What I'm going to do here is to try to build a game from the ground up using the simplest principles possible, and eventually relate it to various Halo titles. I'm going to explain everything in excruciating detail. The aim of this exercise is not to push my opinion on what constitutes a competitive game, but rather to explain what the vast majority of people in this community fail to understand, which is that for every option that is tweaked,
everything else in the game is affected. There also seems to be an outstanding lack of consensus as to the fundamental ideology of game design, which goes much farther than merely FPS games. To begin, let’s break all competitive video games down into their core components.
- Risk and reward – This is the simplest concept to grasp, which is that if a player chooses to execute a maneuver that is especially powerful or effective, it should come at greater risk to the player. This can be accomplished one of two ways. The first way is to either give the maneuver a long cooldown period, or otherwise endanger/harm the player if misfired. The second way is to make the maneuver especially difficult to perform, so that it is not an ideal approach in the general flow of the game. This principle applies regardless of whether you are speaking in terms of methods of attack, or other situational scenarios.
- Balance – All players must start on even ground (or in a loadout scenario, different but equal ground), and rely on their personal merit to gain the upper hand, wherein they will be rewarded and granted an advantage, in which case the opposing team must work that much harder to reclaim control. The environment and tools must be designed in a manner that makes gaining the advantage significantly desirable, creating an objective-based scenario, while at the same time avoids a runaway situation that prevents the losing team from ever regaining a foothold.
- Skill ceiling – At no point should the upper limit of individual or team performance be approached, there must always be room to excel. This means molding the mechanics of the game to ensure that it allows superior players to punish their opponents in almost all instances in which they are performing correctly. This will encourage strategy as well as advocate personal skill. There should also be a multitude of options given to each player, so maintaining a presence over the entire environment for either player is nearly impossible.
- Teamwork/skill ratio – A game should not covet either teamwork or skill above the other. If both aspects are desired and encouraged to be shown, there should be equal amounts “lone-wolfing” and equal amounts team participation. “Teamwork” in this scenario shall be the cooperation of two players in-game to accomplish a certain objective that requires both of them to be focused on the same task and coordinate themselves based on the status of the other teammate, as well as having two or more players working on isolated responsibilities. There should be value and significance in one-on-one encounters, and at the same time strength in numbers and overall team coherency.
With that said, there are certain rules that should be followed when forging the basic mechanics of a game.
- Do not fix something by indirectly altering something else. Every alteration has far-reaching consequences, and when you choose to alter a different variable in order to fix one you feel is broken, you create unseen issues that cannot be resolved until they are thoroughly explored and tested, rendering the previous exposition of known problems pointless. Known issues are determined within a defined environment and if you isolate them and fix them on their own, then the environment remains unchanged, only the problem is resolved. It is also much easier to predict further issues when you can tangibly compare one visible variable to the rest of the engine.
- When considering features, ask yourself, “what skill does this cater to?” Skill sets are perhaps defined as reflexes, precision, awareness, and creativity. When you are considering changing/adding something, invest time into figuring whether this alteration will reward a base skill set, and avoid adding things solely for aesthetic value. Analyze every interaction and limitation of the game, and explore whether or not these things can be changed to better enable a player or team to show true talent, but avoid changes that upset the balance of the game.
- Minimize randomness. Randomness is the antithesis of everything that is competitive, and every attempt to eliminate it from the game is beneficial. If randomness is present, it must be heavily controlled. A player should be given the opportunity to enact precise, responsive control over himself and any interactive part of his environment, and his in-game executions should be consistent to his input. Remove things that are consistent but make no rational sense. Do not overload the game with avenues of attack, to the point that it is completely impossible for the other player to guard at least somewhat effectively or predict his opponent's movement.
- Prioritize your mechanics based around the most common occurrences in the game. Barring any rare instances that prove to be game-breaking, you should mold the functions of your environment to ensure that the most common exchanges between players are the most consistent of all.
These are the bare fundamental rules of all games, virtual or otherwise, regardless of genre. If we accept that the point of a game or competition is to observe the superior winning out over the inferior by virtue of sheer skill, then to ignore any one of these rules is contrary to all good sense. They must be obeyed in order for a functional game to be created. With that settled, let’s get a little bit specific. Let’s talk about what makes FPS work, their general characteristics, objectives, and in-game advantages. Let’s also discuss what is favorable and unfavorable as far as conscious design is concerned.
