Balance dogma VS accessibility dogma. Which one produces more decline?

[Cryomancer]

Balance is like equality in "politics". More equality means that everyone will be eqqualy poor, uneducated and suffer eqqualy. There no way to have eqquality or balance without appealing to the lowest common denominator and forcing the lowest common denominator into everyone

I am surprised by you optimism in believing that the best people get to the top. In reality it's the worst of humankind that gets to the top. The more cynical the person is the more likely they are to succeed. The more moral the person is, the more likely they are to fail. Compare EA to Troika.

Is not the best who get to the top, the world is not just or fair, however, if the state tries to make things "balanced", the result is always worse, look to the countries which tried to "end" the racial inequality. Affirmative action programs only lead to awful consequences and destroyed the education in those countries. In white majority countries like USA and in white minority countries like Brazil/South Africa. Or the countries suffering with mass starvation after they tried to have equality in land ownership. The result is mass starvation. In USSR, in Zimbabwe, everywhere. And this will happens in South Africa soon. You can believe that someone being born into a noble family is "not fair, he din't deserved the noble title", however, you can't argue that a lot of countries was better when they are monarchy. That the empire of Brazil was far better than modern Brazil. Cuba, Cuba before the revolution had more Europeans living in Cuba than Cubans living in any European country. Now is a complete shithole. Haiti too. Once the most prosperous colony in Americas is now the poorest country in Americas. Argentina before Peron also was extremely rich. Venezuela, before socialism was extremely rich. And the unique developed country left in Central/South America is Chile, thanks to Pinochet which salved the country from becoming like Cuba.

EA is an example of cynical company doing amazingly well, but D&D 4e is an example of a cynical company receiving what they deserve. Pathfinder become the most popular TT game on 4e times. D&D which was the most popular TT game ever, lose the spotlight to Pathfinder. And Paizo now decided to make a lot of mistakes of "muh balance" "muh accessibility", with pathfinder 2e. Lets hope that Pathfinder 3e will be more like D&D 2e or PF1e...

And lets hope that Paizo will not force Pf2e into OwlCat.

accessibility

fuck colorblind people

I an talking about other type of accessibility IE - "lets appeal to a wide audience"

cause you don't want player to figure out the best build 1 hour into the game.

Having "the best build" is a bad idea in the first place. The ideal should be "the best build for A in situation B with the tradeoffs C and costs D"

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I an talking about other type of accessibility IE - "lets appeal to a wide audience"

does that include colorblind people?

 

[Cryomancer]

I an talking about other type of accessibility IE - "lets appeal to a wide audience"

does that include colorblind people?

Appealing to colorblind people is ok. Appealing to Teletubbies is not OK.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Serious_Business]

This thread makes me feel like going to a uni class or something, all the kids are proper and saying the right things, showing their "intellectual dynamism", but you know they're not actually thinking anything interesting. The solution of course is to steal their lunch money while punching them firmly in the gut

 

[smaug]

balance is only autistically important in multiplayer. for single player you just need to make all things fun somehow but not necessarily equal.

What games have done this in your opinion?

 

[Butter]

balance is only autistically important in multiplayer. for single player you just need to make all things fun somehow but not necessarily equal.

What games have done this in your opinion?

A R C A N U M

 

[Zer0wing]

Do we really have to choose? Accessibility and balance are both in dialectical connection of shit and piss and one is useful to another to sell the boring game of lacking game design to both newbies and genre veterans. Actually fuck RPGs this time. Ask yourself if Devil May Cry 3 would be awesome action game if it was balanced? If it ditched both extremely hard bosses and as extremely unbalanced weapons and styles?

 

[Cryomancer]

balance is only autistically important in multiplayer. for single player you just need to make all things fun somehow but not necessarily equal.

Even in MP games. Balance is not that huge important. And very subjective. I mean, see how many people are crying over panzerbusche 39 on BFV and when they pick the weapon, can't kill anyone. And how many people crying over shotguns on BF1 despite shotguns being the least used weapons. See people crying over "russian bias" on warthunder...

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[AgentFransis]

What OP describes as balance is just over balancing. A game should be balanced not in the sense that all possible builds are roughly equal in strength but in the sense that most reasonable builds should be able to complete the game while not trivializing the challenge. The more interesting build choices you have while still accomplishing that objective the better your design is. It's also bad balance if you have lot's of cool options but most of them are too weak, that's no fun.

It's also bad balance if it's too easy/obvious to break the game's challenge. Like Morrowind's alchemy is largely fine. It's a funny option if you want to use it and is obviously broken. But for example crafting in KotC 1 is not that great since it's seemingly a major mechanic that you're supposed to use, and the early game challenge certainly invites you to, but it pretty quickly leads to your party being too strong and cheapens the whole looting aspect of the game.

As an aside imbalanced multiplayer games can actually be great. In Dominions some nations are wildly stronger than others but since the games are free for alls it auto-balances: the players know which nations are OP so they get ganged up on.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

Pick a racing game for eg, if the game has only one car and zero options, the game is 100% balanced.

