The million dollar question

DrjonesDW3d · 2003-11-21T16:09:39

There is one problem I can see with nearly all of today's popular games. I feel that this is one thing that turns a lot of people away from the games. So I ask you guys this question, to see if it is something that has an answer. What can games do to become more ballanced? ie Natural Selection (if anyone isn't familiar, fun strategy FPS mod for hl found at natural-selection.org). This game used to be a TON of fun. It's mix of strategy and fps created a new genre for me. I would stay up hours playing it. This was in it's early beta stages when everyone knew how to play. Now it has moved on and changed quite a bit deal. It now definatly has the flaw of balance issues. I'm not talking about which side wins more, there are two, aliens and marines. Both would probably win about 50% I'd say. The problem I see is that the games last about 25-30 minutes, however, almost 100% of the time, the outcome of the game is decided in the first 5 minutes. During this time one team almost always gets some advantage that puts them in the lead for the duration of the game. It's almost like you don't need to play the 2nd 20 minutes. After the first 5 you always know how it's going to turn out. During the first part of the game, one team gets put in a very good position, and the other is in a very bad position. These are positions that you often can't get out of. If the other team has all the resources early, then they can do things to make sure they don't lose them. Meanwhile the team without the resources can't gain them to do anything that would allow them to take resources back. I see this as a problem. Games are fun because they are somewhat unpredictable, yet still based on strategy. If everything was planed, and you knew exactly what was going to happen, than it wouldn't be fun. To me this makes me extremly (I mean very very very) frustrated. I wish I just had a button that could end the game early after the outcome has been determined. It's totally pointless to keep playing. If your on the wining side you know your going to win, if your on the losing side you know your going to lose. Yet the game drags out untill this actually occurs. It just ends up with one team constantly killing, and one team constantly dieng. It isn't fun when you are traped with no way out. Infact, that's probably one of the least fun positions you can put someone in. Some people will probably say that you might as well play the rest of the game because it's a game and its just to have fun, even if you know the outcome, but we are competitive beings by nature, not many people can have fun when losing or feeling traped. I think this is true for other games too. ie Everquest. Again i got very frustrated at this game. It was a game I hated, but was addicted to. The problem here was that there were always people at the top, who had all the cool stuff. But, more than that, they had all the cool stuff. The average person on the other hand, had no chance in hell of ever achieveing any of this stuff. Yes it was nice to dream about it, but unless you happend to be in the good clan, or know someone up there, (or have $$$$ to spend on ebay) it wasn't going to happen. Do you guys agree with this? For a game to pull in a larger audience and keep it, you need to give everyone the image that they can still 'win.' Is this possible? In some ways I think it isn't. ie in natural selection, one obvious solution is to make it so the things that people do to gain advantage, aren't as drastic. ie make it so gaining or losing resource nodes don't have such an impact. But then, if you take all the advantages out, then it might as well be completly random, and thus not really worth playing either. What are your guyses thoughts? Is it possible to have a competitive game (we like competiton) where everyone thinks they are wining? (we hate losing) I say games are ment to be played by humans, they should be designed to work with (and not against) our natural human behaviour. We don't like to be put in a situation we have no control of. We like to grow and advance, but we hate when we are stuck in a situation that we can't. [edited by - DrJonesdw3d on November 15, 2003 4:08:42 AM]

Game Design and Theory Game Design

Started by DrjonesDW3d November 15, 2003 03:01 AM

9 comments, last by DrjonesDW3d 21 years, 2 months ago

sSimontis

100

November 21, 2003 04:09 PM

Most games want to let the player win. Because of this they put all sorts of balance problems in the units, not the maps. Then, when you get online, these problems are still there. Most games suffer from this, but are patched up for online play overtime. If game designers were more creative, they could use maps for an advanage instead of unfairly tweaking stats. I have seeing this is many games, although most of the time it is very minor. Still, the issue is there.

Scott Simontis
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The million dollar question

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