- Base mobility – The defining aspect of any FPS is how you get around, including pure player speed, amount of three-dimensional mobility, and input reaction time. A functional system would involve exceptionally tight response to changes in direction, a brisk base movement pace that allows players to re-enter the action at reasonable intervals, considerable gravity to avoid "floatiness," and ideally a streamlined manner of moving in all dimensions.
- Health system – As has been demonstrated over the years, there are a few ways of implementing health, such as Halo’s rechargeable shields concept. A working health system is one that should punish players for taking damage and force them to seek out powerups to restore their hit points, so as not to create a scenario in which a defeated player's damage becomes meaningless.
- Weapon variety – A staple characteristic of the FPS genre is that you have weapons that vary in effectiveness and application. Weapons in an FPS should have differing functionality and power to promote gameplay variety and possible player specialization, and should generally avoid overlapping with other weapons in range and function. The melee system is especially important, and should be treated as a rare and situationally-oriented alternative to the player's firearms.
- Map design – Whether designing maps around player abilities or vice versa, maps must be crafted with utmost care. Maps should be designed to guide players in a cyclical pattern, but avoid bottlenecks and "no man's land." There should be clear lanes of fire in some areas, but care should be taken to avoid overemphasis on maps that encourage pot-shots. Each room or area in a map should have multiple access points, and powerups should be spread across all map sections.
- Aiming system - The mechanics behind firing your gun and tracking your opponents on-screen. This shall possibly include aim assist, bullet magnetism, aim acceleration/deceleration, bloom, recoil, and the visible HUD. Aiming is the most basic form of skill in an FPS, so the system itself should be responsive and solid-feeling, with as little assistance granted by the game as is practical. A suggested ratio of a "perfect" kill (e.g. three shot kill in H1) might be one out of every 10 direct encounters.
- Spawn system – A properly designed spawn system is crucial to the overall balance of a shooter, as it is one of the main aspects when considering options for a losing team to recover. Spawn systems should never spawn players in areas that put them at either a large advantage or disadvantage. The spawn system should have some small amount of predictability and be controllable to an extent if it is to be utilized in a skillful way, but remain random enough that it is not a damning factor for one team in the course of a match.
- Custom items/powerups/status effects/etc. – Depending on the particular design of a game, these sort of things can be used to add depth and variety. Powerups should compliment player abilities, and should ALWAYS encourage aggressive play, but remain at a reasonable level of power so as to be able to be neutralized should they be utilized in a careless way.
With that, we can come full circle and start talking Halo. I beg your pardon if I reiterate a lot of what has been said in my previous rants, but a lot of things are worth stating over again, given the seeming ineptitude of the audience I’m delivering this to. Halo is what could be called a “medium-pace” FPS, which is something that was definitely unique at the time of its release, and may still be, depending on your opinion. When you talk about what constitutes balance in an FPS, the speed of the game is often the biggest determining factor, though you must evaluate this in hindsight because it is a number of interwoven characteristics that determine a game’s speed.
It is important to differentiate between different types of shooters, because some modes of play will work if a game designer is intentionally trying to promote a certain style of combat. It seems to me that this only tends to be a problem when game designers attempt to install any amount of realism into their game. Let it be said that realism is almost always a hindrance and distraction to real skill, though it is important to note when this is significant. For example, it is entirely realistic that a rocket launcher would take some amount of time to reload (though not entirely realistic that someone can do it while running at full speed) – this is a good thing. It plays to the concept of risk & reward as well as a balance between power and vulnerability. An example of realism clouding the picture, on the other hand, would be bloom. Bloom is a characteristic of shooting games that is implemented solely to mimic real life limitations, but the fact of the matter is that bloom doesn’t cater to a skill. If the controller was violently churning in your hands as you attempted to fire on your opponent, then maybe that would be a case for its validity, but as it stands, bloom is a frustratingly needless feature in games with built spread already built in. But, I digress.
