up to literally any merchant and basically acquire all of their money & equipment, leaving them with only a couple of caps or a mutfruit. On one hand, that’s a ton of fun. OTOH, that totally breaks immersion and basically guarantees that you’ll max out Barter as quickly as possible, regardless of what kind of build you’re aiming for. It honestly feels like a cheat, even though it’s totally legal.
I worked on a game where designers recommended a certain amount of dodge for a certain level of creatures. The funny thing is this amount was about 50% more than the effective dodge 'cap' - due to the way it was calculated 33% of it was doing nothing. They were confused because players still hit things a lot. But the reason why was because players were using skills that got rid of the monsters' chance to dodge. As a programmer I put the whole combat system into a spreadsheet similar to how he mentioned in here. It let the designers actually design things rather than going by their "feel" which was oftentimes wrong. It also revealed overpowered stats and useless stats.
I love your content, thank you for sharing. This is the method I devised (unknowingly similar to yours) because I was trying to figure out how to gauge difficulty on rpgs fights in pathfinder. The only thing I added that you briefly touched on was I explicitly married target thresholds to narrative implications. For example if I wanted a fight to be easy, I wanted the players to hit the monsters frequently (75+% when the dice is rolled), and I wanted the monsters to have a hard time hitting the players (5-25% when the dice is rolled). Then I realized a fight where both sides have an easy time hitting each other is a race to death (I did not factor in amount of damage delt into this pin). A boss should be hitting easily (75% of the time) and hard to hit in return. That fit nicely as I could select a monster/creature with the mathematical properties I wanted and I could narrtively say "Yes, the big boss IS hard to hurt. That makes sense, why he's the big boss." and the math backs up the story. The only other thing I actively use with this pin technique is to make sure there is enough wiggle room for players to burn consumables or abilities to tilt the math in their favor if something is too hard for them. The idea being it allows them to control a dramatic reversal of fortune which allows them to both be in control and feel a rush of accomplishment.
This was super useful and really helped address one of my biggest issues I have run into! Another question I had was about how developers come up with and design around unique effects for items or spells. A great example are the Science Weapons in Outer Worlds as well as unique weapons in other RPGs as well as spells or abilites that can cause players to climb walls, change shape, etc. I really like the cool affects and wonder how developers go about implementing them without potential game breaking issues.
Thanks, Tim, Fascinating stuff! I did some research on this many years back when making a "delevel" mod for Freelancer. Turns out, your way is pretty much how most RPG devs do it. Many MMOs periodically talk about how they do balance passes, and you basically summed it up. Only thing I think you missed is the emphasis on "feel". Sometimes the numbers just don't add up to an enjoyable experience for players, and that's usually an indication that changes should be made in other areas. You see this occasionally in RPGs as well as fighting games and sometimes even shooters; sometimes a class/weapon/etc. is really strong statistically, but nobody plays it because it isn't fun. In MMOs, this may manifest as a 'meta' class or build that only hardcore players play. Ways I've seen them solve this issue usually involve tweaks to adjacent mechanics, or sometimes even just animations and effects to make it feel more powerful. Unfortunately the only surefire way to test feel is to actually play the class or weapon or whatever and see how it, well, feels. Maybe a beautiful corner or slice can be used for this.
One thing which is alluded to in the video, but I think should be called out as loud as possible: Limit randomness. This is imho the biggest flaw of D&D, especially at lower levels. With a d20 and skills in the range of +1 to +3 it's almost completely irrelevant what the skill is. It's also impossible to balance, because the randomness is so big compared to the skills. You see this limiting with most modern Pen & Paper games (and in extension crpgs) going to multiple dice instead, so you have expected values, which you can use to calculate how hard something is with a reasonable degree of certainty (e.g. if you have 2d10, you have an expected value of 10.5, so not only are the +1 to +3 far more important, you also can start calculating how hard a check will be with a reasonable degree of confidence).
This pinning is a good idea. While a totally different genre than what you usually cover, back in the day when overwatch 1 was released i remember reading about how they used tracer as sort of the control character. They wouldnt change her but would use her as a metric for all other characters. I think this is a great idea as with things like hero shooters or mobas, anything that adds new characters as they tend to have a power creep problem. Now i cant say if this is still their design philosophy as i havent touched a blizzard game in a while and really havent touched any multiplayer games either.
I think lots about the many games I played and then consider what I'd do differently. I also like to make a sort of anchor set of basics to build on. These are the stats, this is how skills scale and use the stats in game. Here are the possible outlier skills and why they are outliers. Test and observe. Test and observe!
Bigger numbers help give wiggle room for your skills. You don't have to grt silly with it, but creating a scale of something like: 10 - 2000 and keeping 90% of your skills in this range, whether its for actions outcomes(heals, damage) or HP, it will allow you to think about pacing in your encounters.
I know it's a divisive game but Fallout 4 did a great job imho with the DR system. It's quite dynamic in that stacking DR items beyond fifty percent reduction range had a drastically reduced effect. Rare that a game actually rewards "medium" armor and gets that balance right.
Procedural is a canvass. Game features are the colors that are on the painter's thing that has all the colors. Then you draw and refine the canvass using the features. Overlapping two features makes it a great color.
I spent about a year making an overhaul mod for fallout 4, I also was never taught how to try to balance a big game like that, but I actually came to the same conclusions basically that Tim talks about here
I actually started with skill range (as per your video on skills) so I had that range right, then I could work out what the bonus amounts were going to come from character attributes to be in proportion to that. That let me figure out the bonus amount that was going to go to hit points from the endurance stat. Then I could work out total hitpoints that then let me work out the damage amounts. Typing it out it sounds like I did everything backwards lol but I wanted to make sure the skills bonuses and attribute bonuses were solid first as they are hardest part I think. I followed a similar method though, each part informed the next, had to go back a step and change it a few times (I ended up using 1-20 skill range in the end). Also this is all being written up as a TTRPG, once its done I will have all the content and charts and formulae that will hopefully be pretty easy on to make into an indie RPG for PC.
I know this is not what the question referred to, but I always wonder how to give player more content without revealing all your tricks at once or being stringent. ("balancing" game features) Maybe there should be different approach to "parallel" content (new dungeon or storyline or a play area based on the same foundation) and "orthogonal" features. (new weapon/ability that's completely different, means of flying/teleporting that weren't there before, Cheat-o-Vision, etc) I see people get a whole lot more excited for orthogonal features than parallel ones, but the game also needs to have some meat on it.
