Quake Wars Dev Diary #1: Balancing Asymmetrical Multiplayer Team-Play

Developer Diary from
Paul "Locki" Wedgwood
Managing Director & Lead Game Designer
Owner of Splash Damage Ltd


The man leading the charge on the new Enemy Territory kicks off our new developer diary series with a look at game balancing.

By Paul 'Locki' Wedgwood | July 10, 2006

One of our Most Wanted games of 2006, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars looks to blend the best of several worlds: the class-based teamplay of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory; the wide-open, go-anywhere, vehicle-laden mayhem of the Battlefield games; the sci-fi setting of the Quake universe; and the technical horsepower of an id Software engine.

At this year's E3, we had our first chance to try out the game for ourselves, and we suspect gamers will get the same chance at QuakeCon 2006 in just a few weeks. As work on the game continues, we kick off a new set of developer diaries giving a behind-the-scenes look at how Splash Damage and id Software are attacking the various challenges inherent in building a huge multiplayer game, starting with the biggest hurdle: balancing.

Introduction

My name is Paul 'Locki' Wedgwood and I'm the owner and Lead Game Designer at Splash Damage -- developers of id Software's Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (ETQW).

Past Projects:

E3 2006 and Players' First Impressions

We came out of E3 2006 on a huge high; ETQW scooped-up over 30 awards and nominations from dozens of websites, magazines and official show judges, including Game of Show, Best PC Game, Best Shooter, Most Anticipated Game and perhaps most importantly, several awards for Best Multiplayer Game of E3 2006.

Following E3, Splash Damage and id spent weeks reviewing the status of Enemy Territory. 2006 has been a great year for us, with incredible response from the press and the community. It's also been a challenging year, as the team here has given extraordinary effort towards completing the game this year. Unfortunately, sometimes effort isn't all you need -- sometimes you just need more time. To ensure the quality we want, we've decided to push the release out of 2006 to allow for extended testing, feedback and game balancing.

Asymmetrical Gameplay Balance

One of the largest development challenges we're facing (and an extremely important issue to those of us that are ex-clan players) is the balancing. ETQW's unique asymmetrical teams and objective-based missions present interesting challenges. Matches are balanced internally, but we know that a larger community of players can develop more strategies and exploits in a week than internal testing can discover in a month. This is why I've decided to talk about gameplay balance in our first developer diary entry.

We're now entering the beta phase of the game's development, and this signifies a change of focus for our design team and our collaboration with id Software; that of achieving great multiplayer gameplay balance. However, ETQW's multiplayer focus on military objectives challenges us with balancing hurdles that didn't exist before.


Those of you that played ETQW's predecessor, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, will know that Wolf ET had opposing Allied and Axis teams that were fundamentally the same. As a result, we were able to use a commonsense approach for balancing the game. We balanced the weapons against each other using a simple "Damage Over Time" formula that took into account their damage per round, rate of fire and reload speed, which resulted in the total damage the weapon could deal in a given period. You could do this on paper and be fairly sure that your initial implementation of weapons would work out well.

However, ETQW features asymmetrical gameplay with fundamentally different teams, each featuring unique character classes that make use of different items, tools, abilities, weapons, vehicles and deployables, battling in maps with different military objectives for the invading alien Strogg and human Global Defense Force, in turn resulting in player rewards for team play that unlock yet more abilities and items. This asymmetry is unique in ETQW's multiplayer combat and really adds depth to the team play, but also adds substantial complexity in tuning and balancing the gameplay.

In the past, real-time strategy games, such as Warcraft III, solved similar balancing challenges with dozens of automated "chess computers" that played each other over and over, simulating thousands of hours of play in response to small gameplay changes by the designers. We can't do this with ETQW because you can't accurately predict the endless (and often crazy) tactics and strategies that 24-32 real people will employ against each other in our campaigns. The balancing challenge with ETQW is further complicated by the nature of each mission's objectives. The alien Strogg and the human GDF each have unique military objectives that they must pursue while battling each other to achieve victory -- not just flags to capture or bases to defend. These objectives -- such as constructing a bridge or hacking a shield generator -- require unique cover, concealment and fortification. The routes between critical locations need tuning, which in themselves are inherently asymmetrical because one side is generally attacking while the other defends.


Despite its overuse by game designers, the rock-paper-scissors analogy is nevertheless relevant to all of this: instead of comparing two units based on the comparative effect they have, we implement "counters" to each team's ability, tactic, or employable strategy. Each ability of one team needs a counter-ability for the opposing team, which in turn needs a counter-counter-ability for the original team: every great sniper location needs opposing concealment for attackers; each open vehicle route needs cover for defenders; every choke point needs fortification.

Our solution, then, is a heuristic approach: that of gut-feeling, passionate theoretical debate, iterative revision, thousands of hours of human playtesting, and yet more animated discussion. This is an accurate meter for judging asymmetrical gameplay feedback, but a huge undertaking -- each one of ETQW's maps could be compared to four Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory maps in depth and complexity.

The end result in all of this, though, is that ETQW will feature incredibly focused gameplay balance. For us, this is not just a goal, but rather a design imperative that drives every element of ETQW's multiplayer combat.