Consider that a 16-shot BR and sniper-start gametypes are both incredibly competitive, so to speak. A 16-shot BR would necessitate the strictest teamwork and the utmost focus on power items, but it would eliminate lone-wolfing and cause the power items to be extremely unbalanced. Sniper starts (or a weapon with sniper-like power and characteristics) would require incredible individual prowess, however it would eliminate the real effectiveness of power items and would also mostly abolish teamshooting. Furthermore, both scenarios, in their upset state, would cause the game to slow to a crawl by eliminating incentive to move, promoting clustering, and producing an altogether unfavorable game environment. Please note that these are hyperboles, so don’t read too much into them.
For example, let’s look at squad-based shooters like Rainbow Six or Call of Duty. You’ll note that except for the initial position-jockeying, these games are fairly slow. Why is this? To answer this question, we must consider a few different factors about the game that define it, and how they interact with and affect each other as well.
- Kill times – As is the general rule with squad shooters, almost every weapon is a power weapon. If you get shot, you are dead, as most of these games afford a player a very slim reservoir of health for the sake of realism. This has the obvious consequence of taking risk & reward to an extreme.
- Weapon characteristics – As squad shooters model themselves after realistic weaponry, you are going to be a very effective killing machine. Your incentive is to stay still due to the bloom, which will grant you a particularly long range of fire, so you are encouraged to stay in the shadows and either pick people off from a distance or surprise them as they try to move.
- Map design – The maps are usually large, complex, and littered with copious amounts of clutter as well as tight spaces. In addition to creating a wealth of hiding spots and hidden avenues of attack, most of the weapons have a very favorable range, which creates a large “no-man’s land” scenario in which you can’t traverse open areas, and in which you really can’t move anywhere without an extreme amount of caution.
So, you pretty much get the point by now. Squad shooters are slow. What about games like Quake and Unreal?
- Kill times – To contrast completely, arena shooter kill times are very slow, which ironically leads to quick gameplay in their case. There is generally a weapon "tier" system, but even the most powerful guns rarely kill in one hit, if that (or, they take a while to charge). This creates a scenario in which battles are specifically won by both aiming and outmaneuvering - made possible because arena shooters are based around rapid character movement - and are thus sometimes long and drawn out exchanges with daring acrobatics, as well as replenished health.
- Weapon characteristics – As previously stated, the weapons follow a more or less linear scale of power, rarely deviating too far from the normal course of the Doom-style caste system. Since the battles become longer, it is obviously of little use to attempt to ambush somebody, so the games revolve around cycling and protection of certain power items.
- Map design – The map design is of little consequence most of the time, but arena shooters generally feature medium-sized Colosseum-style maps that don't have "power positions" so much as they have common battle grounds, which are usually near powerups. Often the maps have zero clutter and each room has many access points.
This gives a general idea of how FPS games can be paced, and will hopefully enlighten some people on the fact that differently-paced games must be structured differently.
So with all of these guidelines laid, what should a properly balanced shooter behave like? What sort of signs should we see in-game that clue us in to whether or not a shooter is designed correctly?
- Even teamwork-to-skill ratio - In a shooter with ideal design, there should be perceivably equal parts communication and coordination with teammates as individual responsibility and performance.
- Strength off spawn or readily available powerups - If a game provides limited access to power items, then the game should afford a freshly spawning player with the inherent firepower to take down an opposing player in control of the map. A good indicator of this is the ability of one player to take out multiple opposing players of full strength, if he executes correctly and skillfully. If the player shall spawn weak, then the map shall be littered with available pickups. Due to the long duration and penalizing nature of death and spawns in Halo, a player must have a fair chance to wreak certain havoc on every spawning opportunity.
- Additive adaptation vs. subtractive adaptation - A shooter shall owe its skillfulness to a synergy of many different factors requiring a certain division of focus on the part of the player. It shall not derive its difficulty from the removal of avenues by which a player can demonstrate reflexive or cognitive prowess, thus constraining his ability to perform, for the main proponent of game-changing plays is creativity, which cannot be exercised when only a small number of avenues of attack exist.
