Using game balancing to affect the difficulty of games.
January 7, 2025
When designing the difficulty of your game, especially in multiplayer, balance is an important consideration.
For those who don’t know, balancing in game design is the way designers adjust the way different parts of a game interact with each other to achieve certain design goals, and balance in games is when the components of a game are equally powerful in relation to each other(not accounting for player skill).
The slow time to kill and the forgiving ranges of weapons in Fortnite makes the game more casual and lowers the skill ceiling dramatically, whereas the fast time to kill and unforgiving weapon considerations combined with the obfuscated and intricate spray patterns of Counter-Strike(among other things) makes the game highly competitive and creates an extremely high skill ceiling. The Counter-Strike series is not a game where you can snipe people with a pistol(looking at you, Fortnite).
The way your game is balanced can heavily affect how difficult your game is. Having to learn the balance of a game can create welcome friction, although when not done right it can create an unnecessarily steep learning curve. Nobody wants to memorize 5 billion stats just to begin a game. However, other games like Dark Souls utilize this learning curve to create systems that encourage, and often require, mastery.
There are many other ways that balance can be used to affect a game's difficulty such as creating tighter niches for items or nerfing easier to use items and systems. Now it's important to note that a game's learning curve is independent from a game's difficulty level. Difficulty is, in its most simple form, how much a game demands skill higher than your current skill. Ease of use is an important factor in balancing and while simply using this factor may create uninteresting and uncreative items and systems, using this alongside other factors can create balance that fosters effort, practice, skill, and challenge.
For this scenario let's assume we’re a game designer working on a FPS. In our game we decided to have our main weapon be a pistol. Our pistol is a mid range weapon with a time to kill of 2 seconds. We want it to require a little bit of skill to use. Now, let's make it a primary weapon in the beginning of our game.
In the beginning, the player has no experience or skill. As such, by balancing the pistol around a slightly higher level of play we have altered the difficulty of our game using balance. Now let's make a variant pistol. Let's use the same balancing stats from the standard pistol and change two stats: ease of use and reload speed. Let's make it considerably harder to use by reducing the damage output.
By simply changing this stat, the variant pistol feels like it is weak and underpowered. But this is where the reload speed comes in. By reducing reload time to even out the time to kill, we have created a weapon that feels different from the starting pistol. To make it even harder to use, let's remove ADS(Aim Down Sights).
The normal pistol excels at defending positions. In a 1v1 duel, even from medium range, and even against a medium range intended weapon, the standard pistol will win because of its higher damage output and the controlled and slightly methodical approach it encourages.
The Variant Pistol is much more chaotic. It can take on multiple opponents at once and its versatility rewards players with the skill to use it. It is balanced in a way that can add more depth and challenge to the game while still remaining balanced.
The way that the difficulty is designed is not in increasing enemy stats or nullifying certain approaches, it is in the design of the balance. I believe this to be a much more interesting way of designing difficulty as it also dramatically increases the skill ceiling while making your experience harder, as a whole, I think that this approach feels much more organic.
When proper balance is achieved, everything should have a niche. There should be at least one situation where said item or system is powerful. With the pistol and the Variant Pistol we created niches for both weapons.
Now, for demonstration purposes, let’s create a sniper. A sniper is one of the most complicated weapons to balance and requires you to really think out how you want it to play(and also if you really need it). For now, let's make it play “realistically”. We want it to pick off targets from a distance, and be useless anywhere else. For simplicity's sake, let’s set three ranges: Close, Regular, and Far.
Let’s say that Close is <30ft, Regular is 30-75, and Far is 75+. Let’s balance the game around the regular pistol. Let's say the regular pistol’s range is Regular, let's say the Variant Pistol’s range is Close, and the snipers range is Far.
One part of difficulty is how much you punish the player for making mistakes. The difficulty of the Souls games is highly derived from how punishing it is.
In Elden Ring, a single mistake can mean game over.
Back to our scenario, If a player holding a Variant Pistol runs out into an open field and sees someone with a regular pistol 40 feet away. We’re going to be a bit forgiving with our players and let the player with the Variant Pistol still hit some shots but deal less damage.
But now let’s tighten the niches a little. Imagine the same scenario from before. Now, the player with the Variant Pistol fires a few shots and they don’t even hit. Player A didn’t use the weapons the way the Game Designers intended them, and they were punished severely. The game instantly got harder.
There’s a difference between “versatile” and “unbalanced”. A versatile weapon can be used in many situations, an unbalanced one can be used in any. Think about duct tape. It can be used in many different situations, but you can’t get by without using other tools. Otherwise we’d see carpenters running around with duct tape to make furniture.
There's one more method for adjusting difficulty with balance. How do you make things harder for the player? You make them weaker. But if everyone is weaker, then it makes it easier to survive. If it’s harder to beat other people, then it is easier for you to not be beaten. Going back to the introduction, which game is harder, Fortnite or Counter-Strike? Of course it’s CounterStrike. There’s a reason why it has a thriving esports scene and players are still getting better. A lot of this has to do with the premise and goal of the games, but it’s mostly one factor: time to kill.
Fortnite has an extremely high time to kill, making it easier for newer and less competent players to do well. Whereas Counter-Strike can sometimes have a time to kill of 0. The ultimate answer to time to kill is not in making the player weaker, but in making them stronger. A lower time to kill is ultimately less punishing, fostering more casual play. The TTK(time to kill) of Counter-Strike is punishing and is balanced around skill. That’s the final secret to creating difficulty through balance.
Time to kill(In the context of difficulty) should increase proportionally to skill level. Let's look at one weapon in CS that has 0 TTK: the rifle. The rifle can kill an enemy in one hit if you shoot them directly in the head, which requires substantial luck or skill in aiming.
Counter-Strike also utilizes weapon spray to increase TTK proportionally to your aiming skills. Fortnite’s time to kill is not controlled purely by skill, but by luck. The weapons do a flat rate of damage, but the weapons you get are randomized. The more powerful the weapon will always win, thanks to the removal of the building mechanic.
Fortnite is an easy game. It’s intended to be played casually and appeal to as large of an audience as possible. The game exists as a progression system for the battle pass, skin store, and other social elements. Fortnite is far less difficult because of the significant impact of luck and most importantly, the TTK.
We’ve learned how time to kill can be balanced around skill, how niches can affect difficulty, and how playstyles can be balanced in a way that encourages skill and really challenges the player. Balance is not a single statistic.
Making all the enemies have twice as health will not make the game difficult in the same way as using balance. Balancing is a very powerful tool that can be used to affect the playstyles and depth of a game.
The balancing method feels more organic because it also affects your game's skill ceiling, creating ways to go even beyond what skill you demand of the player. Balancing is a complicated topic, and can often lead to entirely new departments being created. It grows with complexity as artificial depth(new characters, abilities, weapons, etc.) is added. This method is very useful because it adds depth while minimizing complexity.
This essay is by no means a complete guide, but I hope that anyone reading this will find interest in this method to dive into the many nuances of balance. Read more and this original article at my blog, Tech With Arjun.
Image Credits
Epic Games - Official Fortnite Blog - “Say Cheese! Here’s how to grab the best screenshots.” - Article March 2, 2020
Riot Games - Valorant - Weapon images for regular pistol, variant pistol, and sniper in diagram
Riot Games - Valorant - Gameplay Screenshot
Fromsoftware/Bandai Namco - Elden Ring Gameplay Preview - November 4, 2021
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