it's not so much that "overpowered" mechanics are good, but specialization. Being in a situation where you're being relied upon to "save" everyone feels great. Video games are often reactive puzzle solving.
I like this interpretation. Essentially the most balanced game is one where everyone has the exact same tools and resources and that's just boring. Like yeah a game like Overwatch could be perfectly balanced if there was exactly 1 DPS/Tank/Support hero and everyone was forced to play the same thing in each role. But by diversifying the roles so that some DPS are better at area control while others are more long range or short range and so on, and doing the same for each class, it makes the game more interesting. And the way you balance it is by giving them tradeoffs. Reaper does a ton of damage and has self-sustain capabilities, but his trade off is that he has to get really close to actually hurt anyone.
I loved that last sentence… Hey… Imagine this: You see yourself (and your team, maybe) dying, in SloMoCam… Then you are at the start of the scene. You got a chance to NOT DIE! But HOW? What can you do? What can you change? Who can help you? Who could obstruct you?! Time’s running out… One Chance… to NOT DIE
@@BlazeMakesGames i can throw ffxiv online around here because when ya playing as a dps or in a party with one you just see crap drop dead left and right because they can single target, well with the occasional AOE (gonna start comparing rouge class and marauder/warrior class gameplay) but as a warrior i have a AOE move and agro gen out the tail but my ability to kill so FAR FAR shorter then if i killed the same foe as a rouge but i can also for more sustainable and longer save my self by just eating damage of many folks at face. and as a final fantisy game we got limit brake and the short is ya get one bar for the whole party and depending who limit breacks depends on the reaction ie tank gives whole team defence boost the up to the sky and healer/supports just megga aoe heal (also for the love of god if you want short time for joining dungeons get healer or tank but healer is instant) and depending on your dps type you do huge one shoting strike or aoe strike. as every class but tank is squishy so unless your tank main is dead and gone you are gonna get flattened in any evernt in dungeons so ya need the healer and tank to be on each other well or death will come to the party.
@@BlazeMakesGames precisely my point. So like your example with reaper. You know that you have to get close to actually do anything. So you plan your entire playstyle around it, by waiting or by getting your teammates to create those openings.
LOL. This is such a narrow interpretation. Yes specialisation has a good part to play, but it goes beyond that and specialisation is NOT the be all and end all.
It looks like one problem in this discussion is the word "overpowered" being used to cover very different types of situations. Very broadly speaking, it's used to cover more power at more cost, but also used to cover more power at the same cost. With the first type of overpowered, some things are more powerful than other options, but have a cost to acquire them. Limit Breaks often require buildup and cannot be used repeatedly, power weapons require effort spent to control the map and risk to go after them, unique characters are irreplaceable, etc. The second type of overpowered is for things that are more powerful and have no additional cost, which brings up the problem you mentioned at 6:13 , where to be competitive, players have to choose those options or a counter to them, reducing viable options. This can also be an issue in single-player games if they're balanced around certain options that have more power than other options at the same cost.
I would have liked more examples regarding the latter as well. A truly overpowered choice is one where the player has no reason not to go for it and how to fix it. With e.g. the limit breaks in FF7 (original) overriding the attack prompt: While the game urges you to use it as soon as possible you can hold off (defending/using magic etc) and save it for a tough fight. So if let yourself be clobbered by weak enemies that pose no threat to you before a boss fight you have the best attack ready at the start of the fight and can trivialise essentially everything in the game. They went for a more interesting option in FF9 where your character instantly goes into trance (going Super Saiyan) once having received enough cumulative damage - meaning that actively building up to that might actually backfire when its activated during an easy battle.
His point was that the gaming community at large tends to conflate things that are actually a problem for the game with things that are just strong but enhance the game.
I feel like overpowered is the totally wrong word to use, as it literally means "too powerful". And the video even explains how these "overpowered" game mechanics actually are balanced by something or exist to empower the player. So they are either balanced or purposefully strong to serve a specific vision. Therefore they aren't "overpowered". If something really is overpowered than it is "too powerful " and therefore harms the game. Of course something being slightly over-/underpowered doesn't ruin a game and can make up for balance by increasing variety of playstyles or something similar.
Some things can be like the Halo 1 pistol is blanced it's the DMR of the game. But the halo 2 BR and Duel welidng SMGs are unbalanced as they break the deisgn of the game by being OP and making everthing else even power weapons near pointless... Like I go around with duel weilding pistols and it isn't fun to a normal gamer to be at that kinda of disavantage with guns that should be in balance with each other as per the desing intent. In Pokemon the power creep is real and easly fixable they just don't for some reason. It all depends on desing intent and when broken then it's OP.
The video would have really benefited from defining what overpowered means to him. Like, things can be both asymmetrical AND overpowered because of a different input/output ratio.
The distinction between powerfull and overpowered is one of context, an OHK move can be anywere between OP and useless based in how often it is the best option available.
When I used to teach Game Design, the first thing I taught the students about "balancing a game" is that "Balance" is not a "mathematical equilibrium", Balance is "adjusting your game to the experience you're creating". Some games are made for you to feel Overpowered, some are the opposite, and some are whatever they want to be, but to balance a game that wants to make you feel overpowered is actually to make it enjoyable to be overpowered.
There's definitely a delicate balance to these things, the over focus on competitive balance has definitely drained a lot of the fun out of many a multiplayer game for the average person.
Prime example would be "DOTA riff with a better anime". Sword of the Occult (which gave a stacking AD buff on kills, lost on deaths) was fun to play with, especially if you took a character not meant to be played full AD and built them for raw damage. They removed it because the ten best Koreans in the world didn't have a use for it.
absolutely, last PVP game i played was quake champions, and the reason as to why is it still uses OG game balance methods, there are things that arguibly overpowered still work and feel fair, meanwhile everything else is just some boring meta game BS
Still quite unfortunate how Evolve released earlier than it should have and wasn't given a solid chance to redeem itself the second time around. Hopefully one day a similar concept is able to see success.
@@SpinningTurtle66 If 2K didn't screw up, and allowed TR to finish the major update planned for Stage 2 (canceled mid-way due to them pulling the plug), I think it could've possibly survived long enough for a console re-release. Unfortunately neither happened. If it released today, given all the horrid DLC/MTX shit allowed by consumers, it likely could've been on the same level as DBD and other similar 4V1 games in terms of player count. I don't think Evolve, at least from what it was at the time, could have ever been a major title, but certainly a mid-tier gem. The only issues the game ever had (imo) was balancing (next to DLC characters), and that simply could be solved through more analysis of player interactions and trying different approaches to balance, all of which required more time than it was given.
Yeah, I could really see the core concept working (1 v many multiplayer where the lone player gets powerful over time), but it would probably need some serious re-working that a AAA publisher isn’t going to accept. Hell, make it 4 vs 4 and killing an alien is what makes the others stronger, so that the humans are forced to fight the aliens
@@no_genius I think a plausible solution to Evolve's "monster running" could have simply been more tools for the hunters to trap/lock off areas quicker/easier, or simply punish the monster for not engaging, by giving less consumption benefits from wildlife or something else to encourage engagement. In regards to your either change to Evolve, or a separate idea: If you mean killing an alien buffs the other 3 aliens, and then other 2, etc. that could maybe be an interesting game concept, but I also think it would become discouraging to die and have to wait while dead (if there's nothing beyond death). Though it also could add to the hunters by giving them upgrade(s) based on the killed alien, perhaps random if anything. I don't believe there are any current 4VX games that have such a concept(s), but I think the idea alone would be interesting to see.
I think one genre that makes good use of being overpowered is metroidvanias. For example, in metroid dread, you feel like an unstoppable killing machine by the end.
In every metroid game, you're an unstoppable killing machine by the end, for about 15 minutes, and then lose it all by the start of the next game. My favourite no-power take is probably Ori, where in normal games you would unlock double jump, in Ori you basically start with double jump + wall run, and end with triple jump +wall run +wall jump +glide +ricochet
I never realised how much I wanted to hear you talk about the intricacy of Dota 2 until I heard you talk about Dota 2. You described it perfectly, and why it feels so fantastic to learn the mechanics after 1000+ hours.
Man he is so bad tho. Medusa vs Viper mid in this patch? Neither can do their job as mid. Dusa can't farm neutral camps and Viper can't create threat, since both of them are slow AF. Medusa excells at pushing out waves with minimal interaction then farm neutrals job for pos1, Viper is about occupying and denying areas, job for pos1. That matchup is so fundamentally wrong.
As others have pointed out, I beleive that the term OP is being misused here; as an example, you mentioned the power weapons in Halo: these weapons are very powerful, however, this power is balanced by their scarcity. If everyone had a rocket launcher, then it would become OP, however, the fact that a rocket launchers spawns in specific locations at specific times, which requires effort, time, and luck to get to, this practically balances the weapon. You come to a similar conclusion, however, these semantics calling different things OP does actually matter, as I believe that some miscommunication happened between where you see people calling things OP [say the sniper in tf2, as while he is balanced by the fact he takes a good amount of skill to be good at, this counterbalance only exists outside of the match, which means that a perfect human (or a bot) can easily wipe the whole server if they are good enough - the balance of server-wiping and being good at aiming is not balanced, and therefore a lot of people believe that to be OP, whereas something like Ubercharge, which makes you literally invincible is not in fact considere OP, as it takes a good amount of care and effort to build up this ability]
90% of the things you talked about, no one would consider "bad balance". Limit Breaks and Torture Attacks are limited by resources, so of course they're the strongest option when you can use them. Calling a randomly dropped power weapon overpowered is like calling rolling double sixes overpowered. If everything is "overpowered", then there's nothing to be "over". Asymmetrical multiplayer games still try to give each side a roughly equal chance of winning. None of this is "bad balance". The only thing that was actually an example of bad balance was the Fire Emblem part, which actually was a good example of how certain options overshadowing others can make a more fun experience. Oh, and Dan, but who really complains about underpowered joke options anyway?
I feel like the point of the video was exactly that people are being too fast to call things overpowered without considering the wider context that mean it's not actually "over" at all. How yes, the double sixes are, indeed, the strongest option, but people shouldn't go online to shout about how op it is and scream at the devs after being on the recieving end of the 1/36 chance.
i feel you entirely missed the point of this video, this is talking about how something that is objectively the best can be a good thing and be balanced in the overarching game. he talks about how allowing something to be objectively overpowered in one since or another with another aspect being is limit or counterplay, this gives more of the game chances to shine. without this games get very stagnant, everything has to be equal to everything else, thats why you lose joke characters because no deviation is allowed to prevent something becoming "overpowered". i take it simply as balance is not being equal its not allowing something to strictly dominate the way you play.
@@lewis1423 i would argue you are talking about different definitions of balance OP was talking about the overall game balance - for example in a MP game giving either side a roughly even chance at winning (assuming comparable levels of skill with the game) you are talking about the balance of individual mechanics - for example if said MP game were a shooter and all weapon choices coming to roughly equal DPS a violation of the first kind of balance would mean the game develops a dominant strategy/playstyle that pretty much everyone who wants to win will use a violation of the second kind without a violation of the first, would start favouring counter strategies to the overpowered thing until their prevalence causes the players to shift away from a commonly countered strategy towards other options - this creates somewhat of an ebb and flow between common strategies
Love your content, but I heavily disagree with a lot of points made in this video. Like others are sure to have pointed out, part of balance is availability. Nuke launchers in the Fallout series are powerful when used, but not an overpowered mechanic as they can only be shot like twice so using them has trade-offs. Also, in regards to automation being broken in Satisfactory, automation is the core mechanic of the game making it the baseline of power and manual crafting is 'underpowered'. It's like saying that driving a train in Train Simulator is overpowered because it earns you more money than not driving the train; its a train game!
You missed the point then, he literally said that no one would call the automation in Satisfactory OP because it's what the game is about. Like you just didn't listen.
@@hedgehog3180 I don't think you listened to literally the second half of that sentence "We don't consider these things to be overpowered [dramatic pause] even though they totally are." Do you just tune out every time he takes a breath? My point was that it literally CANNOT be overpowered since it is the baseline of power in the game.
Funny thing about satisfactory is that manual crafting is actually better than automation in the short term and in the early game, as long as you're constantly consuming resources, automation gets better when you get to use it to cover downtime by producing a surplus (and if it's fully self-sufficient (which you can do just before phase 2), automation has an unbounded return on investment because you can just AFK, whereas manual crafting has an opportunity cost of not exploring/crafting other things/building factory), but if you don't want to rely on downtime then manual crafting is quite necessary the entire game. Also I discovered that if you're connected to a game as guest in satisfactory, that if you increase your simulation speed (via a speedhack) that crafting and mining speed scales with it and the server just accepts that >:) so in this context manual crafting is OP and the only thing that stops this exploding into winning the game very fast is that some things must be built in an assembler.
I also feel like in the sections where he talks about Multiplayer titles a lot of the comments seemed to be made in isolation on paper when these have greater implications when viewed as a whole where the problems stem from.
Agreed. Satisfactory's automation is *more* powerful than manual crafting by design, as a core pillar of the game, but it is not *too* powerful. They want you to automate; you are supposed to automate. Making it balanced with or less powerful than manual crafting makes no sense.
I really liked evolve before its tragic death. Most monster players before evolve stage 2 would actually try to beat the hunters before stage 3 because a monster fully leveling up opened up the option to destroy a power relay on the map. So stage 3 monsters would have a raw power advantage, but the hunters would have set up time and a garunteed area to fight, often making stage 3 a detrimental choice unless you had already fought the hunters multiple times, killing a hunter would incur a health penalty upon their respawn, and if you didn't have a few of those already you were basically garunteed to lose. And when the free to play evolve stage 2 came around, there were huge changes to the game that essentially garunteed at least 1 battle with a stage one monster and it became beneficial to initiate the stage 1 fight so it could be done on your terms. Then the best plan was to do the bulk of the fighting at stage 2, attacking and running after getting a down or 2 or just finishing them off if possible. Stage 3 was more of a finisher, regaining some health in order to finish off a team that was already and the back foot.
Oooh! I know this one! In TRPGs, having player strength scale in lockstep with enemy strength takes away both the feeling of having been weak two months ago when you first encountered that new terrifying enemy, and the awesome power that comes with having leveled up a few times and kicking that same opponent clear into next week.
One thing game designers and game managers (Dungeon Master, Game Master, whatever you call it) can often stand to remember is that having the chance to let your players rip enemies that were once a threat to them a new one is a great time for all involved. Be it cultists, security robots, enemy soldiers or even the exact same boss that caused them trouble a few secessions back (and hasn't gotten any stronger in the interim) players will truly feel like they've made progress when they realize now THEY are the 800 lb guerilla in the china shop. Also, this is why MMO's that have areas 'automatically adjust to your level' lose so much of their feeling of progress.
This is why I thought the Star Wars: Force Unleashed games were more fun on the easiest difficulty - harder difficulties made enemies more bullet-sponge (lightsaber-sponge?), which really ran counter to the 'Unleashed' power fantasy of being a complete uncontrolled badass
The best way to increase difficulty in that game was to enable the max damage mod and the max damage taken mod This way all hits you did were lethal as they were supposed to be But you also died yourself in a couple hits
I think something that a lot of people really need to remember is that the primary goal of any video game should be that it's fun. 'Cause if it isn't fun, why wouldn't your players just turn it off and play something else? Y'know, unless they're unhealthily addicted to it or something, but hey, who would ever get addicted to a video game? Hahaha...
@@joaopedrocruz6432 i think we could replace "fun" with "enjoyable". Obviously fun is enjoyable, but people also love horror, intricate stories, strategy optimization, and even overcoming skill barriers.
@@jasonreed7522 all those things are themselves fun (merely pushing the fun a layer beyond the design into a meta interaction by anticipation or strategising or investment)
You briefly touched on card games, but I think for strategy games in general having the best strategy be something interesting is very important. Like, it's ok if a card/unit is above average if it's a unit that creates interesting games. There is going to be a best unit anyway, might aswell be the one that people enjoy playing.
My favorite reason for imbalance is realism in historical strategy games. There was a period in Crusader Kings II where horse archer units were completely overpowered basically just because they were completely overpowered in reality, the main way of limiting them was by restricting what cultures or governments had access to them. Heavy cavalry was similarly power in areas which had access to them, no one had ready access to both, and even the cultures that had each were unlikely to interact in normal gameplay. Light infantry are weak, but the cultures the use them the most tend to get absolutely tons of them, both from the buildings that get access to and from their governments giving them a bonus to troop count based on unsettled land in they're territory.
Remember: Incentive player to play a certain way rather than punish them for playing the game in the "wrong way". Like XCOM 2 Timed turns, which punish you for being cautious, unlike XCOM EW Meld, which reward/Incentive making risk moves.
