"Why Gjallerhorn is overpowered" (Destiny)

by CyberKN , Oh no, Destiny 2 is bad, Saturday, August 15, 2015, 17:21 (3485 days ago) @ electricpirate

"It's funny, there's an interesting reaction, which is the opposite of what we wanted, because we're actually trying to create more viable options so you have more choices to pick from," says senior designer Sage Merrill. "There was a bug late in the development of Destiny where the trails didn't appear for the sub-munitions of Gjallarhorn, so you couldn't see what it was doing and it wasn't this spectacular display that it is now. However, the bug didn't get logged as, 'This doesn't look awesome." It got logged as 'isn't powerful enough.'"

This fun story gives us some insight into one of the reasons that Gjallarhorn might have become a dominating force among the Destiny community. Merrill went on to describe the intricacies of weapon balancing and why developers find it so tricky. A designer can't always trust the cold math that dictates a weapon's DPS, because our own human perceptions tinker with how a game feels balanced.

"I can overpower a gun just by adjusting the audio," says Merrill. "People will say, 'this gun is useless,' but then we change the audio to give at this huge sniper boom and the next day people will say, 'this gun is completely broken and overpowered.'" All we did was change the audio. It doesn't matter if guns are really balanced, it matters if they are perceived as being balanced. I could have a gun that is completely underpowered, but if everybody assumed it was really strong because it felt badass, we would probably still have to do some balancing to it."

I don't believe a word of this. The Suros Regime sounded like it was firing Ping-Pong balls, but was still considered one of the most devastating weapons pre-nerf.

I agree that hard math isn't the end-all of balancing, but "I can overpower a gun just by adjusting the audio" is the most absurd thing I've ever heard.