+1 (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, July 01, 2015, 22:47 (3232 days ago) @ Korny

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.

Were you with Grey Matter, or Treyarch?

Treyarch.

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).

The issue is that some guns are that way by design (Hawkmoon can kill in one shot if you're lucky, two shots if you're slightly less lucky), and I think Bungie based their weapon philosophy on DPS as a whole. If you mess with the perks, you gotta take into account the way some stack, and how some perks (such as Full Auto) tweak the base stats of the weapon (or player). And that's before you even get to base stats on a weapon. It makes sense WHY they take the "easy" approach, but I think it's wrong too...

I'm not really sure that it's "easier" to do it the way that it seems it was done. I just think that they didn't expect balance to be such a big deal, didn't expect players to play so close to the bleeding edge of "best theoretical builds," and didn't plan out how to keep balance as the game progressed. I mean, a lot of the workflow and design of the game just seems backwards to me from how you'd want to do a progressively adaptable game with a constant stream of new content flowing into it. They automated all kinds of things that would make more sense (and take little time) to have curated (bounties, Xur's items, Nightfall modifiers etc.) and simultaneously made a game world that seems to have hard-coded enemy types, spawn numbers, levels, etc. all the while claiming that this is a world that will grow with the players. Heck, even the "random" in-game world events are actually on a very predictable schedule. It doesn't make sense to me unless I frame almost every design element in the cloak of "how can we be evil to get our players addicted?" And that makes me sad.

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.