- Absence of stalemates - A balanced shooter will demonstrate an acute lack of standstills that are not directly caused by overt team cautiousness. That is to say, there will be no qualities in the game that inherently discourage smart yet aggressive playstyles, and in no situation will a team assume an unfair amount of control over either the map or the power items that prevents the opposing team from being able to engage effectively and leaving as little as possible to chance. This will also be promoted by a game that encourages cycling and has many different points of objective.
- Counterbalancing vs. reward - The abilities and features granted to a player off their immediate spawn should be counterbalanced, which is to say that they are abilities with both positives and negatives. This is in direct contrast to items/weapons/etc. that are acquired externally, which should grant the player an uninhibited reward for displaying superior skill and map control.
So with all that said, why don't we run over some "practice problems" like we used to do in elementary school math books? The points given have been somewhat abstract, and you may be left wondering, "gosh Lemon, what you say makes sense, but how and to what do I apply it?" Which is a perfectly valid question. Consider the following:
1. If the given maps for a Halo game follow the archetypal "wide-open" design that has been prominent since H2, and kill times are long, what effect is sprint going to have on the game?
As much as you people didn't want to hear this at the time (and you all did NOT want to hear this at the time), sprint negatively effects the game balance, especially in objective gametypes. You all simply took that for granted because you think that since you run faster, the game is somehow faster. It isn't; believe me, I enjoy being able to get from point A to point B in a jiffy, but the entire point of this post was SYNERGY OF VARIABLES. What is the problem that has plagued Halo ever since the first game? Overemphasis on teamshot. What happens when you give players the ability to reenter combat THAT much faster after they respawn? Think about it for a moment, and please try to move beyond the "it would be boring to watch, otherwise" misgivings you all seem to have.
2. What purpose does bloom serve in Halo?
Zilch. Now we all know that bloom is annoying in its own right, but what is the actual functional irrelevancy of it? Bloom is meant to be a unique characteristic of the gun you are holding. It is supposed to differentiate between different types of guns and give players a choice for preference or ability. There's only one problem, though - everyone starts with the DMR. There IS no differentiation. If there was a second possible starting weapon that had a larger bloom and more powerful rounds (or the inverse), then bloom would have a purpose. But there isn't, and it doesn't.
3. It is difficult to avoid being killed by grenades. Should we alter the fuse time or the running speed?
I have to tell you, you all pissed me off to no end with this argument when Reach first came out. Once again, we revisit one of the fundamental principles I have given to you - fix problems in a way that is considerate to the big picture. You might be saying, "huh Lemon, but surely altering the grenade fuses is the most minimalist way of dealing with the problem," and you'd be right. However, Reach is plagued with problems - and the grenade blast radius is not one of them. Do you know why the absurdly long fuse for H1 nades was permissible? Because they were friggin' mini-nukes. You lengthen the grenade fuse in Reach, you nerf grenades beyond repair. And as it happens, base movement in Reach is sluggish overall. Thus, if you want to avoid grenades, increase movement speed.
4. Sanctuary could be described as one of the "wide-open" maps that are advised against. Why is it a desirable competitive map?
Sanctuary is designed in such a way that it does not encourage camping power positions and sniping, by virtue of a decent amount of cover in its open areas and one important factor, which is that it is not a map that was forged in the spirit of "skirting the rafters with your back to a wall and aiming into the center." Sanctuary is cut in half and the center section is walled off so that the action is naturally guided towards the more complex areas, but it also avoids being a bottleneck nightmare by containing many avenues of attack.
5. Are single-shot weapons more skillful than burst weapons?
In a word, no. Frankly, I don't know where this ridiculous idea came from, and the people who propagate it are utter idiots. Undoubtedly, their skewed perception on this subject comes from the BR vs. DMR/pistol debates, as they point this out as a somehow "self-evident" example of single-shot weapons being superior. If we look back, one of our core skill sets for FPS games was "precision." Now you tell me, does it take more skill to hold a target for five shots, or for twelve shots? That, if anything, should be self-evident. Do not confuse absurd amounts of aim assist, a large spread, and bad netcode as being a flaw of some kind in burst weapons. Think of the CE pistol as being a nine-shot weapon, instead of three - the range, accuracy, and kill time are all intact. Do you have the skill to hit nine shots?
Hopefully what I am telling you people is starting to make sense here.
