In game design, balance is the concept and the practice of tuning the relationships between a game's different systems, usually with the goal of preventing any from being ineffective or otherwise undesirable when compared to their peers. A system in or entering an unbalanced state represents wasted development resources at the very least, and at worst can undermine the game's entire ruleset by making important roles or tasks impossible to perform.
A common example is the balancing of primary weapons in a competitive first-person shooter. It is generally desirable for each weapon, if used correctly, to be equally effective over the course of a session.
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Balancing does not necessarily mean making a game fair. This is particularly true of action games: Jaime Griesemer, design lead at Bungie, said in a lecture to other designers that "every fight in Halo is unfair".[1] This potential for unfairness creates uncertainty, leading to the tension and excitement that action games seek to deliver.[2][3]
In these cases balancing is instead the management of unfair scenarios, with the ultimate goal of ensuring that all of the strategies which the game intends to support are viable.[1] The extent to which those strategies are equal to one another defines the character of the game in question.
Balancing goals shift dramatically when players are contending with the game's environment and/or non-player characters. Such player versus environment games are usually balanced to tread the fine line of regularly challenging players' abilities without ever producing insurmountable or unfair obstacles.[3] This turns balancing into the management of dramatic structure,[2] generally referred to by game designers as "pacing".
The best pacing is achieved by the presence of a human gamemaster who can observe players and rebalance the game in response to their emotional state. Some videogames attempt to replicate a gamemaster by creating AI systems that infer emotional state from player input,[3] and research into biofeedback peripherals is set to greatly improve the accuracy of such systems.[4] However, the pacing of most games is either pre-defined or adjusted relatively coarsely (see Dynamic game difficulty balancing).
Pacing is also a consideration in competitive games, but the autonomy of players makes it harder to control.
In role-playing games (RPGs) in which a gamemaster (GM) creates or operates the adventure, one of the GM's duties is to ensure game balance. For example, creating monsters or other adversaries whose abilities are far beyond those of the players is acceptable only if the players have a way to avoid them or do not themselves need to defeat them.
According to books such as the Dungeon Master's Guide for Dungeons & Dragons, players involved in such an imbalanced game are likely to complain of unfairness, and because most of the players' characters might also fail or die before their time, they would feel powerless and unable to influence the game's events. Conversely, a game whose imbalance favors the players will most often lack challenge and suspense. Players are more likely to feel satisfied by playing when the principles of game balance are applied skillfully. Creating a balanced adventure is one of the challenges of acting as a GM, when the game itself is not properly designed to have an internal setting of the difficulty. Most role-playing books that address the issue of being a GM give substantial attention to this issue.
Another aspect of game balance within RPGs is that of balance between the choices made during character creation, such as race and class. This extends to other genres incorporating RPG elements, such as role-playing video games. Character creation options that lead to ineffective or less powerful characters will largely go to waste if players feel they are not worth choosing. Players who choose them anyway may be frustrated if they feel they are stuck with a character that is inherently disadvantaged, especially after they have invested time and effort in it. Because this aspect of game balance depends most heavily on the rules of an RPG rather than the work of the GM, it is usually the responsibility of the game designer.
Many role-playing game systems, such as GURPS, allowed players to spend character points to help balance character creation, instead of the older random generation method used by Dungeons & Dragons which can lead to severe imbalance between players due to random variation. Often, games force players to pair advantages with disadvantages in order to maintain game balance.
Game balance is less of an issue in less combat-oriented games, particularly modern narrativist role-playing games, due to an increased emphasis on a character's personality. The most recent edition of Ars Magica allows players to balance virtues (in-game advantages) with flaws which, while they may make the character's life more complicated, do not necessarily disadvantage them. The indie role-playing game Dogs in the Vineyard takes this a step further, as every aspect of the character, whether positive or negative, may be used to the player's advantage; also, the power of the characters opposing the players is bound to rules.
In the most general sense, a game may be called "balanced" if the skill of a player is sufficiently important in determining the outcome: if two players of equal skill have equal chance of success.
Game balance in "versus" fighting games is usually defined in terms of the balance between the fighter characters that players can select. Ideally, the odds between two opposing players should be the same regardless of which characters they select, all other things being equal (and without taking into account the advantage a player might gain from choosing a character that favors his or her individual strengths or playing style). A game would be badly imbalanced if a novice could beat an expert simply because the novice uses an inherently superior character.
Game balance is a natural consideration in real-time strategy games where players can choose between multiple armies or sets of units with substantial differences between them.
For example, the real-time strategy game StarCraft has been critically identified as exceptionally well-balanced. The three races available to players (Terran, Protoss, and Zerg) are said to be almost perfectly balanced with each other, even though there are tremendous differences in the way they operate and their strategic strengths and weaknesses. There is no clear consensus among expert competitive players of StarCraft that any one race is superior in all cases.
Critical response indicates that the increased strategic depth of a well-balanced real-time strategy game greatly increases the game's enjoyability. StarCraft is a clear example of this, as it is still popular despite being released in 1998.