I have seen some games provide new features that only work in the new areas, e.g. a flying mount that only works in the new zones. That way, the designers don't have to reverse engineer old content to work with new features.
Making orthogonal deisng is basically only done well In runescape because you have to be that kind of designer, but for a way to start weaker and get back up on power that's how the eldern ring DLC works. Basically anyone can design a content island into a game but then you have the problem of only few things or none carrying over to outside. Exmples wow expansions or Warframe'a Duviri.
Orthogonal features and content are the two best reward types for me as a player. Zelda games are notorious for the former: every once in a while, you get some new gameplay changing item, ability, etc. This is Zelda'a secret source, imho.
Btw, besides doing that in-game, they also greatly overhaul gameplay between games. Zelda franchise is the Masteclass for "orthogonal features as reward". Hey, Tim, maybe do a video on this topic?😅
Here is the question, what kind of attack you personally find most satisfying? Is it range shot high damage, or a lot of range shots stay on the target low damage, is it high damage melee swing, or a lot of fast low damage melee swings? Or other? what kinda attack pattern personally bring you the most joy?
Good Evening Tim , this topic has always interested me , in Fallout 2 i would always die in tutorial unless i chose the most efficient build , i wish there was more leeway to try crazy or just weird builds.
Separate damage and hit reactions. Use damage and hit reaction clamps. Use cooldown timers for attack actions and hit reactions on the player and enemies. There's more work up front, but it will make balancing/tuning significantly easier. This is especially true when it comes to making the content fun and fair.
Hey tim. :) Random question for you. How do you do level design? Do you have a different zones like "Here are challenges the players must overcome", "Here are player rewards", "Here is lore" or "You find nothing of interest"? Is there a threshold or amount you recommend in specific quantities or groupings to strive for or to avoid? How do you do zone/level layout? Is there a process you follow when designing levels the player will exist and then interact in? Sorry if I missed you covering this topic in a previous video. Thank you again for all your work, I appreciate you taking the time to pass on wisdom.
I think my video Everything I learned from Disneyland ua-cam.com/video/MiAEBpXlelk/v-deo.html is the closest I’ve come to talking about your questions. You might want to look through my Level Design playlist.
Time-to-kill is pretty rigorous in some shooters, and in some hack-and-slash games. For example in Diablo 4 they wanted the game to feel like a constant challenge, so the math works out that at level 5 it takes you X seconds to kill a specific enemy archetype, and at level 50 it still takes X seconds, unless you've specialized your gear and abilities to specific enemy types, in which case it would be above or below X. I think in spectacle fighters they try to make it work out that you'll see at least one attack sequence from an enemy so there is a general average minimum time to kill, and in "skill based" games you reward precision attacks or specific intended combos with higher TTK but otherwise your level means very little, it's back to the Diablo 4 formula of everything taking a set amount of time - not to punish, but to prod players to learn the specific ways to kill each enemy type. Then you reward them at some point with a series of varied enemies that the player, if they have learned each skill shot or combo, can eliminate quickly for some reward. The reward may not even be a power upgrade, it's just there to help the player feel rewarded for learning all the killshots.
Wow, first time I've seen one of your videos use a transition/cut haha (the reason and timestamp is in the video description, if y'all didn't catch it)
Hey Tim how do you design this with a class based system? Like do you design for say an EQ warrior? Then scale everything down? Or do you design for a class thats in between like say a bard? Also how do determine an enjoyable amount of turns per encounter?
I design for damage output, and then achieve that differently for different classes. Some classes have ranged attacks…but those can miss. Make attacks can’t miss but you need to spend a round or two closing. Some ranged attacks do a lot of damage but are only usable a limited number of times between rests, while powerful melee attacks need to charge up. All of these look and feel different to the player…but they average to the same amount of damage per round. As for rounds per encounter, I usually plan for 3-4 rounds for a normal mob, 10-15 for a boss, and 1 for “trash mobs”. Depending on combat goals, those would get adjusted. For example, if I want buffs/debuffs to matter in normal encounters, they need to do last more rounds.
Hi Tim, have you read the book 'Game Balance' by Brenda Romero and Ian Schreiber? I've found it's a useful resource that I've used in my university lectures and would be interested to hear what your thoughts are.
So when it comes to creating balanced games, what sort of research do you do regarding other games in the genre? For instance, when going from isometric rpgs to first person rpgs, did you look at other games to see what DPS or what speeds they used to achieve their particular game feel? Does this research help or is every game too unique for anything to transfer from one to another?
I usually play other games in the genre to see what kind of features they have, but I usually don't use their number ranges in my own games. I talk about how I pick numerical ranges in more detail in these videos: ua-cam.com/video/SL_aTjKsxok/v-deo.html ua-cam.com/video/96uGEA0r6Bo/v-deo.html
I think it's important to mention that you can only do balance when you have an actual build of the game that has feature that need balance. This guarantees you are only balancing the actual features that made it, in their close to actual state and can test the balance feel by playing. Balancing paper features on paper for a video game would be a waste of time. Things will change once you hit playable build, and removing even one thing may (will) lead to total rebalance.
Everything in creative space seems as essentially a gradient descent over a feature space to optimize a highly irregular cost function of “pleasure”. 😅
You've mentioned before that some forms of committees aren't effective for game development. What do you think about Valve's company structure in that case ? Is it something different or do you think it can have issues ?
Valve is so heavily subsidized by their Steam platform that it is hard to judge how their structure has any of its own effects. It might help or hinder their development work, but without any time or budget constraints, how could someone external understand what had happened?
They are a big anomaly, and besides the live playtesting each week with the devs in room we don't really know what they're doing better that can be replicated. But look how few games they successfully released in the last decade (Deadlock Alpha is live)
Is it really that hard to believe flat models can also work under the right conditions ? Is management style completely overriden when you have a golden goose giving you money ?
@@felicianofrontado3134 its not done often but Tesls hs no job roles you just work on what you think makes their products better. But also they are so rich they don't have any budgeting. You can see that that won't work in most places.
But how do u handle player choice? Like can choose to do A or B during a combat which would yield different calculations. (wether during combat or while choosing a build etc) And then if u have enough of those there is exponentially exploding number of possibles to calculate.
My method is... just wing it, and then test it. If it's fun, keep it. If it's overpowered compared to other things, limit it in someway. If it's underpowered, but still kind of fun, give it some utility or scrap it.
