Replying to a player on Twitter who said recent patches have made the game “unplayable,” Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt conceded that he’s not satisfied with his studio’s current balancing approach.
“Hey, yeah I think we’ve gone too far in some areas. Will talk to the team about the approach to balance,” he wrote. “It feels like every time someone finds something fun, the fun is removed.”
I don’t get it.
There is no need for balance in PVE.
Just make every primary viable to use (within a reasonable level by boosting them all), then balance the enemies off that and add new enemies and guns.
As long as you don’t get severely punished for not using meta weapons, then why does it matter? Not everything has to be perfectly balanced, especially a non-competetive game…
I fucking hate the “meta” era of online gaming we are in. Everything has to be meta. “You shouldn’t use that gun, it deals 0.3 DMG less than the others”, “that armor is bad since patch 27383727 3 minutes ago”, “how dare you play this champion that has a 2% lower win-rate”.
Fuck off, meta is something that became relevant for pro gaming. I don’t give a shit about the meta, this is bronze, it literally doesn’t matter at the skill level 99% of players are at. People just want to have something to blame when they lose: “of course you won, that weapon is OP/imba/busted”.
And it’s making its way into pve/coop too now. Every time I launch a new online game I have to learn what people want me to play so that I don’t get yelled at. How about you just let me play? So what if my build is not optimal?
I think gaming has made amazing strides, but along the way some people forgot that the main goal is to have fun.
MWO and EvE have entered the chat
What are you going on about lol? I am saying that anyone can use any gun without being literally unable to play higher difficulties because it is too bad… If something is so fucked that you will never get close to winning without using X gun, then that is literally a “meta” that you can’t win without and I am arguing against doing that?
Helldivers is literally one of the least toxic games I have ever played. Nobody gives a fuck what you use or do as long as you don’t intentionally team kill or screw the team.
I was agreeing with you but ok.
What I’m talking about is the culture of constantly balancing everything, which inevitably creates a meta that needs to be followed. In pve games like helldivers, no need to balance imo. Back when constant patches in games weren’t a thing, a strong gun was just that, a strong gun.
Also, even though I don’t play the 2nd game, from cursory readings of Reddit and Lemmy posts that reach the front page, it seems a lot of players are quite mad at some weapons being stronger than others.
You are describing balance, actually. If all weapons are viable and you’re not punished for using one instead of another, it means that they each have their niche or they’re balanced well. And the balancing target is the enemy.
It’s easier to balance in a pve game because the AI behave predictably and have known stats. Tweaking AI and enemies is a good tool for pve balance, but only as it can allow some mechanics to be viable. Tweaking enemies will do nothing to balance weapons between themselves.
There is another balancing bullet too : making the game so easy that the relative power of weapons between themselves doesn’t matter. But it cannot work with HD2 because the game is supposed to be hard.