Balancing Brink

As it prepares Brink for release, Splash Damage explains how it's designing the fun in and the unfairness out.

With games becoming ever more complex, ensuring that every element works in concert is increasingly important for developers. The buzzword for this fine tuning is 'balancing', of course, but what exactly does this vague term mean? We spoke to Splash Damage lead designer Neil Alphonso and creative director Richard Ham to find out how they approached the task with upcoming team shooter Brink, how you go about catering for new and experienced players alike, and how to encourage teamplay.

Do you have terms internally to describe aspects of balance?
Neil Alphonso: We have high goals in terms of balance. It's a goal not to have one-hit kills, which has proved tricky to work out. We want everyone to have a good time, and not be victimised. To have people feel they have a chance to defend themselves.

Richard Ham: We borrowed terms from MMOGs, like under- and over-powered. Our main testing development has been playing it. We look at abilities that are getting used, and abilities getting used too much. You look at the testers, because they play it most and use the most powerful weapons and abilities. It's about listening to feedback. It takes months and we've been working on balance at every step. We've inherited this very sophisticated system from Quake Wars that allows us to tweak individual things from day one. One term we use that's extremely important to the game is 'necvars', text files of values that we can change locally, upload to a server and then it gets automatically dispersed through the world.

NA: This is how we update the game very quickly. We have a very limited set of people who play the game, and it's always been a concern that we're tuning it to how we play. It's a potential failing in previous games from the studio, in that they're a bit hardcore. This allows us to track statistics when the game is out in the wild, and updates stuff really quickly and cheaply. Adjustments are accompanied by patch notes, explaining why such and such a weapon was reduced. It allows us to iterate very quickly.

RH: Do not expect Brink to be a closed system where you buy the game and that's it. We want to engage people in a dialogue, problems they run into, bugs they've discovered. That way we can be responsive to what players feel they need from the game, and it's very exciting for us.

What kind of metrics do you use to compare, say, a medic's ability to heal himself, with the merits of an engineer who can hack turrets?
NA: We don't use a metric for that. We use our experience and playing it a lot. It's difficult but not impossible to put a metric on that. We've buffed and debuffed abilities so they fall within certain brackets.

RH: And through 'necvars' we can continue to do that. This is subjective stuff. Even if we could find a perfect equation that truly expresses the epic purity of balance in all of our 58 different abilities, players would still call bull**** on it.

NA: One of my favourite quotes is from Rack Foster, who told me once that in an MMOG a game is perfectly balanced when everyone is complaining equally. Some people are that way.

RH: There are some abilities in the game that are better than others. We knew that, and there's a number of ways to address that. 1) It's hard to argue against an ability that makes your life meter 15 to 20 per cent longer. That's good in any circumstances. We made that the first ability that you could get. It's available to everyone. Anything that we identify as generally more powerful we make as widely available as fast as possible. As you get higher up the ladder of abilities, we focus on offering more options in combat rather than more power. Players can that way tune their play to particular abilities as they get more experienced. If they have, say, high-level hacking abilities, they can start hacking away at enemy turrets. Some players will say those abilities are rubbish because they don't let you kill anybody directly, and if that's your attitude then don't buy the abilities. It's about making sure every ability has its rightful place in combat. It's about tactical complexity. The abilities are less intuitive as you get higher up the ranks. More delays, and more emergent stuff that wouldn't have an obvious use for new players.

What about the low-level abilities? Are you trying to manage them differently to, say Battlefield, where medics couldn't get a defib unit at the beginning?
RH: Our medics will be able to heal from day one! We tried to make it simple. Every time you level up you get one credit, which can buy one ability. Our abilities are spread over four categories. Soldier, Operative, Medic, and Engineer. Then there's a fifth category called Universal. You can use those no matter what class you are at any time. They are the things like making the life meter longer. Things that, no matter what, they're truly useful and simple meat and potatoes things. All the classes have everything you would expect. The bases are covered, and in the first few levels you have access to just these abilities. We have five ranks. When you get to rank two, we start to introduce you to the class specific abilities. When you hit rank three (level 10), more interesting stuff comes up, and you start to see a layer where it's about how one player can best another player. As you go higher up the ranks you see more interplay between the various things. By that time players have got the basics and understand how to play the game, which keeps giving as you get higher.