Meld wasn't properly implemented, IMO. The first canister was always close to your squad and risk was minimal. Furthermore, you don't need a lot of meld (if any) to field a strong squad, so it is ineffective as a way to stop players from camping. I agree that the turn limits for XCOM 2 feel punishing but I feel that it's mostly due to veterancy: EW taught us to take our time because failing a mission was extremely punishing and retreating was hard. In XCOM 2 if things go south in timed missions you can just evac with no repercussions, there's no panic meter or any other consequences for failure.
That sounds kind of like WoW's offline experience bonus or whatever they're calling it. It started as a penalty for playing too long (to encourage people to touch some grass once in a while), but they changed the wording of it to being a bonus for the first time you play after you've not played for a while. Mechanically the same thing, but completely different responses from the players.
@@SrPomar Meld can be really important early to mid game with MECs and can be huge in the late game with gene mods, especially if you're struggling. It gives you a chance to recover fast by being risky and that's pretty cool, plus it gets drip-fed to you via enemies that drop it so you still get to use it.
Love your videos generally, but you appear to have conflated the concept of a "power fantasy" game mechanic with the concept of an "overpowered" game mechanic. When a game like Bayonetta or Final Fantasy works the occasional moment of power fantasy into the game by design, this is significantly different than when a competitive game (or even a single-player one) includes a strategy or mechanic that is so dominant that most players gravitate to using it exclusively or nearly exclusively at the expense of the depth and breadth of the gameplay experience. Agreed that there is too much focus on perfect balance in many games, but you've missed the mark here.
The important thing to remember about balance is that it's not a virtue in itself. It's an artistic choice, which has a lot of potential benefits but isn't inherently the right artistic choice to serve every creation. Also, I will use the term "overpowered", but I try to be conscious about it and only use it to describe things where after meaningful thought I have concluded are genuinely bad for the experience because they're too good relative to the alternatives
When I was a kid I used to love the board game "Stratego" (I haven't played it in over 2 decades so I apologize if I misremember some of the rules) but this video reminded me of it's interesting approach to balance with two units: The Spy and Bombs. In Stratego, (a game where you had to find your enemy's flag without knowing what any of their units were until you attacked them) the spy was the absolute weakest unit, easily killed by any other unit. In contrast, the bomb was a stationary trap that would kill any opponent that walked into it. Any unit EXCEPT for the spy. I sometimes see this approach of making the weakest unit the bane to the strongest unit applied in video games and it's always interesting to see. Using healing magic on zombies is probably the most well known example I can think of
I'm pretty sure there are different versions of the game so that might have been the version you had but the one I have has the spy able to kill the 10 (strongest unit in the game) but only if the spy is the attacker, and bombs can be destroyed by the 3. The version I played also has the "spotter" which is only one level above the spy, and instead of attacking, the spotter can take a guess as to what the other piece is, and if they get it right that piece dies, but since it's so weak, if they get it wrong their spotter is dead and that's a big loss because of how obviously powerful it is.
@@jdr293 That is DEFINITELY a different version than what I had played but at the same time seems pretty interesting. The version I played was a computer game version on one of the earlier MacOS systems (My other computer was Windows 3.11 and Geoworks for reference to time period) so the guessing mechanic might have been a bit tricky to program back then. I've always wanted to relearn the game since but never had an opportunity for it
In the standard version of the game the spy is the only thing that can kill the 10 other than another 10 but it loses to everything else, and the bomb kills everything except the sapper which is otherwise a fairly low level unit, there isn't any spotter unit that's definitely a special thing.
There is also a scout which can move in a straight line any amount of steps but it loses to any unit meaning its more of an info gatherer The catch is that it CAN defeat the spy and the flag Meaning you can use it to bait your opponents spy in a position where an unexpected scout can capture it from across the board
Imbalance/Asymmetry and overpowered are two different concepts. Imbalance is that A beats B 65% of the time, B beats C 65% of the time, and C beats A 65% of the time. Each option has advantages but those advantages can be mitigated via your own choices. Dota is a great example of imbalance, each hero is unique and does something powerful, but within the roster of other heroes exists options to mitigate or even counter their advantage. Overpowered is when A beats B and C 70% of the time, or when an option is so much better than its counterparts that it'd be foolish to not pick it. In a fighting game if one character is just so much better than everyone else that picking them vs not picking them has a large impact in your win rate, and there is no option to counter them, its overpowered. In Yakuza 7, one character has a single target spell that costs low mp, that does more damage than any other single target spell from that element that character can do, even ones that cost 4 times the mp. Thats overpowered.
The first game that comes to mind when talking about "intentionally designed overpowered" is monster train, where it is kinda of easy to find what would seem like "game breaking synergies", things like a 3x4 atack unit dealing 13x4 damage shielded by a unit wich can tank anything that comes in it's way. And sure it may carry you trough early and mid game but then... Comes the late game were the game throws the same amount of bullshit you have in your arsenal if not more and then there's the end-game boss... We don't talk about the end-game boss.
I disagree with calling certain core gameplay mechanics (such as glory kills or manual crafting) "overpowered" because they are kind of necessary for the game to be playable. It's more like they feel overpowered since other option are deliberately underpowered (health kits in Doom or manual labour in Satisfactory). Also, the game can be generally balanced and offer extremely powerful options at the same time (ubercharge in Team Fortress 2, for instance).
I'm so glad you talked about Crawl! That's one of my favorite multiplayer games of all time and it just doesn't get the attention it deserves. Fantastically fun and you always feel so powerful while playing it
the main thing thats hurting crawl is that the multiplayer is local only (unless they changed that at a later point) - in PC gaming you get couch coop/pvp only extremly rarely... so its effectively a single player game on PC (or at least launched as one)
Warframe is suffering from some of the problems mentioned in this video right now. Balance has always been all over the place in the game. But right now there's one playstyle that consists in using an explosive weapons to just nuke all the enemies as soon as they spawn. It has no downside, there's no self damage, no ammo shortage, it's not difficult to adquire one of those weapons, etc. It has entirely overshadowed every other playstyle and it ruins the fun for anyone in the group not using it. Imagine playing another looter shooter like borderlands or deep rock galactic and not being able to kill a single enemy because one player nukes them all instantly.
Before the AOE meta was the meme strike mirage meta. And before that was the Ember/Banshee 4 afk meta. And all that’s ignoring that you can still spam khora’s whip for stupid damage at a ridiculous range. While I love warframe’s narrative and stylistic choices, weapon balance has never really existed after the Plains update.
Remember that even before the plains, Warframe had overpowered Mag where everyone would huddle in a small corner and spam abilities to nuke everything and pull all the drops to that one location. Over 6 years ago, DE tried nearly five different ways to kill the Draco farm, and eventually had to just delete the node from the starchart. By the very nature of warframe having powerful weapons/abilities and a lot of grind, players will automatically seek to maximize the efficiency of their grind. It's the old saying about optimizing the fun out of a game. I'd argue that Warrfame is in a much better place now than it was in the early days, mostly due to the volume of content. There are dozens of smaller things you can grind for that don't require maximizing for room nukes, and plenty of options for farming in a more relaxed setting. Now, instead of farming a single map for weeks, you can rotate between Eidolons, Index credit farming, random relic opening missions, open world bounties, and Railjack missions. And that's just a small fraction of the pretty good variety of missions. There are nearly a dozen good ways to farm credits and endo, and there are tons of weapons to burn for mastery fodder. If you really want a challenge where stuff doesn't die quickly, go run Steel Path, where the enemies are all level 100+. I think the current state of variety is a lot better than it was before, where the "best" option was to pick the most overpowered way to farm one single map. (If anyone is going to argue that every single one of those mission types are bad, Warframe probably isn't the game for you. Take a break and go play something else.) Just remember that when DE implemented self damage with explosive weapons, basically no one used them. And any weapon with absolutely horrible ammo economy doesn't see any use. It turns out that killing yourself with a single misclick and not being able to use your main weapon are pretty terrible feeling experiences when you always have the option to use a powerful sword with a surprisingly large range. Weapons in Warframe are generally powerful, so there's not much room for weapons to go from useless to overpowered. Players have always complained about overpowered things in Warframe, so nerfing this week's most powerful loadout into the ground doesn't accomplish much. Honestly, if you're doing missions on regular tilesets, the solution to not having anything to kill is to get better at your parkour game. Learn the tilesets and figure out the fastest way to move around. If you're really desperate, start using speed volt or portal nova and blow past everyone else so you're the first person to run into enemies. The parkour system is really what makes Warframe special. If you want best-in-class gunplay, try Doom or Destiny. If you can't find enemies, usually the problem is not being fast enough to find the enemies.
Have you ever considered a series where you analyse how game mechanics are effected by simple changes, for example, playing left for dead verses modded so that players can see the entire map in a top down game style way, and seeing how it changes the dynamics as the infected can't be as sneaky etc? I think it would be cool to see your take on something like that
Regarding Dota: The video doesn't even begin to explain the depth of the game that stems from its "overpowered" design. Heroes have overpowered strengths and debilitating weaknesses but the items can greatly aid in countering those strengths and helping with the weaknesses. One of the best examples of that is in my opinion Enigma: His ult is incredibly overpowered on paper, it's a long disable that does pure damage (can't be reduced by armour/magic resistance) and it can't be resisted with spell resistance. However it also has terrible range, you need to stand in front of the spot you want to cast it in. On top of that, Enigma also has terrible movement speed, making getting in position EXTREMELY hard. However, Blink Dagger lets him blink into the perfect spot instantly from a distance, making positioning much easier. This creates a situation where Enigma has a big weakness he himself can fix, but it requires resources, meaning there's more important timings. First timing would be Enigma hitting level six where you can't let him get too close. Second timing would be him farming a Blink Dagger where you need to be careful of his position at all times because he could surprise you. His ultimate however has another weakness in that it's a channelled ability and it can be interrupted. This means that even if he does jump in and get off a good ult, as long as there's one person with a stun or a silence that wasn't caught, they can interrupt his ult and heavily restrict the damage it causes. This brings us to a third timing: Enigma purchasing BKB. BKB is an item giving spell immunity, it gives Enigma a way to channel his ultimate without being interrupted. The only way to counter that would be spell immunity piercing disables. One could pick a hero like Bane or Silencer that both have immunity piercing disables (more overpowered ults), both of these heroes bring different interactions to the table: Bane's ult is unit-targeted, meaning that it can be countered by yet another item that blocks unit-targeted spells every X seconds: Linken's Sphere. This brings us to our third item timing, Enigma getting Linken's to counter Bane. Before that, Enigma has to either catch Bane in his ult, or hope his teammates occupy Bane. Silencer's ult however is a global silence that can't be blocked by Linken's, but can be purged, meaning that Enigma can't jump in unless he either catches Silencer or Silencer uses his global silence first. One ability being super overpowered in a specific way resulted in a ton of interactions between the heroes, as well as the items. Creating a lot of secondary goals like "hit this character with my ult so that I don't get interrupted immediately", "get this item fast because we need it to teamfight" or "wait for this character to use this ability so that I can jump in".
Yup, EVERY hero has something absolutely insane about them and something they are quite terrible at, which creates countless interactions and makes it all feel balanced Another example is Faceless Void, his Chronosphere is arguably the most poweful ability in Dota as it creates a huge sphere which stuns everyone for a very long time and once you are in it you absolutely cannot get out on your own. But it also affects your teammates as well, meaning ONLY Void can act in his Chronosphere, and a bad Chronosphere can lead to his whole team dying cuz he accidentally caught them in it It also has a huge cooldown and the rest of Void's kit of spells don't offer much damage or utility since his ult is so stronf. Meaning he needs items to even make his ult poweful, since without items for attack damage/speed he won't kill anyone in Crono on his own without teammates Dota's design is truly ingenious and that's not even the tip of the iceberg since it's not just heroes but there are hundreds of items and other mechanics It's sad that people practically don't talk about it, I am glad this it was mentioned in this video
I remember one of the coolest mechanics I used to enjoy is Slark's OP ability to heal quickly when he is hidden from sight... but if someone was playing bloodseeker his passive instantly cancels out Slark's healing because oyu can see him on the map... I thought that was a perfect example of and OP ability cancelled out by another ability... Or at least it used to be, I haven't played the game in years so they might have changed it... but I always thought it was a cool counter... Or one of my favorite hero designs of all time... Night Stalker... who's only OP during the night....
This is a bit of a gripe I have with unmodded Rimworld. It's perfectly balanced, all the time. You can get sligthly more powerful, but always with drawbacks and hard caps. Playing with mods hat remove just those hardcaps makes the game much more fun.
Rimworld is not at all meant to be balanced. It's focused on making sure that you feel like your enemies always have the potential to have the upper hand. This makes it feel way more triumphant and meaningful when you beat an event, and you're more willing to overlook the costs of the victory. The mistake a lot of players make is becoming overly loss averse to the point where they practically stop playing the game because they're constantly reloading quicksaves because of bad rolls. Mods can help with this by allowing you to make characters overpowered, but imo once you start doing that you're no longer playing to the strengths of the game and rimworld becomes boring very quickly.
I thought this was gonna be about something completely different, I thought it was how in some games, you build yourself up slowly in a very methodical way, in which it's very obvious you're exploiting an unexpected interaction, to become much more powerful, than you even thought you could be, a gamebreak
An interesting mechanic could be for characters in multiplayer to be OP in one aspect and underpowered in another for example a game I played as a kid, it was like dodge ball but only with one ball and there was a “mother” on each team she couldn’t be knocked out but could only be out of bounds behind the enemies field, so you would need to toss the ball back there
Great asymmetric multiplayer games I'd recommend, that weren't mentionned: - Natural Selection 2 (it's by the guys who made Subnautica) - Zombie Panic Source (it's free and the greatest zombie vs. human game ever!!)
NS2 is great but I was disappointed the base building in it was less interesting than in Tremulous where bases could be built pretty much anywhere and moving away from the starting location was a common and usually good tactic leading to lots of interesting situations of figuring out where the enemy is trying to build.
I like NS2. But I feel like it really shows its age. Last time I played was probably about 2 years ago and even then I barely managed to find a well-populated server. Likewise, I really like the idea of a commander coordinating and telling everyone else what to do, but when I played no one really wanted to be the commander. Nevertheless, I'd love to see an NS3, though I still wouldn't buy it until it goes on sale for 15 EUR or less.
Also, OP is when something has same cost but more power, the rocket launchers are balanced as the requier (?) Skills, Time and learning, so they arent OP because they are rare and exclusive
You didn't see anything those quotation marks in the title were always there I hear this whole capitalism thing is pretty overpowered, thinking of getting in on that: www.patreon.com/ArchitectofGames NOOB CYKA BLYAT IDIOT TEAM FINISH FAST REPORT ALL BG: twitter.com/Thefearalcarrot
I'm surprised you didn't mention Destiny 2 at all since that game is the prime example of Overpowered stuff being nerfed, sometimes with reason but with unintentional effects
I feel like balance is necessary to the fun itself. However, I also believe perfect balance is pretty impossible. A valuable solution I often don't see is a rock paper scissors approach. Each option has advantages against some, and disadvantages against other options. So no one option is completely better than all others.
Isn't that just moving the problem to the meta layer, though? If my team drafts more scissors it'll probably win against a paper comp but lose against rocks, at that point the match itself is just a formality unless it's a mirror match.
@@SrPomar That depends on how many options there are, how mutually exclusive they are, and how strong the advantages/disadvantages are. Many games do end up with something similar, with some characters being good against some, but weaker against others. If you have a team you could go full paper, or go with an even distribution, or anything in between, with advantages and disadvantages to those compositions.
Generally in PvP, you won't know what you're up against until you go in, so it would be a risk no matter which way you go. And in terms of PvE, it would provide more balance as certain bosses would be more or less beneficial depending on what you picked. For example, ranged characters in most games are often at a flat out advantage. But you can create a boss where being in melee is mostly required, and ranged classes do reduced damage the closer they are to the target. That sort of thing. So in theory, no one option would ever reign supreme
Planetside 2 has this, in the sense that there exist specific counters to each thing but they are often limited to just that meanwhile there are general purpose loadouts that do a lot of things great but are worse against any particular thing.
One trick to help balancing is to make a rock-papers-sissors dynamic. That's one of the methods that Magic uses to maintain balance, and it's only when something (like affinity) is so much more powerful that it breaks that dynamic
I don't remember the name of the game, but there was an old game with a huge blue godzilla-esque monster, a very fast teleporting alien ninja lady who could capture magic nodes or something like that to get stronger, and 5 humans that were individually weak but could buy equipment and work together to build up a base and get stronger. Three factions, each played very differently. Don't know if it ever caught on, but it was fun to play with my brothers at the time. I always thought it was genius to make deliberately unbalanced factions like that.
