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Like Goldilocks, gamers, developers and pundits alike are in search of a game that's balanced just right. Is it even possible at all?

Game balance is one of my favorite subjects. I spent over a year of my life attempting to balance a lesser-known RTS game called Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds. While developers may fret about balance issues more than enough--see the recent delay of the PS3 downloadable title Calling All Cars to create closer matches--there are never easy answers to a balance problem because there are always factors that you either didn't think of, or couldn't possibly have predicted. This notion is the center of Michal Blicharz's article at GameDaily. He is writing in response to another article by Tom Cadwell, who since writing the article years ago, became a lead designer at Blizzard, and particularly has worked on Warcraft 3.

Cadwell breaks down methods for balancing a game during development, and it's a fascinating read. Blicharz refutes the central notion that you can balance the game toward targeted gameplay. What he means is that regardless of how a designer intends for a competitive game to be played (such as an RTS), the players will turn the game into something else. This has been proven in Cadwell's own game. In WarCraft 3, players figured out which units were the best and which units were worthless, and so in almost all competitive games, a large number of the units and strategies that Cadwell wanted to be used, are in fact not used at all because they are deemed weak.

The notion that a designer's targeted gameplay and balance can never be perfectly achieved is correct. However, Blicharz's assertion that the idea of attempting to balance toward targeted gameplay should just be thrown out is not reasonable. If you can't have a target for gameplay, how can you design a game at all? You have to aim for something, albeit with the understanding that players will derail the game from that direction. It is still possible to steer the game back in the direction you intended through patches, but you have to be able to tell what player innovations are good or bad for the game.

Post-release development is a collaborative effort. The players contribute to game design by creating tricks that are fun but weren't intended by the designer. The designer can still attempt to steer the came back toward the intended gameplay, while at the same time allowing players to hold onto their "healthy" innovations. The end results will of course never perfectly match the targeted gameplay, and it shouldn't. But simply letting players run rampant with a game can destroy it quickly, because they aren't trying to find what's fun, they're trying to find what wins.

Hey, thanks: GameDaily

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