An asymmetric industry

This week in our workshop we were asked to play Fox and Geese. It's a game where one player controls 14 geese and one player controls one fox. The fox is trying to jump over all the geese (which is symbolic for eating them I guess, unless jumping over them causes them to teleport somewhere), and the geese are trying to surround the fox. Clearly, 6 geese can take down a fox. When I initially started playing it I thought "hey hang on, this game is clearly not balanced, the fox has much more power to do". However, after playing it for about 3 seconds, I soon discovered that the geese were balanced to match the fox's evil-jump-of-killing-geese-death-amon.

The current state of the industry, I think, has needed to and is needing to continue to move towards asymmetric titles which are very well balanced. This is probably due to the rise of the RPG and the use of RPG elements in almost every genre. RPGs by nature offer enough customisation to encourage a player playing through a game several times. This customisation of course creates a different play style every time, removing any equality between characters. This has become the norm for first-person shooters. Sure, there may be some similarities such as character speed, but there is usually enough difference between them to cause the label "symmetric" to become redundant.

One of the first games to start this off were the Final Fantasy games. From around 2 or 3, the "job system" was introduced. This allowed you to pick primary jobs (or classes) for your characters and had a massive effect on each character's moveset and abilities. Add to this the ability to have multiple jobs and the combinations were effectively limitless, warranting excessive amounts of play. While I haven't had much hands-on experience with this title, I can guarantee that most people have their preferred job set. The combination they believe to be the most powerful or useful. Were the games balanced? I haven't heard too many complaints regarding jobs being too weak or too strong, but this may be because this is a player vs. environment game. I believe players are more impacted by imbalance when other players are involved.

The first-person shooter used to be one of the most symmetric genres around. All players started with equal health, speed, payload and equally efficient locations. While there were a lot of different guns players were able to pick up, and some ridiculously super powered ones as in the case of Quake II, the reality is that all players still had equal opportunity to these resources. This all started to change with the development of Counter-Strike. In CS, players were able to buy new more powerful weapons every round. Depending on how many people they or their team killed, they would receive an amount of money to buy whatever guns they wanted. This is quite balanced to play mind you, some of the weaker guns in the hands of the right player are just as deadly. But this inclusion of RPG elements in an FPS game began the gradual removal of symmetric gameplay from the genre. The fact that players could be very unique in an FPS game left players wanting more.

Enter the modern FPS. Something like Call of Duty 4. Dark Seeker. Battlefield 2 and 2142. These games have incorporated RPG elements with great care to create a truly customisable yet balanced system. Take Battlefield 2 for example (since it's the one I've played the most). Battlefield 2 rewarded you experience points for every kill you made, every game you played and every capture point you earned. Once you've gained enough points, your avatar will level up, allowing you to unlock a new weapon of your choice. You could select between the different classes and unlock a few new guns for each. This gave you more options to select from instead of just the default weapon load-up. The Heavy Support troop could get a PK machine gun, which was a lot more powerful than the standard gun, yet was balanced out with a higher inaccuracy to make sure that the weapon didn't dominate completely. This holds true for all the weapons, and it is truly a credit to the games designers to maintain a perfect balance with all the customisability.

So what? What does it mean if the game industry is becoming more and more asymmetric, at least in the case of FPS games? Well, specifically for me, it highlights the need to give careful thought to any variance between players, and to consider the effects on them if any changes are made. The best way I can think of to achieve this is just excessive amounts of play testing, fine-tuning, and trying different combinations to ensure we have a flowing piece of genius at the end.