Hi Tim. I recently went through the progress of trying to balance a superhero rpg. The game's main source of customization is talents which are similar to perks from fallout. To keep a sense of balance i tried to make a behind the scenes point buy system that puts value on every aspect of a talent. My question is did you ever face a situation while balancing perks where you chose to make it above or below value on purpose?
i don't know if you talking about this in the past , but in an RPG , what is a good way to make sure / code that you take into account all the stats modifiers from all the gear / perks when calculating damage or other stats?
Fallout 1 and 2 had both DR and DT, which resulted in making AP ammo not work. AP ammo reduces DT but it has less damage. It meant JHP ammo weirdly doing more damage to even heavily armored targets than AP ammo. New Vegas had a DT based system, which worked much better and is mechanically more realistic.
When putting pins on stuff like HP, Damage, etc, do you generally outline them for each major section of the game? As in, you start by setting what HP and DMG you should have at each section, and then work backwards to come up with a curve or progression that gets you there.
I use the player level as the metric I balance against, so player HP per level, damage output per level, etc. Then when areas of the game are made, I plan for the player being in a certain level range, and I can determine difficulty based on that.
I think most people would just take what was previously calculated by others. You don't see much discussion about it since only a few people would actually calculate it themselves. As you talked I kept thinking of Valheim, where the enemies doesn't really have, as I remember, numeric health, neither the player on the screen. As you eat of course you see damage as a red bar going down or green for the players.. They also probably did calculations, but it feels like most of this was just done by feeling rather than calculating exact numbers. Does it feel like that enemy goes down too easy? or does it hit too hard.. Also some other thing came to mind: subnautica.. If you go into that game knowing nothing, there are some terrifying seacreatures in it. and you can genuinely be scared, but all the wind came out of their sails when in one of the dev conferences they were talking about monster designed, they were talking about how none of the monsters can kill the player in the first attack. They don't communicate this so you don't know that you are NOT in danger, and it works perfectly. As they explained it, the player doesn't know but it was programmatically ensured that no matter how much HP you have, nothing kills you with the first attack, and after that they go do a round letting you always thinkg that you NARROWLY escaped and attack.. I think it's interesting take on how to tell damage to players.
In Bioshock ( talk about being under sea ) when you were ver low hp , players actually stopped taking damage for a brief amount of time , so it felt like you healed just at the right time or cleaned the enemy just before it killed you.
I once read comments from an online game designer, talking how they just eyeball numbers when they change balance after launch, fully knowing their players have much better spreadsheets. That one made me think, why? Why do you know your players have better spreadsheets and you don't try to emulate that? I'd hope that's a rare thing and that most designers would have a better way to gauge how much a change will affect the full picture than simply hoping for the best...
I think a lot of it is just about time. There are some pretty obsessive fans out there, and unlike game designers (who have to think of everything) fans have the luxury of focusing exclusively on one or two things which interest them. With a large enough player base, I’ll bet it becomes inevitable that folks on some message board will think some game element through better than you possibly could.
Do not touch hp and damage at all, hp low damage high is a constant(for player and enemies), adrenaline intensity is dependent on it, if you touch it you are decreasing emotional reward. So leveling up is making the game less fun in that regards
I watched a video today about healers being mostly useless in many action based games or too boring, and it's true but the one standout is TF2 medic which actually slowly adds overhealth at full. Without that, healing is just the worst form of damage prevention. And I think thats just balance issue when you let dodge or reduction scale way too high. Case in point many rpgs, payday 2 and many warframes. But it all seems to be consequence of the early decisions od how much enemy damage scales.
Its rare but I know RPG where dodge isnt a 100% it just reduces damage a lot, and also every crit in an attack follows the same roll. Souls. I played it on android, its an autobattler gacha with decent graphics, music and secial attack animations. However there is no storu or immersive choices what so ever. however it has avoided most of the pitfalls of too many rarites of heroes(just 3) and even has soul link mechanic for catching up most of your heroes to the highest 5. But there are 2 modes where the levels are preset and wont matter.
To answer it: If it's about health-damage, whereas damage is dealt over time, you just need to figure out the time you want the fight to last. In my case I want extended battles between large space ships and shorter battles between small space ships. So the former should be let's say 4 minutes, the latter 45 seconds. For the former it means the ratio of 240 is needed, meaning 240 times as much health as effective DPS. Countering damage with repair is also a thing, so I compensate for that. If DPS is 50, RPS is 10; health = (50-10) * 240 = 9600 health. I take that as a starting point, so actual testing/simulation is required. Add to that various other mechanics that influence these, which in my case is stamina mechanic, damage dampening, armor, various weapon types, distance dynamics, etc. When I am content with the combat, the next step is to add another dimension to it: Other types of ships, other ship sizes, other weapons, other tactics. Then I check if the repair ratio is ok, if there are bad parts in combat (like unwanted kiting), too strong or too weak encounters. Ultimately it depends on the complexity the game has, but consider that ultimately it has to "feel" good and be fun, so thorough testing is required.
The closest I've seen to this conversation is in the JRPG community. Like how some fromsoft games and Shin Megami Tensei games have strange bell curves in power scaling behind stats called soft caps. Its an amazing topic that I've looked into for fun a lot.
I find it a bad accessibility practice when the game doesn't tell you the stats or their effect. It's hard finding a game that shows you the rules or their results anywhere. Usually it's excused by their fandom figuring it out anyway. But tgat only happens you get the right Wiki nerds with OCD. And plenty of games are too small for even that.(especially mobile) If they even have a wiki.
@@635574 well have you ever asked why and tried to give a possible reason? I like to entertain the idea that if the number is hidden that just means they want you to focus on other parts. An outside example would be like in fallout New Vegas. The fact that they give you a number value to succed a skill check gives you a clear goal but it also means that every point between your current skill level and the the skill check value mean nothing.
@@mikeuniturtle3722 Hiding the value you need to reach does nothing to change the fact that every extra point you gain before you reach that number does nothing, it just means you have no idea if the goal is in reach and whether or not a few points will be enough or not. Hiding weapon values also generally does not make a game feel more natural, it just means you don't know which weapon to use, and it is often very arbitrary as to which weapons are more powerful than others so you can't always just guess. You can apply numbers to real life phsyics and stuff anyway so it is not necessarily unrealistic to have numbers on things. In real life, even without numbers, you can tell if someone is hurt or not and somewhat gauge the severity of an injury but a lot of games don't have anything to indicate such things besides numbers so removing the numbers just leaves the player blind. A game may have visible indications for when characters are hurt but the underlying mechanics are not necessarily realistic and a guy may be able to take a few bullets with relative ease even if they have realistic looking wounds and seems like they have serious injury, so what you can see on the surface may not provide much info on the actual state of a character. Seeing the exact numbers of how much damage stuff does is not exactly realistic but removing the numbers does not necessarily make the game feel any more realistic. Removing HUD elements and visible stats doesn't change the fact the game is still game and it will still feel like a game unless it actually simulates everything realistically.
