Perfect Imbalance in Games

Written by: Alisdair Araujo

In the case of most games, you as a game designer don't want things to be perfectly balanced. There should always be some imbalances in your game system, be it carefully crafted, subtle imbalances. As seen time and again, games become more engaging with just a little bit of imbalance. Multiplayer games are good examples of this.

While this does sound odd and counter intuitive, let's think about the opposite of this with an example of Chess. Chess is a symmetrical game and in being so, is balanced. For the casual player, personal strategies will evolve over time and every game will feel fresh. However for the non-casual player-base, fixed strategies end up being created, most optimal ways of playing the game, aka a Meta.

Now taking a video-game, as an example.

When Star-craft became closest to numerical balance the entire genre of Star-craft changed from a strategy game to an action game. Best possible tactics were calculated and it became a game of who could execute on those tactics the most efficiently. This caused the game to feel stale and repetitive. Perfect balance can limit the number of interesting decisions a player can make.

When it comes to perfect imbalance, MOBAs’ especially League of Legends (LoL) tends to get it right. League of Legends creates a meta game which is a constantly evolving state of play. This allows players to experiment and grow. It allows players at all levels of play to continuously change their strategies and grow without having an artificial wall to overcome without getting into the strategy and experimentative parts of the game, But perfect imbalance isn't haphazard, game elements are carefully crafted imbalances built into the system. This helps create a game within a game in trying to figure the system out.

The second part of perfect imbalance is called cyclical imbalance.

Let’s say Game element ‘A’ is slightly better than average. Everyone will start using ‘A’ This causes people to start thinking about countering ‘A’ which leads us to ‘B’. This makes ‘A’ look weak in the current meta game, leading to a drop of champion ‘A’. All those players are looking for a new element to help them counter the now dominant ‘B’ leading us to champion ‘C’. This keeps the game from feeling stale by creating a constant and ever changing environment for players to grow.

How to create a cyclical imbalance?

You have to create a game, where no matter how skilled a player is, his character can’t be great at everything. Second, you need a firm knowledge on what beats what and thirdly you need to give your players a wide enough array of options, so they can find an answer to anything you throw at them, without it being one predetermined plan.