cedgedc wrote...
See this is a great ideal. The reality is something different however. When you release an rpg that allows you to mix and match abilities, the designers put together some semblance of ballance, with the full knowledge that no matter how they ballance things, players will always find a loophole.
I agree with this premise in theory, but are you somehow suggesting that adrenaline burst is a loophole? :/ If it is, that's a pretty obvious loophole that would have taken them about 15 minutes to discover....
cedgedc wrote...
Designers design class X to be played one way, but it turns out players design builds that allow you to play in a completely different fashion.
Mistakes are one thing, sure... it happens. Nobody is perfect. But there's not really any excuse for the lack of power in the biotic classes on insanity. This is easy to test. Likewise, it is easy to see that soldier and others have way easier ways of dealing with insanity.
If the class design is fine, then there is a design flaw with the health and layerings of shields/barriers/armor in the actual ecounters. The amounts need to be adjusted perhaps. If I had the source code and could tweak the balance, I could discover how to properly fix it.
cedgedc wrote...
Very often this doesn't get picked up early on- say in Alpha and Beta testing because testers/ players in those phases generally only go through the game, touring content, looking for stuff that is broken, bugged, not working properly etc. They look for the obvious problems with the game.
Of course. I don't blame them for trying to fix quest bugs before balance issues. Still, balance issues can be the easiest to fix because these parameters are often all in a single location and are scriptable or there some config file somewhere that can modified.
Considering the costs to build the game, the cost to attempt to perfect to balance is actually kind of small. Even then, it can be fixed after launch if they are so inclined (but that never happens in a Bioware game as of late).
They could easily hire someone like you or me to play their game at a fairly cheap price to look for balance problems while they get it ready for production. In many of these cases, there has been delays due to PC/xbox versions being developed at different times and so on. This is a great time to do balancing.
cedgedc wrote...
More importantly however, most take it for granted that different classes have different difficulties associated with them. In ME1 I found sniper to be all but impossible to play as, as many fights started you veritably in melee range with your oponents. Much more challenging than assault, where these encounters where I'm forced into close range have no affect on my performance.
Players only take it for granted because they've gotten used to unbalanced games. This is really not a good excuse, especially since Bioware has contributed unbalanced games for as long as I can remember. Perhaps KOTOR was among the few games that was balanced a little tighter than usual, but it still suffered (like all bioware games) the difficulty scaling problems - hard in early levels and easy at later levels.
I also found the sniper rifle to be impossible to use in ME1 for the most part. The real problem though was the accuracy mechanics. Most of the VII sniper rifles and lower had an accuracy of 1 or something very small. Assassination also didn't give a 100% chance to hit... so you could miss with your most important skill. It wasn't until you got a Master class sniper rifle where the Sniper Rifle actually started to pay off. Even then though, the Pistol or Assault Rifle were better :/ The accuracy mechanics in ME1 were simply not very well thought out - another reason why spamming Biotics was better.
There were situations in ME1 that *should* have been a sniper's dream... like disabling the bomb on that red planet and firing at the guys on the ground once you left the building. But it actually really sucked and was very inefficient and risky way to kill them. It was always better to just charge in with immunity with a pistol or assault rifle :/
cedgedc wrote...
If you're going into an RPG with the assumption that all classes will provide the same challenge, require the same amount of skill, and achieve the same results, then you're being a bit naive. No rpg I have ever played has been this way. Try playing dragon age origins as a mage then try it again as a melee rogue. It's night and day.
Whether I am naive or not doesn't dismiss the balance problem that exists
I have played Origins. I think Rogue and Mage are both really strong. Playing as 2h warrior is a sure way to gimp yourself in Origins, so that's a better example of a class imbalance. Playing a tank is just redundant, especially at the beginning :/
Of course, in DA2, they switched it around. 2H warriors became the imba-class. This is super clear.
cedgedc wrote...
IF you find it too easy to play through in one style, then it is up to you, the player who is challenge-conscious, to challenge yourself. Again I reiterate that the 'warrior' archetype, in nearly every rpg created, has always been viewed as the more beginner class type. Some MMO's and such have branched away from this, but on the large part, it's still very much a truth.
Origins is the clear example where this wasn't the case actually. In BG2, all classes were actually quite powerful. Mages of course were rediculous at high levels, but all of them got to be quite good if you equipped them well and buffed them up appropriately.
Still, I don't think it's the player's responsibility to do damage control on balance problems. This is a game design problem.
Modifié par egervari, 04 avril 2011 - 10:01 .
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