5:11 A suggestion as a player: make enemies (especially!) and players never survive more than a couple of *connecting* "hard hits", no matter the level gap. Otherwise, the combat won't feel lethal and thus bad and game-y imho. "Hard hit" meaning something done by a strong weapon (e.g. two-handed axe, shotgun, etc), and "connecting" meaning overcoming defenses such as parry/block. Imho, no one should survive 5 greatsword or shotgun connecting hits to the face or it will feel super bad no matter the context. From that, balance other weapons (e.g. if greatsword takes 1, daggers might take 2). This is A reason Stealth Archer™ felt so good: it felt more lethal whereas other styles would expose health-sponginess more.
One way to handle difficulty or level/gaps can be adjusting number of enemies and/or chance for hits to connect. Most games feel much better for me when I crank damage both to enemies and player by factor 2x or more (e.g. Ghost of Tsushima Lethal mode, Assassin's Creed Origins Cursed Weapons, Skyrim Mods).
I think this is where armor/DT comes into play. 2 shotgun blasts might consistently drop an unarmored human, but are useless against power armor. This also provides a mechanic by which a player can gain substantial toughness-acquiring increasingly better armor-without feeling cartoony, as high HP often does.
@@nw42 indeed. But there is nothing stopping a level 0 character from entering a power armor or using a shotgun against a lvl 100 one that is caught without one.
Off balance (one is plain better than alternatives) is boring, but too balanced is also boring (decisions dont matter much). A slight off balance that changes over progressing the game is interesting.
It depends what approach do you have, they both legit. "Slight off balance" seems like situational balance where one or another weapon/skill will be more or less effective or counter each other. It's like a pikeman/cavalryman/archer, rock/paper/scissors, shotgun/sniper rifle/assault rifle in short/mid/long range.
@@rottensunbeam I would make a temporal imbalance over the games progression, lets say with a third of the ability types and weapon types be slightly stronger for a few levels, then switching to the next thrid, etc. This also favors switching playstyle. If all abilities/ weapons have ultimately the same DPS in most situations, they also become boring. Thats too balanced then. The player will not feel he can "trick the game and feel smart".
Bullet sponges sucked Using a flamethrower also sucked Hair should burn Realism loved the gore but rdr2 had the perfect style Wearing Power sucked ass Alien Vs Predator is perfect Ripping people in half Spine cord ripped out Stepping on dead corpes Kicking dogs 🐕 people Bugs ect The reloading is trash Unkillable characters seriously Just add Realism
About to call it a night
“Tim Cain posted 9 seconds ago”
Sighs and sets alarm
I don't know if you'll see this but thank you for these videos. I've been lucky enough to work with the Halo IP and balancing weapons is what I do. It was really refreshing to hear this problem from the angle of an rpg and where points overlap and differ. Keep up the great work
Nice! I know people who work on Halo. You keep up the good work too!
@CainOnGames your description of pins was really familiar. There's a gdc talk by Jaime Griesemer about balancing the sniper rifle. They knew that its long range and 1 hit kill were pins that could not be changed so they reduced the firerate to balance it.
I can assume you've done similar with mana costs and rare ammo to keep weapons powerful without being too powerful.
This is similar to how card games design, by designing "baseline" cards that act as templates.
Lightning: 1 mana 2 damage spell
Bear: 2 mana 2/2
Everything else scales from this as the baseline.
It's a great design philosophy and it's nice to hear it in terms of RPGs.
Spreadsheets are great but I can imagine it becoming cumbersome at a certain scale. There's a UA-camr called Vash Cowaii who has built a sql database for the games he plays. He reverse engineers the game's logic and math and makes it so that you can query the DB for things like the highest DPS build. I have to think that a tool like that made by a developer for their own game could be very powerful.
This kind of thing is what tools programmers do a lot of
I would start with gameflow at the start of balancing a game: how should the game feel, how fast should the player progress and how long and difficult should encounters be. Then finding values in a prototype that simulate that goal, and balance similar system off of that start.
A great teacher (either in Uni, a book or a UA-cam video!) won't necessarily teach you new things, but will help you make sense of things that you didn't know how to express before.
I've recently struggled with a balance and use a similar method that the one you mentioned here, although it was a team effort of many people balancing different things at the same time. Eventually we decided "OK, this part is good enough, now let's move numbers on the next feature". We knew the levers we had to use and had open comm lines to follow weekly and daily goals throughout the process which made the balance process more straightforward and avoided two features moving on opposite directions at the same time.
How you express it makes complete sense, and it really helped me to cement that in my head. Also it's always good to know we're not losing all of that game dev knowledge! Thanks Tim!
the first 4 seconds always make me happy and relaxed and I know I'm about to learn something and enjoy it, you're like a walking anti-depressant and I love your content Tim
Thanks for sharing Tim! If anyone is interested, there is a fantastic book called "Game Balance" by Ian Schreiber and Brenda Romero that goes really deep into this topic. Highly recommended!
Is Brenda Romero related to John Romero?
@@alexandrecosta2567 yup, they are married
this is reminiscent of the Expectation-Maximization method, where you find the optimal point in a high-dimensional parameter space by taking an "optimal step" for a subset of the parameters while conditioning on fixed values for the rest, and then alternating their roles
Wow. Just wow. I was blocked struggling with a design for a prototype and this popped up! Thank-you so much! Also if anyone has other references, please do share! Especially sample spreadsheets to guide starting this work would be fabulous!!! p.s. love your channel!
sometimes games have the vagues balancing rules and you get warframe and sometimes its so predictable every weapon is trash like borderlands.
I played couple roguelikes and RPGs with gear merge mechanics on android these few months and the total DPS stat approach where weapons just deal damage with different patterns or perks works OK (when you don't have shotguns so inaccurate only one pellet hits at point blank range and makes the whole gun type actually unuseable, looking at you, Idle Breaker).
But if you want to avoid boredom and overshooting have a boundary for precentage deviations from the norm. Its not as needed if you only have a few diatinct weapons.
Yea I would just Google "balance dev log", you'll find a ton of things. It's mostly the same stuff, but there are some interesting ideas.
