Balance vs Fun: Street Fighter 1, The Most Balanced Fighter Of All Time | Castle Super Beast Clips
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I think going for fun is obvious. Look at how long MvC2 and Melee have stuck around in people's minds. Both of the games have over half of their rosters considered practically nonviable yet they're still active games.
Well yeah, but you know it'd be nice if Kirby and Bowser could at least function through buffs.
@@leithaziz2716 As as Zelda enjoyer, I feel you. I just picked the most extreme examples to demonstrate the point.
Nidhogg 1 was still fun, despite both players being the same.
However, if there are different types of fencers that do their own things, plus some universal stuff.
The game would have more staying power, despite nothing wrong with the original and it being as balanced as it could be.
On the other hand, if every character moves like Mario, and not Toad or Luigi, then that may backfire depending on how it's presented.
Those kinds of games are more fun to watch now because people will go for risky or non-meta chars more often once money and prestige isn't really on the line anymore lol
Nah. Gotta make everything baby easy with no execution that's the modern eSports corporation fueled way. To have flashy things but no options. Marvel 2 and 3 both have a crazy amount of options and some wild execution. Won't be seeing it again any time soon
One thing I’ve noticed regarding this kind of debate is that the sentimentality for less balanced games usually (but not always) comes from older more experienced players. They’re the ones that’ve stuck around with MvC2 or old Guilty Gears or Third Strike, and have the perspective of people that’ve played quality games that didn’t need intrusive balancing changes to be good. But that really only gets at part of the issue, I think. For every old veteran, there’s a dozen players who completely fell off, and while some of them might have fallen off regardless, I think Sean is a good example of why that can happen with regards to a lack of balance. He’s definitely not the worst character, even in his own game, but I think the fact that he’s bad, and bad on purpose, is pretty accepted. If you were someone new to fighting games back around Third Strike, or maybe back around Online edition, you could’ve easily looked at Sean and seen a character that appealed to you. Maybe you liked the black representation, him being Brazilian, his basketball aesthetic, or whatever, but character identity is especially important when you don’t know the ins-and-outs yet. You’re not gonna know that Sean was intentionally made weaker as a challenging character for experienced players, or that he was brought low after Second Impact. All you know is that you really can’t do much compared to a lot of the other characters, and what you can do is just mediocre. Some new players may rise to the challenge and make the best of it, but for a lot of players, playing a fighting game at all is challenging enough, and it can be discouraging to find out that the character or characters you connected with just really didn’t get the attention or tools that could’ve made them, well, maybe not great, but genuinely practical to play. Your “fun”, in essence, got undervalued, and this can lead to you undervaluing the game in turn. This only gets more hyper-focused if there are genuinely great characters in that same game, characters who very obviously got the sort of tools that make them rewarding and fun to play for their own sake rather than as a challenge or "off-meta" pick. Not even to mention Pat's comments about characters so strong they warp their games around them.
I know Woolie only brings up GunZ: The Duel like once every 5 years, but still thought "Here goes Woolie bringing up GunZ again" for some reason
To be fair, GunZ is the most aggressive Woolie-bait game in existence. I don't think you're at fault.
to be fair, GunZ: The Duel is a game that needs to fucking exist again in some form and I'm surprised it hasn't been recreated into a modern game yet.
It's basically an issue of framing: The point of "Balance" in a game is, ultimately, Fun. Fun is the end-goal, always always always. But that can be real easy to overlook from a birds-eye view when all you have are statistics and player sentiment (I.E. endless bitching and moaning.) It's really easy to lose the fun in the pursuit of systemic perfection. Plus, of course, fun is obviously subjective. DIfferent players can have wildly different *types* of fun, even when playing the same game.
A game where designers have actively talked about and grappled with this problem is Magic: the Gathering. Magic's a pretty broad game with a lot of ways of playing it, and a handful of what the developers have referred to as "Psychographic profiles." You have Tommy/Tammy, who plays for cool experiences. They like doing cool things. You have Johnny/Jenny, who plays for personal expression. They like to make innovative combos or find unorthodox uses for things. And then you have Spikes, who play to win. They value winning due to their own skill above all else.
Now, these are obviously not hard categories, and there are a few other side variants and sub-categories (Vorthos likes the lore and theme of the game, Mel likes elegance in design, etc.) but it's a good way of remembering that Fun is a very, veeery broad category, and some things that might increase fun for one section of your userbase might impede the fun of other sections. If the game's too fast, Spike and Johnny might be having a fun time finding clever ways of winning faster than their opponent, but Tammy's going to sit there being sad they can't play their big monsters. If there's too much random chance, Tommy might be having a blast pulling the lever on the slot machine while Spike's pulling out their hair because RNJesus just stole the win from them. It's a balancing act.
The one thing Woolie forgot about butterflying in Gunz the Duel was that it let people get INSTANT headshots with the shotgun. If I remember right, when you swung with a sword it would auto aim for the head. Therefore you would swing and change to a shotgun for auto headshots. I think I'm missing some info but that's the gist of it. Gunz the Duel was the most broken fun I've ever had in a shooter.
