The total number of characters is irrelevant. If a game has 10 viable characters out of a roster of 40, and you just delete the bottom 30 characters from the game, does it become more balanced?
It’s worthless judging Marvel on the basis of how many individual characters are usable seeing as it’s a team-based game. There are a ton of different viable team configurations, and so many variables go into constructing a team what with DHCs and different assist types that even teams that share some of the same characters can play radically differently. Marvel is balanced.
If you went though the trouble of making 52 playbable characters you should either make them ALL good or ALL average not just 10/40 of them are useable.
As a gamer I expect more from developers than 10 winnable characters for $50-60.
It’s not easy to make a balanced fighter without extensive playtesting and you really have no clue how balanced something is until a lot of people start playing and doing things you never thought about.
When designing characters and their movesets, as a designer you would need to think about the end goal strength and weakness of your character and usually you would want the character to either balance out or focus on a particular strength. This is easy when creating 1 character, but when you have more than that, you have to balance against every other character and the more you have, the harder it gets because there are so many variable matches. MvC2 was destined to not have a fully balanced cast, it was designed so that you could pick anybody and hopefully the partner characters can cover for a weak character’s dispositions. 1v1 fighters are easier, but the same rules apply. Guilty Gear in it’s many iterations have gotten closer to a really diverse cast of characters that are well balanced to an extent. With a few awful counter matches still present, it is still very good in the balance department when it comes down to it.
In the end we can only hope that when you’ve reached the end of the road for a fighter at top level play, if the game is still fun with whatever viable characters are left then the game is balanced enough. That’s even if you only have 10 out of 60 characters viable ala MvC2. In a perfect world, you would see everybody used in competitive play like in Guilty Gear or ST, but sometimes having a balance that’s akin to most fighters like 3S where really only 1 character doesn’t get played really at all in high level competitions is good because some people like the challenge of learning less favorable characters.
Having balance in a game just means the only thing you need to worry about when playing a fighter for a long time is whether or not you’ll get bored. The only reason you’ll ever feel cheesed at a balanced game is because of lack of your own skill rather than the game being bullshit.
So long as there are enough decent and balanced characters to be played seriously and no one or two characters really shows up as so broken as to completely scew the game then that is as far balanced as it really needs to be. Extra characters can remain fun in casual mayches.
In SFIII, while 70% of people use Chun and Ken it is not because they are brokenly excessive over everyone else. When a character is Fan popular and Strong enough to be top-tier then it will be played more than any other character. likewise, people tend to swarm to the characters who the champions play. Ken is all Three. Fan popular, Strong enough to be in the top tier, and Daigo has made him seem Uber. The Daigo vid with the Parry in the finals vs Chun Li has become such an iconic part of the scene that people will be more likely to pick these two characters.
Many players are sheep. They play what they see at the top. In a game with only a limited number of choices, it is harder to really see that. I also play other competitive games and see the same. Magic The Gathering for an example. Some big event comes along and someone creams everyone with some new deck. Everyone netdecks it and plays it locally and kills all their Scrub friends. People try and bring it to some other big event and it does not do so well, often the deck suddenly does not place. It was pure surprise factor that won for it the first time.
So if an event is top 2 of Ken/Chun, then more people play Ken/Chun and we see more Top Twoes with these two characters. Unlike the random quirky Magic deck, they are solid characters so do not get dethroned easily.
Now if people were allowed to play Gill in tournaments, that is an example of a character that would actually make the game unbalanced.
The games which maintain tournie playability are those which are both fun to play and watch, while having enough playable characters to have diversity and nothing which truly stands out as broken. To truly maintain its place on the scene, it is the type of game where new strategies and techniques pop up once in a while. In SFIII and ST, there is still room for innovation and growth.
However, it is the fact new things are found or innovated constantly which also may lead to the downfall of the intended balance. Many of the tricks in ST were not really intended during development. If someone found some way in SFIII for someone to somehow do a Super or EX without using up any Super Bar, it would make the game fall completely apart at the competitive level. Say Ryu could suddenly do EX Hadoukens without wasting bar due to some abuseable glitch being discovered.
I don’t think VF should really win any prizes for good balancing. Granted, the tiers are very, very close, but that’s because the core, extremely useful moves of basically everyone’s move set are near-identical
Um, wow, I had no idea so many people would respond so quickly. These are pretty impressive forums.
I’m glad to hear from people who share my sentiments (and from the people that politely disagree too of course :wgrin:). You guys bring up some interesting points.
BTW, what is “ST”? I’ve heard a lot of people mention it, and while I feel like I should know what that stands for, nothing comes to mind.
I hope you’re not actually expecting an answer to that.
The way I see it, balance is only a major issue if the game lacks other redeeming qualities. About half of 3S players pick a top tier and Marvel goes without saying, but people still enjoy playing those games competitively.
If anything I’d say balance has more of an effect on personal enjoyment rather than the competitive playability of a game. Some people might get tired of seeing a certain character, others might not, but in general it doesn’t seem to affect the integrity of high-level play. I’m sure there are games more balanced than ST that are already long dead.
Edit: Thinking ahead, I wonder how online play and greater use of the Internet will do to the value of balance in a fighting game. There’s already this “me too” (sorry I keep saying that) philosophy where every random player wants to feel like they know things that otherwise wouldn’t affect their enjoyment of the game. When newer titles come out there are going to be people who have never played a fighting game in their lives telling me what the tiers are. With less of a divide between casual and hardcore players, will the average consumer start caring about “balance” and “tiers” just because hardcore players say so? To the degree where it might affect the success of a game in some way?
Everyone has the same speed throws, fast mid, sidekicks, low kicks, launchers, sweeps, etc. The moves to vary in properties/damage/execution/recovery, but everyone generally has the same basic tools under all their ‘signature’ moves that set them apart. Some stray from the mold more than others (Lei, Shun), but by and far they all have offensive tools that work in similar ways for the same purposes.
And let’s not forget the best move in vf5 that everyone has; fuzzy guard!
Hmmm, I never looked at it like that. I guess I can see where you would get that from. But VF isn’t the only fighter like that, that’s for sure. I think it’s because that VF has no “special” moves, so a lot of people would fight in a similar manner by default. And yeah, fuzzy guard is dope.
Balance rarely is a serious problem because most of the time:
1)people playing each other are not at the same skill level
2) Most players do not use every tool that their character has in every single match.
Balance is only an issue in extremes. SNK Boss syndrome (wtf his projective covers the whole fucking screen wtf) and crappy no damage dealing pixies. The shit that is just obvious.
But this is coming from a guy who thinks all the players obsessed with tiers need to get real. Because tiers assume a lot of the players too.
Tiers assume:
“If both players are at the same skill level and both are using everything their particular character has then the person with the higher tiered character will win”
If it’s fun and not completely one sided then balance isn’t an issue.
Look at 3S where the big 3 have a sizable advantage over the rest, I remember last year at evo everyone was booing the top8 matches because it was a chun fest yet you don’t see 3s declining in popularity anytime soon.
I may be drunk as fuck right now, but I do not need to be sober to tell you that no one gives a shit about your long winded rants about shit you don’t even fully comprehend.
In other news, fuck 3s. That game is hot garbage. People clown on games like marvel because they only see a handful of characters winning tournaments. These are the same people that started playing SF because they saw some gay ass video of Daigo baiting JW into a super. Right, no one gives as shit about your bitch ass opinions you fucking noobs.