Theres a new genre term i've heard called "broken battle simulator." Referring to games like Vampire Survivors, Seraph's Last stand, 20 mins til dawn, etc. They make you feel escatic when you get a good run going and very quickly. Isaac and the like started this years ago, but this new wave is an ultra fast dose of adrenaline and dopamine. Really fun.
Since Metal Gear Rising was mentioned, it has a wooden sword unlock that's objectively the worst. You can't slice through anything and you can even buy "enhancements" that make it do less damage. Its description says it's for an extra challenge and is a good example of having something underpowered being really fun.
Great video! The first game I thought of on this topic is Caves of Qud. Qud is an extremely hostile game, some late game enemies have the ability to permanently drain stats, one late game enemy the chrome pyramid has the a forcefield preventing projectiles, incredibly high defense and a swarm rack (which fires 10 missiles in a turn and knocks you back) in addition the pyramid can use some of its massive health pool to make more missiles. However the player also has many tricks at their disposal, on the surface you can get some crazy character upgrades like a quad rifle build that I did utilizing giant hand (2h wep in 1 hand) and extra arms which have the effect of the giant hands as well. Of course with clever use of game mechanics, you can use cloning draught to get infinite cloning draught and items that will potentially raise your stats (or kill you). Of course death cant stop you if you look into the future to see if you'll die (save scumming as a mechanic).
I’m leaving this comment because I want RUclips to show me more videos like this. Excellent job Adam! Another amazing, interesting, and fun to watch video!! :)
"I’m leaving this comment because I desperately want RUclips to f'ing show me more videos like this video, that I just witnessed.! Excellent job, *Adam*! Another *Amazing*. *Interesting*. and *fun to watch* video, Adam.!! >:)"
What I like the most is when a boss becomes a playable character and yet they are even stronger than they have ever been instead of weaker, of course, I'm talking about DMC5 Vergil It takes some effort to learn how to play him but once you do you are the storm that is approaching
To reiterate others' points, "overpowered" isn't a great word to use. Something being a powerful option doesn't make it "too powerful" unless this detracts from the fun of the game somehow. Now, I'll go a bit deeper in theory to see if I can elaborate what that means. When people talk about a strategy or weapon or character being "overpowered," they are complaining specifically in the context of "this OPTION, out of many other possible options of similar accessibility, is far and away the best option, to the point of rendering all other options null and irrelevant." So key words: option, accessibility, and "renders irrelevant." Overpowered is a word that only exists in the context of having options, having various options for how you would like to play the game. Importantly, the options being compared are equally accessible: in a shooter, for instancs, no one really complains earnestly that the power weapons locked behind several hoops you have to jump through just to get your hands on them are "overpowered" in comparison to your starting gear because they don't have comparable accessibility. If you get the power weapons, you've earned them, and yes they are more powerful but not arbitrarily so, because they were not just one of the many available starting kits. A better example of a clearly overpowered option would be if you had three ability to *start* a Halo game with a rocket launcher and an energy sword from one of the starting loadouts: this option would overshadow all of the others to such a degree that no one would pick anything else, and it is arbitrarily accessible compared to the other options. Here's the crux of it: when an option is overpowered in the way I have described, what is does is it takes away from the player the freedon to play how they would like , to explore alternative options and express themselves through their style of play. And people do express themselves through their style of play (Thats a topic in and of itself, I think)! When any of several equally accessible options is severely overpowered, it gives those players who would naturally gravitate towards other styles of play the message that "what you would most like to do is not as valuable as what others want to do, it's not good, won't be fun, you should feel discouraged from taking this option." This goes doubly for if most options are balanced, but one option is severely *under*powered. Whoever's favorite character is bottom tier garbage won't be enjoying themselves until they learn to suck it up and adopt a more effective strategy. Just some preliminary thoughts. I think that the phenomenon of "players expressing themselves through style of play" is fertile ground for further discussion.
"When people talk about a strategy or weapon or character being "overpowered," they are complaining specifically in the context of "this OPTION, out of many other possible options of similar accessibility, is far and away the best option, to the point of rendering all other options null and irrelevant."" That may be what they think they are complaining about, however in practice what people end up complaining about 99% of the time is those powerful balance options that add to the flavor of the game and not take away from it.
I like the solution of making everything feel OP. I've been playing Titanfall 2 for years and I've heard just about every weapon in the game get called OP.
One thing I love is somewhat Gothic/Gothic 2 type gampley in an RPG, where at the end of the game You feel really strong, OP almost. Hate the constant challenge type gameplay, makes my progress fell worthless... So OP is good!
In Team Fortress 2, there's a mode called Mannpower that's all about controlling incredibly powerful "powerups" and using them to your team's advantage. It was great until the devs created a mechanic that heavily punished players who were doing well with the powerups by making them take more damage for an unspecified amount of time. It feels terrible, and completely goes against the whole point of the mode.
I really like how in some singleplayer RPGs (especially when you play on a hard difficulty), in the beginning some random level 1 mosquitos will totally annihilate you, but then in the late game you can basically wipe the floor with anything that you come across. It feels very rewarding if the beginning is a struggle, but you're then rewarded for your grinding and exploration in the end. I tend to play games very thoroughly, doing all the side quests and stuff, and I love to feel OP in the end. Usually by the last quarter-ish of the game I want to see the ending already, so it's nice when combat is no longer a difficult hurdle to overcome. My character feels strong and I feel like I did my job.
to me overpowered is when something is so strong it stops the game from being played the intended way, if the goal of the game is to feel strong by giving the players a lot of power then its not overpowered. For example: the goal of a souls game is to feel accomplished after beating the boss and if there is a weapon that removes the feeling by making it too easy than that is overpowered and should be removed Feeling powerful and being overpowered are different things that use diff context. and this video is about the former not the latter
Just saw this video, haven't fully watched it yet, but it reminds me when I play pvp fps games, I always love to play the worst possible class or whatever because it's always so fun when I dodge bullets and melee a heavy or whatever it's just so satisfying. I die 5 times before I get 1 kill but dang it I don't care it's so fun anyway
I'm so happy you chose dota as the thumbnail picture for this topic. I play Dota 2, HotS, and Smite. Although in HotS and Smite you are never truly out of the fight, this also lends to a wet noodle feeling to most abilities and auto attacks. Playing while ahead in Dota leads to a snowball effect that can cause you massive comeback issues if you feed while you get carried away while feeling like a god in the moment. It also makes the comebacks feel so sweet of you get stomped early. It's very flaccidified in MOBAs that are not Dota 2.
All overpowered things are imbalanced, but not all imbalanced things are overpowered. You repeatedly conflate the 2 ideas and it dramatically detracts from your point.
For those who don't play Dota 2 but enjoyed hearing about the different heroes, another cool one is invoker. A hero that has three elements which he manipulates into different combinations giving him access to 10 different spells, from throwing tornados to dropping a meteor, which combo with each other and if executed correctly can wipe out entire teams, and also give him a versatile toolkit to deal with almost any situation.
I feel the same way about "realism" that you do about "balance" in this video. Is it useful? Yes. Is it inherently positive in everything? Heck no. But people treat it that way, even in situations where I think not being realistic is...kind of necessary for the experience to work at all.
Are you kidding? All I ever see is “realism is not fun.” People constantly complain about realism existing. At best, for the most part, you can hope that they won’t notice or complain about the realism that’s there.
Honestly I have gotten really disheartened recently since MMORPGs started seemingly removing support roles. Like there was this very specific niche thing I enjoyed doing and its... I mena its not gone but its no where near as present.
Growing up, I regularly played on a certain server in a Roblox-stye indie game. The entire game was just a boss battle. Basically, there would be one boss and the entire server would be "normals," and every round, another boss gets chosen. There were multiple different classes (heavily inspired by TF2) one could pick as a normal, and multiple different bosses one could pick. It was a great example of a game with asymmetric design. Every round was filled with action and strategy. Still one of my favorite games I've ever played. Now of course, it was still a balancing act. Normals would get buffed, then bosses would get buffed. New classes and bosses would be added, some would be removed. New maps were introduced, and maps cycled based on player vote each day. It was all to keep things fresh and interesting. This is just my experience with asymmetric design and how it could be done well. I would even argue that both Mirror's Edge and its sequel are examples of asymmetric design. You're just some young woman running across rooftops, being able to easily take out enemies who have body armor and rifles with just a nice wall run into a kick to the face, on your way to dismantle a dictatorial corporation mostly on your own with little more than your parkour and martial arts skills. They try shooting you, but just can't hit you. You are overpowered so long as you keep your speed up, which is exactly how the devs want you to play the game. Instead of just taking the easy route, they WANT you to jump over this, slide under that, then zipline across that gap and tackle a guard to land safely. I've taken so many unnecessary lines because it just feels good, and helps keep me protected in combat. Say you're in an arena with a few enemies. Your best bet is to just keep going around the arena, using your speed to one-shot enemies. Parkour around the guys with the stun sticks, jump up and take out the guys with rifles then come back to finish off the rest. In my opinion, Mirror's Edge Catalyst actually does a better job at that asymmetric design just because you can't use the guards' guns. You're forced to rely on the parkour and hand-to-hand combat, you can't just take out one guy and use his gun to take out everybody else. The game even strongly encourages using the guns at at least one point.
I disagree with you on Dan not being fun bad in SFV. He's always actually been mid-tier and people could always oull off stuff with him, but the SFV mechanic of his taunts allowing for his semi-infinites and long combos while ALSO giving the enemy V-Trigger is a fun way to both feel like Dan's suddenly channeled the power of his taunts into something powerful but also that he's still bad since he gave the enemy all the tools they needed to kick his butt. Heck, in MVC2 Dan is bottom tier and yet they still gave him an extremely damaging super where he explodes, damaging the enemy and himself!
This pretty much exactly... Also Dan wasn't a joke character in Street Fighter 4 either, he was solid mid tier (but only because the actual low-tiers were *extremely bad*)
flipping a physical coin actually isn't perfectly balanced, the side thats facing up when flipped has an approximately 1% higher chance than the side facing down
I ended up overpowered in my first Elden Ring playthrough because I used both magic and bleed - both of which are considered OP but which made my first Fromsoft experience SO much fun. There were still challenges, struggles, and I died from dogs, chariots, dogs, imps, and dogs. But because of my OP build I didn't need to spend an hour on every major boss. So I had FUN.
Too much balance is exactly what happened to one of my all time favorite games, Minion Masters. The game was incredibly fun, but after hearing the same people whine and whine about balance, the devs slowly just removed all the interesting synergies between cards from the game and now we're left with a pool of cards that have few cool things to do and every fight feels similar, despite the game arguably having better balance today.
My main problem with 4v1 type of asymmetric games is the fact that the 4 people are expected to cooperate which in random online games isn't always a given.
My thoughts on balance are that devs seem to listen the the loud minority known as the comp players who have the loudest voice because they are more organized than the rest of the players and complain alot more. The thing wrong with comp players is not even always OPness it is also the illusion of OPness. Like when a new item is released and no one has found any great counter yet instead of wanting to find a counter which may shake up their preferred meta they get salty and demand the dev to change the weapon and basically make it unplayable. THIS is what hurts games more than anything. But also even if that weapon was actually OP in comp why can't comp be just balanced differently than casual? Some games do this and it's great but then you have games like rainbow six siege that worships comp and even the casual is just a training for comp and it can be fun but often times stressful and limiting. Like using goofy strats can get you kicked or team killed even if it's not comp. I really think the comp players need to not be the only ones who have a voice but they are the ones getting to meet the devs and speak to them and whisper in their ears... "Nerf everything I do not like papi."
Great video but Dan in street fighter 5 is actualy amazing, both in concept, evolution from past game, Lore, and actual gameplay. the thing is that making this character a joke again wouldnt have worked. 5 games in and you cant evolve the bad aspect and expect people to be exited. what they did is making him and bad mix between riu ken and ryo from KOF (the base joke). and a lot of move that all seems bad on him. but lore wise he made his own fighting style. and turns out that his fighting style is considered the most powerful in the lore. (kage is literaly born from ryu's will to kill and use this fighting style. plus this man can throw one handed fire balls, an they are reallt bad but considering how hard it is his normal hadoken might be better than ryu. but he like to flex. his DP same, he jumps forward because he just want to get in his oponent, making it bad at what it suposed to be. and you can continue on and on. he is one of the most powerfull character in the lore but because of his personality and way of training he sucks. thats the evolution of the joke past his first apearance. to really push it even further, his dad was the best street fighter in the world, and was killed by sagat. he seeked revenge and thats where he created his own fighting style. plus also learning the most powerfull and dangerous ability in SF, the Shun Goku Satsu, but the only time we see him use it is in a cut scene where he trip on a bag before executing it. and whats the joke, he just want t omake friend withe people, so instead of killing them he doesn't use the raging demon, he uses the exact oposite move, the way of the man, wich does minimal damage and deplete your health. but you cant develop this joke forever. 5 games in you must evolve it to the next level, he cant be a bad character for the sake of it once again. so you know what lets give him the most powerfull ingame tool only him would be able to handle, tauns. he can cancel anything in taunts and can cancel any taunts into anythig. he is still dog shit, but this totaly represent him, and eded up putting him near the top of the tierlist. there is enouth bad character in SF 5 to hype maches. but Dan is a beloved character and people liked to see him evolve in a funny way, way more than if was just bad while beign the suposedly best character in the game.
There were certain moments in Destiny 2 (a game I deeply loved even as it became dumber and dumber) where a new gun was totally OP and it was… extremely fun. I remember the Jotunn coming out and everyone was just peeking around corners hurling mini suns at each other. I loved it! I abandoned all the things I had planned to pursue getting one and then used it every day for months. Made whole builds around the thing, even knowing it was a cheap one-shot weapon. It was just too fun!
Oh boy, my take incoming... "overpowered" mechanics or abilities usually come with a drawback, one bigger than their lesser powerful counterpart. The place I usually find this problematic is the strategy games I play. Take Supreme Commander and Planetary Annihilation. Both are very similar games, that function extremely similarly since, you know, one is based on the other. Let's then look at the tactical missile in both games, they're fired by multiple units, that can be used in many different situations, but crucially in PA there's only one counter. Not in the "there's only one good way to counter this meta", no there's literally only one way to counter them destroying your stuff, and that's a specific unit along 1 of 4 unit paths. Now I don't consider tactical missiles in PA overpowered, but there's a reason they're one of my main game balance annoyances. Other than that, yeah I agree with the rest. An unbalanced ability can be, uh, balanced by the game, if that makes sense. See Endless Space 2, one of my favourite 4x games. All races you can play are overpowered. And I've played them all and beaten the (second) hardest AI with all of them. And they don't have one overpowered ability, if creative enough there's a lot of room to absolutely stomp a game. But that's the thing, everybody can do that, so it's "balanced". All that aside, I have seen some overpowered stuff along the way. Extreme example, the Star Wars mod of Sins of a Solar Empire, specifically the AI made to work with the mod. It just spawns a bunch of stuff in along the way, making you lose the game within 10 minutes. Sure it's a challenge, but not a fun one. Balance is good, but a balanced amount, not too much, not too little. If that makes sense.
I was happy during the video remembering my old MTG cube draft tournaments (cube is the most underrated game ever). It is a great example of unbalance. There are many overpowered "bomb" cards, much specialization and counteraction, bombs would be kept in the cube according to how fun they were to play and also how fun it was to beat them, each card had just a 50% chance of being selected to each tournament, and there was a little bit of fun asymmetry with a few cards that would change rules (global conspiracies like worldknit). The balanced play organically evolves from the draft "marketplace" and the fact that cards are singletons. Overpowered cards aren't be onipresent and they are chased by players. We could test and try the cube design without harm, the balanced play is very stable.
I ran into a somewhat similar situation when I and my friends put together a game format for MTG. Basic idea was that every player played one of the colors, meaning their deck could only have cards of that color and a tiny number of artifacts. Winning was defined by 'all your enemies are dead when the round is over' (defined by whoever went first) and ran on the color relations. So Red and Blue both had one common enemy with Black, but both had an enemy that didn't count for Black's victory. The amount of wheeling and dealing that ensued to try and ensure it was your personal common enemy with another player beside you (you sit in the color wheel arrangement for this reason) that went down and not that of the other guy allied to that player by the time the next round started was epic. Plus even 'enemy' colors would sometimes conspire to prevent another's win. (As alternate win condition cards were not banned from the format.) Eventually we had to implement a limit on duplicate cards centered on rarity to keep truly degenerate things emerging. (Let's just say Blue was basically always forcing rules updates to prevent everyone else collectively ganging up to remove them from the game first and leave it at that.) It ended up teaching all of us a lot about MtG design in general. (last edition IIRC had max 1 mythic, 3 rare slots (of which one CAN be Mythic), 6 uncommon in a 60 card deck, max 3 artifacts, and all decks were exactly 60 cards.) Last time we played, we all drafted 'identity' decks with some of all of that color's tricks rather than some specific strategy to win. It was a good time, despite the winner eventually being Green and White (Because Green screwed me (Black) over after I'd worked to help him, by killing Red, with the logic of 'I can win with White right now, or risk losing.' Couldn't even be mad, Black would do that in a heartbeat.) We also wished we could set up a full on 'Guilds of Ravanica' game in similar format, but never got around to it. (my god that would be complicated, ya know?)