It didnt auto aim to the head you would dash with the sword cancel the dash with a slash, cancel the slash with a weapon swap to first gun aim your gun shoot reload, cancel the reload with a weapon swap to 2nd gun shoot, cancel with a weapon swap to sword repeat. Shotguns also didn't do headshot damage revolvers did, but it wasn't much of a bonus from what I remember. It also wasn't removed it just didn't come back for gunz the 2nd duel which died within a month or 2 of releasing because of how fucking boring it was. It tried to be what gunz was intended to be without the bugs which is boring as shit comparatively AND had gender locked premade characters that could only use set weapons when gunz the duel was free flowing any gender any weapon combo. I grew up with gunz the duel and moved to privet servers because I couldn't give it up when it went down lol.
He also made it sound like butterflying was the wall run when the wall run is an intended mechanic
@@HaxDotCombo as someone who has never played the game and knows nothing about it I didn't get that impression at all
Something that I don't see explored much in this topic when it comes to balance in any genre really, is that making characters have defined weaknesses and strengths encourages the player to work around those weaknesses which can be really interesting to watch.
If a character was good at everything, it can make their archetype be considered somewhat boring. But you can make it so that someone excells REALLY well in one area, while making them struggle at another. Grapplers are a good example of this where they usually have powerfull throws, but have to work around a slow movement speed. Or zoners who excell at long range but need help when it comes to defense. That's why I'm not entirely against nerfs if they're creative ones that put a new spin on how a character is played afterwards.
In Pat's defense about the Warframe thing, Warframe has had a *real* problem about deciding what gets buffs or not (to the point where a few "buffs" were actually objectively worse than their original incarnations), and that little detail about "what Meta Knight did to Brawl" could almost count as to what Mesa and Mesa Prime did to warframe design with how Crowd Control became nearly useless but they still nerfed CC focused frames.
I'll never forgive them nerfing the Hell out of Valkyr's Hysteria.
Warframe is made by autistic people. They nerfed all explosive weapons then gave half the weapons explosive forms. And $200 dollar for rivens used as band aid fixes.
I still remember them nerfing an entire 3-2 frames for a SINGLE event because it made it super easier to farm and there like nah no fast farm for you
@@phantomgoblin5540 "Mag is a frame entirely built around sucking up every single power-up on the map to you and stunlocking everything. We made a murder superevent built around you having this. Anyway, we're taking that away."
@@KaosMachina Or when DE nerfed ember because they said she was killing enemies that weren't even in view only to turn around and buff saryn!
Karate Champ is the most fair and honest fighting game ever made. Identical movesets, a truly neutral round start, and a one hit win condition.
yes but Karate Champ is primitive and somewhat sluggish, it's more of a prototype to now traditional fighting games with a variety of characters and good play mechanics. Street Fighter 1 also has a balance of gameplay with the choice of Ken vs Ryu, yet the controls were aweful.
POINT! BEGIN!
Doesn't Divekick function around every character having a jump and a divekick? I wonder how flexible it turned out. Is it balanced at all?
Bushido Blade?
The most fun balanced game I've seen is Nidhogg. Perfectly balanced, incredibly fun.
I do think over focusing on balance can be bad for a game in the long term and over nerfing stuff can suck. But I think the opposite mentality of "no nerfs only buffs" is just as destructive especially in certain cases.
Like in a game like Street Fighter that is meant to be relatively constrained it wouldn't make sense to buff everything and everyone, a consistent power level needs to be maintained or else I think what makes the game appealing could be lost.
Everyone like to talk about buffs only, but no one runs long tournaments in Street Fighter 2 Rainbow Edition.
"no nerf only buff" has been actively hurting DBFZ for ages. The player base has been begging for character power level to be lowered for ages, but the devs just believe so hard in the all buffs utopia
I think Dragon Ball FighterZ is an example of what happens when you’re too liberal with buffs and not willing to nerf problematic characters. You risk turning your fighting game into a party game.
Everyone has already been mentioning DBFZ, so I'll go into detail with one example in the game. Z Broly has been constantly getting buffs to the point a lot of his new strengths just shut down any interesting counterplay or weaknesses he might have had otherwise.
He has the best zoning in the game (better than Super Baby or Frieza who meant to be THE zoners), has a shield that denies projectiles AND Z-assists, has long reaching normals, has the luxury of having excellent throws as well as the walk speed and buttons of a normal character (meanwhile Super Broly has stubby and somewhat slow normals), and his old weakness of not being able to land a knockdown midscreen without assists or meter has now been patched.
It's less about considering him "broken". It's moreso that the ways he's buffed make him more boring because there's less you have to think about and worry when it comes to your gameplan. Most of it is risk-free and if you win, then it was probably the right strategy.
