For a note on the future of this game please see here.

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This go around we're going to be talking about balance.  For me this topic has shot up in importance given this game's demo situation.  I've done a tiny demo on our Discord, which can be downloaded in the naadg-testing channel, just to make sure it actually runs and basic stuff like that.  With that done I'm onto a slightly more substantial demo which includes the equipment side of things.  Both the first release and the coming one has had me step aside and think about balance.

Like I'd imagine of many, balance is something I've only noticed when its pretty far off.  I recall week one Darius or Black Clever Miss Fortune from the older days of League of Legends.  Both of those situations were fairly notorious for being wildly "out of balance."  With those two in mind, I can pretty clearly think of what isn't good.  But what is good balance?  That, for one, I'm not sure is answerable the same way across all games.  Balance in chess is limited to questions of the symmetry of the pieces and who goes first.  Of course balance in an RPG is quite different.

With that in mind, let's deal with the subject more abstractly.  We'll talk about a couple games.  The first that comes to mind is Path of Exile and it's Ultimatum League.  The parts of that game which feel the worst are those moments where you deal no damage to the enemy and they deal a huge amount to you.  There are a few reasons why this might come about but what is consistent between all of them is that it does not feel good at all.  On the contrary, you being in the position to pop every enemy that comes into your path with a single click, while more enjoyable, is not terribly engaging and leaves quite a bit of fun on the table.

We'll return to this idea later, but keeping on with PoE, in the Ultimatum League there is a Survival mode where a giant pile of powerful enemies are thrown at you all at once.  As the name of the mode suggests, you have to survive.  What I find interesting here is that while you have virtually no chance against these enemies, and that they can kill you quickly - the same problem described before - it feels nothing like a boss fight, where the same "difficult to kill/you die instantly" parameters exist.  I think this reveals something about the context in which the feeling of balance is experienced by the player.  To be clear, in both certain boss fights and in Survival you have no chance.  Nothing has changed there.  The biggest difference is the context in which the player is approaching the situation.  In Survival it is understood you can't win by fighting, the goal is to survive.  In the boss battle the goal is to win through battle and often times, if not playing optimally, you can't win.

This I believe is the key to good balance, however that actually looks.  I think the player needs to be allowed to compete in all reasonable situations.  Of course, we shouldn't expect a fresh player to be able to take on the final boss, there's quite a bit of fun in progression and we shouldn't leave that on the table either.  But all things being equal there should never be a situation where the player's ability to compete is impinged.  They always need the chance to positively effect their outcome.

Let's look at another example but now using this lens as a means to interpret things.  When I was considering my annoyance with PoE bosses killing you outright, I kept thinking about raid bosses in World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV or Destiny 2.  In those situations the bosses are far more powerful, some taking fifteen plus minutes to beat, even while playing optimally.  So what's the difference?  Why don't those extraordinarily difficult bosses feel as bad as the ones in PoE.  I think there are two reasons.  For one, the raids are often optional, you don’t need to do them to progress.  But secondly, I think the center point of the competition is different.  In raids the goal is most often to carryout a series of gimmicks to stay alive or to be allowed to damage the boss.  The main place the players compete "against" the game is in the learning and then successful performance of those gimmicks.  The annoyance or frustration that comes from repeated failure is often with the other players, not with the game itself.

So, let's come back to Not Actually a DOS Game and tie this together.  If it wasn't clear before, whatever the balance of this game turns out to be, my guiding principle is that the player should always, always, always, be allowed to compete.  What does this mean in the context of the game?  It would mean that unelected dramatic peaks of difficulty should be avoided.  It would mean that the player always has options to develop themselves in order to tackle harder content.  It also means that if there is content well beyond the player's current power it shouldn't bar them from going for what they want.

While these comments don't speak to the specifics of the game in hard detail, as it is a bit difficult at this stage of development, it does capture the thinking I am trying to apply to the project as a whole.  Hopefully this thinking will lead to a result where the game is both challenging but fair and one where the reward feels earned.

As said at the start.  A small demo is out on our Discord in the naadg-channel.  This is just to ensure nothing dumb is preventing people from playing.  A more substantive demo will be out be out in the coming days that will be posted here.  If you want to see the game in action be sure to join us on Discord and Twitter and keep an eye out for the demo.