Interesting video, but I think, as much as you can say that, you used a "wrong" definition of overpowered here. Overpowered means "too powerful", "imbalanced" does not mean "has a power difference", but that there is no corrective leveling the playing field again. In pretty much all you examples you yourself gave the reasons why they are not "overpowered" or "imbalanced", because there is something else equally powerful that balances it, like f. e. in L4D Versus the raw power vs. the respawn, or in Halo the fixed spawn points and cycles, or in Among Us that the team is playing against a more powerful individual. None of these are examples of "overpowered" or "imbalanced" gaming mechanics. To my understanding, pretty much the only example you gave for something op is the "Yeet someone out of a window"-move in L4D2. That actually is op, since it has no counterplay, you can't really react, you can't avoid the windows, it's just insta-death. And therefore that ain't a fun gameplay mechanic.
No. There is a reason there are unanimously agreed banned characters in certain fighting games. And the percentage of specific banned heroes skews towards a only very handful heroes in the version used in competitive MOBA tournaments. Players simply DON'T WANT to deal with the BS that character brings during competitive play. In casual and/or single player games, it's a totally different topic.
The nice thing about MMOs is that they have so much content. Take an independent zone like Bozja and the devs are free to experiment and make the tools they give you fun instead of worrying about everything being perfectly balanced for world first races and the like. Bozja's imbalance doesn't affect anything outside of that zone.
I think the best example of what you're talking about and I'm surprised you didnt mention is in rougelikes/-rougelites. Games like hades where you progressively become stronger through meta progression and creating godlike synergies with your boons and weapons. Or games like the binding of isaac or monster train where you use your knowledge of game mechanics (and a bit of luck) to create broken builds. But since the game is difficult to complete usually, becoming overpowered through your own smart decisions makes you feel amazing
I think you might have missed the best example of this: roguelikes(and lites). Binding of isaac, gungeon, hades, the best moments are when you get super lucky and end-up destroying everything with one hit, but if that happened everytime it would become boring
And that's why Repentance made Isaac boring, they nerfed all the overpowered items while barely improving the bad ones, making much harder to become a powerhouse. Before Repentance once every 10 runs you can get pretty strong if you know what to do, but after it you will get an overpowered run once every 50 runs, making the game boring.
In roguelikes overpowered options also serve the important purpose of letting someone learn what the game is like. Given the nature of the genre you're obviously going to die a lot and you really won't learn much about the game if you never get very far because you don't get to encounter later mechanics or enemies and if you just keep dying it's hard to figure out what you should do to avoid that. Having an overpowered option allows a player who doesn't know a lot about the game to get much further than they normally would and therefore learn much more about the game and figure out how to deal with those elements and learn what they should prepare for in the future. In FTL for example the Shrapnel gun is extremely OP, by far the most powerful weapon in the game only maybe competing with the Burst Laser mk2 and because of that it allows a player to really easily get super far and maybe even beat the first stage of the boss, but then they reach the second stage which will kill them if they don't understand the mechanics of the game. However now they have knowledge of what to prepare for in the boss, what kinda dangers they'll encounter along the way and what to look for in a weapon, that knowledge is what's needed to actually build skill at a game as tactical as this one. There's a good chance you might get your first victory with that weapon however now after you've won with that you'll be ready to take on the game in more challenging ways, roguelikes aren't played against anyone after all and the appeal of them is beating impossible odds so making the game more challenging for yourself now that you know you can beat it would be interesting.
A point about DoTA's balance that was missed: I think part of what is critical to the balance of the heroes is actually in the item system. Items in DoTA aren't just a list of pieces for a preset build you work towards every game, they're tools with specific purposes in relation to your character's, team's and enemies' strengths and weaknesses. While there will still be a favored team based on the draft, smart item choices, and making use of the timings associated with them, can help turn a game on it's head. Disables? BKB, Linkens, Lotus Orb, or Aeon Disk have you covered in some meaningfully different ways. Need to get away? There are a variety of things which either increase your movespeed or cause you or your team to move a distance. Enemy attacks a lot? Get evasion, block, or armor. Enemy bought evasion? There's evasion piercing. Etc. The truly good teams will never find themselves in an unwinnable game because aside from mechanical skill, there are usually some clever item choices they can make which a lesser team wouldn't think of. See: Some of the greatest games at The International.
I was going to talk about this but had to cut it for time, you're absolutely right - items are the big correcting factor that keeps the really powerful abilities of heroes you may not have countered taking over the game, silver edge and BKB being the really obvious ones!
people think that every mechanic having the same amount of power in a game is necessary for game balance, but in reality balance in a game is about making sure that the game is fun to play and retains depth of interaction at all levels of play. having a hand full of characters that are the strongest in a fighting game is fine as long as the players who use less powerful characters can defeat them using skill.
Exactly! The power gap (power delta, power differential, etc.) being small is important, but it needn't be nonexistent, just sufficiently small. Now, of course that's a lil subjective, but generally it's also not too hard to find a point where most people are satisfied.
@@benjoffe948 It's frankly also impossible to quantify power at all, like there's no unit of "game power" or whatever, and statistical methods also don't work and often just leads to missing the bigger picture. It's obvious when something is too powerful because it'll end up dominating the game but once things are roughly equal it becomes basically impossible to tell what is more powerful because it's so dependent on player skill and specific contexts. People of course are idiots and will complain if their favourite thing isn't completely OP but that's why devs really should not listen to the playerbase when it comes to things like this because often circlejerks can develop that become so loud that anyone who doesn't buy into it is excluded.
Kevin Jordan (class designer on vanilla and TBC World of Warcraft) has some excellent insights on this topic on his youtube channel. I highly reccomend people to check it out. I played classic wow a lot, and the janky imbalanced things made some classes really amazingly fun and unique to play. The warrior had better scaling with gear (and buffs!) than anybody else, making you and your other brown-bois the centerpiece of the raid group. You felt riddiculously powerful, week after week, even to the point that your playstyle changed because your damage meant you were generating so much red-mana. The mage had so many ways to prevent itself from taking damage, while also having so powerful AOE options that you could kill entire medium-level dungeons alone, in just a little more than the time it took to just run through the place, which was a fantastic way to earn gold, or in some cases, even to gain XP. Killing dozens of mobs at the same time, because you had learned to use your toolkit made you feel extremely powerful. (Not to mention that late-game, your critical hits with fire spells placed a DoT effect on the enemy, which grew in strength as more crits landed, and also new crits would reset the timer on the DoT, meaning a team of well co-ordinated mages would make the DoT enough to outshine the damage that the rest of the kit did. One mage got to do double or even nearly tripple damage.) The hunter could use it's pet, and his own drop-combat/threat-reset ability to run past high level dungeon mobs alone, and just go straight to killing the bosses, letting you quickly farm items to disenchant (destroy to gain trade-goods) or pick up uncontested end-of-dungeon mining/herbing nodes. The classes i played all had these stupidly overpowered aspects to them, and I absolutely loved it.
Big Yellow actually had a video on why, despite Super Smash Bros. Ultimate being the most balanced, Melee is the best balanced. A lot of it comes from hype moments with mid-tiers and faffing around with Bowser. The placement of each character in the list allows for cool moments Ultimate simply does not possess.
I was just thinking about this the other day in relation to games like AOE4 and Overwatch that went downhill pretty much as a result of too much focus on balance.
@@AutumnReel4444 Overwatch was at its best on release, when most characters were broken in their own way and nobody gave a shit about balancing towards ESports and professional play. That's not nostalgia glasses, that's my genuine opinion. Then Blizzard slowly just nerfed everyone and made the characters boring. Not to mention they added tons of shields and new characters that turned the game into a first-person MOBA rather than a shooter, but that's a whole other thing.
As an active League player who had never heard anything about Dota 2 other than the fact that it's difficult, I think your description of the game just made me fall in love with it, it sounds super dynamic and infinitely fun. I just looked into the player stats and, while it's obviously not quite as big as League, it seems like the game is still very much alive, so I guess I'm gonna try it! Thank you. PS: I totally think that making every player in a PvP game equally OP is the absolute best and most fun way to balance it.
16:44 Thought this was the background on my PC for a second. Glad to know I’m just another sheep and now James Webb’s cosmic cliffs is THE background image
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." Overpowered doesn't mean different specialities. It doesn't mean good at different things. The way you use the word doesn't match with how most people use the word, and as such the claim that the word has "a bad rep" rings false. That said, the actual points, terminology aside, made in the video are quite solid. For single-player games, it's not much of an issue, unless it overshadows a large part of the game. If it's limited by time (hyper beam in Super Metroid or the One-Hit Obliterator in BotW), resources (high-end consumables or heavy mana/energy draining abilities in tons of games), or frequency of use (limits in FF games or supers in many fighting games), there's no problem. And arguable they're not overpowered anyway because of those limiting factors. In the case of PvP fighting games, they're not OP since they're usable by both players. Intended standard gameplay mechanics that are in the entire or most of the games, like the Doom glory kills, aren't overpowered either, because the game is built around them. They're the standard for how powerful things should be. In that case it's more that other strategies are underpowered for various reasons, both mechanically weaker and intentionally designed to be avoided. In multiplayer, it's still not OP even if it's an asymmetrical game, since those games are balanced (successfully or not) to create a fun and relatively fair experience for both teams. And that balance changes depending on player skill. For instance, in Mafia/Werewolf games like Town of Salem, Among Us, and others, the mechanically stronger faction has more of an advantage the less skilled the players are, and with better players the "innocent" faction gets more of a benefit. Town of Salem shows a good example of that if you compare the role lists for ranked play when it started, and how it is now. Since the players are overall more skilled now, the new list is far more even and doesn't allow for as many mistakes by the Town as the original one. In symmetrical PvP games having abilities that are very powerful in certain circumstances but weaker in others is balanced unless they can tilt the circumstances to their favour more than others can (assuming equal player skill).
Charging someone out of a window or of a ledge, or even better, multiple people or even the whole team in some situations, is the most reawrding feeling in L4D2 VS.
I never thought about this before. And in fact, I feel that succeeding with an underpowered hero/weapon/ability and absolutely crushing people with overpowered things are a huge part of games being fun, rather than everything being completely level
Ever since I was a kid I always loved feeling powerful in games, but not invincible (for instance, using a god mode totally ruined the fun for me, i'd rather be really hard to kill but not invincible). This is probably why I love games like Diablo or Borderlands
Can you really say something is overpowered when it has drawbacks? Can you call the survivors in L4D overpowered because they have guns and pipebombs? Or do you call the infected overpowered because they can respawn continuously? I'm going to have to go with no. Each side has their strengths, and this has in fact been balanced to hell and back to give either side an advantage in certain situations. I feel like this video doesn't know what point it's trying to make, and is much to loosely throwing terms around that are a tad bit too ambiguous. Having said that, thanks for clearly pointing out that DOTA is nothing but a homework game, where you need to know every single hero to even have a chance at playing proper.
As DOTA 2 is a homework game, is that one of many factors as to why it has a different Esports model that does not appeal to some professional Esports players that have yet to grow or choose their game of Choice?
@@jirehtheprovider I'm uncertain. One could easily look at a game like CSS which requires a lot of physical skill, but you can't avoid learning maps, strategies, how to respond to specific weapons and setups. I imagine this is comparable to games like DOTA, but such information is definitely absorbed in different ways.
I think a central aspect is making game elements feel fun is making them powerful *in specific contexts.* No one tool should be the best in every situation - that's how you get a stale and boring game where it feels like your choices don't matter, or like there's only one viable strategy. That said, I don't think you should design challenges that *forces* the player to use certain tools. The best situation is where you have different challenges that have differing levels of difficulty based on what tools you use to approach it, so you can either stick to your own playstyle and have a harder encounter, or switch it up to have an easier time. When you run into an encounter that is easy with your playstyle, that can feel really validating and fun (a moment of being "overpowered"), and when you beat an encounter that is really difficuly with your playstyle it can feel rewarding. But if your stragegy is "the best" in every situation, no challenge will feel interesting.
You cant use single player games as an example of something being over powered because it is completely irrelevant in that case. Logically balance matters The most in multiplayer as each person is suppose to be going against another thus things are suppose to be ideally fair, and thus when they aren't there's no fun to be had. There is a difference between something being the most powerful strategy and something being over powered. Your examples of power weapons in halo and the kraber from apex legends by definition cannons be deemed as over powered because they are specifically balanced to be fair within their respective games, halo being timers and ammo limits ect. You seem to misunderstand what people mean when they say something is over powered in a game and have conflated something being overpowered with something being unbalanced. By definition games like evolve, left for dead, halo, and a plenty of other asymmetrical and symmetrical games are balanced.
I feel like Battlefront II (2017) throughout its lifetime was balancing in a way that promoted the basic concept that being overpowered in multiplayer is fun. Whenever a new unit or hero was released, they were generally incredibly powerful. The result was multiple glorious periods of time where the game turned from a Star Wars shooter into something akin to multiplayer Doom. And it was really cool, because both sides got to play in an interesting way. One side desperately holds out against very broken enemies, while the other plays as and supports massive tanks. A very fun gameplay loop, until development ended, and now the game is in a weird limbo state.
TL;DW: False Equivalence: The Video. You repeatedly conflate the words "powerful" and "overpowered". I mean, really, you called automation in automation games overpowered. That is, frankly, absurd. Every hero in Dota2 is overpowered? No, they all have ways in which they are powerful. If you do not feel compelled to choose one over the others, lest you lose, they are obviously not overpowered. Overpowered means nothing more or less than "sufficiently more powerful than other available options to be harmful to the gameplay experience." You can't just re-define overpowered such that it includes things that are not harmful to the gameplay experience. I like your stuff normally, but this video was really weak.
This is why glitches can be really fun. Knowing some "secret" technique to make yourself unstoppable feels... good. it's why games game like first gen pokemon, skyrim, oblivion, pkm mystery dungeon are so fun to play in this manner. It's often not even a glitch, but an exploitable system that acute knowledge of can lead to an easy victory in many instances.
Actually flipping a coin isn't perfectly balanced. As the head side tends to be more decorated, making it very slightly heavier and increasing the chances of tails occurring. This is incredibly marginal, but a good thing to know.
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Bad balance can be good when *I'm the one* playing the op character.
I honestly find it kinda fun being the underdog at times
O
M
G
XD
Playing the OP character can also sometimes being boring as hell
That's why op characters work best in single player games. No one has to play against Mr. OP.
And when the opponent is incapable of feeling frustration. Soooo singleplayer it is.
it's not so much that "overpowered" mechanics are good, but specialization. Being in a situation where you're being relied upon to "save" everyone feels great. Video games are often reactive puzzle solving.
I like this interpretation. Essentially the most balanced game is one where everyone has the exact same tools and resources and that's just boring. Like yeah a game like Overwatch could be perfectly balanced if there was exactly 1 DPS/Tank/Support hero and everyone was forced to play the same thing in each role. But by diversifying the roles so that some DPS are better at area control while others are more long range or short range and so on, and doing the same for each class, it makes the game more interesting. And the way you balance it is by giving them tradeoffs. Reaper does a ton of damage and has self-sustain capabilities, but his trade off is that he has to get really close to actually hurt anyone.
I loved that last sentence…
Hey…
Imagine this:
You see yourself (and your team, maybe) dying, in SloMoCam…
Then you are at the start of the scene.
You got a chance to NOT DIE!
But HOW?
What can you do?
What can you change?
Who can help you?
Who could obstruct you?!
Time’s running out…
One Chance… to NOT DIE
@@BlazeMakesGames i can throw ffxiv online around here because when ya playing as a dps or in a party with one you just see crap drop dead left and right because they can single target, well with the occasional AOE (gonna start comparing rouge class and marauder/warrior class gameplay) but as a warrior i have a AOE move and agro gen out the tail but my ability to kill so FAR FAR shorter then if i killed the same foe as a rouge but i can also for more sustainable and longer save my self by just eating damage of many folks at face. and as a final fantisy game we got limit brake and the short is ya get one bar for the whole party and depending who limit breacks depends on the reaction ie tank gives whole team defence boost the up to the sky and healer/supports just megga aoe heal (also for the love of god if you want short time for joining dungeons get healer or tank but healer is instant) and depending on your dps type you do huge one shoting strike or aoe strike. as every class but tank is squishy so unless your tank main is dead and gone you are gonna get flattened in any evernt in dungeons so ya need the healer and tank to be on each other well or death will come to the party.
