Game balance

http://nethack4.org/blog/strategy-headroom.html (Author’s mirror: http://ais523.me.uk/blog/strategy-headroom.html)

I found this article a bit hard to read, but maybe the central point is something like this:

A game with high-headroom game (e.g. Nethack) gives the player a lot of freedom in their decisions, but this results in some options (known by having spoiled yourself) to be clearly superior and thus makes the game easy for experienced players (and also in Nethacks case near-impossible for non-spoiled beginners). A game with low-headroom (e.g. Crawl?) instead makes all the decisions completely about the current situation, causing the player have to aggressively adapt to the one path the RNG is pushing him towards. The problem is then that if for example you want to play a wizard character but the game won’t let you because the loot happens to have no spellbooks and instead there is a lot of good melee equipment. Playing to win, the low-headroom game subtly trains you to play its way rather than yours. But as a tradeoff, the game can stay challenging even for experienced players who would enjoy struggling with an underdog character. A low-headroom game aspires to be “balanced”.

The ideal for a low-headroom game is that it forces you down a particular path to victory, that varies each game. If the path that the game “wants” you to take doesn’t work half the time, though, there’s a problem.

Many indie game developers glorify “meaningful decisions” in games which seems like the same thing.

I think I used to like (the idea of) low-headroom games, as I saw them as skill-based rather than memorization based. However, for a long time now I think I’ve enjoyed the act of expression and roleplaying more than proving my skills (for that, I play go). For a game like Fallout New Vegas which I’m likely to only play once or twice in my lifetime, it’s very fun to make a character I want. I may self-impose challenges if find the game too easy. Nethack also clearly takes this approach of recommending self-imposed challenges rather than programming the game to be “fair” and “balanced”.