Playstation LifeStyle interview with Luke... (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, July 01, 2015, 19:42 (3233 days ago) @ Xenos

Speaking as someone who has balanced weapons in FPS PvP, I think bungie has been balancing their weapons in exactly the wrong ways.

They seem to come up with base models for each class, balance all of those, and then add in perks and exotic behavior. The problem with this is that players don't want to play with the base weapons; they want the ideal perk combos and exotics with the largest advantage.

When I worked on weapon balance for the early CoD games, we took the ideal scenario for each weapon and balanced those. Then we removed all of the bonuses and looked at the base weapons to see if there were any truly horrible outliers. If there were, we buffed those base models in ways that kept the final, ideally upgraded weapons' stats the same as when we originally balanced them (eg: the DMR with ACOG scope was balanced, but with iron sights it was awful, so we added some zoom to the iron sights to make the base model not totally horrid to use).

We also played with other stats on the weapons. The BAR in CoD:BRO was just the best gun, period. Our weapon designer wanted it to feel authentic, but sadly the authentic reason that not every allied solider had one in WWII was because they were too expensive and took too long to mass produce. So to keep the accuracy and damage values in line with the real weapon, we reduced the player's walking speed, ADS speed, and turning speed when they had that weapon equipped. Likewise, when people used the pistols, we greatly increased movement and turning speeds to make up for the guns being totally inaccurate at range and doing (relatively) little damage. As far as I'm aware, that game was the first FPS that actually messed with player controls in an attempt to balance the weapons.

Anyway, I think Destiny's weapon balance should be re-assessed assuming every player has an ideal roll for their chosen weapons. Balance that, remove the perks, and then modify base stats to bring every weapon up to a baseline 80-90% effectiveness compared to the ideal roll. I also think they should make time to kill slower across the board (current TTKs of less than 2 seconds are not fun).

That all being said, the real problem with Destiny multiplayer is the awful netcode. I don't really get how you can go about balancing weapons when you still have invincible players running around soaking up golden gun shots and people getting postmortem melee kills. Gotta fix that first, imo.