@@BlazeMakesGames precisely my point. So like your example with reaper. You know that you have to get close to actually do anything. So you plan your entire playstyle around it, by waiting or by getting your teammates to create those openings.
LOL. This is such a narrow interpretation. Yes specialisation has a good part to play, but it goes beyond that and specialisation is NOT the be all and end all.
It looks like one problem in this discussion is the word "overpowered" being used to cover very different types of situations. Very broadly speaking, it's used to cover more power at more cost, but also used to cover more power at the same cost.
With the first type of overpowered, some things are more powerful than other options, but have a cost to acquire them. Limit Breaks often require buildup and cannot be used repeatedly, power weapons require effort spent to control the map and risk to go after them, unique characters are irreplaceable, etc.
The second type of overpowered is for things that are more powerful and have no additional cost, which brings up the problem you mentioned at 6:13 , where to be competitive, players have to choose those options or a counter to them, reducing viable options. This can also be an issue in single-player games if they're balanced around certain options that have more power than other options at the same cost.
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I would have liked more examples regarding the latter as well. A truly overpowered choice is one where the player has no reason not to go for it and how to fix it.
With e.g. the limit breaks in FF7 (original) overriding the attack prompt: While the game urges you to use it as soon as possible you can hold off (defending/using magic etc) and save it for a tough fight. So if let yourself be clobbered by weak enemies that pose no threat to you before a boss fight you have the best attack ready at the start of the fight and can trivialise essentially everything in the game.
They went for a more interesting option in FF9 where your character instantly goes into trance (going Super Saiyan) once having received enough cumulative damage - meaning that actively building up to that might actually backfire when its activated during an easy battle.
His point was that the gaming community at large tends to conflate things that are actually a problem for the game with things that are just strong but enhance the game.
I feel like overpowered is the totally wrong word to use, as it literally means "too powerful". And the video even explains how these "overpowered" game mechanics actually are balanced by something or exist to empower the player. So they are either balanced or purposefully strong to serve a specific vision. Therefore they aren't "overpowered". If something really is overpowered than it is "too powerful " and therefore harms the game. Of course something being slightly over-/underpowered doesn't ruin a game and can make up for balance by increasing variety of playstyles or something similar.
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Some things can be like the Halo 1 pistol is blanced it's the DMR of the game. But the halo 2 BR and Duel welidng SMGs are unbalanced as they break the deisgn of the game by being OP and making everthing else even power weapons near pointless... Like I go around with duel weilding pistols and it isn't fun to a normal gamer to be at that kinda of disavantage with guns that should be in balance with each other as per the desing intent. In Pokemon the power creep is real and easly fixable they just don't for some reason.
It all depends on desing intent and when broken then it's OP.
The video would have really benefited from defining what overpowered means to him. Like, things can be both asymmetrical AND overpowered because of a different input/output ratio.
@@xKumei I agree a definition would make sense. By these standards, over or under powered seems to equate to just not being equal at all times.
The distinction between powerfull and overpowered is one of context, an OHK move can be anywere between OP and useless based in how often it is the best option available.
When I used to teach Game Design, the first thing I taught the students about "balancing a game" is that "Balance" is not a "mathematical equilibrium", Balance is "adjusting your game to the experience you're creating".
Some games are made for you to feel Overpowered, some are the opposite, and some are whatever they want to be, but to balance a game that wants to make you feel overpowered is actually to make it enjoyable to be overpowered.
mechanics should be balanced a game should be picked by anybody and easy to understand
There's definitely a delicate balance to these things, the over focus on competitive balance has definitely drained a lot of the fun out of many a multiplayer game for the average person.
Prime example would be "DOTA riff with a better anime".
Sword of the Occult (which gave a stacking AD buff on kills, lost on deaths) was fun to play with, especially if you took a character not meant to be played full AD and built them for raw damage.
They removed it because the ten best Koreans in the world didn't have a use for it.
absolutely, last PVP game i played was quake champions, and the reason as to why is it still uses OG game balance methods, there are things that arguibly overpowered still work and feel fair, meanwhile everything else is just some boring meta game BS
obligatory bringing up of overwatch here. thanks for ruining all the characters i cared about, blizzard!
Yeah, they should focus on making a game fun before even thinking about balance. its easier to do a good game this way, than the other.
I personally don't even bother with multiplayer. It's just a hassle.
Still quite unfortunate how Evolve released earlier than it should have and wasn't given a solid chance to redeem itself the second time around. Hopefully one day a similar concept is able to see success.
Asymmetric VS is a really interesting concept
Yeah, I loved the idea and playing it a little bit, but it didn’t have enough time to… evolve into a better game
@@SpinningTurtle66 If 2K didn't screw up, and allowed TR to finish the major update planned for Stage 2 (canceled mid-way due to them pulling the plug), I think it could've possibly survived long enough for a console re-release.
Unfortunately neither happened.
If it released today, given all the horrid DLC/MTX shit allowed by consumers, it likely could've been on the same level as DBD and other similar 4V1 games in terms of player count. I don't think Evolve, at least from what it was at the time, could have ever been a major title, but certainly a mid-tier gem.
The only issues the game ever had (imo) was balancing (next to DLC characters), and that simply could be solved through more analysis of player interactions and trying different approaches to balance, all of which required more time than it was given.
Yeah, I could really see the core concept working (1 v many multiplayer where the lone player gets powerful over time), but it would probably need some serious re-working that a AAA publisher isn’t going to accept. Hell, make it 4 vs 4 and killing an alien is what makes the others stronger, so that the humans are forced to fight the aliens
@@no_genius I think a plausible solution to Evolve's "monster running" could have simply been more tools for the hunters to trap/lock off areas quicker/easier, or simply punish the monster for not engaging, by giving less consumption benefits from wildlife or something else to encourage engagement.
In regards to your either change to Evolve, or a separate idea:
If you mean killing an alien buffs the other 3 aliens, and then other 2, etc. that could maybe be an interesting game concept, but I also think it would become discouraging to die and have to wait while dead (if there's nothing beyond death). Though it also could add to the hunters by giving them upgrade(s) based on the killed alien, perhaps random if anything.
I don't believe there are any current 4VX games that have such a concept(s), but I think the idea alone would be interesting to see.
I think one genre that makes good use of being overpowered is metroidvanias. For example, in metroid dread, you feel like an unstoppable killing machine by the end.
In every metroid game, you're an unstoppable killing machine by the end, for about 15 minutes, and then lose it all by the start of the next game.
My favourite no-power take is probably Ori, where in normal games you would unlock double jump, in Ori you basically start with double jump + wall run, and end with triple jump +wall run +wall jump +glide +ricochet
Which works because the bosses are unfair bastards the first 12 times
@@ingvarsuigin609Samus simply never learns
I never realised how much I wanted to hear you talk about the intricacy of Dota 2 until I heard you talk about Dota 2. You described it perfectly, and why it feels so fantastic to learn the mechanics after 1000+ hours.
Man he is so bad tho. Medusa vs Viper mid in this patch? Neither can do their job as mid. Dusa can't farm neutral camps and Viper can't create threat, since both of them are slow AF. Medusa excells at pushing out waves with minimal interaction then farm neutrals job for pos1, Viper is about occupying and denying areas, job for pos1. That matchup is so fundamentally wrong.
As others have pointed out, I beleive that the term OP is being misused here; as an example, you mentioned the power weapons in Halo: these weapons are very powerful, however, this power is balanced by their scarcity. If everyone had a rocket launcher, then it would become OP, however, the fact that a rocket launchers spawns in specific locations at specific times, which requires effort, time, and luck to get to, this practically balances the weapon. You come to a similar conclusion, however, these semantics calling different things OP does actually matter, as I believe that some miscommunication happened between where you see people calling things OP [say the sniper in tf2, as while he is balanced by the fact he takes a good amount of skill to be good at, this counterbalance only exists outside of the match, which means that a perfect human (or a bot) can easily wipe the whole server if they are good enough - the balance of server-wiping and being good at aiming is not balanced, and therefore a lot of people believe that to be OP, whereas something like Ubercharge, which makes you literally invincible is not in fact considere OP, as it takes a good amount of care and effort to build up this ability]
90% of the things you talked about, no one would consider "bad balance". Limit Breaks and Torture Attacks are limited by resources, so of course they're the strongest option when you can use them. Calling a randomly dropped power weapon overpowered is like calling rolling double sixes overpowered. If everything is "overpowered", then there's nothing to be "over". Asymmetrical multiplayer games still try to give each side a roughly equal chance of winning. None of this is "bad balance". The only thing that was actually an example of bad balance was the Fire Emblem part, which actually was a good example of how certain options overshadowing others can make a more fun experience.
Oh, and Dan, but who really complains about underpowered joke options anyway?
Thank you
I feel like the point of the video was exactly that people are being too fast to call things overpowered without considering the wider context that mean it's not actually "over" at all. How yes, the double sixes are, indeed, the strongest option, but people shouldn't go online to shout about how op it is and scream at the devs after being on the recieving end of the 1/36 chance.
@@Diamon_Boots if it was, then he didn't show examples of that.
i feel you entirely missed the point of this video, this is talking about how something that is objectively the best can be a good thing and be balanced in the overarching game. he talks about how allowing something to be objectively overpowered in one since or another with another aspect being is limit or counterplay, this gives more of the game chances to shine. without this games get very stagnant, everything has to be equal to everything else, thats why you lose joke characters because no deviation is allowed to prevent something becoming "overpowered". i take it simply as balance is not being equal its not allowing something to strictly dominate the way you play.
@@lewis1423 i would argue you are talking about different definitions of balance
OP was talking about the overall game balance - for example in a MP game giving either side a roughly even chance at winning (assuming comparable levels of skill with the game)
you are talking about the balance of individual mechanics - for example if said MP game were a shooter and all weapon choices coming to roughly equal DPS
a violation of the first kind of balance would mean the game develops a dominant strategy/playstyle that pretty much everyone who wants to win will use
a violation of the second kind without a violation of the first, would start favouring counter strategies to the overpowered thing until their prevalence causes the players to shift away from a commonly countered strategy towards other options - this creates somewhat of an ebb and flow between common strategies
Love your content, but I heavily disagree with a lot of points made in this video. Like others are sure to have pointed out, part of balance is availability. Nuke launchers in the Fallout series are powerful when used, but not an overpowered mechanic as they can only be shot like twice so using them has trade-offs. Also, in regards to automation being broken in Satisfactory, automation is the core mechanic of the game making it the baseline of power and manual crafting is 'underpowered'. It's like saying that driving a train in Train Simulator is overpowered because it earns you more money than not driving the train; its a train game!
You missed the point then, he literally said that no one would call the automation in Satisfactory OP because it's what the game is about. Like you just didn't listen.
@@hedgehog3180 I don't think you listened to literally the second half of that sentence "We don't consider these things to be overpowered [dramatic pause] even though they totally are." Do you just tune out every time he takes a breath? My point was that it literally CANNOT be overpowered since it is the baseline of power in the game.
Funny thing about satisfactory is that manual crafting is actually better than automation in the short term and in the early game, as long as you're constantly consuming resources, automation gets better when you get to use it to cover downtime by producing a surplus (and if it's fully self-sufficient (which you can do just before phase 2), automation has an unbounded return on investment because you can just AFK, whereas manual crafting has an opportunity cost of not exploring/crafting other things/building factory), but if you don't want to rely on downtime then manual crafting is quite necessary the entire game.
Also I discovered that if you're connected to a game as guest in satisfactory, that if you increase your simulation speed (via a speedhack) that crafting and mining speed scales with it and the server just accepts that >:) so in this context manual crafting is OP and the only thing that stops this exploding into winning the game very fast is that some things must be built in an assembler.
I also feel like in the sections where he talks about Multiplayer titles a lot of the comments seemed to be made in isolation on paper when these have greater implications when viewed as a whole where the problems stem from.
Agreed. Satisfactory's automation is *more* powerful than manual crafting by design, as a core pillar of the game, but it is not *too* powerful. They want you to automate; you are supposed to automate. Making it balanced with or less powerful than manual crafting makes no sense.
I really liked evolve before its tragic death. Most monster players before evolve stage 2 would actually try to beat the hunters before stage 3 because a monster fully leveling up opened up the option to destroy a power relay on the map. So stage 3 monsters would have a raw power advantage, but the hunters would have set up time and a garunteed area to fight, often making stage 3 a detrimental choice unless you had already fought the hunters multiple times, killing a hunter would incur a health penalty upon their respawn, and if you didn't have a few of those already you were basically garunteed to lose. And when the free to play evolve stage 2 came around, there were huge changes to the game that essentially garunteed at least 1 battle with a stage one monster and it became beneficial to initiate the stage 1 fight so it could be done on your terms. Then the best plan was to do the bulk of the fighting at stage 2, attacking and running after getting a down or 2 or just finishing them off if possible. Stage 3 was more of a finisher, regaining some health in order to finish off a team that was already and the back foot.
Oooh! I know this one!
In TRPGs, having player strength scale in lockstep with enemy strength takes away both the feeling of having been weak two months ago when you first encountered that new terrifying enemy, and the awesome power that comes with having leveled up a few times and kicking that same opponent clear into next week.
One thing game designers and game managers (Dungeon Master, Game Master, whatever you call it) can often stand to remember is that having the chance to let your players rip enemies that were once a threat to them a new one is a great time for all involved. Be it cultists, security robots, enemy soldiers or even the exact same boss that caused them trouble a few secessions back (and hasn't gotten any stronger in the interim) players will truly feel like they've made progress when they realize now THEY are the 800 lb guerilla in the china shop.
Also, this is why MMO's that have areas 'automatically adjust to your level' lose so much of their feeling of progress.
This is why I thought the Star Wars: Force Unleashed games were more fun on the easiest difficulty - harder difficulties made enemies more bullet-sponge (lightsaber-sponge?), which really ran counter to the 'Unleashed' power fantasy of being a complete uncontrolled badass
They couldn't be more leashed
The best way to increase difficulty in that game was to enable the max damage mod and the max damage taken mod
This way all hits you did were lethal as they were supposed to be
But you also died yourself in a couple hits
I think something that a lot of people really need to remember is that the primary goal of any video game should be that it's fun. 'Cause if it isn't fun, why wouldn't your players just turn it off and play something else? Y'know, unless they're unhealthily addicted to it or something, but hey, who would ever get addicted to a video game? Hahaha...
It isn't necessary to be fun just to provide an experience it can be one of frustration, sadness, revolt or other things depending on the narrative.
I don’t find it fun to play cuphead but it’s the only game I can play
Games are art.
Art can also mean intentionally evoking frustration, anger, fright, boredom, trpidation, etc.
See for example: Pathologic (2 is great).
@@joaopedrocruz6432 i think we could replace "fun" with "enjoyable". Obviously fun is enjoyable, but people also love horror, intricate stories, strategy optimization, and even overcoming skill barriers.
@@jasonreed7522 all those things are themselves fun (merely pushing the fun a layer beyond the design into a meta interaction by anticipation or strategising or investment)
You briefly touched on card games, but I think for strategy games in general having the best strategy be something interesting is very important.
Like, it's ok if a card/unit is above average if it's a unit that creates interesting games. There is going to be a best unit anyway, might aswell be the one that people enjoy playing.
My favorite reason for imbalance is realism in historical strategy games. There was a period in Crusader Kings II where horse archer units were completely overpowered basically just because they were completely overpowered in reality, the main way of limiting them was by restricting what cultures or governments had access to them. Heavy cavalry was similarly power in areas which had access to them, no one had ready access to both, and even the cultures that had each were unlikely to interact in normal gameplay. Light infantry are weak, but the cultures the use them the most tend to get absolutely tons of them, both from the buildings that get access to and from their governments giving them a bonus to troop count based on unsettled land in they're territory.
Remember: Incentive player to play a certain way rather than punish them for playing the game in the "wrong way".
Like XCOM 2 Timed turns, which punish you for being cautious, unlike XCOM EW Meld, which reward/Incentive making risk moves.
Meld wasn't properly implemented, IMO. The first canister was always close to your squad and risk was minimal. Furthermore, you don't need a lot of meld (if any) to field a strong squad, so it is ineffective as a way to stop players from camping.