I came to this intuitively, somehow through my experience as a game designer. Extrapolating this idea to a combat system in an action game, you can balance the difficulty either from the player's and weapon's side or from the AI's side. If you tweak both things at the same time, you can go crazy and end up in an endless loop of tweaking. So I agree 100% you have to balance one system agent to the point you are happy with it, lock it and then proceed to balancing the next thing around the first one, but not both of them simultaneously.
There are a number of games out there that seem to not balance their combat, or if they do it's a broader level "was this fun" or "what stopped players from having fun here?" And they may tweak some knobs but they certainly weren't diving into the mathematics. Then there are some games that are mathematically sound but don't deliver on the expected experience. It's truly fascinating. Almost makes me want to hear from Larian or a similar studio what their process is.
IMO game balance in single-player games only matters insofar as it keeps all (or at least most) skills & gear useful, and thereby interesting. Conversely, it matters to avoid a skill being SO useful that it essentially becomes mandatory.
E.g. In Fallout 1, the Barter skill is incredibly unbalanced: at high levels you can walk up to literally any merchant and basically acquire all of their money & equipment, leaving them with only a couple of caps or a mutfruit. On one hand, that’s a ton of fun. OTOH, that totally breaks immersion and basically guarantees that you’ll max out Barter as quickly as possible, regardless of what kind of build you’re aiming for. It honestly feels like a cheat, even though it’s totally legal.
I worked on a game where designers recommended a certain amount of dodge for a certain level of creatures. The funny thing is this amount was about 50% more than the effective dodge 'cap' - due to the way it was calculated 33% of it was doing nothing.
They were confused because players still hit things a lot. But the reason why was because players were using skills that got rid of the monsters' chance to dodge.
As a programmer I put the whole combat system into a spreadsheet similar to how he mentioned in here. It let the designers actually design things rather than going by their "feel" which was oftentimes wrong. It also revealed overpowered stats and useless stats.
you have been a massive inspiration for me! thanks for everything you have made including this channel :D
I love your content, thank you for sharing. This is the method I devised (unknowingly similar to yours) because I was trying to figure out how to gauge difficulty on rpgs fights in pathfinder. The only thing I added that you briefly touched on was I explicitly married target thresholds to narrative implications. For example if I wanted a fight to be easy, I wanted the players to hit the monsters frequently (75+% when the dice is rolled), and I wanted the monsters to have a hard time hitting the players (5-25% when the dice is rolled). Then I realized a fight where both sides have an easy time hitting each other is a race to death (I did not factor in amount of damage delt into this pin). A boss should be hitting easily (75% of the time) and hard to hit in return. That fit nicely as I could select a monster/creature with the mathematical properties I wanted and I could narrtively say "Yes, the big boss IS hard to hurt. That makes sense, why he's the big boss." and the math backs up the story.
The only other thing I actively use with this pin technique is to make sure there is enough wiggle room for players to burn consumables or abilities to tilt the math in their favor if something is too hard for them. The idea being it allows them to control a dramatic reversal of fortune which allows them to both be in control and feel a rush of accomplishment.
This was super useful and really helped address one of my biggest issues I have run into!
Another question I had was about how developers come up with and design around unique effects for items or spells. A great example are the Science Weapons in Outer Worlds as well as unique weapons in other RPGs as well as spells or abilites that can cause players to climb walls, change shape, etc. I really like the cool affects and wonder how developers go about implementing them without potential game breaking issues.
I think I could hear the dog breathing near the end I was bit freaked out considering it's 3am with nobody else but me in the kitchen.
It’s like living with Darth Vader.
@@CainOnGames "I have altered the ambience in this room.
Pray I do not alter it further."
Thanks, Tim, Fascinating stuff!
I did some research on this many years back when making a "delevel" mod for Freelancer.
Turns out, your way is pretty much how most RPG devs do it. Many MMOs periodically talk about how they do balance passes, and you basically summed it up.
Only thing I think you missed is the emphasis on "feel". Sometimes the numbers just don't add up to an enjoyable experience for players, and that's usually an indication that changes should be made in other areas. You see this occasionally in RPGs as well as fighting games and sometimes even shooters; sometimes a class/weapon/etc. is really strong statistically, but nobody plays it because it isn't fun. In MMOs, this may manifest as a 'meta' class or build that only hardcore players play.
Ways I've seen them solve this issue usually involve tweaks to adjacent mechanics, or sometimes even just animations and effects to make it feel more powerful.
Unfortunately the only surefire way to test feel is to actually play the class or weapon or whatever and see how it, well, feels. Maybe a beautiful corner or slice can be used for this.
Brilliant, just what I needed to think about for my project. Perfect timing Tim!
One thing which is alluded to in the video, but I think should be called out as loud as possible: Limit randomness. This is imho the biggest flaw of D&D, especially at lower levels. With a d20 and skills in the range of +1 to +3 it's almost completely irrelevant what the skill is. It's also impossible to balance, because the randomness is so big compared to the skills. You see this limiting with most modern Pen & Paper games (and in extension crpgs) going to multiple dice instead, so you have expected values, which you can use to calculate how hard something is with a reasonable degree of certainty (e.g. if you have 2d10, you have an expected value of 10.5, so not only are the +1 to +3 far more important, you also can start calculating how hard a check will be with a reasonable degree of confidence).
algorithmic punch!
This was incredibly insightful and helpful, thank you Tim!
You should write a book at this point. I'd buy it.
This pinning is a good idea. While a totally different genre than what you usually cover, back in the day when overwatch 1 was released i remember reading about how they used tracer as sort of the control character. They wouldnt change her but would use her as a metric for all other characters. I think this is a great idea as with things like hero shooters or mobas, anything that adds new characters as they tend to have a power creep problem.
Now i cant say if this is still their design philosophy as i havent touched a blizzard game in a while and really havent touched any multiplayer games either.
I think lots about the many games I played and then consider what I'd do differently. I also like to make a sort of anchor set of basics to build on.
These are the stats, this is how skills scale and use the stats in game. Here are the possible outlier skills and why they are outliers. Test and observe. Test and observe!
Bigger numbers help give wiggle room for your skills. You don't have to grt silly with it, but creating a scale of something like:
10 - 2000 and keeping 90% of your skills in this range, whether its for actions outcomes(heals, damage) or HP, it will allow you to think about pacing in your encounters.
Level scaling in Skyrim to me is a perfect example of how not to apply or scale with levels in your game.
I know it's a divisive game but Fallout 4 did a great job imho with the DR system. It's quite dynamic in that stacking DR items beyond fifty percent reduction range had a drastically reduced effect. Rare that a game actually rewards "medium" armor and gets that balance right.
