Weapon balance

Weapon balance is the difference in power and abilities of the available weapons in multiplayer first person shooter computer games. It has a very immediate impact on the gameplay of these games. In large communities, players soon discover and exploit weapon imbalances to dominate other players, who will not enjoy the game as a result.

Designers of multiplayer FPS games often go to great lengths to not only balance weapons, but to achieve a desired style of gameplay. This involves vast amounts of play testing and tweaking.

Players often describe individual weapons as being balanced or unbalanced depending on how powerful they are found to be in use in normal gameplay.

The concept of weapon balance can also be expanded into class balance, where players can freely choose numerous class of avatars, that have its own strength and weakness and meant to complement each other as a team.

Elements of a weapon's balance

* Damage: the damage done per shot by a weapon.
* Accuracy: most weapons are modelled as less than perfectly accurate. The percentage of shots which hit will tend to fall off for less accurate weapons as the range to the target increases.
* Splash Damage: whether damage will also be done if a shot does not hit perfectly, and the range and falloff for this damage.
* Ammunition, magazine size and reload time: adding various ways weapons can cut out at inappropriate times reduces their overall effectiveness.
* Rate of fire: a weapon which fires faster does more damage but empties its magazine more quickly. Some weapons, such as beam weapons, fire continuously, but this is often modelled simply as a weapon with a high rate of fire.
* Availability: the ease with which various weapons can be obtained strongly affects the potential for damage from that weapon. This is particularly true of realistic first-person shooters in which significant changes in the nature of the weapon would detract from the realism. Powerful weapons must therefore be made harder to obtain.

Weapons can also take a number of different forms, such as instant-hit weapons, slow-moving projectiles such as rockets, grenades, mines, melee weapons and so on, and this distinction can have an effect.

Most often the situation will be nothing like this simple. In some games two weapons can be used at the same time; in others, weapons may have multiple modes of fire with very different properties; in some games, weapons come only as a 'kit' and so kits rather than weapons must be balanced. These differences are what make a game individual and unique, but at the same time, they can make achieving an enjoyable weapon balance very difficult.

Different balances

Different players favour games with different weapon balances. Also the style of game has a huge bearing on the desirable weapon balance. Heavily competitive, fast-paced deathmatch games like Quake and Unreal Tournament favour very carefully balanced weapons. In Quake 3, for example, there is no weapon which is universally weak. Every weapon has a particular strength and may have significant weaknesses against players wielding different weapons. In more realistic, team play games (such as the Counter-Strike games, the Battlefield games and so on) weapons are not usually so well balanced, because simply killing the enemy is not the objective. Teams work together to achieve other objectives such as capturing locations or planting bombs, and a fair fight is not always called for.

Sniper rifles and similar tend are particularly controversial in deathmatch style games, but are considered an essential element of the weapon balance in realistic shooters and class-based team games. In the former, sniper rifles allow the wielder to accrue numerous kills while only really being vulnerable to other snipers. In the latter, the decision for players to take up sniper rifles is a tactical one. In most, the maps are designed to prevent snipers taking overall dominance while still allowing for a significant role.

Examples for Weapon balance
Quake
Railgun
The railgun in Quake II, III and IV is well balanced because although it does very high amounts of damage, it takes around a second to reload after every single shot; it is hard to achieve good accuracy at close range, which is the most common situation in Quake maps; and most importantly would-be rail-gun snipers tend to remain vulnerable to other weapons, particularly rockets.

BFG10K
Experienced players find Quake's BFG10K too powerful, and they are not found on any of the heavily-played maps or professional maps. The BFG is widely said to be an unbalanced weapon.

Quake III
Quake III's weapons are so well balanced that in mods such as Rocket Arena 3, players are given all the weapons (except for the BFG) as they begin a round, and still find they use almost every weapon.

Unreal Tournament series
Unreal Tournament has good weapon balance despite each weapon having a very different secondary fire mode. The Flak Gun, for example, is very useful as a shotgun at close range, but can also fire fragmentation grenades which are powerful at longer range. Because the weapons can each be used in different ways, there is more flexibility for a player to tackle any given situation with whichever weapon they prefer.

