Sirlin On SSFIITHDR Interview Part 2

In this concluding part of our interview with David Sirlin, the man addresses just how to balance games and why maths doesn't factor into it, why Resident Evil 5's competitive multiplayer needs an HD Remix, and some more thoughts on Street Fighter IV. You can check out part one of our interview, which focuses on arcade culture amongst other things, right here.

Considering your lecture at the Game Developers Conference [titled "Balancing Multiplayer Competitive Games"], what do you think of gaming these days?

It seems that that there just aren't all that many interesting asymmetric games - ones where each player can have really different starting conditions. Fighting games, RTS games, and decks in card games are the most common examples, but not a lot of games even attempt the kind of balance I like.

Could you elaborate a bit?

One type of balance is making sure a game doesn't degenerate down to a few (or even one) moves/strategies/situations. So, if all the pieces in chess were pointless except the rooks or something, you'd say that's imbalanced. All competitive games need to care about avoiding things like that. In my lecture I called that "making sure you present enough 'viable options' to the player." But there's a different type of balance, too - the balance of different starting options like characters in a fighting game, or races in an RTS. It's not just that you need the gameplay to present interesting choices along the way... you also have to make those starting options fair against each other. I really like games that try to do that, but most don't. In most first person shooters, for example, you can pick up any gun. Those aren't starting options like "you are Zangief and you can never throw a fireball." Even in a game that has classes, you can switch classes during gameplay so they actually don't need the kind of balance that a game with locked-in starting options needs. The more asymmetric the starting choices, the more you additionally need to care about all the match-ups being fair. Ultimately, this whole task of balancing a game is mostly in the realm of intuition, in my opinion.

Now that's interesting. Why?

I guess the first realisation is that you cannot solve your game - you can't play it optimally. If you could, the game is shallow, so why are we even talking about it? People have to realize we are trying to balance a complex system that, by definition, cannot have optimal play. And then factor in human tolerances, like how well can players guess, how fast can they react to things, so good luck using math on this. Imagine trying to come up with some equation of how fast Chun-Li should walk, or a number that captures how good her fast walk speed is compared with how good Ken's low roundhouse is. Would you say the answer is about... 7.2? It's basically nonsense to begin with. Effectiveness of her walk speed is affected by things like her throw range, the speed of her attacks, angle of them, priority of them, how good ground attacks in general are as opposed to jumping a lot... That's a Street Fighter example, but you could use any game. I mean, I'm talking about all competitive multiplayer games here.

I know.

And let's say you discovered that Chun-Li is too good. Can you imagine using an equation to tell you how to fix it? Her walk speed? Her throw range? Maybe a new arc on spinning bird kick would help? It's so complicated that you need a deep understanding of the problem combined with intuition, but I think a lot of people think there is some math involved here. I have a math degree from MIT and I like math, so if it were useful to me, I would use it - but it's mostly not. That said, in an RPG where you have lots of stats and levelling curves, math comes into play more. Blizzard games use a lot more math than a fighting game for example, but even then, their real balancing solutions come from human analysis. Blizzard's Rob Pardo, in a lecture at a previous GDC, mentioned that he tells his designers not to "math the fun out of the game" or something. Sometimes some analysis of firing rate to damage will lead you to "balance" the game by making a move feel weak, but as a designer you have to consider not only the effect on the system, but the effect on player psychology. Making changes that feel good is as important as solving the balance problems.