Procedural is a canvass. Game features are the colors that are on the painter's thing that has all the colors. Then you draw and refine the canvass using the features. Overlapping two features makes it a great color.
This is very helpful, I am currently making a rpg on the side and I needed a better idea on how to balance the game
I spent about a year making an overhaul mod for fallout 4, I also was never taught how to try to balance a big game like that, but I actually came to the same conclusions basically that Tim talks about here
I actually started with skill range (as per your video on skills) so I had that range right, then I could work out what the bonus amounts were going to come from character attributes to be in proportion to that.
That let me figure out the bonus amount that was going to go to hit points from the endurance stat. Then I could work out total hitpoints that then let me work out the damage amounts.
Typing it out it sounds like I did everything backwards lol but I wanted to make sure the skills bonuses and attribute bonuses were solid first as they are hardest part I think.
I followed a similar method though, each part informed the next, had to go back a step and change it a few times (I ended up using 1-20 skill range in the end).
Also this is all being written up as a TTRPG, once its done I will have all the content and charts and formulae that will hopefully be pretty easy on to make into an indie RPG for PC.
I know this is not what the question referred to, but I always wonder how to give player more content without revealing all your tricks at once or being stringent. ("balancing" game features) Maybe there should be different approach to "parallel" content (new dungeon or storyline or a play area based on the same foundation) and "orthogonal" features. (new weapon/ability that's completely different, means of flying/teleporting that weren't there before, Cheat-o-Vision, etc)
I see people get a whole lot more excited for orthogonal features than parallel ones, but the game also needs to have some meat on it.
I have seen some games provide new features that only work in the new areas, e.g. a flying mount that only works in the new zones. That way, the designers don't have to reverse engineer old content to work with new features.
Making orthogonal deisng is basically only done well In runescape because you have to be that kind of designer, but for a way to start weaker and get back up on power that's how the eldern ring DLC works. Basically anyone can design a content island into a game but then you have the problem of only few things or none carrying over to outside. Exmples wow expansions or Warframe'a Duviri.
Orthogonal features and content are the two best reward types for me as a player. Zelda games are notorious for the former: every once in a while, you get some new gameplay changing item, ability, etc. This is Zelda'a secret source, imho.
Btw, besides doing that in-game, they also greatly overhaul gameplay between games. Zelda franchise is the Masteclass for "orthogonal features as reward". Hey, Tim, maybe do a video on this topic?😅
Here is the question, what kind of attack you personally find most satisfying? Is it range shot high damage, or a lot of range shots stay on the target low damage, is it high damage melee swing, or a lot of fast low damage melee swings? Or other? what kinda attack pattern personally bring you the most joy?
Good Evening Tim , this topic has always interested me , in Fallout 2 i would always die in tutorial unless i chose the most efficient build , i wish there was more leeway to try crazy or just weird builds.
Separate damage and hit reactions. Use damage and hit reaction clamps. Use cooldown timers for attack actions and hit reactions on the player and enemies. There's more work up front, but it will make balancing/tuning significantly easier. This is especially true when it comes to making the content fun and fair.
Hey tim. :) Random question for you. How do you do level design? Do you have a different zones like "Here are challenges the players must overcome", "Here are player rewards", "Here is lore" or "You find nothing of interest"? Is there a threshold or amount you recommend in specific quantities or groupings to strive for or to avoid? How do you do zone/level layout? Is there a process you follow when designing levels the player will exist and then interact in?
Sorry if I missed you covering this topic in a previous video. Thank you again for all your work, I appreciate you taking the time to pass on wisdom.
I think my video Everything I learned from Disneyland
ua-cam.com/video/MiAEBpXlelk/v-deo.html
is the closest I’ve come to talking about your questions. You might want to look through my Level Design playlist.
Here’s the playlist link:
Level Design
ua-cam.com/play/PLI8W_yHW-3DUHt9I1BoHMJxCV-j2T_d_0.html
Your “pin it” method is called stochastic gradient descent :D and how a lot of AI is trained
I hope that means I am in good company.
Time-to-kill is pretty rigorous in some shooters, and in some hack-and-slash games. For example in Diablo 4 they wanted the game to feel like a constant challenge, so the math works out that at level 5 it takes you X seconds to kill a specific enemy archetype, and at level 50 it still takes X seconds, unless you've specialized your gear and abilities to specific enemy types, in which case it would be above or below X.
I think in spectacle fighters they try to make it work out that you'll see at least one attack sequence from an enemy so there is a general average minimum time to kill, and in "skill based" games you reward precision attacks or specific intended combos with higher TTK but otherwise your level means very little, it's back to the Diablo 4 formula of everything taking a set amount of time - not to punish, but to prod players to learn the specific ways to kill each enemy type. Then you reward them at some point with a series of varied enemies that the player, if they have learned each skill shot or combo, can eliminate quickly for some reward. The reward may not even be a power upgrade, it's just there to help the player feel rewarded for learning all the killshots.
Wow, first time I've seen one of your videos use a transition/cut haha
(the reason and timestamp is in the video description, if y'all didn't catch it)
I like to do my videos in one take. It just feels more honest and less "slick".
My exact problem right now thanks tim
Hey Tim how do you design this with a class based system? Like do you design for say an EQ warrior? Then scale everything down? Or do you design for a class thats in between like say a bard? Also how do determine an enjoyable amount of turns per encounter?
I design for damage output, and then achieve that differently for different classes. Some classes have ranged attacks…but those can miss. Make attacks can’t miss but you need to spend a round or two closing. Some ranged attacks do a lot of damage but are only usable a limited number of times between rests, while powerful melee attacks need to charge up.
All of these look and feel different to the player…but they average to the same amount of damage per round.
As for rounds per encounter, I usually plan for 3-4 rounds for a normal mob, 10-15 for a boss, and 1 for “trash mobs”. Depending on combat goals, those would get adjusted. For example, if I want buffs/debuffs to matter in normal encounters, they need to do last more rounds.
@@CainOnGames sir, you are a legend I really appreciate the response! I will try to chart this out in excel now, thanks again!
I'm delighted to learn I already do this (though I've called it "modeling"). 🖤
Hi Tim, have you read the book 'Game Balance' by Brenda Romero and Ian Schreiber? I've found it's a useful resource that I've used in my university lectures and would be interested to hear what your thoughts are.
I feel bad for all people who aren't subbed to your channel or don't know you have a YT channel.
