Hey everyone. We just posted what is essentially our treatise on game balancing for a game with an open ended character development system; something we’re very concerned with for our current game under development. I’d be greatly obliged if anyone wanted to take a look and offer their thoughts on the subject:
http://crowquillgames.com/the-game-within-musings-on-balance-upgrades-and-phred/
It reminds me of a very good article from 2010: http://www.eldergame.com/2010/11/how-to-balance-an-mmo-and-how-to-stop/
Like said PHRED gets open-ended improvements, so the complexity rises with the skill branching. At some point even a dedicated QA team won’t be able to cover and test all those combinations. You may hand out a beta version for public testing to collect enough data, because data is the key in my opinion.
I’d actually like to see more games that throw balance to the wind. Sure, balance out the basic stuff, but let the synergy go wild. Looking back, those are the games I had the most fun in.
Mass Effect 1 had some neat combinations of mods for guns and ammo. On my third play-through, I had a sniper rifle that was 1-shot-1-kill, but had a cooldown time of like 5 seconds per shot. It was amazing, and I loved using it. ME2 and ME3 had no such overpowered combos, that I found, and I didn’t enjoy them nearly as much.
Saga of Ryzom had the ability to make your own spells. Some intrepid adventurer figured out that you could use the heal spells, along with the mana-recoup, to keep an entire group of like 10-20 people healed all the time, so long as they didn’t screw up. This let groups of people fight things that would have been impossible otherwise. I loved the game at this point. Because of this ‘exploit’, they revamped the entire magic system and it was crap forever after.
For PvP, balance is essential. I understand that. But for PvE and single player games? Let us have some fun!