Since all the obvious answers have been covered, I’m gonna dig deep on a genre nobody but me even plays anymore anyway.
Character-based asymmetry in versus puzzle games. It’s never been remotely balanced, and I don’t believe it ever could be.
Suppose I put you in charge of developing a balance patch for Puyo Puyo Fever, Puzzle Bobble 3, Magical Drop, Meteos, etc, you could just name any other puzzle game that has this. What changes would you make? What changes could you even try to make?
If you look at something like a fighting game, characters have large movesets, and every move has a bunch of variables attached: startup, active, recovery, hitstun, damage, meter gain. Which means there’s a lot of surface area for developers to adjust and fine-tune until the cast hopefully feels balanced enough. Even if they don’t get it right on the first try, they can gather data from players and use that information to figure out what needs to be patched.
Puzzle games have little to no room to even try to do this. So when you try to give character choice a mechanical effect on gameplay, but they only do one thing like a dropset or garbage pattern, there are almost no meaningful buffs or nerfs that can be handed out when it turns out that Void Hole is kinda good and Skeleton T kinda isn’t.
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix famously tried, and, well, an attempt was made but it ultimately couldn’t do all that much. The tiers got shuffled around slightly, but it’s still Ken Fighter.
Since all the obvious answers have been covered, I’m gonna dig deep on a genre nobody but me even plays anymore anyway.
Character-based asymmetry in versus puzzle games. It’s never been remotely balanced, and I don’t believe it ever could be.
Suppose I put you in charge of developing a balance patch for Puyo Puyo Fever, Puzzle Bobble 3, Magical Drop, Meteos, etc, you could just name any other puzzle game that has this. What changes would you make? What changes could you even try to make?
If you look at something like a fighting game, characters have large movesets, and every move has a bunch of variables attached: startup, active, recovery, hitstun, damage, meter gain. Which means there’s a lot of surface area for developers to adjust and fine-tune until the cast hopefully feels balanced enough. Even if they don’t get it right on the first try, they can gather data from players and use that information to figure out what needs to be patched.
Puzzle games have little to no room to even try to do this. So when you try to give character choice a mechanical effect on gameplay, but they only do one thing like a dropset or garbage pattern, there are almost no meaningful buffs or nerfs that can be handed out when it turns out that Void Hole is kinda good and Skeleton T kinda isn’t.
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix famously tried, and, well, an attempt was made but it ultimately couldn’t do all that much. The tiers got shuffled around slightly, but it’s still Ken Fighter.