Good morning Tim!
DOG!
So when it comes to creating balanced games, what sort of research do you do regarding other games in the genre? For instance, when going from isometric rpgs to first person rpgs, did you look at other games to see what DPS or what speeds they used to achieve their particular game feel? Does this research help or is every game too unique for anything to transfer from one to another?
I usually play other games in the genre to see what kind of features they have, but I usually don't use their number ranges in my own games. I talk about how I pick numerical ranges in more detail in these videos:
ua-cam.com/video/SL_aTjKsxok/v-deo.html
ua-cam.com/video/96uGEA0r6Bo/v-deo.html
Thanks Uncle Tim
End game enemies with expensive armour should just sell the armour and retire from raiding.
But then they would be defenseless against other raiders coming for their hard earned plunder
@@UlissesSampaio I'm sure they could hang out in a town that doesn't know their past.
@@wesss9353 yeah, but they would be easy prey for bandits 😅
I think it's important to mention that you can only do balance when you have an actual build of the game that has feature that need balance. This guarantees you are only balancing the actual features that made it, in their close to actual state and can test the balance feel by playing. Balancing paper features on paper for a video game would be a waste of time. Things will change once you hit playable build, and removing even one thing may (will) lead to total rebalance.
Everything in creative space seems as essentially a gradient descent over a feature space to optimize a highly irregular cost function of “pleasure”. 😅
You've mentioned before that some forms of committees aren't effective for game development. What do you think about Valve's company structure in that case ? Is it something different or do you think it can have issues ?
Valve is so heavily subsidized by their Steam platform that it is hard to judge how their structure has any of its own effects. It might help or hinder their development work, but without any time or budget constraints, how could someone external understand what had happened?
They are a big anomaly, and besides the live playtesting each week with the devs in room we don't really know what they're doing better that can be replicated. But look how few games they successfully released in the last decade (Deadlock Alpha is live)
Is it really that hard to believe flat models can also work under the right conditions ? Is management style completely overriden when you have a golden goose giving you money ?
@@felicianofrontado3134 its not done often but Tesls hs no job roles you just work on what you think makes their products better. But also they are so rich they don't have any budgeting. You can see that that won't work in most places.
@@635574 true, but they also don't pass safe work regulations soooo 🤣, I wouldn't say it's an ideal model.
so, it's like solving a Rubik's cube.
Check out Sakurai's: Making your game easy to tune
But how do u handle player choice? Like can choose to do A or B during a combat which would yield different calculations. (wether during combat or while choosing a build etc) And then if u have enough of those there is exponentially exploding number of possibles to calculate.
My method is... just wing it, and then test it. If it's fun, keep it. If it's overpowered compared to other things, limit it in someway. If it's underpowered, but still kind of fun, give it some utility or scrap it.
TLDW you have to find one thing and pin it as your goal and then try to only move one thing at a time when changes are needed.
Hi Tim. I recently went through the progress of trying to balance a superhero rpg. The game's main source of customization is talents which are similar to perks from fallout. To keep a sense of balance i tried to make a behind the scenes point buy system that puts value on every aspect of a talent. My question is did you ever face a situation while balancing perks where you chose to make it above or below value on purpose?
If you want things to not be too over or underpowrr household pick an acceptable percentage for deviations from the curve.
i don't know if you talking about this in the past ,
but in an RPG , what is a good way to make sure / code that you take into account all the stats modifiers from all the gear / perks when calculating damage or other stats?
Fallout 1 and 2 had both DR and DT, which resulted in making AP ammo not work. AP ammo reduces DT but it has less damage. It meant JHP ammo weirdly doing more damage to even heavily armored targets than AP ammo. New Vegas had a DT based system, which worked much better and is mechanically more realistic.
When putting pins on stuff like HP, Damage, etc, do you generally outline them for each major section of the game? As in, you start by setting what HP and DMG you should have at each section, and then work backwards to come up with a curve or progression that gets you there.
I use the player level as the metric I balance against, so player HP per level, damage output per level, etc. Then when areas of the game are made, I plan for the player being in a certain level range, and I can determine difficulty based on that.
I think most people would just take what was previously calculated by others. You don't see much discussion about it since only a few people would actually calculate it themselves.
As you talked I kept thinking of Valheim, where the enemies doesn't really have, as I remember, numeric health, neither the player on the screen. As you eat of course you see damage as a red bar going down or green for the players.. They also probably did calculations, but it feels like most of this was just done by feeling rather than calculating exact numbers. Does it feel like that enemy goes down too easy? or does it hit too hard..
Also some other thing came to mind: subnautica.. If you go into that game knowing nothing, there are some terrifying seacreatures in it. and you can genuinely be scared, but all the wind came out of their sails when in one of the dev conferences they were talking about monster designed, they were talking about how none of the monsters can kill the player in the first attack. They don't communicate this so you don't know that you are NOT in danger, and it works perfectly. As they explained it, the player doesn't know but it was programmatically ensured that no matter how much HP you have, nothing kills you with the first attack, and after that they go do a round letting you always thinkg that you NARROWLY escaped and attack.. I think it's interesting take on how to tell damage to players.
In Bioshock ( talk about being under sea ) when you were ver low hp , players actually stopped taking damage for a brief amount of time , so it felt like you healed just at the right time or cleaned the enemy just before it killed you.
@@yourstruly5013unreliable healthbars are a trick some games use to give you the feeling of tension, design delve talked about it recently.
I once read comments from an online game designer, talking how they just eyeball numbers when they change balance after launch, fully knowing their players have much better spreadsheets. That one made me think, why? Why do you know your players have better spreadsheets and you don't try to emulate that? I'd hope that's a rare thing and that most designers would have a better way to gauge how much a change will affect the full picture than simply hoping for the best...
I think a lot of it is just about time. There are some pretty obsessive fans out there, and unlike game designers (who have to think of everything) fans have the luxury of focusing exclusively on one or two things which interest them. With a large enough player base, I’ll bet it becomes inevitable that folks on some message board will think some game element through better than you possibly could.
Do not touch hp and damage at all, hp low damage high is a constant(for player and enemies), adrenaline intensity is dependent on it, if you touch it you are decreasing emotional reward. So leveling up is making the game less fun in that regards
I watched a video today about healers being mostly useless in many action based games or too boring, and it's true but the one standout is TF2 medic which actually slowly adds overhealth at full. Without that, healing is just the worst form of damage prevention.
