Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
In a well-balanced PvE game, these characteristics should be evident:
■
The player perceives the game to be fair.
In a PvE game, the player's percep-
tion of fairness involves a number of factors and is complicated by the absence of
an opponent. The later section “Making PvE Games Fair” addresses these issues.
■
The game's level of difficulty must be consistent.
The
perceived difficulty
of the
game's challenges (described later) remains within a reasonable range so as not to
surprise the player with abrupt jumps or drops. The perceived difficulty may be low
or high but should not change suddenly, especially within a single game level. The
later section “Managing Difficulty” discusses this in detail.
To balance your game, you need to use certain design and t uning techniques to be
sure the game exhibits these properties. The remainder of the chapter discusses
these techniques.
A
strategy
is a plan for playing a game, usually according to a principle or approach
that the player believes is likely to produce success. One player may favor an aggres-
sive approach while another may depend on a defensive approach, for instance, but
each thinks her strategy has the better chance of bringing victory. The term
domi-
nant strategy
, which comes from formal game theory, refers to a strategy that
reliably produces the best outcome a player may achieve, no matter what her oppo-
nent does. Dominant strategies are undesirable because once a player discovers one,
she never has any reason to use any other strategy. It makes all other choices point-
less and thus limits the fun the player can have with such a game. Still worse is a
dominant strategy that one player may use but another player may not, which can
occur in asymmetric games (the later section “Balancing Asymmetric Games” dis-
cusses this scenario). When that occurs, the dominant strategy not only obviates
other strategies, it makes the game unfair. Designing your game's mechanics to
avoid a dominant strategy is, therefore, an essential part of game balancing.
NOTE
The term
domi-
nant strategy
doesn't
mean that the player
who uses it always
dominates her oppo-
nent. It means that the
strategy is superior to
all the other strategies
a player has available.
A player using a domi-
nant strategy can still
lose through bad luck.
Sometimes one single choice can be a dominant strategy, if that one choice gives
the player enough of an advantage. This section refers to player strategies, options,
and choices interchangeably because any of these may cause one strategy to domi-
nate all others.
Strategies that avoid loss or prevent an opponent from scoring points can also qual-
ify as dominant. Prior to 1955, a basketball team could use endless delaying tactics
to kill time on the clock to preserve their lead—a dominant strategy because it pre-
vented the other side from getting control of the ball and scoring. Leagues imple-
mented the shot clock to force the team with possession in such situations to shoot
the ball, thus creating more opportunities for their opponents to get it back.