This comparasion is stupid because it has nothing to do with balance
Balance presupposes you have multiple different things.

Skiming through your unnecessarily large post, and even most posts in this thread, seems like people here have been infected with Swayer school of thought that balance must mean that every mechanical aspect of the game must be of equal value in every situation of gameplay. Which is a moronic motion.

Balance in games simply means that nothing is useless and nothing makes that the other things useless.
Everything should have their pros and cons to garantee they aren't invencible/worthless, but they should still be distinct.
Or to put it in better terms "Each tool for the rigth job".

Take a Warrior and Thief for example.
One is meant to engange in conflict the other is meant to avoid it.
None is efficient in the other's realm of action.
Yet both are balanced and both are distinct.

 

[Cryomancer]

Balance in games simply means that nothing is useless and nothing makes that the other things useless.(...)
Take a Warrior and Thief for example.
One is meant to engange in conflict the other is meant to avoid it.
None is efficient in the other's realm of action.
Yet Both are balanced and both are distinct.

Except that in a highly stealth campaign, the thief has the advantage and in a heavily hack & slash campaign, the warrior has the advantage.

And as i've said, a lot of people swear that shotguns are overpowered despite being the least used weapon on BF1. Why? Because balance is subjective. Hell, there are people defending nwn2 nerfs against spell casters and ludicrous +5d6 fire, +5d6 martial weapons which can tear the faceless man apart in few seconds. Sorry but I disagree about that definition of "balance".

The idea of everyone being good at X is not balanced.

For eg, imagine a sorcerer of silver draconic bloodline which knows mostly cold spells. He would struggle against undead far more than a Paladin. However, against fire elementals, he would have a easy time. So in a campaign heavily undead based, the Paladin will have a far easier time and what is the problem?

 

[pomenitul]

Accessibility goes hand in hand with commercial cupidity, which lies at the root of the Decline.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

Balance in games simply means that nothing is useless and nothing makes that the other things useless.(...)
Take a Warrior and Thief for example.
One is meant to engange in conflict the other is meant to avoid it.
None is efficient in the other's realm of action.
Yet both are balanced and both are distinct.

Except that in a highly stealth campaign, the thief has the advantage and in a heavily hack & slash campaign, the warrior has the advantage.

Are you disagreeing?
Because that is literally the point of my post...

 

[Dramart]

Personally I don't give a fuck because if the games are shit you just don't play them, and you always have great games that you can play again. With accessibility I think it's bad if you make it too casual, but as long as there are different difficulties and well done, it's okay. With Balance I think you mean more or less variety? I think a game tries to be entertaining, interesting, and for the AAA companies we can add to make tons of money, then of course they are going to try to make it as attractive ass possible to the masses, so this last thing is the main problem since the developers are too worried to get success and they can neglect to make their game interesting or more complex. But this is not necessarily a bad thing since it's a mtter of taste, I mean subjective and one could say sometimes the games were made better when tried to appeal to more people.

For example Fallout games when were made more casual by changing them into RPGs they were enhanced, of course this is my opinion like the one of many others, you also have people who think they are the biggest shit in history and the old ones were one-hundred of times better. Other times it makes the game worse, the cases you mention about BG2, DAO, and DAI are good examples, this is also subjective of course, but I believe that in this case and I think we believe the same, the less variety of spells made the game worse. This is not simplicity bad, complexity good. I've seen you like Gothic, which can be considered complex with some things to learn, but there are games that are simple and better, but see, it's matter of opinion, because I think Gothic is garbage. Games you think are incline other people think are decline, what is the consensus? What is an RPG? Elephant, Elephan, Elephant! Bring the minigun we have some demons to smite. It's a matter of time.

 

[Cryomancer]

Balance in games simply means that nothing is useless and nothing makes that the other things useless.(...)
Take a Warrior and Thief for example.
One is meant to engange in conflict the other is meant to avoid it.
None is efficient in the other's realm of action.
Yet both are balanced and both are distinct.

Except that in a highly stealth campaign, the thief has the advantage and in a heavily hack & slash campaign, the warrior has the advantage.

Are you disagreeing?
Because that is literally the point of my post...

Keeping the game challenging and enjoyable for all playstyles is good. But this is not the ""balance"" which I an criticizing. I an criticizing this developers which see balance as a absolute dogma and for eg, don't care about thieves in the poorest region of the empire using daedric armor because the PC is high level on Oblivion, cooldowns and shit like that.

 

[Funposter]

Balance creates mediocre games, accessibility creates bad games and even non-games

 

[Lawntoilet]

Obsession with balance is a problem but if by "accessibility" you mean "mass appeal" then the bigger comes from "accessibility."

Games should be "accessible" only in the sense that their rules are clearly communicated to the player. If the player is unwilling to exert the effort to understand the rules, or just too dumb to do so, fuck 'em.