And I think thats just balance issue when you let dodge or reduction scale way too high. Case in point many rpgs, payday 2 and many warframes. But it all seems to be consequence of the early decisions od how much enemy damage scales.
Its rare but I know RPG where dodge isnt a 100% it just reduces damage a lot, and also every crit in an attack follows the same roll. Souls.
I played it on android, its an autobattler gacha with decent graphics, music and secial attack animations. However there is no storu or immersive choices what so ever. however it has avoided most of the pitfalls of too many rarites of heroes(just 3) and even has soul link mechanic for catching up most of your heroes to the highest 5. But there are 2 modes where the levels are preset and wont matter.
Proof by contradiction
This sounds alot like debugging hard to find bugs. You change one thing at a time so you know what sid what.
Experimenting with end transitions now I see...
depth-first search strikes again (or maybe greedy algorithm is a closer analogy?)
To answer it: If it's about health-damage, whereas damage is dealt over time, you just need to figure out the time you want the fight to last. In my case I want extended battles between large space ships and shorter battles between small space ships. So the former should be let's say 4 minutes, the latter 45 seconds. For the former it means the ratio of 240 is needed, meaning 240 times as much health as effective DPS. Countering damage with repair is also a thing, so I compensate for that. If DPS is 50, RPS is 10; health = (50-10) * 240 = 9600 health.
I take that as a starting point, so actual testing/simulation is required. Add to that various other mechanics that influence these, which in my case is stamina mechanic, damage dampening, armor, various weapon types, distance dynamics, etc. When I am content with the combat, the next step is to add another dimension to it: Other types of ships, other ship sizes, other weapons, other tactics.
Then I check if the repair ratio is ok, if there are bad parts in combat (like unwanted kiting), too strong or too weak encounters. Ultimately it depends on the complexity the game has, but consider that ultimately it has to "feel" good and be fun, so thorough testing is required.
End of line patch
Hey what’s up 18 minutes ago!
You posted this comment 18 minutes ago, so what’s up 18 minutes ago!
The closest I've seen to this conversation is in the JRPG community. Like how some fromsoft games and Shin Megami Tensei games have strange bell curves in power scaling behind stats called soft caps. Its an amazing topic that I've looked into for fun a lot.
I find it a bad accessibility practice when the game doesn't tell you the stats or their effect. It's hard finding a game that shows you the rules or their results anywhere. Usually it's excused by their fandom figuring it out anyway. But tgat only happens you get the right Wiki nerds with OCD. And plenty of games are too small for even that.(especially mobile) If they even have a wiki.
@@635574 well have you ever asked why and tried to give a possible reason? I like to entertain the idea that if the number is hidden that just means they want you to focus on other parts. An outside example would be like in fallout New Vegas. The fact that they give you a number value to succed a skill check gives you a clear goal but it also means that every point between your current skill level and the the skill check value mean nothing.
@@mikeuniturtle3722 Hiding the value you need to reach does nothing to change the fact that every extra point you gain before you reach that number does nothing, it just means you have no idea if the goal is in reach and whether or not a few points will be enough or not. Hiding weapon values also generally does not make a game feel more natural, it just means you don't know which weapon to use, and it is often very arbitrary as to which weapons are more powerful than others so you can't always just guess. You can apply numbers to real life phsyics and stuff anyway so it is not necessarily unrealistic to have numbers on things. In real life, even without numbers, you can tell if someone is hurt or not and somewhat gauge the severity of an injury but a lot of games don't have anything to indicate such things besides numbers so removing the numbers just leaves the player blind. A game may have visible indications for when characters are hurt but the underlying mechanics are not necessarily realistic and a guy may be able to take a few bullets with relative ease even if they have realistic looking wounds and seems like they have serious injury, so what you can see on the surface may not provide much info on the actual state of a character. Seeing the exact numbers of how much damage stuff does is not exactly realistic but removing the numbers does not necessarily make the game feel any more realistic. Removing HUD elements and visible stats doesn't change the fact the game is still game and it will still feel like a game unless it actually simulates everything realistically.
5:11 A suggestion as a player: make enemies (especially!) and players never survive more than a couple of *connecting* "hard hits", no matter the level gap. Otherwise, the combat won't feel lethal and thus bad and game-y imho. "Hard hit" meaning something done by a strong weapon (e.g. two-handed axe, shotgun, etc), and "connecting" meaning overcoming defenses such as parry/block. Imho, no one should survive 5 greatsword or shotgun connecting hits to the face or it will feel super bad no matter the context. From that, balance other weapons (e.g. if greatsword takes 1, daggers might take 2). This is A reason Stealth Archer™ felt so good: it felt more lethal whereas other styles would expose health-sponginess more.
One way to handle difficulty or level/gaps can be adjusting number of enemies and/or chance for hits to connect.
Most games feel much better for me when I crank damage both to enemies and player by factor 2x or more (e.g. Ghost of Tsushima Lethal mode, Assassin's Creed Origins Cursed Weapons, Skyrim Mods).
I think this is where armor/DT comes into play. 2 shotgun blasts might consistently drop an unarmored human, but are useless against power armor. This also provides a mechanic by which a player can gain substantial toughness-acquiring increasingly better armor-without feeling cartoony, as high HP often does.
@@nw42 indeed. But there is nothing stopping a level 0 character from entering a power armor or using a shotgun against a lvl 100 one that is caught without one.
Off balance (one is plain better than alternatives) is boring, but too balanced is also boring (decisions dont matter much). A slight off balance that changes over progressing the game is interesting.
It depends what approach do you have, they both legit. "Slight off balance" seems like situational balance where one or another weapon/skill will be more or less effective or counter each other. It's like a pikeman/cavalryman/archer, rock/paper/scissors, shotgun/sniper rifle/assault rifle in short/mid/long range.
@@rottensunbeam I would make a temporal imbalance over the games progression, lets say with a third of the ability types and weapon types be slightly stronger for a few levels, then switching to the next thrid, etc. This also favors switching playstyle.
If all abilities/ weapons have ultimately the same DPS in most situations, they also become boring. Thats too balanced then. The player will not feel he can "trick the game and feel smart".
Bullet sponges sucked
Using a flamethrower also sucked Hair should burn
Realism loved the gore but rdr2 had the perfect style
Wearing Power sucked ass Alien Vs Predator is perfect Ripping people in half Spine cord ripped out Stepping on dead corpes Kicking dogs 🐕
people
Bugs ect
The reloading is trash
Unkillable characters seriously
Just add Realism
Hey Tim! Thanks *a lot* for your videos
Let's make a game together. Bet you won't 👀