I agree that the turn limits for XCOM 2 feel punishing but I feel that it's mostly due to veterancy: EW taught us to take our time because failing a mission was extremely punishing and retreating was hard. In XCOM 2 if things go south in timed missions you can just evac with no repercussions, there's no panic meter or any other consequences for failure.
That sounds kind of like WoW's offline experience bonus or whatever they're calling it. It started as a penalty for playing too long (to encourage people to touch some grass once in a while), but they changed the wording of it to being a bonus for the first time you play after you've not played for a while. Mechanically the same thing, but completely different responses from the players.
@@SrPomar Meld can be really important early to mid game with MECs and can be huge in the late game with gene mods, especially if you're struggling. It gives you a chance to recover fast by being risky and that's pretty cool, plus it gets drip-fed to you via enemies that drop it so you still get to use it.
Love your videos generally, but you appear to have conflated the concept of a "power fantasy" game mechanic with the concept of an "overpowered" game mechanic. When a game like Bayonetta or Final Fantasy works the occasional moment of power fantasy into the game by design, this is significantly different than when a competitive game (or even a single-player one) includes a strategy or mechanic that is so dominant that most players gravitate to using it exclusively or nearly exclusively at the expense of the depth and breadth of the gameplay experience. Agreed that there is too much focus on perfect balance in many games, but you've missed the mark here.
The important thing to remember about balance is that it's not a virtue in itself. It's an artistic choice, which has a lot of potential benefits but isn't inherently the right artistic choice to serve every creation. Also, I will use the term "overpowered", but I try to be conscious about it and only use it to describe things where after meaningful thought I have concluded are genuinely bad for the experience because they're too good relative to the alternatives
When I was a kid I used to love the board game "Stratego" (I haven't played it in over 2 decades so I apologize if I misremember some of the rules) but this video reminded me of it's interesting approach to balance with two units: The Spy and Bombs.
In Stratego, (a game where you had to find your enemy's flag without knowing what any of their units were until you attacked them) the spy was the absolute weakest unit, easily killed by any other unit. In contrast, the bomb was a stationary trap that would kill any opponent that walked into it. Any unit EXCEPT for the spy.
I sometimes see this approach of making the weakest unit the bane to the strongest unit applied in video games and it's always interesting to see. Using healing magic on zombies is probably the most well known example I can think of
I'm pretty sure there are different versions of the game so that might have been the version you had but the one I have has the spy able to kill the 10 (strongest unit in the game) but only if the spy is the attacker, and bombs can be destroyed by the 3. The version I played also has the "spotter" which is only one level above the spy, and instead of attacking, the spotter can take a guess as to what the other piece is, and if they get it right that piece dies, but since it's so weak, if they get it wrong their spotter is dead and that's a big loss because of how obviously powerful it is.
@@jdr293 That is DEFINITELY a different version than what I had played but at the same time seems pretty interesting. The version I played was a computer game version on one of the earlier MacOS systems (My other computer was Windows 3.11 and Geoworks for reference to time period) so the guessing mechanic might have been a bit tricky to program back then. I've always wanted to relearn the game since but never had an opportunity for it
In the standard version of the game the spy is the only thing that can kill the 10 other than another 10 but it loses to everything else, and the bomb kills everything except the sapper which is otherwise a fairly low level unit, there isn't any spotter unit that's definitely a special thing.
@@hedgehog3180 You guys are definitely making me want to play again... (which isn't a bad thing)
There is also a scout which can move in a straight line any amount of steps but it loses to any unit meaning its more of an info gatherer
The catch is that it CAN defeat the spy and the flag
Meaning you can use it to bait your opponents spy in a position where an unexpected scout can capture it from across the board
Imbalance/Asymmetry and overpowered are two different concepts.
Imbalance is that A beats B 65% of the time, B beats C 65% of the time, and C beats A 65% of the time. Each option has advantages but those advantages can be mitigated via your own choices. Dota is a great example of imbalance, each hero is unique and does something powerful, but within the roster of other heroes exists options to mitigate or even counter their advantage.
Overpowered is when A beats B and C 70% of the time, or when an option is so much better than its counterparts that it'd be foolish to not pick it. In a fighting game if one character is just so much better than everyone else that picking them vs not picking them has a large impact in your win rate, and there is no option to counter them, its overpowered. In Yakuza 7, one character has a single target spell that costs low mp, that does more damage than any other single target spell from that element that character can do, even ones that cost 4 times the mp. Thats overpowered.
The first game that comes to mind when talking about "intentionally designed overpowered" is monster train, where it is kinda of easy to find what would seem like "game breaking synergies", things like a 3x4 atack unit dealing 13x4 damage shielded by a unit wich can tank anything that comes in it's way. And sure it may carry you trough early and mid game but then... Comes the late game were the game throws the same amount of bullshit you have in your arsenal if not more and then there's the end-game boss... We don't talk about the end-game boss.
I disagree with calling certain core gameplay mechanics (such as glory kills or manual crafting) "overpowered" because they are kind of necessary for the game to be playable. It's more like they feel overpowered since other option are deliberately underpowered (health kits in Doom or manual labour in Satisfactory). Also, the game can be generally balanced and offer extremely powerful options at the same time (ubercharge in Team Fortress 2, for instance).
I'm so glad you talked about Crawl! That's one of my favorite multiplayer games of all time and it just doesn't get the attention it deserves. Fantastically fun and you always feel so powerful while playing it
the main thing thats hurting crawl is that the multiplayer is local only (unless they changed that at a later point) - in PC gaming you get couch coop/pvp only extremly rarely... so its effectively a single player game on PC (or at least launched as one)
Warframe is suffering from some of the problems mentioned in this video right now.
Balance has always been all over the place in the game. But right now there's one playstyle that consists in using an explosive weapons to just nuke all the enemies as soon as they spawn. It has no downside, there's no self damage, no ammo shortage, it's not difficult to adquire one of those weapons, etc.
It has entirely overshadowed every other playstyle and it ruins the fun for anyone in the group not using it. Imagine playing another looter shooter like borderlands or deep rock galactic and not being able to kill a single enemy because one player nukes them all instantly.
Before the AOE meta was the meme strike mirage meta. And before that was the Ember/Banshee 4 afk meta. And all that’s ignoring that you can still spam khora’s whip for stupid damage at a ridiculous range.
While I love warframe’s narrative and stylistic choices, weapon balance has never really existed after the Plains update.
Remember that even before the plains, Warframe had overpowered Mag where everyone would huddle in a small corner and spam abilities to nuke everything and pull all the drops to that one location. Over 6 years ago, DE tried nearly five different ways to kill the Draco farm, and eventually had to just delete the node from the starchart. By the very nature of warframe having powerful weapons/abilities and a lot of grind, players will automatically seek to maximize the efficiency of their grind. It's the old saying about optimizing the fun out of a game. I'd argue that Warrfame is in a much better place now than it was in the early days, mostly due to the volume of content. There are dozens of smaller things you can grind for that don't require maximizing for room nukes, and plenty of options for farming in a more relaxed setting. Now, instead of farming a single map for weeks, you can rotate between Eidolons, Index credit farming, random relic opening missions, open world bounties, and Railjack missions. And that's just a small fraction of the pretty good variety of missions. There are nearly a dozen good ways to farm credits and endo, and there are tons of weapons to burn for mastery fodder. If you really want a challenge where stuff doesn't die quickly, go run Steel Path, where the enemies are all level 100+. I think the current state of variety is a lot better than it was before, where the "best" option was to pick the most overpowered way to farm one single map. (If anyone is going to argue that every single one of those mission types are bad, Warframe probably isn't the game for you. Take a break and go play something else.)
Just remember that when DE implemented self damage with explosive weapons, basically no one used them. And any weapon with absolutely horrible ammo economy doesn't see any use. It turns out that killing yourself with a single misclick and not being able to use your main weapon are pretty terrible feeling experiences when you always have the option to use a powerful sword with a surprisingly large range. Weapons in Warframe are generally powerful, so there's not much room for weapons to go from useless to overpowered. Players have always complained about overpowered things in Warframe, so nerfing this week's most powerful loadout into the ground doesn't accomplish much.
Honestly, if you're doing missions on regular tilesets, the solution to not having anything to kill is to get better at your parkour game. Learn the tilesets and figure out the fastest way to move around. If you're really desperate, start using speed volt or portal nova and blow past everyone else so you're the first person to run into enemies. The parkour system is really what makes Warframe special. If you want best-in-class gunplay, try Doom or Destiny. If you can't find enemies, usually the problem is not being fast enough to find the enemies.
Have you ever considered a series where you analyse how game mechanics are effected by simple changes, for example, playing left for dead verses modded so that players can see the entire map in a top down game style way, and seeing how it changes the dynamics as the infected can't be as sneaky etc?
I think it would be cool to see your take on something like that
Regarding Dota: The video doesn't even begin to explain the depth of the game that stems from its "overpowered" design.
Heroes have overpowered strengths and debilitating weaknesses but the items can greatly aid in countering those strengths and helping with the weaknesses.
One of the best examples of that is in my opinion Enigma:
His ult is incredibly overpowered on paper, it's a long disable that does pure damage (can't be reduced by armour/magic resistance) and it can't be resisted with spell resistance. However it also has terrible range, you need to stand in front of the spot you want to cast it in. On top of that, Enigma also has terrible movement speed, making getting in position EXTREMELY hard.
However, Blink Dagger lets him blink into the perfect spot instantly from a distance, making positioning much easier.
This creates a situation where Enigma has a big weakness he himself can fix, but it requires resources, meaning there's more important timings.
First timing would be Enigma hitting level six where you can't let him get too close.
Second timing would be him farming a Blink Dagger where you need to be careful of his position at all times because he could surprise you.
His ultimate however has another weakness in that it's a channelled ability and it can be interrupted. This means that even if he does jump in and get off a good ult, as long as there's one person with a stun or a silence that wasn't caught, they can interrupt his ult and heavily restrict the damage it causes.
This brings us to a third timing: Enigma purchasing BKB.
BKB is an item giving spell immunity, it gives Enigma a way to channel his ultimate without being interrupted. The only way to counter that would be spell immunity piercing disables.
One could pick a hero like Bane or Silencer that both have immunity piercing disables (more overpowered ults), both of these heroes bring different interactions to the table:
Bane's ult is unit-targeted, meaning that it can be countered by yet another item that blocks unit-targeted spells every X seconds: Linken's Sphere.
This brings us to our third item timing, Enigma getting Linken's to counter Bane. Before that, Enigma has to either catch Bane in his ult, or hope his teammates occupy Bane.
Silencer's ult however is a global silence that can't be blocked by Linken's, but can be purged, meaning that Enigma can't jump in unless he either catches Silencer or Silencer uses his global silence first.
One ability being super overpowered in a specific way resulted in a ton of interactions between the heroes, as well as the items. Creating a lot of secondary goals like "hit this character with my ult so that I don't get interrupted immediately", "get this item fast because we need it to teamfight" or "wait for this character to use this ability so that I can jump in".
Yup, EVERY hero has something absolutely insane about them and something they are quite terrible at, which creates countless interactions and makes it all feel balanced
Another example is Faceless Void, his Chronosphere is arguably the most poweful ability in Dota as it creates a huge sphere which stuns everyone for a very long time and once you are in it you absolutely cannot get out on your own. But it also affects your teammates as well, meaning ONLY Void can act in his Chronosphere, and a bad Chronosphere can lead to his whole team dying cuz he accidentally caught them in it
It also has a huge cooldown and the rest of Void's kit of spells don't offer much damage or utility since his ult is so stronf. Meaning he needs items to even make his ult poweful, since without items for attack damage/speed he won't kill anyone in Crono on his own without teammates
Dota's design is truly ingenious and that's not even the tip of the iceberg since it's not just heroes but there are hundreds of items and other mechanics
It's sad that people practically don't talk about it, I am glad this it was mentioned in this video
I remember one of the coolest mechanics I used to enjoy is Slark's OP ability to heal quickly when he is hidden from sight... but if someone was playing bloodseeker his passive instantly cancels out Slark's healing because oyu can see him on the map... I thought that was a perfect example of and OP ability cancelled out by another ability... Or at least it used to be, I haven't played the game in years so they might have changed it... but I always thought it was a cool counter... Or one of my favorite hero designs of all time... Night Stalker... who's only OP during the night....
This is a bit of a gripe I have with unmodded Rimworld. It's perfectly balanced, all the time. You can get sligthly more powerful, but always with drawbacks and hard caps. Playing with mods hat remove just those hardcaps makes the game much more fun.
Rimworld is not at all meant to be balanced. It's focused on making sure that you feel like your enemies always have the potential to have the upper hand. This makes it feel way more triumphant and meaningful when you beat an event, and you're more willing to overlook the costs of the victory.
The mistake a lot of players make is becoming overly loss averse to the point where they practically stop playing the game because they're constantly reloading quicksaves because of bad rolls.
Mods can help with this by allowing you to make characters overpowered, but imo once you start doing that you're no longer playing to the strengths of the game and rimworld becomes boring very quickly.
@@caracalfloppa4997 I use mods to make the enemies overpowered lmao.
I thought this was gonna be about something completely different, I thought it was how in some games, you build yourself up slowly in a very methodical way, in which it's very obvious you're exploiting an unexpected interaction, to become much more powerful, than you even thought you could be, a gamebreak
An interesting mechanic could be for characters in multiplayer to be OP in one aspect and underpowered in another for example a game I played as a kid, it was like dodge ball but only with one ball and there was a “mother” on each team she couldn’t be knocked out but could only be out of bounds behind the enemies field, so you would need to toss the ball back there
Isn't that regular dodgeball? Any out of bounds ball goes to the person standing past the far end.
Great asymmetric multiplayer games I'd recommend, that weren't mentionned:
- Natural Selection 2 (it's by the guys who made Subnautica)
- Zombie Panic Source (it's free and the greatest zombie vs. human game ever!!)
Natural Selection 2 is fantastic! Really should play that again sometime
NS2 is great but I was disappointed the base building in it was less interesting than in Tremulous where bases could be built pretty much anywhere and moving away from the starting location was a common and usually good tactic leading to lots of interesting situations of figuring out where the enemy is trying to build.
I like NS2. But I feel like it really shows its age. Last time I played was probably about 2 years ago and even then I barely managed to find a well-populated server.
Likewise, I really like the idea of a commander coordinating and telling everyone else what to do, but when I played no one really wanted to be the commander.
Nevertheless, I'd love to see an NS3, though I still wouldn't buy it until it goes on sale for 15 EUR or less.
7:05 I think Halo's power weapons are _balanced around_ their positions in the map, not overpowered
I think overpowered is only when something is more powerful than it should be not stronger than everything. Meta is usually op but ults aren't
Also, OP is when something has same cost but more power, the rocket launchers are balanced as the requier (?) Skills, Time and learning, so they arent OP because they are rare and exclusive
@@JJSSBU yes if accesability is equal but not poer it's op
You didn't see anything those quotation marks in the title were always there
I hear this whole capitalism thing is pretty overpowered, thinking of getting in on that: www.patreon.com/ArchitectofGames
NOOB CYKA BLYAT IDIOT TEAM FINISH FAST REPORT ALL BG: twitter.com/Thefearalcarrot
I'm surprised you didn't mention Destiny 2 at all since that game is the prime example of Overpowered stuff being nerfed, sometimes with reason but with unintentional effects
I feel like balance is necessary to the fun itself. However, I also believe perfect balance is pretty impossible.
A valuable solution I often don't see is a rock paper scissors approach. Each option has advantages against some, and disadvantages against other options. So no one option is completely better than all others.
Isn't that just moving the problem to the meta layer, though? If my team drafts more scissors it'll probably win against a paper comp but lose against rocks, at that point the match itself is just a formality unless it's a mirror match.
@@SrPomar That depends on how many options there are, how mutually exclusive they are, and how strong the advantages/disadvantages are. Many games do end up with something similar, with some characters being good against some, but weaker against others. If you have a team you could go full paper, or go with an even distribution, or anything in between, with advantages and disadvantages to those compositions.
Generally in PvP, you won't know what you're up against until you go in, so it would be a risk no matter which way you go.
And in terms of PvE, it would provide more balance as certain bosses would be more or less beneficial depending on what you picked.
For example, ranged characters in most games are often at a flat out advantage. But you can create a boss where being in melee is mostly required, and ranged classes do reduced damage the closer they are to the target. That sort of thing. So in theory, no one option would ever reign supreme
Planetside 2 has this, in the sense that there exist specific counters to each thing but they are often limited to just that meanwhile there are general purpose loadouts that do a lot of things great but are worse against any particular thing.