I think it was Karl Jobst who made a video about Goldeneye speedrunning pointing out that the actual ultimate strategy for beating levels the fastest is by staring at the floor the whole time. The game has to load less assists, therefore the frame rate is better, makes getting faster times easier. It’s the most basic thing ever, but nobody in the community does it, because it’s boring and terrible to watch.
Speedrunning can really be a monkey's paw at times when you discover a trick that makes all future runs of said game very boring to watch. The process of discovering more ways to cut the time are very hype, but you always run the risk of finding that one error of code that lets you skip straight to the final boss from the tutorial level.
Either that or the most consistent speedrun ends up being one where the runner is forced to play as safe and risk-free as possible. Halo 2 Legendary is kinda like that, but it's so easy to get killed that most runners are just expected to die at least 3-5 times per level.
Pfft, since when has "being terrible to watch" stopped an "Any %" speedrunner from doing things that turn the run into an incomprehensible mess?
Some runs do still do it... I think. Like the whole grenade throwing run that he covered has you looking straight up instead, and that does help.
@@Darkkfated There's some entertainment in watching some fucker phase through universes to show up and kill the final boss in 10 minutes. Floor staring simulator however, isn't.
This is why I prefer single-player games, as they are not victims of egregious nerfing. The Resident Evil games are the perfect example. Their hardest difficulties aren’t all that formidable once you acquire NG+ weapons and abilities.
The perfect comparison is, of course, Team Fortress 2. When Valve added a competitive mode, me and my friends couldn’t stop laughing at the idea of a balanced, fair game mode where half of the weapons are useless sight gags and one of the classes has a built-in instant kill
The idea that "balance is bad, broken is fun" only really applies to the first couple months when people are still learning. Once degenerate shit gets discovered then people will get frustrated and not want to deal with the top tier sweatlords anymore.
Rebalancing things keeps that grimy sort of thing to an acceptable level and prevents people from just dropping it.
Well then Fromsoft has followed that to a tee with how busted Elden Ring was at launch.
Really, because I remember a certain game with four broken "kings" being really popular for a whole decade or so.
It's worth mentioning that in World of Warcraft, your pet as a hunter used to have an impact on your damage. IIRC Cats and Wolves were the best damage. Eventually they switched it so that your pet damage was normalized, and instead your pet choice was a buff or debuff you wanted to bring. This led to another hierarchy of which pets would be the best to bring based on your team comp.
Eventually they let you bring whatever pet you wanted by stripping all of the buffs and abilities out and making it an entirely cosmetic choice.
Originally some pets were even different from others of the same type, there was a rare pink bird in mulgore that had a max movement speed slower than walking.
reminds me of how the pet for GW2's ranger makes up half their damage and that it took 2 expansions to finally make a ranger subclass that lets you "turn off" the pet.
Yes, fun definitely has to be the priority. I would also add that it's usually better to rebalance by buffing weaker characters/abilities over nerfing stronger ones, if possible. Nerfing stronger ones carries the risk of taking the fun out of whatever got nerfed, while buffing weaker stuff has a chance of making those more fun.
Gearbox was really smart about sowing goodwill all the way back with Borderlands 1 by separating bug fixes on whether or not they were popular exploits by fans. There’s a hole in the floor in one of DLCs that gives you infinite access to a loot room you’d only otherwise have access to once. When the game was remastered, the hole remained and if I recall correctly, was made easier to do.
Though they did fuck it up in the remaster where if you went to the room you're meant to show up would proc a impassable door that's right over the hole. And never fixed that.
Nidhogg is perfectly balanced and Incredibly fun
In the beginning the game was empty and formless and God said "Let there be Neutral". God saw that the Neutral was good and he sought to separate the Neutral from the Setplay, God called the Neutral Ryu and the Setplay he called R. Mika
And there was Oki
And there was Abare
Ode To R. Mika -Kufuu
And then on the sixth day God said ruin Baiken, and she was ruined...
I seem to remember that SF1 gives Ryu the tiniest advantage by starting Ken closer to the corner.
when I played overwatch in like 2017-18, I almost always went with Mei because her whole kit was designed around being the most annoying person in the match. I could keep the point locked down a whole match without actually directly fighting anyone by just chaining together abilities that made me extremely hard to actually hit while still body-blocking the objective. It was basically Griefing as a legitimate strategy.
This was me with Brigitte when she was absolutely busted. It wasn't fun for anyone else...but man it was the best time for ME just destroying everyone and not letting them get a chance.
OW balance is so weird now that they just go MAKE REIN PLAYABLE cause your comps get very limited and stale.
