Comments on: This Game Doesn’t Have Enough Characters

By: Winter

Winter — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 08:29:33 +0000

Often times (when they want the games to be balanced) developers WILL test every paring, as much as they are able to at least. Obviously with huge, crazy games like Dragonball (or Marvel vs Capcom 2 or what have you) that’s not possible, but for normal fighting games they will absolutely test them. For example, Sirlin (of sirlin.net) relied on the years of experience everyone had with Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo when he was making HD Remix mode (rebalanced mode) of SSF2T:HDR. As an example, he said that he discovered in a certain match the key for one character was to do a certain move over and over again by having someone mention it to him at the end of a tournament he ran once. Years later, someone else mentioned the key to playing the OTHER character in that match to him.

So that’s the kind of balance that can go into a game. In the huge roster games, though, you don’t get that… (There are ways you can mitigate the problem of a big roster, mind you…)

By: Carnival of Video Game Bloggers, March 2009 @ The Collected Writings of James Newton

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 23:04:21 +0000

[...] green-fingered Eclipse is next with two offerings: the first is This Game Doesn’t Have Enough Characters, a sentiment which, as a Sonic fan, I’ve never shared. However, Video Games vs. [...]

By: Eclipse

Eclipse — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 21:19:00 +0000

Hi Michael, and thanks for dropping by.

You make an excellent point about needing to test for combinations of fighters, and I wish I’d thought to include that when I was writing this post.

In truth, I doubt developers test every combination in games with ridiculous numbers of fighters. Still, I imagine they would test pairings they expect to be troublesome, to make sure that they work out well enough. Other than that, my guess is they use their feel for the game and mechanics most of the time, and test when they think there might be a problem.

By: Michael Chui

Michael Chui — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 05:36:47 +0000

Now, in attempting to do a licensed game right, developers have to focus on making the characters who are in the game worthwhile characters to play, as well as design the rest of the engine from the ground up. All of this takes a long time to do. A different thing to remember is that you're usually balancing pairings. Do a little bit of combinations. For 8 characters, you have 28 combinations. For 20, you have 190 combinations. For 162, you have 13041 combinations. Imagine the developers actually going through each pair and checking those for balance. And the best way to do that checking is to actually play it through a few times. (Automating it using AI would be possible, but arguably lower quality for anyone with brains or dedication.)