Game balance is something that will be a hot topic as long as video games continue to be made. In competitive, multiplayer games, one does not have to look too hard to find raucous discussions about certain characters, abilities, or weapons being overpowered or underpowered. In single player and cooperative games, these discussions aren’t nearly as prevalent; however, for the developers of these titles, game balance is still a high priority. Striking the correct balance between accessibility and challenge is an art game designers all over the world have striven to perfect, with a wide variety of success. This week on Two Cans Gaming, I want to take a look at one particular balance issue in the recently released game Gunfire Reborn.
What is Gunfire Reborn?
Gunfire Reborn is a first-person shooter, wherein players utilize dozens of different weapons, powerup scrolls, and powerup orbs to fight their way through different worlds packed with enemies and ammunition. It also takes significant notes from rogue-like games, meaning that the weapons and powerups available to players change every time players. This inconsistency is by design, as it helps make each play session of these rogue-like games provide a unique experience. On the other hand, this randomness means that designers can not assume that players will consistently encounter any given weapon or powerup.
The Problem
The problem arises when we compare Gunfire Reborn’s single player experience against its multiplayer co-operative experience. This problem is that the addition of more than one player makes the game significantly easier. Players are typically limited in that they can revive themselves only once in a given playthrough. Once up to three other partners are added into the equation however, players are able to revive each other, frequently bypassing this “one revive per game” limitation. This means that when playing alone, you are allowed to only make one fatal mistake before you are forced to end your run and begin anew.
The developers behind Gunfire Reborn have implemented some defensively-oriented powerups to address this problem however. One such powerup is the scroll named “Triple Comeback”. This scroll gives its owner two extra opportunities to pick themselves up, meaning that player is allowed to make three fatal mistakes before a game over is earned. There are also a few scrolls that give players more maximum health, decrease the amount of damage taken, or provide more opportunities for healing, but these are similarly few and far between. The reasoning for doing this makes sense: dealing high amounts of damage is generally much more satisfying than not taking damage, which is why the majority of the powerups offered increase players’ damage output. This decision just unfortunately means that solo players rarely get the survivability tools they need to survive the high damage output of certain enemies.
There are a few possible solutions that Gunfire Reborn could implement to remedy this disparity between the multiplayer and singleplayer experiences. One possibility is to limit the number of enemies that actively target the player at a single time. This would make each encounter more survivable, while still presenting high-pressure combat situations for the player to tackle. Another solution would be to scale the accuracy of enemies’ attacks with the number of players currently in a given game, similar to how enemies’ health currently scales. This would help reduce solo players’ reliance on defensive power-ups to be able to complete a successful run, while maintaining the necessary difficulty increase for multiplayer. A third possibility is to add one-shot protection; this system could prevent the player from losing more than 50% of their max HP in a single hit, or could prevent an attack from killing the player unless they have more than1 HP remaining. Such systems have been used in action games before, as fighting for your life once you are on your last sliver of health has been proven to be an excellent source of excitement.
Why Bother?
While another possible solution is to remove the ability to play Gunfire Reborn alone entirely, this approach would definitely have a negative impact on the game’s player retention. There are many reasons players may choose to play games alone: their internet connection may not be consistent enough to support online play, or they may simply prefer to not interact with the game’s online community. Abandoning this portion of your game’s playerbase by disabling solo play is a move that is extremely unlikely to be well received under the best of circumstances, and it is for this reason that I would not remove the single player aspect of Gunfire Reborn. But as stated above, it could use a little tweaking.
In the meantime, I hope the upcoming holidays leave you feeling reloaded, and I’ll see you next week!
-Mark