Overbalance is a major issue that can remove all spice from a game in favour of "muh esports"
Rainbow Six Siege is a major example of this. For the first couple years of the game's life every map had a day and night variant, nothing major just some lighting changes to mix things up. Eventually pros kept complaining that night maps existed cause it was too hard to see (even though Pro League and the Ranked playlist only had the day maps anyway) so not only did Ubisoft stop making night maps, they retroactively removed every single one even from customs. Another example of pro players complaining is the Operator Zofia. On top of her normal abilities Zofia had a secondary ability where she could revive herself in a long protracted animation and would get back up with 5HP (1HP at release). This almost never factored into anything cause she had no health afterwards and everyone double tapped her anyway, but the occasion it did work was really fun. About two years ago however a pro player during a tournament downed Zofia and decided to gloat giving her the full 5 seconds to get back up and win the 1v1. After this he cried to Ubisoft and they removed Zofia's self revive.
There's also Dead by Daylight's continuing struggle between "competitive video game" and "funny hide and seek game where Eren Jaeger gets chased by Albert Wesker" which resulted in the most embarrassing dev hosted tournament ever where they hired casters who didn't know how the game was played so they just made things up on the fly, or when they paid a bunch of the top streamers on Twitch to promote the game a year ago but because the game has terrible UI design and no easing in for new players they all just mocked the game and quit immediately. The epitome of this is Michael Myers.
Myers is considered one of the worst Killers in the game as he is the only Killer who can completely lose his power leaving him with just his melee. However despite this he is considered to be one of the more fun Killers to play and face due to his play style feeling accurate to the source material with him stalking you throughout the match before attacking. He even has the most varied builds of any Killer usually. However one add on named Judith Myers' Tombstone has been a balance nightmare for nearly 7 years. The way DbD works is Killers need to down Survivors and put them on a meathook 3 times (or twice if their teammates take too long to save them) to kill them. But the Tombstone add on makes it so that when Myers fills his meter he can just grab a full health Survivor by the neck and kill them on the spot no hooks required. It can be frustrating from a competitive stand point, but for many people who just play the game for the goofy chases with horror characters it shakes up Myers a lot from other Killers, especially since you don't know if he has it until he uses it on someone. So the more competitive players and the casual crowd get into many a "friendly" argument over this. No matter what happens to this add on the devs will lose.
What happened to Siege is a damn shame.
Ubi soft shot themselves in the foot with Rainbow. To much eSports too fast.
For Honor was the same way.
it's sad seeing a game get gutted for that kind of short-sighted trendchasing, i'm still upset about the Team Fortress 2 update in 2016 (when they were feeling the heat from OW and got insecure) that completely removed the old school matchmaking (join a server that rotates through maps every ~20 min, teams autoscramble if one side's rolling too hard, your friends join through steam and sometimes they get on your team, sometimes they don't) in favor of an extremely dysfunctional, poorly thought-through clone of a modern, >> E-SPORTS
@@ckorp666 holy shit I didn’t realize how much of modern tf2’s toxicity came from that matchmaking change. No wonder every fucking pub game of tf2 i’ve played has had literal actual white nationalists dominating the vote kick button. Shit sucks there and nobody talks about it
I find the concept of balance being able to be applied to both fighting games (direct competitive gameplay) and pve games (functions against a constant) to be a little interesting. Considering in a fighting game 'balance' both constrains you and your opponent when it's done correctly. While in a pve game 'balance' may simply refer to how fast/reliable it is to clear content. It feels like going into the intricacies of one that affect or don't affect the other might be an interesting exercise.
I tend to see PVE balance to be about things like DPS and wether or not it shuts down most of the pressure compared to what the normal strategy is.
Magic in let's say Dark Souls 1 is considered broken in PVE because with the right setups it can 1-2 shot many bosses with the right spell (Dark Bead is infamous for being a shotgun at close range), as well as the fact that most enemies and bosses struggle to pose a threat at long range. Enemies are "balanced" around a slow and methodical close quarters combat, which makes magic non-commital and not as risky.
In Elden Ring, what's considered broken is mostly raw DPS through weapon arts or incantations like Black Flame which just burn through foes' HP. It's broken in the sense that it stops enemies from having time to retaliate. It can be the same strategies as a normal playthroughs, it's just that there's less interactions and back and forths due to the DPS.
i highly recommend cole wehrle's (the designer of board games root and oath, for those who don't know) GDC talk about kingmaking in table top games. not only does he get into similar points, but he also talks about the origins of what we consider "fair" and "balanced" , how that has changed thanks to the industrial revolution, and how all games, even if they're spreadsheet simulators, are story telling devices and that should be embraced
It helps that, in Melee's case, there are multiple high level characters who are good. Fox is considered the best character, but Falco, Marth, and Jiggs are also S-Tier, and there still be some characters still viable regardless in there. Heck, saw that even a Roy, considered D-Tier, has a tournament win on his belt.
Brawl, on the other hand, has characters that have literally unplayable match-ups (like chain grabs that will just eliminate a stock on grab and have 0 skill requirement), and some characters that are gawd awful, like Pokemon Trainer who got crippled by the Stamina system put on him for accuracy, all the way down to freaking Brawl Ganondorf. Brawl Ganondorf is in the same game as Diddy Kong with Double Bananas, Olimar with 6 Pikmin, Snake with the same level of skill power and more projectiles, Ice Climbers and Dedede with their infinite grabs, and freaking Brawl Metaknight.
