The Balance game

 Losing the will to grind

I think perhaps the least fun part of the game development cycle, unless you happen to be mathematically inclined I guess, is the whole 'balancing' of a game's systems after you gone through the fun part of actually making it. Sitting down and deciding how much XP a single area should divulge so that players don't level too hard too fast, scaling damage so enemies take and dish out as much as the original vision intended and pulling back on unforeseen master-builds that the developers didn't even realise were possible when they shipped the game because players just be that wild sometimes. It's a headache, to be honest. But a necessary headache to maintain a balanced gameplay experience for all players, because it is important that these games cater for everyone and don't just funnel everyone to playing in the exact same fashion because "this is the way to win." No one likes those sorts of games.

Of course, there are certain games where the idea of balance reigns much more supreme than others. Cobbling together a broken character in XCOM  is something of an achievement in itself for the amount of RNG that needs to go right in stat generation and gear drops- but when we're talking about broken classes in a PVE-yet-Competitive style title like a Diablo game... and nerfs start becoming necessary. I mean the entire point of Diablo is to try and become like a god squashing puny mortals beneath your boot. When I played Diablo 3 the build I left on was a Necromancer with Simulacrum and a Bone lance powered up to one shot everything short of the game's final bosses- which then turned into a oneshot because I had two Simulacrums. Sure, that seems kind of broken but it's more endgame leaning, because there'll always be another harder world tier that will force me to change up my game if I intend to keep up with the carnage. Diablo IV is just starting on that journey now.

The first season of Diablo IV has kicked off and beside resetting a depressing amount of progress (requiring side quests to be grinded from scratch in order to meet basic faction-level buffs like 'increase carried health flask number') the developers at Blizzard also took their hand at rebalancing the game to put everyone on the same playing field. And in doing so the team took the route of nerfing literally every single class in the game, destroying certain powerful builds, nerfing XP rates from slain mobs, buffing certain problem mobs- and altogether just kneecapping everyone and rebuilding the path back to excellence into an even more time-consuming slog. Sure, there was that one Necromancer that managed to one-shot Uber Lilith one time- but when 90% of Necromancers can't even touch the final dungeon, surely that's something requiring subtle tweaks rather than full scale nerfing? (As if Druids needed to have their capabilities diminished even further.) 

Understandably this has ruffled quiet a few feathers as Diablo players are left scratching their heads wondering what happened to the wonderbuilds they had in their pocket just a scant few weeks ago. We're talking completed builds that took hundreds upon thousands of hours to cobble together, presumably in waiting for some new content to challenge it, only to now feel somewhat worthless in a rebalancing of the world's power. Of course, it's not like everyone is reset back to zero... unless you want to partake in the season in which case you absolutely need to reset back to zero because there's currently no system for 'rebirth' in the game as of yet. It kind of feels like Blizzard has flipped the 'reset' switch on absolutely everyone at the same moment, and left a plethora of unhappy players along the way.

Of course, we as players know there are only a few ways that our discomfort can be made known to those who make these games, and although there's only one method that will actually make a difference, there's very few communities out there that are genuinely willing to quit playing a live service game in protest. Instead those upset prefer to let their grievances be known through review bombing, the most annoyingly vapid technique for upset that the industry has come to rely on. And yes, Metacritic currently lists the user review score of Diablo at around about 3.0- with protest reviews practically dribbling out of the coffers. Somehow I think it was the widespread statements of 'quitting' that more inspired the emergency fireside chat from the developers.

In their fireside conversation the team were somewhat upfront about their reasons and thoughts that go into making content in a manner that really opens up the veil between developers and the public. It's interesting to know, for example, that they did consider the top most dungeon that only a few classes were capable of facing up to, to be too hard because the idea is to make content that will keep the most people entertained for as long as possible. Unfortunately we are beholden to the three-month patch cycle that seasons allow, forcing today's mistakes to last for a quarter of a year, but it's comforting to know that in some instances the developers are, in fact, aware of the community they're just stepped on. They even went so far as to promise they won't do a patch like this again. 

But they didn't cover all the concerns of the community. For example, no word at all was given as to why players can't have as many stash tabs as Diablo's biggest competitor offers, further sparking fears that such is because the team intend to sell increased stash space on the premium marketplace. And if the word we hear from Blizzard trying to justify the lack of stash space is anything to go by, I wish Diablo was just going the greedy monster route. According to a community manager replying to a inquisitive soul on Twitter, the Stash tabs are actually so limited because every single player you meet in the seamless open world game is rendered fully from all their equipment and inventory to everything they have in their individual stashes- so Diablo simply lacks the memory to load all of that data. If that's true... I weep for a studio once considered the creame of game development.

Balance is the key to keeping the replayability of games alive, and when we come to titles like Diablo which are meant to keep the entire company buoyant for the next two years at least- replayability is a pretty big issue! Sure, there's a certain 'too big to fail' aspect of Diablo which makes the games immune to bad press to a certain degree, but an unhappy player base is a poachable one and now that Path of Exile 2 has been announced (hopefully with better netcode this time around) it seems that only the masters of their craft are going to be able to stay ontop. I think what we can learn from this is that if your priorities are split between what the game needs to feel balanced and what the investors need to be assured you're correctly monetising the game: you've already lost the fight,