Someone on twitter asked me this question and I think it’s worth answering in a longer form than twitter allows. I’ve already answered this question in brief and in video form at various points, but I think it’s important to address here:
Something that bothered me from PoE was the constant updating to classes and races to balance them. Did you guys worry about this>
In Baldur’s Gate I or II or even the Icewind Dale series? I mean really who cares if one class is OP or Race or Hybrid class? >>
You guys are making a single-player RPG not an MMO or game with a online multiplayer component.
Variants of this question are common in single-player CRPG circles. The implication is that balance is important in an MMO/multiplayer environment but it is not important (or so much less important that it doesn’t merit addressing in patches) in a single-player CRPG.
I would like to repudiate this in two general ways: 1) I will argue that overall balance is important and valuable for players in single-player CRPGs 2) I will argue that individual CRPG players and CRPG communities overall do not present consistent objections to tuning and this undermines the general complaint. It is not the responsibility of individuals or communities to be consistent in their feedback, but it is the job of the designer to
design, which means considering the needs of the audience by listening to and interpreting feedback on a broader scale.
Yes, Balance is Important in Single-Player CRPGs
I think it’s easy enough to make the first point through reductio ad absurdum: why not give AD&D fighters 1d4 hit points per level, a worse THAC0 than wizards, and worse saving throws than any other class? Obviously it’s because playing them would feel terrible. Why don’t we give all of the enemies attacks that do 1-3 damage, a quarter of the hit points of the PCs, and rock-bottom defenses? Because playing through that would feel boring for anyone who had the slightest interest in combat content and systems.
Some may say, “Hey, no one is arguing that balance isn’t important at all,” but in fact that
is what many people directly say or suggest. Maybe they don’t really
mean it (which I will get to later), but that is often what comes up. If we can agree that
some degree of balance is important, then there’s no point in suggesting anything to the contrary and we’re really just debating to
what degree is balance important and worth a) design consideration pre-launch and b) patching.
In my view, balance in a single-player CRPG is important to the extent that it allows players making different character and gear choices to be viable through the content of the game. It is always important to remember that system design (including class, race, ability/spell, and item design) is one part of the equation. Content makes up the other big part (setting aside UI/UX for purposes of this discussion).
When our area and system designers build encounters, they have to be built around an understanding of party capabilities: their overall statistics, their available gear, their consumable items, and their various abilities. In a traditional D&D-style CRPG, this spectrum of possibility gets wider and wider the higher the levels get and the more gear becomes available to the player. The less balanced individual choices are from level to level and item to item, the more difficult it is for area designers to design content that works for a spectrum of choices.