"Accessibility" in terms of seeking mass appeal is how you go from Fallout to Fallout 3.

If you want good RPGs then they all should be exactly as balanced and accessible as Arcanum.

 

[luj1]

Sawyer was never obsessed with balance, he was obsessed with pleasing everybody i.e. accessibility

 

[Wunderbar]

Accessibility is worse

 

[Sharpedge]

balance is only autistically important in multiplayer. for single player you just need to make all things fun somehow but not necessarily equal.

Even in MP games. Balance is not that huge important. And very subjective. I mean, see how many people are crying over panzerbusche 39 on BFV and when they pick the weapon, can't kill anyone. And how many people crying over shotguns on BF1 despite shotguns being the least used weapons. See people crying over "russian bias" on warthunder...

It depends. Games like Dota for example only really have a market provided that some effort goes into balancing them. These are games which are competitive by nature. If the basis by which you want a game to sell is the fact that a game is competitive, then the game needs to be balanced.

 

[TheChickenKing]

I'd think that depending on how the developers approach accessibility, it can be a very good thing. Something that's really bothered me about the modern survival game genre is that due to how Minecraft handled things when it first came out, most developers seem to believe that you can put most of the game's learning tools up on a wiki and just hope for the best. Accessibility, in this context, would qualify as something along the lines of, "The capacity to play a game with a reasonable level of effort", which does not include doing homework on the internet.

Obvious disclaimer: what constitutes a reasonable level of effort is open to heavy interpretation, and it's unfortunate that both developers and players sometimes seem to think that games should require no more thought or effort than watching a film. If you want to watch a movie, watch a movie. But I think the broader point of aiming to a degree of accessibility is reasonable. That includes things like a good UI and systems and mechanics that make sense within the context of the game, which has nothing to do with the number of spells or anything like that. If spellcasting makes sense to players trying to learn it, you could have 5 or 500 and people will figure it out. Even if the game is highly complex, I'm a firm believer that a player should be able to learn through play and experimentation.

That's why I believe balance is the greater of the two evils, at least potentially. It's impossible to experiment and learn through play if everything is of equivalent value, if the game keeps shifting goal posts through regular balance patching, or if there are so few routes to victory that you either find success through a guide or trial and error. That last point probably sounds like a point in favor of balancing, but insofar as balancing is typically used in games these days - smacking down overperforming playstyles/items/classes - it tends to leave one or two viable options behind which sucks both accessibility and fun out of a game.

An overt focus on balance is more responsible, in my opinion, for reduced mechanics and things getting dumbed down so much. It's much harder to balance a massive pool of spells or classes with tons of unique mechanics than it is a handful of simple stats. Meanwhile, someone who doesn't understand basic concepts like "casting spells burns through resources", whether that's a spell slot or cooldowns or mana, isn't suddenly going to find the game easier to play just because there are fewer spells.

There's a whole other issue about how too many choices can overwhelm and stress people out whether you're talking spells in a game or normal everyday choices, but I don't believe that has any reasonable relation to accessibility or balance, at least not directly. People may conflate the concepts, but I'd argue that has more to do with a lack of understanding of the topic at hand than a real connection.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

Personally I think some degree of balancing and streamlining/accessibility is not necessarily a bad thing.

An obtuse number of features doesn't necessarily make a good game. An easy example of this is the grand strategy games. Games like HoI 3 and 4 for example are decent and complex enough to be fun. And then there are obscure World War 2 sims which is pretty much excel sheet with supply chain and shits which nobody except excel enthusiasts will play.

Baldurs' Gate has 300 spells... which perhaps only half of them are worth using most of the time. Their inclusion in case of BG is because DnD, but in general, when you are making a system from scratch I'd rather have smaller number but contextually useful spells rather than a mismatch of badly balanced list of spells (even when divided per spells level like DnD) where there are no reason to take most of the spells list.

A choice is only a choice for the player if they are meaningful. Simply obfuscating through sheer number alone is shit design. If something is put into the game it has to serve a purpose besides "let the players trial and error through this 90% shit list to find the 10% decent ones."

Of course, streamlining these days often means "here are games with no difficulty and 0 player choice" and those kinds of streamlining are way overboard and make for bad games.

The same with balancing. For single-player games, including RPGs, the choice given to the players needs to be balanced against the game, not against each other. Badly balanced single-player games will basically shoehorn players into certain builds (e.g you have to take. Elf psionics, mantis fighter/gladiator, don't take half of the 20 availble classes because they are shit and won't allow you to progress through the game except through save-scumming).

The infamous "Sawyerian balance" is unfun because it tries to balance options available to the player against each other which resulted in everything feeling underpowered and not unique. It is functional and might be needed for multiplayer but is certainly unfun when applied to single-player games.

 

[Sweeper]

Baldurs' Gate has 300 spells... which perhaps only half of them are worth using most of the time

The obvious solution isn't to cut the remaining 150 spells you don't use, but make them useful, and then introduce more.
People who complain about bloat are pussies.