One trick to help balancing is to make a rock-papers-sissors dynamic. That's one of the methods that Magic uses to maintain balance, and it's only when something (like affinity) is so much more powerful that it breaks that dynamic
I don't remember the name of the game, but there was an old game with a huge blue godzilla-esque monster, a very fast teleporting alien ninja lady who could capture magic nodes or something like that to get stronger, and 5 humans that were individually weak but could buy equipment and work together to build up a base and get stronger. Three factions, each played very differently. Don't know if it ever caught on, but it was fun to play with my brothers at the time. I always thought it was genius to make deliberately unbalanced factions like that.
Theres a new genre term i've heard called "broken battle simulator." Referring to games like Vampire Survivors, Seraph's Last stand, 20 mins til dawn, etc. They make you feel escatic when you get a good run going and very quickly. Isaac and the like started this years ago, but this new wave is an ultra fast dose of adrenaline and dopamine. Really fun.
I've only heard of those games being referred to as "bullet heaven," since they are the opposite of bullet hells.
Since Metal Gear Rising was mentioned, it has a wooden sword unlock that's objectively the worst. You can't slice through anything and you can even buy "enhancements" that make it do less damage. Its description says it's for an extra challenge and is a good example of having something underpowered being really fun.
Great video! The first game I thought of on this topic is Caves of Qud. Qud is an extremely hostile game, some late game enemies have the ability to permanently drain stats, one late game enemy the chrome pyramid has the a forcefield preventing projectiles, incredibly high defense and a swarm rack (which fires 10 missiles in a turn and knocks you back) in addition the pyramid can use some of its massive health pool to make more missiles. However the player also has many tricks at their disposal, on the surface you can get some crazy character upgrades like a quad rifle build that I did utilizing giant hand (2h wep in 1 hand) and extra arms which have the effect of the giant hands as well. Of course with clever use of game mechanics, you can use cloning draught to get infinite cloning draught and items that will potentially raise your stats (or kill you). Of course death cant stop you if you look into the future to see if you'll die (save scumming as a mechanic).
I’m leaving this comment because I want RUclips to show me more videos like this. Excellent job Adam! Another amazing, interesting, and fun to watch video!! :)
"I’m leaving this comment because I desperately want RUclips to f'ing show me more videos like this video, that I just witnessed.! Excellent job, *Adam*! Another *Amazing*. *Interesting*. and *fun to watch* video, Adam.!! >:)"
What I like the most is when a boss becomes a playable character and yet they are even stronger than they have ever been instead of weaker, of course, I'm talking about DMC5 Vergil
It takes some effort to learn how to play him but once you do you are the storm that is approaching
To reiterate others' points, "overpowered" isn't a great word to use. Something being a powerful option doesn't make it "too powerful" unless this detracts from the fun of the game somehow. Now, I'll go a bit deeper in theory to see if I can elaborate what that means.
When people talk about a strategy or weapon or character being "overpowered," they are complaining specifically in the context of "this OPTION, out of many other possible options of similar accessibility, is far and away the best option, to the point of rendering all other options null and irrelevant." So key words: option, accessibility, and "renders irrelevant." Overpowered is a word that only exists in the context of having options, having various options for how you would like to play the game. Importantly, the options being compared are equally accessible: in a shooter, for instancs, no one really complains earnestly that the power weapons locked behind several hoops you have to jump through just to get your hands on them are "overpowered" in comparison to your starting gear because they don't have comparable accessibility. If you get the power weapons, you've earned them, and yes they are more powerful but not arbitrarily so, because they were not just one of the many available starting kits. A better example of a clearly overpowered option would be if you had three ability to *start* a Halo game with a rocket launcher and an energy sword from one of the starting loadouts: this option would overshadow all of the others to such a degree that no one would pick anything else, and it is arbitrarily accessible compared to the other options.
Here's the crux of it: when an option is overpowered in the way I have described, what is does is it takes away from the player the freedon to play how they would like , to explore alternative options and express themselves through their style of play. And people do express themselves through their style of play (Thats a topic in and of itself, I think)! When any of several equally accessible options is severely overpowered, it gives those players who would naturally gravitate towards other styles of play the message that "what you would most like to do is not as valuable as what others want to do, it's not good, won't be fun, you should feel discouraged from taking this option." This goes doubly for if most options are balanced, but one option is severely *under*powered. Whoever's favorite character is bottom tier garbage won't be enjoying themselves until they learn to suck it up and adopt a more effective strategy.
Just some preliminary thoughts. I think that the phenomenon of "players expressing themselves through style of play" is fertile ground for further discussion.
"When people talk about a strategy or weapon or character being "overpowered," they are complaining specifically in the context of "this OPTION, out of many other possible options of similar accessibility, is far and away the best option, to the point of rendering all other options null and irrelevant.""
That may be what they think they are complaining about, however in practice what people end up complaining about 99% of the time is those powerful balance options that add to the flavor of the game and not take away from it.
I like the solution of making everything feel OP. I've been playing Titanfall 2 for years and I've heard just about every weapon in the game get called OP.
One thing I love is somewhat Gothic/Gothic 2 type gampley in an RPG, where at the end of the game You feel really strong, OP almost. Hate the constant challenge type gameplay, makes my progress fell worthless... So OP is good!
I love the Axe face from dota 2 coming in form time to time. Honestly i love when you talk about dota 2. Anyways pretty good video as always.
In Team Fortress 2, there's a mode called Mannpower that's all about controlling incredibly powerful "powerups" and using them to your team's advantage. It was great until the devs created a mechanic that heavily punished players who were doing well with the powerups by making them take more damage for an unspecified amount of time.
It feels terrible, and completely goes against the whole point of the mode.
I really like how in some singleplayer RPGs (especially when you play on a hard difficulty), in the beginning some random level 1 mosquitos will totally annihilate you, but then in the late game you can basically wipe the floor with anything that you come across. It feels very rewarding if the beginning is a struggle, but you're then rewarded for your grinding and exploration in the end. I tend to play games very thoroughly, doing all the side quests and stuff, and I love to feel OP in the end. Usually by the last quarter-ish of the game I want to see the ending already, so it's nice when combat is no longer a difficult hurdle to overcome. My character feels strong and I feel like I did my job.
to me overpowered is when something is so strong it stops the game from being played the intended way, if the goal of the game is to feel strong by giving the players a lot of power then its not overpowered.
For example: the goal of a souls game is to feel accomplished after beating the boss and if there is a weapon that removes the feeling by making it too easy than that is overpowered and should be removed
Feeling powerful and being overpowered are different things that use diff context. and this video is about the former not the latter
13:39 DAAAAAMN, thats still pretty good!!!! Comes a hunter becomes prey
Just saw this video, haven't fully watched it yet, but it reminds me when I play pvp fps games, I always love to play the worst possible class or whatever because it's always so fun when I dodge bullets and melee a heavy or whatever it's just so satisfying. I die 5 times before I get 1 kill but dang it I don't care it's so fun anyway
I'm so happy you chose dota as the thumbnail picture for this topic. I play Dota 2, HotS, and Smite. Although in HotS and Smite you are never truly out of the fight, this also lends to a wet noodle feeling to most abilities and auto attacks.
Playing while ahead in Dota leads to a snowball effect that can cause you massive comeback issues if you feed while you get carried away while feeling like a god in the moment. It also makes the comebacks feel so sweet of you get stomped early. It's very flaccidified in MOBAs that are not Dota 2.
All overpowered things are imbalanced, but not all imbalanced things are overpowered.
You repeatedly conflate the 2 ideas and it dramatically detracts from your point.
For those who don't play Dota 2 but enjoyed hearing about the different heroes, another cool one is invoker. A hero that has three elements which he manipulates into different combinations giving him access to 10 different spells, from throwing tornados to dropping a meteor, which combo with each other and if executed correctly can wipe out entire teams, and also give him a versatile toolkit to deal with almost any situation.
I feel the same way about "realism" that you do about "balance" in this video. Is it useful? Yes. Is it inherently positive in everything? Heck no. But people treat it that way, even in situations where I think not being realistic is...kind of necessary for the experience to work at all.
Are you kidding? All I ever see is “realism is not fun.” People constantly complain about realism existing. At best, for the most part, you can hope that they won’t notice or complain about the realism that’s there.
Love the editing, all your videos are awesome. Keep up amazing analysis and fun subjects.
Honestly I have gotten really disheartened recently since MMORPGs started seemingly removing support roles. Like there was this very specific niche thing I enjoyed doing and its... I mena its not gone but its no where near as present.
Growing up, I regularly played on a certain server in a Roblox-stye indie game. The entire game was just a boss battle. Basically, there would be one boss and the entire server would be "normals," and every round, another boss gets chosen. There were multiple different classes (heavily inspired by TF2) one could pick as a normal, and multiple different bosses one could pick.
It was a great example of a game with asymmetric design. Every round was filled with action and strategy. Still one of my favorite games I've ever played.
Now of course, it was still a balancing act. Normals would get buffed, then bosses would get buffed. New classes and bosses would be added, some would be removed. New maps were introduced, and maps cycled based on player vote each day. It was all to keep things fresh and interesting.
This is just my experience with asymmetric design and how it could be done well.
I would even argue that both Mirror's Edge and its sequel are examples of asymmetric design. You're just some young woman running across rooftops, being able to easily take out enemies who have body armor and rifles with just a nice wall run into a kick to the face, on your way to dismantle a dictatorial corporation mostly on your own with little more than your parkour and martial arts skills. They try shooting you, but just can't hit you. You are overpowered so long as you keep your speed up, which is exactly how the devs want you to play the game. Instead of just taking the easy route, they WANT you to jump over this, slide under that, then zipline across that gap and tackle a guard to land safely. I've taken so many unnecessary lines because it just feels good, and helps keep me protected in combat. Say you're in an arena with a few enemies. Your best bet is to just keep going around the arena, using your speed to one-shot enemies. Parkour around the guys with the stun sticks, jump up and take out the guys with rifles then come back to finish off the rest.
In my opinion, Mirror's Edge Catalyst actually does a better job at that asymmetric design just because you can't use the guards' guns. You're forced to rely on the parkour and hand-to-hand combat, you can't just take out one guy and use his gun to take out everybody else. The game even strongly encourages using the guns at at least one point.
I disagree with you on Dan not being fun bad in SFV. He's always actually been mid-tier and people could always oull off stuff with him, but the SFV mechanic of his taunts allowing for his semi-infinites and long combos while ALSO giving the enemy V-Trigger is a fun way to both feel like Dan's suddenly channeled the power of his taunts into something powerful but also that he's still bad since he gave the enemy all the tools they needed to kick his butt.
Heck, in MVC2 Dan is bottom tier and yet they still gave him an extremely damaging super where he explodes, damaging the enemy and himself!
This pretty much exactly... Also Dan wasn't a joke character in Street Fighter 4 either, he was solid mid tier (but only because the actual low-tiers were *extremely bad*)
I just noticed that under each hero you wrote their special op quirk, while "Axe is Axe." I love it
flipping a physical coin actually isn't perfectly balanced, the side thats facing up when flipped has an approximately 1% higher chance than the side facing down
Plus, Edge cases.
I ended up overpowered in my first Elden Ring playthrough because I used both magic and bleed - both of which are considered OP but which made my first Fromsoft experience SO much fun. There were still challenges, struggles, and I died from dogs, chariots, dogs, imps, and dogs. But because of my OP build I didn't need to spend an hour on every major boss. So I had FUN.
Too much balance is exactly what happened to one of my all time favorite games, Minion Masters. The game was incredibly fun, but after hearing the same people whine and whine about balance, the devs slowly just removed all the interesting synergies between cards from the game and now we're left with a pool of cards that have few cool things to do and every fight feels similar, despite the game arguably having better balance today.
My main problem with 4v1 type of asymmetric games is the fact that the 4 people are expected to cooperate which in random online games isn't always a given.
That's exactly why such games are best played with friends. Or just any co-op games in general.
My thoughts on balance are that devs seem to listen the the loud minority known as the comp players who have the loudest voice because they are more organized than the rest of the players and complain alot more. The thing wrong with comp players is not even always OPness it is also the illusion of OPness. Like when a new item is released and no one has found any great counter yet instead of wanting to find a counter which may shake up their preferred meta they get salty and demand the dev to change the weapon and basically make it unplayable. THIS is what hurts games more than anything. But also even if that weapon was actually OP in comp why can't comp be just balanced differently than casual? Some games do this and it's great but then you have games like rainbow six siege that worships comp and even the casual is just a training for comp and it can be fun but often times stressful and limiting. Like using goofy strats can get you kicked or team killed even if it's not comp. I really think the comp players need to not be the only ones who have a voice but they are the ones getting to meet the devs and speak to them and whisper in their ears... "Nerf everything I do not like papi."
Hell yeah, Crawl is amazing. Congrats for being the first RUclipsr I've seen mention it in a video essay.
Great video but Dan in street fighter 5 is actualy amazing, both in concept, evolution from past game, Lore, and actual gameplay.
the thing is that making this character a joke again wouldnt have worked. 5 games in and you cant evolve the bad aspect and expect people to be exited.
what they did is making him and bad mix between riu ken and ryo from KOF (the base joke). and a lot of move that all seems bad on him. but lore wise he made his own fighting style. and turns out that his fighting style is considered the most powerful in the lore. (kage is literaly born from ryu's will to kill and use this fighting style.
plus this man can throw one handed fire balls, an they are reallt bad but considering how hard it is his normal hadoken might be better than ryu. but he like to flex. his DP same, he jumps forward because he just want to get in his oponent, making it bad at what it suposed to be. and you can continue on and on. he is one of the most powerfull character in the lore but because of his personality and way of training he sucks. thats the evolution of the joke past his first apearance.
to really push it even further, his dad was the best street fighter in the world, and was killed by sagat. he seeked revenge and thats where he created his own fighting style. plus also learning the most powerfull and dangerous ability in SF, the Shun Goku Satsu, but the only time we see him use it is in a cut scene where he trip on a bag before executing it. and whats the joke, he just want t omake friend withe people, so instead of killing them he doesn't use the raging demon, he uses the exact oposite move, the way of the man, wich does minimal damage and deplete your health.
but you cant develop this joke forever. 5 games in you must evolve it to the next level, he cant be a bad character for the sake of it once again.
so you know what lets give him the most powerfull ingame tool only him would be able to handle, tauns.
he can cancel anything in taunts and can cancel any taunts into anythig. he is still dog shit, but this totaly represent him, and eded up putting him near the top of the tierlist.
there is enouth bad character in SF 5 to hype maches. but Dan is a beloved character and people liked to see him evolve in a funny way, way more than if was just bad while beign the suposedly best character in the game.
There were certain moments in Destiny 2 (a game I deeply loved even as it became dumber and dumber) where a new gun was totally OP and it was… extremely fun. I remember the Jotunn coming out and everyone was just peeking around corners hurling mini suns at each other. I loved it! I abandoned all the things I had planned to pursue getting one and then used it every day for months. Made whole builds around the thing, even knowing it was a cheap one-shot weapon. It was just too fun!
"Ironically made by some people as evolve"
Adam, you might need to watch "Back 4 Blood proves that valve carried Left 4 Dead" by Crowbcat.
Classics of Game!!! I'm SO glad you know about them. That channel is an enigma.
Oh boy, my take incoming...
"overpowered" mechanics or abilities usually come with a drawback, one bigger than their lesser powerful counterpart. The place I usually find this problematic is the strategy games I play. Take Supreme Commander and Planetary Annihilation. Both are very similar games, that function extremely similarly since, you know, one is based on the other. Let's then look at the tactical missile in both games, they're fired by multiple units, that can be used in many different situations, but crucially in PA there's only one counter. Not in the "there's only one good way to counter this meta", no there's literally only one way to counter them destroying your stuff, and that's a specific unit along 1 of 4 unit paths. Now I don't consider tactical missiles in PA overpowered, but there's a reason they're one of my main game balance annoyances.
Other than that, yeah I agree with the rest. An unbalanced ability can be, uh, balanced by the game, if that makes sense. See Endless Space 2, one of my favourite 4x games. All races you can play are overpowered. And I've played them all and beaten the (second) hardest AI with all of them. And they don't have one overpowered ability, if creative enough there's a lot of room to absolutely stomp a game. But that's the thing, everybody can do that, so it's "balanced".
All that aside, I have seen some overpowered stuff along the way. Extreme example, the Star Wars mod of Sins of a Solar Empire, specifically the AI made to work with the mod. It just spawns a bunch of stuff in along the way, making you lose the game within 10 minutes. Sure it's a challenge, but not a fun one. Balance is good, but a balanced amount, not too much, not too little. If that makes sense.
