In one of the most fascinating sessions of GDC, Bungie designer Jaime Griesemer talked about the art of game balancing, illustrating his views with the apparently tiny decision to extend the rate of fire for the sniper rifle from Halo 2 to Halo 3 by 0.25 seconds.
Accompanied a remarkable collection of Halo 3 screenshots featuring Master Chief apparently holding aloft a series of increasingly large in-game objects, Griesemer admitted early on that the rushed development of Halo 2 meant that its multiplayer was released with no balancing. "We played it on Live and it felt wrong. Somehow we knew it wouldn’t have legs," he said, saying the game that he held in his head didn't match the one he was playing.
It quickly became obvious that the sniper rifle was more powerful than other weapons, because 'optimisers', players who find effective strategies and stick to them, began to use it exclusively. He quickly released a patch, which increased melee damage and gave grenades smaller blast radii, but he never addressed the sniper rifle. It was a decision he clearly regrets: "Make the hard choices - don’t put them off."
To Griesemer, balance is an art rather than a science. It's getting the sweet spot in a game between complexity and simplicity, neither boggling nor boring players. It's a barely manageable set of choices. It's about sitting between chaos and certainty, players neither blindly guessing what they should do next, nor feeling that whatever they chose has a set conclusion. And it's certainly not about engineering equal payoffs or fairness – that's why rock, paper scissors is a bad game: it leads to randomised choices.
Crucial to balance is a sense of flow. The sniper rifle's design is all about maintaining the sense of continuous in-the-moment gaming: "It has very specific timing based on what makes your fingers happy," Griesemer said. Spectacle, too, is important to keeping players in flow, with the sniper rifle creating a contrail and sound effects being subject to a delay over long distances. Such exaggerated causality makes the gun look good on YouTube, because viewers can easily see what's happened, and players don't break out of the game's flow in order to figure how what's just happened. And most sniper rifles aren’t fun, he claimed, because they don’t generate flow.
Indeed, Griesemer said, "Control over flow is the essential design skill," explaining that half Bungie's designers majored in philosophy. "It's not a science – you don’t need a theory, or a control group," he said, advising designers to play the game they're creating in their heads, making mouth noises and detaching themselves from the technical issues of framerate and bugs their game is undergoing in order to get connected with their design.
But not too connected. "Pro players say that the Halo makers are shit at their own game - it’s true. I’m not that good on purpose," Griesemer said. Playing well at his own game makes him feel good, but he mustn’t confuse that with feeling good because the game's well balanced. He spends hours happily driving the Warthog around because it's already well balanced and an intrinsic part of the game, but he mustn't spend time 'imprinting' himself on elements of the game which don't work so well, learning to accept their rough edges when he should be considering cutting or overhauling them.