Redeemer
Sometimes a weapon is intended to be overpowered. The Redeemer in Unreal Tournament, for example, is a steerable nuclear missile that can kill several enemies. It is however balanced because it holds only one shot and the missile can be shot down by other players before it hits its target. This weapon does not greatly disrupt the game because it is very rare and cannot be used in close-quarters without killing the wielder.

Halo 2
Halo 2 has a particularly uneven weapon balance. In very open maps, sniper rifles can dominate. In medium-sized maps, battle rifles are very powerful. Energy sword users are almost unassailable in close maps. Halo 2 players call a combination of charged plasma pistol and battle rifle the "noob combo", because it is almost impossible to defeat in many situations, regardless of the skill of the player using it. These effects are compounded by the fact that Halo 2 does not respawn weapons still in use. This weapon imbalance forces teams to work together to challenge these dominances, but Free-for-all games suffer in comparison.

In April 2005, Bungie Studios adjusted the weapon balance of Halo 2 to increase the power of grenades, melee attacks and the Brute Shot and reduce the power of other weapons, including the magnum. They claimed that in play, grenades were not an effective technique against opponents wielding two weapons at once.

Class balance
Related to weapon balance is class balance, typically employed in team-based multiplayer games and MMORPGs. Originating in Team Fortress, this is employed by almost every team-based multiplayer game. Unlike straightly weapon-based games, each class is chosen before the player is spawned on the map.

Generally, every class will have one or a set of unique weapons or abilities that only that class can use. However, aside from the aforementioned elements of balance (sans availability), there are also other elements that determine their balance:

*Walking speed: As mentioned before, a class with heavy weapon may be forced to walk slowly (or not at all) when moving or firing, making its high firepower moot when being assaulted by a faster player.
* Health and Armor. Some classes may have higher health then others, while some may be able to regenerate health by themselves. Some games even differentiate between types of damage dealt by different weapons (One class may be better at dealing with weapon A while another class may be better at dealing with weapon B).
*Usefulness: Even in the same game, the different objectives may require the team to have more of a certain class than another. For example, one class may hold heavy weapons and walk slowly, while another class may be capable of constructing defenses (such as engineers from Team Fortress or Enemy Territory). Medics could be the only means of restoring health to team members, while scouts/spies may move either very fast, or have the ability to disguise themselves, while carrying very weak weapons. The combination of these classes in a team can mean the difference between victory and defeat. For example, in Enemy Territory, a defense team that has few engineers is usually defeated.

Examples for class balance
In many medieval fantasy MMORPGs, there are classes (often called sorcerers, mages, druids, priests or healers) who have few hitpoints, but are powerful spell casters, and knights (also known as warriors, barbarians, etc) who have a high amount of hitpoints, but have less powerful or non-existent spell casting abilities.

Team Fortress Series
As one of the first class based games, Team Fortress balances each class well, making them all very useful. Engineers and 'HWGuys' (heavy weapons guys) typically build defenses, while Scouts, Soldiers, 'Demomen' (demolitions men) and Pyros (flamethrower men) are typically on offense. Medics can help by either healing their teammates or assaulting, due to their higher health and regeneration ability. Many other class-based games are derived from Team Fortress, and may employ similar tactics.

Enemy Territory
As a realistic class based game, Enemy Territory requires a careful balance of classes in order for the team to succeed. Assaults typically involve Engineers using a dynamite stick to blow up objects, and thus, both sides require quite a few engineers, as a defending team can stop the assault team by diffusing the dynamite sticks; however, defense typically does not involve any Engineers. Since health and ammo packs are sparse, both medics and officers are needed to resupply teammates in order to succeed. Officers can also help by marking certain areas with artillery or even air strikes, denying enemy entrance to the area. Medics, with their high health and regeneration, can storm in to grab objects. Covert Ops are useful in blowing up some objectives and sniping, while Soldiers provide heavy weapon attacks.

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