I was happy during the video remembering my old MTG cube draft tournaments (cube is the most underrated game ever). It is a great example of unbalance. There are many overpowered "bomb" cards, much specialization and counteraction, bombs would be kept in the cube according to how fun they were to play and also how fun it was to beat them, each card had just a 50% chance of being selected to each tournament, and there was a little bit of fun asymmetry with a few cards that would change rules (global conspiracies like worldknit). The balanced play organically evolves from the draft "marketplace" and the fact that cards are singletons. Overpowered cards aren't be onipresent and they are chased by players. We could test and try the cube design without harm, the balanced play is very stable.
I ran into a somewhat similar situation when I and my friends put together a game format for MTG. Basic idea was that every player played one of the colors, meaning their deck could only have cards of that color and a tiny number of artifacts. Winning was defined by 'all your enemies are dead when the round is over' (defined by whoever went first) and ran on the color relations. So Red and Blue both had one common enemy with Black, but both had an enemy that didn't count for Black's victory. The amount of wheeling and dealing that ensued to try and ensure it was your personal common enemy with another player beside you (you sit in the color wheel arrangement for this reason) that went down and not that of the other guy allied to that player by the time the next round started was epic. Plus even 'enemy' colors would sometimes conspire to prevent another's win. (As alternate win condition cards were not banned from the format.) Eventually we had to implement a limit on duplicate cards centered on rarity to keep truly degenerate things emerging. (Let's just say Blue was basically always forcing rules updates to prevent everyone else collectively ganging up to remove them from the game first and leave it at that.)
It ended up teaching all of us a lot about MtG design in general. (last edition IIRC had max 1 mythic, 3 rare slots (of which one CAN be Mythic), 6 uncommon in a 60 card deck, max 3 artifacts, and all decks were exactly 60 cards.) Last time we played, we all drafted 'identity' decks with some of all of that color's tricks rather than some specific strategy to win. It was a good time, despite the winner eventually being Green and White (Because Green screwed me (Black) over after I'd worked to help him, by killing Red, with the logic of 'I can win with White right now, or risk losing.' Couldn't even be mad, Black would do that in a heartbeat.)
We also wished we could set up a full on 'Guilds of Ravanica' game in similar format, but never got around to it. (my god that would be complicated, ya know?)
Interesting video, but I think, as much as you can say that, you used a "wrong" definition of overpowered here. Overpowered means "too powerful", "imbalanced" does not mean "has a power difference", but that there is no corrective leveling the playing field again.
In pretty much all you examples you yourself gave the reasons why they are not "overpowered" or "imbalanced", because there is something else equally powerful that balances it, like f. e. in L4D Versus the raw power vs. the respawn, or in Halo the fixed spawn points and cycles, or in Among Us that the team is playing against a more powerful individual. None of these are examples of "overpowered" or "imbalanced" gaming mechanics.
To my understanding, pretty much the only example you gave for something op is the "Yeet someone out of a window"-move in L4D2. That actually is op, since it has no counterplay, you can't really react, you can't avoid the windows, it's just insta-death. And therefore that ain't a fun gameplay mechanic.
No. There is a reason there are unanimously agreed banned characters in certain fighting games. And the percentage of specific banned heroes skews towards a only very handful heroes in the version used in competitive MOBA tournaments. Players simply DON'T WANT to deal with the BS that character brings during competitive play. In casual and/or single player games, it's a totally different topic.
The nice thing about MMOs is that they have so much content. Take an independent zone like Bozja and the devs are free to experiment and make the tools they give you fun instead of worrying about everything being perfectly balanced for world first races and the like. Bozja's imbalance doesn't affect anything outside of that zone.
I think the best example of what you're talking about and I'm surprised you didnt mention is in rougelikes/-rougelites. Games like hades where you progressively become stronger through meta progression and creating godlike synergies with your boons and weapons. Or games like the binding of isaac or monster train where you use your knowledge of game mechanics (and a bit of luck) to create broken builds. But since the game is difficult to complete usually, becoming overpowered through your own smart decisions makes you feel amazing
I think you might have missed the best example of this: roguelikes(and lites). Binding of isaac, gungeon, hades, the best moments are when you get super lucky and end-up destroying everything with one hit, but if that happened everytime it would become boring
And that's why Repentance made Isaac boring, they nerfed all the overpowered items while barely improving the bad ones, making much harder to become a powerhouse. Before Repentance once every 10 runs you can get pretty strong if you know what to do, but after it you will get an overpowered run once every 50 runs, making the game boring.
In roguelikes overpowered options also serve the important purpose of letting someone learn what the game is like. Given the nature of the genre you're obviously going to die a lot and you really won't learn much about the game if you never get very far because you don't get to encounter later mechanics or enemies and if you just keep dying it's hard to figure out what you should do to avoid that. Having an overpowered option allows a player who doesn't know a lot about the game to get much further than they normally would and therefore learn much more about the game and figure out how to deal with those elements and learn what they should prepare for in the future. In FTL for example the Shrapnel gun is extremely OP, by far the most powerful weapon in the game only maybe competing with the Burst Laser mk2 and because of that it allows a player to really easily get super far and maybe even beat the first stage of the boss, but then they reach the second stage which will kill them if they don't understand the mechanics of the game. However now they have knowledge of what to prepare for in the boss, what kinda dangers they'll encounter along the way and what to look for in a weapon, that knowledge is what's needed to actually build skill at a game as tactical as this one. There's a good chance you might get your first victory with that weapon however now after you've won with that you'll be ready to take on the game in more challenging ways, roguelikes aren't played against anyone after all and the appeal of them is beating impossible odds so making the game more challenging for yourself now that you know you can beat it would be interesting.
A point about DoTA's balance that was missed: I think part of what is critical to the balance of the heroes is actually in the item system. Items in DoTA aren't just a list of pieces for a preset build you work towards every game, they're tools with specific purposes in relation to your character's, team's and enemies' strengths and weaknesses. While there will still be a favored team based on the draft, smart item choices, and making use of the timings associated with them, can help turn a game on it's head. Disables? BKB, Linkens, Lotus Orb, or Aeon Disk have you covered in some meaningfully different ways. Need to get away? There are a variety of things which either increase your movespeed or cause you or your team to move a distance. Enemy attacks a lot? Get evasion, block, or armor. Enemy bought evasion? There's evasion piercing. Etc.
The truly good teams will never find themselves in an unwinnable game because aside from mechanical skill, there are usually some clever item choices they can make which a lesser team wouldn't think of. See: Some of the greatest games at The International.
I was going to talk about this but had to cut it for time, you're absolutely right - items are the big correcting factor that keeps the really powerful abilities of heroes you may not have countered taking over the game, silver edge and BKB being the really obvious ones!
people think that every mechanic having the same amount of power in a game is necessary for game balance, but in reality balance in a game is about making sure that the game is fun to play and retains depth of interaction at all levels of play. having a hand full of characters that are the strongest in a fighting game is fine as long as the players who use less powerful characters can defeat them using skill.
Exactly! The power gap (power delta, power differential, etc.) being small is important, but it needn't be nonexistent, just sufficiently small. Now, of course that's a lil subjective, but generally it's also not too hard to find a point where most people are satisfied.
@@benjoffe948 It's frankly also impossible to quantify power at all, like there's no unit of "game power" or whatever, and statistical methods also don't work and often just leads to missing the bigger picture. It's obvious when something is too powerful because it'll end up dominating the game but once things are roughly equal it becomes basically impossible to tell what is more powerful because it's so dependent on player skill and specific contexts. People of course are idiots and will complain if their favourite thing isn't completely OP but that's why devs really should not listen to the playerbase when it comes to things like this because often circlejerks can develop that become so loud that anyone who doesn't buy into it is excluded.
Kevin Jordan (class designer on vanilla and TBC World of Warcraft) has some excellent insights on this topic on his youtube channel. I highly reccomend people to check it out.
I played classic wow a lot, and the janky imbalanced things made some classes really amazingly fun and unique to play.
The warrior had better scaling with gear (and buffs!) than anybody else, making you and your other brown-bois the centerpiece of the raid group. You felt riddiculously powerful, week after week, even to the point that your playstyle changed because your damage meant you were generating so much red-mana.
The mage had so many ways to prevent itself from taking damage, while also having so powerful AOE options that you could kill entire medium-level dungeons alone, in just a little more than the time it took to just run through the place, which was a fantastic way to earn gold, or in some cases, even to gain XP. Killing dozens of mobs at the same time, because you had learned to use your toolkit made you feel extremely powerful. (Not to mention that late-game, your critical hits with fire spells placed a DoT effect on the enemy, which grew in strength as more crits landed, and also new crits would reset the timer on the DoT, meaning a team of well co-ordinated mages would make the DoT enough to outshine the damage that the rest of the kit did. One mage got to do double or even nearly tripple damage.)
The hunter could use it's pet, and his own drop-combat/threat-reset ability to run past high level dungeon mobs alone, and just go straight to killing the bosses, letting you quickly farm items to disenchant (destroy to gain trade-goods) or pick up uncontested end-of-dungeon mining/herbing nodes.
The classes i played all had these stupidly overpowered aspects to them, and I absolutely loved it.
Big Yellow actually had a video on why, despite Super Smash Bros. Ultimate being the most balanced, Melee is the best balanced. A lot of it comes from hype moments with mid-tiers and faffing around with Bowser. The placement of each character in the list allows for cool moments Ultimate simply does not possess.
Been super into the cycle, glad to see a clip of that in there!
I was just thinking about this the other day in relation to games like AOE4 and Overwatch that went downhill pretty much as a result of too much focus on balance.
Overwatch too focused on balance? You okay there bud?
@@AutumnReel4444 Overwatch was at its best on release, when most characters were broken in their own way and nobody gave a shit about balancing towards ESports and professional play. That's not nostalgia glasses, that's my genuine opinion.
Then Blizzard slowly just nerfed everyone and made the characters boring. Not to mention they added tons of shields and new characters that turned the game into a first-person MOBA rather than a shooter, but that's a whole other thing.
@@auxiliaryboxes So you'd prefer they... nerf shields?
@@bld9826 I wouldn't prefer anything; lost interest a long time ago and it's been many years since I cared to play. Just sharing my observations.
As an active League player who had never heard anything about Dota 2 other than the fact that it's difficult, I think your description of the game just made me fall in love with it, it sounds super dynamic and infinitely fun. I just looked into the player stats and, while it's obviously not quite as big as League, it seems like the game is still very much alive, so I guess I'm gonna try it! Thank you.
PS: I totally think that making every player in a PvP game equally OP is the absolute best and most fun way to balance it.
“Overpowered” is great when it’s a reward for skilled play.
16:44 Thought this was the background on my PC for a second. Glad to know I’m just another sheep and now James Webb’s cosmic cliffs is THE background image
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Overpowered doesn't mean different specialities. It doesn't mean good at different things. The way you use the word doesn't match with how most people use the word, and as such the claim that the word has "a bad rep" rings false.
That said, the actual points, terminology aside, made in the video are quite solid.
For single-player games, it's not much of an issue, unless it overshadows a large part of the game. If it's limited by time (hyper beam in Super Metroid or the One-Hit Obliterator in BotW), resources (high-end consumables or heavy mana/energy draining abilities in tons of games), or frequency of use (limits in FF games or supers in many fighting games), there's no problem. And arguable they're not overpowered anyway because of those limiting factors. In the case of PvP fighting games, they're not OP since they're usable by both players.
Intended standard gameplay mechanics that are in the entire or most of the games, like the Doom glory kills, aren't overpowered either, because the game is built around them. They're the standard for how powerful things should be. In that case it's more that other strategies are underpowered for various reasons, both mechanically weaker and intentionally designed to be avoided.
In multiplayer, it's still not OP even if it's an asymmetrical game, since those games are balanced (successfully or not) to create a fun and relatively fair experience for both teams. And that balance changes depending on player skill. For instance, in Mafia/Werewolf games like Town of Salem, Among Us, and others, the mechanically stronger faction has more of an advantage the less skilled the players are, and with better players the "innocent" faction gets more of a benefit. Town of Salem shows a good example of that if you compare the role lists for ranked play when it started, and how it is now. Since the players are overall more skilled now, the new list is far more even and doesn't allow for as many mistakes by the Town as the original one.
In symmetrical PvP games having abilities that are very powerful in certain circumstances but weaker in others is balanced unless they can tilt the circumstances to their favour more than others can (assuming equal player skill).
Charging someone out of a window or of a ledge, or even better, multiple people or even the whole team in some situations, is the most reawrding feeling in L4D2 VS.
I never thought about this before. And in fact, I feel that succeeding with an underpowered hero/weapon/ability and absolutely crushing people with overpowered things are a huge part of games being fun, rather than everything being completely level
Ever since I was a kid I always loved feeling powerful in games, but not invincible (for instance, using a god mode totally ruined the fun for me, i'd rather be really hard to kill but not invincible). This is probably why I love games like Diablo or Borderlands
Can you really say something is overpowered when it has drawbacks? Can you call the survivors in L4D overpowered because they have guns and pipebombs? Or do you call the infected overpowered because they can respawn continuously? I'm going to have to go with no. Each side has their strengths, and this has in fact been balanced to hell and back to give either side an advantage in certain situations.
I feel like this video doesn't know what point it's trying to make, and is much to loosely throwing terms around that are a tad bit too ambiguous.
Having said that, thanks for clearly pointing out that DOTA is nothing but a homework game, where you need to know every single hero to even have a chance at playing proper.
As DOTA 2 is a homework game, is that one of many factors as to why it has a different Esports model that does not appeal to some professional Esports players that have yet to grow or choose their game of Choice?
@@jirehtheprovider I'm uncertain. One could easily look at a game like CSS which requires a lot of physical skill, but you can't avoid learning maps, strategies, how to respond to specific weapons and setups.
I imagine this is comparable to games like DOTA, but such information is definitely absorbed in different ways.
I think a central aspect is making game elements feel fun is making them powerful *in specific contexts.* No one tool should be the best in every situation - that's how you get a stale and boring game where it feels like your choices don't matter, or like there's only one viable strategy. That said, I don't think you should design challenges that *forces* the player to use certain tools.
The best situation is where you have different challenges that have differing levels of difficulty based on what tools you use to approach it, so you can either stick to your own playstyle and have a harder encounter, or switch it up to have an easier time. When you run into an encounter that is easy with your playstyle, that can feel really validating and fun (a moment of being "overpowered"), and when you beat an encounter that is really difficuly with your playstyle it can feel rewarding. But if your stragegy is "the best" in every situation, no challenge will feel interesting.
You cant use single player games as an example of something being over powered because it is completely irrelevant in that case. Logically balance matters The most in multiplayer as each person is suppose to be going against another thus things are suppose to be ideally fair, and thus when they aren't there's no fun to be had. There is a difference between something being the most powerful strategy and something being over powered. Your examples of power weapons in halo and the kraber from apex legends by definition cannons be deemed as over powered because they are specifically balanced to be fair within their respective games, halo being timers and ammo limits ect. You seem to misunderstand what people mean when they say something is over powered in a game and have conflated something being overpowered with something being unbalanced. By definition games like evolve, left for dead, halo, and a plenty of other asymmetrical and symmetrical games are balanced.
I feel like Battlefront II (2017) throughout its lifetime was balancing in a way that promoted the basic concept that being overpowered in multiplayer is fun.
Whenever a new unit or hero was released, they were generally incredibly powerful. The result was multiple glorious periods of time where the game turned from a Star Wars shooter into something akin to multiplayer Doom. And it was really cool, because both sides got to play in an interesting way. One side desperately holds out against very broken enemies, while the other plays as and supports massive tanks. A very fun gameplay loop, until development ended, and now the game is in a weird limbo state.
TL;DW: False Equivalence: The Video.
You repeatedly conflate the words "powerful" and "overpowered". I mean, really, you called automation in automation games overpowered. That is, frankly, absurd. Every hero in Dota2 is overpowered? No, they all have ways in which they are powerful. If you do not feel compelled to choose one over the others, lest you lose, they are obviously not overpowered.
Overpowered means nothing more or less than "sufficiently more powerful than other available options to be harmful to the gameplay experience." You can't just re-define overpowered such that it includes things that are not harmful to the gameplay experience.
I like your stuff normally, but this video was really weak.
This is why glitches can be really fun. Knowing some "secret" technique to make yourself unstoppable feels... good. it's why games game like first gen pokemon, skyrim, oblivion, pkm mystery dungeon are so fun to play in this manner. It's often not even a glitch, but an exploitable system that acute knowledge of can lead to an easy victory in many instances.
Actually flipping a coin isn't perfectly balanced. As the head side tends to be more decorated, making it very slightly heavier and increasing the chances of tails occurring. This is incredibly marginal, but a good thing to know.
That is why I focus on balance issues that effect the general play pattern of a game or of an individual character in a bad way.