NA: The people who are pretty good in the office can hit that first rank in nearly one match. The only people who are going to have trouble levelling up are people who are holding the controller upside down. It's built into the system to take player skill into account.

Do you see players tend to build up a class before moving on to another?
NA: It depends how people are playing. If you're playing with friends then the characters get to be more specific. People specialise in team play, like clan players and competition players do. If you're playing on your own on the the servers you probably want things to be more spread out. That's one of the reasons we have ten character slots available for people who like creating characters. You can have all sorts of customisation combinations. We didn't want to make levelling up a grind, we wanted it to be fun, so people try new things.

RH: It's a perfectly respectable design tactic that engenders long-term play. Brink is a very fluid game. In any given mission you could find yourself in situations where you need to change class in the middle of a mission to something you normally wouldn't do, only because the players in your team aren't stepping up to the plate. You need to be responsive to players at any given time.

Can you give some examples of things you've tweaked or changed?
RH: The ability to change from one character class to another immediately springs to mind. One of the key abilities of the operative is satchel charges, a great thing to earn. We then decided to move the ability from operative to soldier. It had a nice thematic feel as we were pitching the soldier as the master of destruction. That's one example of the tweaking we've done over time. But that was more a thematic tweak than a balance tweak.

NA: That was me interpreting Richard's design and tweaking it for overall balance. We also cut about 30 abilities. They were increased modifiers on existing abilities, which for me wasn't all that interesting as a game choice for people. It also made the game inherently harder to balance.

RH: I agreed with that cull. It was just kind of like filler. It's not implicitly interesting. We had so many interesting class-specific abilities that I was happy to cut those out. They also had negative stuff related to them as well. Now we just have a couple left that increase the core abilities to make them more interesting for high-level tactical play.

NA: Something we've had a lot of feedback on from the team is the damage of weapons. If we got in an arm's race, raising everything up, we'd turn it into more of a Call Of Duty-style game where it's about spotting the threat and firing off to neutralise it. We didn't want to do that. With our cool movement system, I've always thought it would negate that if you don't have time to react. So we've gone towards the Halo-model of damage, I suppose, but I personally compare it more to Quake, to hitting jump pads and being in the air. I look at it as bringing more things down to baseline rather than boosting things up.

RH: You want players to feel powerful, but not to the detriment of other players. For us, it's a really fine balance between giving a game  that feels powerful enough to put the bad guys down, but gives the other guy a chance to respond and make evasive manoeuvres. It's about trying to find the fine line between classic Counter-Strike-style one-hit-kills and having players be balloons of health that never die.

NA: We have many systems that work in conjunction. So if you're talking about having a weapon that does damage to someone, first you have the factor that it's a team game and also the abilities, like turrets and mines, plus melee, all on top of shooting. It's a combination of these things that will normally bring somebody down.

RH: One of the things we perhaps took for granted is that if we make a game good enough that people are going to stick with it, it doesn't matter how hard we make it - people will master that gun. It then becomes a gun to use to take anybody down. That's a danger we have to worry about.

Is it true that you avoid making overpowered, less popular tools?
NA: Yes. Fortunately we have 24 guns. Our sniper rifles aren't like traditional ones where you can just get somebody in your ironsites and boom, they're dead. We don't even call them sniper rifles, we call them long rifles, so we don't send that message. Fanboys of sniper rifles might think it a ****ty gun, but it can still take heavy-armoured players close to death's door with just one shot. So it's still good. You just have to switch guns to finish a guy off, and that's a tactic you don't often see. It gives the player something to master, and gives the victim of that exchange a situational awareness of what's happening so he can possibly evade it.