There are sometimes circumstances in video games in the action genre in which a player's or team's skill has little effect on whether they win or lose. For example, such imbalance can be caused by one weapon or power-up being so powerful that games are determined primarily by who has access to it.
Imbalance can also be caused by characteristics of the environment that give a large advantage to one kind of behavior or technique. In such a case, game-play may be dominated by that technique instead of a wider (and perhaps more interesting) range of actions. Players may address such problems by community-enforced conventions such as "no camping". Such rules are often ineffective and lead to conflict among players, both in defining the conventions, and in interpreting and enforcing them.
One often-cited example of imbalance in action games, especially first-person shooters, is the possibility of spawn camping, which can cause players to be killed before they have a chance to defend themselves. This is a clear example of the player being unable to influence the outcome of the game.
Tabletop wargames are often played as a competitive and recreational activity rather than as a pure simulation, so in the former case, a balanced selection of forces for the opposing players is essential. A common way of doing this is through the use of army lists.
Game balance is usually maintained through the principle of strength vs. cost. Individually, units have clearly identifiable advantages or weakness. These in combination determine the unit’s relative strength and thus its cost. In theory, a small number of strong units are balanced with a larger number of weaker units if the cost of the two groups is the same.
In the greater context, a player will have a mix of units at his disposal. Dependent on the tactical situation, the mix of units may have an effective value greater than or less than the sum of its parts.
Game designers may decide to deliberately create imbalance for various reasons.
For example, in the multiplayer video game Day of Defeat, the "dod_overlord" map was consciously designed to favor the Axis team. This can allow more experienced players to play on the Allied team as a means of handicapping. Another consideration may have been historical faithfulness to the real Operation Overlord.
In sports games that strive to realistically replicate real-life sports teams (one example might be the Madden NFL series) each virtual team's capabilities are made to mirror those of the real team. Thus, the teams are not designed to be balanced against each other. The imbalance may make the game a more realistic simulation. It also allows handicapping between players, as a better player may choose a weaker team.
A designer may pit the player, or players, against a significantly superior computer-controlled (PvE in MMOGs) force to create an exceptional challenge.
In role-playing game slang, a "gimp" is a character, character class or character ability that is underpowered in the context of the game. Gimped characters lack effectiveness compared to other characters at a similar level of experience.[5] A player may gimp a character by assigning skills and abilities that are inappropriate for the character class, or by developing the character inefficiently.[6] However, this is not always the case, as some characters are purposely "gimped" by the game's developers in order to provide an incentive for raising their level, or, conversely, to give the player an early head-start. An example of this is Final Fantasy's Mystic Knight class, which starts out weak, but is able to become the most powerful class if brought to a very high level. Gimps may also be accidental on the part of the developer, and may require a software patch to rebalance.
Sometimes, especially in MMORPGs, gimp is used as a synonym for nerf to describe a rule modification that weakens the affected target. Unlike the connotatively neutral term nerf, gimp in this usage often implies that the rule change unfairly disadvantages the target.[7]
A "nerf" is a change to a game that reduces the desirability or effectiveness of a particular game element. The term is also used as a verb for the act of making such a change.[8]
The first established use of the term was in Ultima Online, as a reference to the NERF brand of toys which are soft and less likely to cause serious injury.[9][10]
Among game developers, MMORPG designers are especially likely to nerf aspects of a game in order to maintain game balance. Occasionally a new feature (such as an item, class, or skill) may be made too powerful, too cheap, or too easily obtained to the extent that it unbalances the game system. This is sometimes due to an unforeseen bug or method of using or acquiring the object that was not considered by the developers.[9][11] The frequency of nerfing and the scale of nerfing vary widely from game to game but almost all massively multiplayer games have engaged in nerfing at some point.[11]
Nerfs in various online games, including Anarchy Online, have spurred in-world protests.[10] Since many items in virtual worlds are sold or traded among players, a nerf may have an outsized impact on the virtual economy. As players respond, the nerf may cause prices to fluctuate before settling down in a different equilibrium. This impact on the economy, along with the original impact of the nerf, can cause large player resentment for even a small change.[10][11] In particular, in the case of items or abilities which have been nerfed, players can become upset over the perceived wasted efforts in obtaining the now nerfed features.[10][11]
A well-known instance in which a nerf has caused many protests, but much more praise, is when Infinity Ward nerfed the Model 1887s in its video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Before the nerf, the Model 1887s were able to One Shot Kill from medium-long range when all other shotguns in game were limited to short-medium range. The nerfing of the Model 1887s reduced its range to short range.
For games where avatars and items represent significant economic value, this may bring up legal issues over the lost value.[12]
Overpowered (often abbreviated to OP) is a common term referring to a perceived lack of game balance. It is often used when describing a specific class in an RPG, a specific faction in strategic games, or a specific tactic, ability, weapon or unit in various games. For something to be deemed overpowered, it is either the best choice in a disproportionate number of situations (marginalising other choices) and/or excessively hard to counter by the opponent compared to the effort required to use it.