TLDR; way less characters suck in Melee than in Brawl. Same comparatively for Smash 4 (kinda) and Ultimate (to a much better degree).
There’s a video by MoldyBagel called “Lab Coat 21: The Pay to Win Disease” where they theorize Lab-coat Android 21 was made to be top TOP tier to ensure the character would sell to people still playing the game competitively. I don’t know enough about Dragon Ball Fighterz or Arc System Works to say if that’s a reasonable guess, but it’s an interesting idea to think fighting game studios could make deliberately OP characters to sell DLC.
Yeah, the Helminth nerf from Warframe was not exactly “gutted” as Pat initially described it. It was just that some of the good options/abilities got small nerfs to make them less powerful
roar going from like 300% to 50% when you have like 200% power strength is a pretty big nerf and half range nidus grab is horse shit when zephers ability does essentially the same thing but better its just less cool
@SpecialJess2 All Nidus larva needs is to be recastable when active, Zephyr's ability is able to be spammed but for some reason Nidus has to wait to cast it again.
I'm kind of not a fan of the SF1 example for why "perfect balance" is not something a developer should chase. It's true that the game only has 1 playable character in versus mode, but I think if you played the game that would be pretty low on the list of reasons that game is bad. It's super unresponsive, the input reader sucks so doing special moves is incredibly inconsistent, and the game just overall feels very bad to play. It's just all around a a bad game. And on top of this, a game exists with only one playable character, having "perfect balance". That being *Footsies* the game made by Hi-Fight. And that game is really fun.
Footsies is still an example of why that's bad. It is so basic and bare bones in what it can do, it becomes boring after an hour at most. Every single other fighting game is more interesting.
@@NeoBoneGirl I won't disagree that the game is a much more bite sized, casual kind of deal. It's not the kind of game people are going to build a scene around. But imo I don't necessarily think that means it's bad. I think the issue with the argument is generally just that it's way too simplistic an argument against aiming for "balance before fun". It uses a really extreme example that doesn't really support the base argument very well. People can and do have fun playing *Footsies*, and the game is I think still pretty useful as a way of helping new players understand footsies in concept. SF1 is just a bad game that people don't like to play for a ton of different reasons.
@@THeKallOfCtulu Sure but at the end of the day, Footsies WILL get boring if you play it for even 20 hours, which is nothing compared to how long most fighting games can last. It's a neat gimmick but it doesn't have much going past that. The reason it gets a lot of slack is because obviously no one is going in expecting it to NOT be a gimmick game, and thus set expectation accordingly, but if you were gonna try to compare it to MBAACC, there is an objectively correct answer to which game you'd want to play for the rest of time
@@NeoBoneGirl Footsies is just one example of a game like that. Nidhogg is also like that, and if you wanna get abstract, chess is like that as well. Tho really in the end, my point was more about how SF1 is bad in a lot of ways outside of just having 1 playable character for VS mode. The game isn't bad *because* it only has 1 character, it just doesn't help
I think a ghost heard woolie badmouth it years back and has been haunting his recording setup ever since
As one of the 6 Twelve enjoyers, Im still coping that he will be added into SF6 final dlc pack for $150
Now this is really REALLY niche but who else remembers the game Loadout and the 3 shots to kill laser sniper that killed that game when combined with hackers? They destroyed a whole weapon type to nerf it but the side effect of people getting aimbots to use the weapon killed the game anyway. They could have just removed tiered weapon parts and gotten better anticheat and everything would have been fine.
"Gumbercules? I love that guy!"
I draw a simple line, if there is a character that is so overpowered to the point it invalidates the select screen then that character needs to be nerf to the ground, the "dont nerf just buff everyone!" is one the stupidest things i have ever heard.
Now what happens when the game is too broken or too balanced to the point nerfing one or a few characters doesnt fix it?
Then thats just bad game desing, fighting games is about 2 players, if it is too restrictive for the sake of competition (Strive, MK11, the first few years of SFV) then the game is not fun at all, as players want to express themselves with the game, but if the game is waaay too restrictive then thats just the developers holding your hand telling you "NO! you have to play this way!".
What happens when a game is too broken? it might get a few laughs but it will only get a cult following instead of a massive success, and it might be boring for the audience (Marvel vs capcom 3, sailor moon, hokuto no ken) this types of games are divisive, its a one touch kill with a alot of expression but small interaction (balance) betwen the players.
A great fighting game would go for that middle spot where there is plenty of options for both players both offensively and defensively, there is player expression but plenty of interaction (third strike, killer instinc, etc) where if the degeneracy comes from certain characters instead of the gameplay itself, then it can be fixed with patch.
Developers for fighting games in recent times have fallen for the trap of "dump down everything and balance" will bring new players! when stuff like SFV showed us how mistaken that aproach is, only the competitive and hardcore audience cares about balance, casuals just wants to play a fun game with their friends and do the cool thing.