What about classes? If you see a particular class being unpopular, is the solution to power it up?
NA: There are other things we have to look at because the classes are linked to the maps. We can look and see if certain classes are dominating the map, and manipulate some of the values, timers, spawn rates to correct that. I suspect the best shooter players will be the best soldiers, so just because the soldiers are killing the most people doesn't necessarily mean they're overpowered. So we have to look at the overall experience and the usage of abilities. So if we think medics are using self-revive too much, we can slightly adjust the cool-down on how long before you can use it again. Little things like that.

RH: If we find that operatives aren't getting the same love as other classes we can use those necvars. They're so powerful. Patches are a lot of trouble, with beta testers and certification, and time-restrictions on how many you can do. But with these you don't have to touch game code at all. We can fix problems reported to us in just one evening. We've hundreds of necvars we can play with. Say, how much damage you do with a certain bullet, or the spread radius of shotguns. Cool-down times. Speed of reload. For that last one we just change a value and the game automatically plays the reload animation faster. We're really pleased to have it in Brink. And it works best when used in concert with players.

You said the classes are tied to the maps. Is that due to the new unique missions for each class?
NA: That's exactly it. For any stage in the map you'll have primary and secondary objectives that will require a specific class. In container city, if you don't have a soldier then you're not getting past the first objective.

How hard is it communicating that necessity to players? In Battlefield Bad Company, for example, you frequently find people standing at the back sniping and not doing anything.
RH: It's definitely something we work hard at. We didn't necessarily get it perfect in every case, but our main goal was to ensure the information is available for you if you need it. If you ever find yourself in a situation in the game where you don't know what to do, bring up the wheel, and it will make things very clear: it shows the most important thing your team needs to be doing right now. If you find your soldiers aren't getting to their destination and you bring up the wheel, you'll be told to escort those soldiers. If you're ever at a loss, the wheel will give you clues. It's a huge part of the system, giving the information to players when they want it. Not forcing it down their throats. We definitely want to support the idea that you play the game in the way you want to play. If you want to you can do very well in this game without ever firing a shot, by being a medic, say. By not drawing attention to yourself you can stay alive longer and heal your team mates more. That's a smart tactical decision to make.

How do you feel about games that bring match players together based on rank, or those that don't have any ranking at all, like Battlefield?
RH: We do take a different approach to matchmaking than most games. We don't think that approach of ranking always works, because at some point you'll come up against someone who is just better than you. We match people based on their character level. What we find frustrating is going into a match and having someone walk all over you because of their levelled-up state. You wonder why you're fighting against superman. It makes no sense. So every time you go up a rank, you'll be matched with people of that rank. It creates an interesting dynamic. You get into a rhythm where you know how everything works, until you hit a new rank, and you're in an entirely other game that you didn't know existed. It keeps you coming back for more.

NA: It makes it easier to balance, as you've got people of relatively the same power level. But you can opt out of that if you're a player who's gained confidence over years and doesn't care who they come up against. The most important thing in matchmaking is the quality of your internet connection. We don't use dedicated servers for consoles, it's peer to peer. The person with the most upload bandwidth is king.

RH: It always comes back to the idea of letting the player play the way they want to play. It's inviting. We want people to feel they're contributing to teamplay in a way they couldn't in other games.

Didn't read it all cuz i get a.d.d. but no headshots? :(

Still, i wanna drop them after i headshot them lol

Yeah I've been worried that this was going to be like COD or KZ3 but I'm liking the sound of no one-shot kills. Still kinda upset that they have no female characters to choose from, stupid.

I dont think youll have to worry about wide open maps. They may be big but i highly doubt there will be many open areas. This all takes place on the Arc. A run down man mad island that has turned in to a war zone between security and resistance. Its goin to be a lot of close area fighting.

Even with out seeing an maps or modes yet, if they are really thinking this game out there would be no way they would have open areas. They are really pushing this freedom of movement which is parkour. Parkour needs a lot of random thinks just placed everywhere. Open areas would completely go against what their trying to make a main focus of the game. There will be a lot of small gaps, openings, cracks, and anything else you can think of to make there be 10 dif ways to get to the same spot.

blah, blah, blah, blah. still waiting for a beta/demo. LET US PLAY IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

lol. i'll stop.