I would absolutely take fun over balance. Every game that I played that usually changes a character/weapon/abilities, either by nerfing them or outright changing them, makes me upset, and my interest in that game/s drops dramatically. Overwatch was one of those games, but there's plenty of cases that match up with OW.
I miss the censors:(
*Give me (quieter) poyo or give me death!*
For real. The idea was good, they were just a little too loud.
yes, add the whispery Poyo from the TerminalMontage video
Honestly what's really bizarte is when single player ONLY games have obsession with balance, i.e the Elder Scrolls games
I cannot think of a single thing that makes me more upset than thinking about the gradual decline of mechanics to make them not broken....for some godforsaken reason. Magic in Morrowind needed tweaks and it could have been directly iterated upon in Oblivion to be amazingly fun but instead the costs for magicka and shit are so ridiculously limiting it defies all logic
This is a debate I wish more game designers had among themselves simply because its a great question
If fun more important than game balance not just in fighting games but any game type
Obviously a character that trivializes a game by one shoting everything and everyone is no fair but having hyper focused characters on one aspect of the games gameplay isn't as unfair as some might think, even in real life not everyone is a jack of all trades, that's the point of the Olympics, people that hyper focus on one thing to be the best at it, what's wrong with a zoner being good at long range, what's wrong with a close combat specialist being top tier up close and personal, both still get wrecked out of their ideal situations and if the issue is no one can match them in their preferred play style and distance than wouldn't it be the same if they fought one another,
life is about making the best of what you have and if that means there are situations you just can't get out of then so be it the same is true for others, and if there are those that defy the odds and still win regardless than the victory is all the sweeter, there's a reason Evo Moment 32 is so amazing and its because no one thought the comeback was possible, against overwhelming odds grasping victory from defeat means more than anything else
I feel the same with Shooters, balancing guns doesn't make sense in the first place since a real body isn't a bullet sponge so being able to live a Shotgun blast at close range while not realistic people would prefer that since turning a corner could get you killed by one, but if all guns could one shot or 2 shot it becomes a game of who can point and click better and that's boring to watch, Overwatch was so much fun when it came out because everyone played differently and not everyones gameplay was get close or stay far away, Playing Genji at a distance is safer but I wanna get in close and I can do that with him while also being able to snipe from afar if I need to conserve health
all in all I'm glad this discussion was had and while I don't believe Buffs over Nerfs is the way, I do understand the idea of make people better not make everyone worse because it will just turn everyone into the same thing or flat out break characters and make them unusable
We need to discuss more about balance in fighting game and how the general public could get involved in the conversation... including Reggie...
I knew Warframe would come up, for years they stuck with Buffs over Nerfs. It got ridiculous to a point, however, when some builds were literally just autoplaying the game (cough MONKEY cough). Around then, I still played, but solo or with friends as I do and I never really engage with "What's everyone doing?" meta since yes, it felt like meta became the target of nerfs as everything else still gets buffs. Like, I felt like watching an explosion in the distance, "Oh no, anyway..." It helps that I've been a Hydroid main forever and he doesn't care about meta, he'll always be just fun even if not the best (hope THAT ages well as a comment). Even the Helminth system mentioned I barely interacted with.
To this day, the "No man army problem" hasn't been fixed yet.
Asmongold talks about how fun PvP was during Mists of Pandaria because EVERYONE WAS EQUALLY BUSTED.
Another aspect not totally mentioned is skill level balancing. Grapplers are imcredibly weird to balance since they rely very often on how much they can make you stand still. So as a new player you will likely get stomped against someone who just knows how to do a 360. But when you learn how the game works you can trivialise the match until they start to anti air you or check your backdash
Which podcast highlight was the one where they compare becoming better at fighting games to running a marathon?
Didn't catch the stream, so is there any particular reason why Woolie is cosplaying as Guido Mista?
woolie knows what hes talking about
If you buff everything you're eventually hitting the point where you're intrinsically changing how the game itself is changed to a detrimental effect. You could say giving every street fighter A Gun is a buff, and there are actually fighting games like this that can be fun, but you've moved entirely away from what Street Fighter's core appeal is. Constantly raising the bar to try and keep things fresh and fun leads to immense power creep.
There is nothing left DE can throw against the player in Warframe that can't be trivialized in some way. They can't design an enemy that's fun to fight within their limitations against the apocalyptically broken 4-to-win the game's turned into. The only potential threats in Warframe are the one that completely shut you down from doing this. Once you let the genie out of the bottle, there's no putting it back.
That's why balance is important. They aren't opposed to one another and they never have been. A poor balance choice can happen in either direction, a game that isn't fun is usually bad because it just isn't fun.
Either the characters are all busted, or none are is my philosophy
I’m not a fan of the whole “fun Vs balanced” thing because it implies that the two can’t coexist. Street Fighter V is a pretty well balanced game and it’s my favourite fighting game ever (controversial opinion, I know).
SF1 is actually an interesting example because while Ryu and Ken are identical and the only ones available on multiplayer, Ryu's moveset was designed (poorly, but it was) to be able to take down all the other characters in arcade mode, and the same does still apply to future versions of Ryu. I bet if there were somehow a game where it was SFV's engine but you could only pick Ryu, it'd be both balanced _and_ fun. But of course, that only reinforces the point that what makes a game fun is its mechanics and playability, not its balance.
Side note, but speaking of mirror matches I just remembered Roseball. That was pretty fun.
To me I think smash ultimate is the perfect example of balance
There are almost objectively BOTTOM tier characters and there are very very agreeably top tiers in that game, but the overall power scaling is more tight net, All the whole retaining what makes the character unique
It’s why the games meta is so fun to watch because you always have literally who characters making a splash almost every month
Gunz the duel was so fucking good.
Why does Woolie sound like an AM radio host?
9:30 this is literally what Blizzard just did with Diablo 4
Honestly I'm expecting that game to fall flat on it's face sooner rather then later.
Big shoutout to the Darkest Dungeon devs who tried to nerf every community strategy because "muh super hard survival game" was being ruined to them and they're No Fun Allowed.
"Only do buffs no nerfs" works a lot better in something like a fighting game then something like an MMO. Just having to worry about a cast of around 20-30 characters is a lot easier then something like WoW trying to keep up if they just buffed every class/spec into god-tier and had to keep adjusting the mechanics for PvE just to try and keep up to maintain a challenge.
It's also a thing of where you draw the line to make a game challenging and not BS. If the players can constantly do BS then the enemies have to follow suit to make it difficult. It's like if DMC4 was balanced around Dante guard flying then it'd be way more unforgiving then it already is.
That statment makes me draw parallels to how many broken builds there are in Elden Ring that it almost feels like the devs tried to make enemies and bosses overtuned to counter it, and it leads to players who don't follow the meta having a frustrating time. Wether it's frequent delayed attacks that are hard to learn naturally without trial and error, high damage and vigor requirements, 10 second combos, AOE attacks and more. All of these patterns are common to normal enemies btw.
Chaos is balance...
SF1 had no hitstun (as Leon Massey has pointed out) and required players to ACTUALLY ‘git gud’ cuz the motion inputs HAD to be frame perfect. THAT’S why it sucks, not because ‘balance isn’t fun’. Shoot for ‘equilibrium’ like MTG does, not the strawman of ‘balance=every match is 5/5’.
KoF ‘98 has been given many updates over the years...the majority of people still play vanilla.
Does the KoF collection have the updated version? Or the vanilla one. I bought it recently
From my experience the majority of people play the balanced Ultimate Match version
Yeah, makes sense. Final Edition did get released this year along with LRG version, but all versions still incorporate vanilla for obvious reasons. Even top KoF players are still playing classic. You can check today, and Dakou will still be playing it.
Man split gate removed portal momentum. That killed the game
if both players in your fighting game aren't mashing furiously to get the controls to register a fireball motion you fucked up as a developer
balance is just numbers and can always be tuned. gameplay and how we interact with the medium is the most important. you can always tune dmg numbers by a %
Where’s the Poyo?
There was a time in Destiny 2 where there was a gun that was way too overturned. It was called Prometheus Lens and it was basically an actual heat leaser than literally melted people. Clearly overpowered and broken.
So Bungie decided... Hey it's gonna take a bit to fix... Let's make it so everyone can easily get it. Having everyone have the same broken weapon was, well, balanced in a way. Even gave a little reward if you played during that strange time.
Balance is actively detrimental to fun.
Sheeva in MK11 and Lab Coat Android 21 in DBFZ are both proof that unbalanced characters are also unfun.
Busted>Balanced. Everytime.
GINYU A SENTAI
Tier lists and all this other stuff should be emergent, community-generated aspects of a game. The devs should focus on a game being fun in the way they want and only patch/update based on when things are actually malfunctioning or the balance is _so bad_ it's ruining PvP.
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned smash ultimate, since almost EVERYONE is viable, I've seen EVERY CHARACTER used competitively. Not always to the best, they don't always make top 5 but for fuck's sake because the roster is so huge, you CAN'T be ready for everything everyone can pull off. It's why People surprising everyone with a little mac or a ganondorf is awesome.
Isn't Little Mac always memed on for having terrible escape options to get back on stage?
@@leithaziz2716 which is WHY it's hype when he wins anyways.
If a studio bevomes too nerf happy the community will never stop crying for whatever the most broken thing is at the time to be nerfed, and once that monster is slain the mob will find a new one to hunt
If you don't sub to the church of" if everyone is op no one is op" Play any games series that people say it peaked the most. I bet you'll find some BROKEN ass mechanics but fun as all hell
As much as I love Warframe and dumped countless hours into it, DE got themselves into that corner themselves. I remember the moment it finally dawned on me how out of touch they were with their game, when they showcased the Kuva Bramma and they all looked giddy at blowing everything up in one shot and none of them pointed out how busted it was. Just for years down the road them nerfing AOE weapons cause it finally hit them how braindead they made their game.
Hell they let Wukokg run rampant for years pretty much auto playing the game until they got the notion to fix the issue.
The Helminth nerfs werent gutting of the entire system, just that a few select skills were meta while it highlighted just how outdated a lot of the kits of the other frames were. For instance why bother playing Rhino when you can just take his roar and slap it on Nezha? Nezha is straight up just better Rhino. Gloom is pretty much what everyone uses cause the issue most frames have is being too squishy, so instead of solving the problem with reworks they used Helminth as a fix, then they scrambled to fix the problem Helminth highlighted by nerfing the abilities most used to a degree, but its Warframe so even nerfed Roar will make you outright busted anyways.
Helminth should've never been implemented at all.
Monster hunter did it best becuase they just buff things and let people have fun.
look, I don't think Street Fighter 1 would instantly become a fun game if you had a variety of characters to play it as, because at the end of the day you're still playing Street Fighter 1.
Being balanced has NOTHING to do with how shit street fighter one was.
okay but explain how balance DIDN'T kill chess
The brokenest of the broken were all played competitively with no updates, patches or fixes. Just make it fun and busted. If e-sports dont like it, they'll play it anyway for money.
Shout out to rougelike games such as "risk of rain 2" who actively tell you to "break our fucking game. We dont care. Do it. Do it mother fucker. Mod in goku for all i care. Mod it, if your computer can run it, make it unrun it.
Like.
Warframe, Fire Fall (rip), and Final Fantasy all changed my healers to be more "balanced" for difference reasons. Warframe is free and still around but I have no incentive to pay for ff14 if they are removing the entire play style of my character to make a more balanced experience between casual and try hard supports. NEVER balance classes around casuals.
How did they change the healers to be more balanced? Trinity is still pretty much the best healer in the game by and you pick the other healers or "healers" for shits and giggles, at least last I checked.
@@hisnitch Trinity was nerfed over the years to only give 75% DR and most people have ways to heal themselves and get energy now. Her damage reduction is terribly low while warframes like citrin provide healing with triple crits and 95% dr that eventually slows and stops enemies and warframes like wisp provide long unmodded duration unlimited energyless healing, max hp, cc, huge aoe blind that explodes heads for more damage and dps buff. Trinity is old I still play her but she is a lot weaker then she used to be and needs her armor strip augment to even do anything "useful" that other healers base kits dont have but they can hemelith in. Her giving 99% dr again or invincibility again would be a huge buff and give her a niche or maybe give her 3x more duration or something ANYTHING she has the shortest base duration out of all supports oh god is her duration so short 10s for 50% dr that caps at 75% with mods and is affected by affinity range when it used to be map wide! it was 10s because it was map wide invincibility why is it still 10s.
It's weird how as relative newbie, the most balanced fighting games are the ones that seem to get the least attention in competitive circles. Which is weird, since you would think people would want the most fair game for a competitive setting.
There's a reason why no one plays the later versions of SF3.
@@Chaoktarukto People do play the later versions of SF3, since Third Strike is the third iteration of SF3. Though you are right in that people tend to play the first version of Third Strike specifically.
A perfect balance is near impossible in a good game but when you have a roster to pick from, a choice that is weak and feels miserable to play might as well not be in the game.
That’s a highly subjective feeling though, and it changes frequently as games grow and evolve. I don’t think this is a helpful mindset, it’s a really extreme response to a personal issue.
Dark Souls 3 is the most balanced Soulsborne game.
It is also my least favorite.
Ah yes , 3rd Strike, the perfectly balanced game where Urien lands a grab and makes you eat an unblockebel super, or the game where Makoto can just straight up instant kill you if she has two bars, such an amazingly balanced game with no gimmicks
Devs making the game for themselves so stop playing and let the dev team play it instead seems to be what eventually happens lol.
Game balance is only ever brought up as an excuse for being bad at the game.
Or you can be DnF duel your broken but not broken enough to be fun
DNF Duel is a perfect example of why the "just buff everyone lol if everything is busted nothing is busted" philosophy is just as dumb as overfocusing on balance to the detriment of fun. Especially in the case where your system mechanics aren't really built for super high power level stuff.
SF1 isn't balanced, doesn't Tiger Shot take off like a third of your hp?
that’s not a playable character in sf1.
Balance _sucks_ and 5v5 is stupid. I hate seeing potentially fun games getting ruined by balance obsession.
honestly outside of alpha 3 & 3rd strike i find street fighter as a whole to be rather boring.
if pat's analogy of MK being a really fancy steak you finish in 2 or 3 bites is true then street fighter to me is the dryest, blandest and unseasoned chicken sandwich you can get.
why does it sound like woolie is in a fish bowl?
he's using a different mic and still needs to set it up properly. He explains this in the very beginning of the podcast episode.
He's stuck in your screen. Free him.