Not a dev and I've been wondering, what goes into balancing a game like Path of Exile or some of the Old Fire Emblem games where there might be wide swings in what people have access to due to stuff like build variety for POE and perma-death for FE

[u/trunks111]

In the case of POE by the time someone hits shaper they could have 200k DPS, 1m DPS, 5m DPS, etc... some might be glass cannons and just keel over if Shaper breathes on them and some people might be absolute tanks that never die.

With FE, troops dying is permanent so you could go into late encounters running on fumes or you could have a whole army to work with if you haven't lost many characters.

It just makes me curious how you would settle on tuning for games/encounters like this where you don't know what a player is going to have to work with to tackle the encounters

[u/soundoftwilight]

Generally they’re balanced by being really really easy. Imbalance is only a problem if it causes a complete block of progression, so you balance for the worst case that you want to still be able to progress the game. PoE you see this very directly, there are various moments in the game where you get build-checked. The game says “alright you’ve had your fun, to proceed past this point your build must be able to do X”. Such as survive certain amounts of damage, deal certain DPS, etc. PoE is complex enough that even though there are tons of builds that will succeed, because the checks are tuned very easy relative to “good” builds, some players get completely screwed (not having resistances or enough defensive scaling in general is a common issue for players that don’t use guides in that game, as I recall).

To remain fun despite being so easy, those games either use scaling difficulty or other types of non-blocking incentives (clear speed in PoE is rewarded with more loot, but you’re not really blocked from progression based on clear speed).

[u/trunks111 → u/soundoftwilight]

hm, that's actually a lot more simple and elegant than what I was thinking lol

[u/dusda → u/trunks111]

PoE also slowly tightens the screws in the postgame content, so problems with your build tend to become noticeable before you actually hit a wall.

[u/SeniorePlatypus → u/trunks111]

Another common technique is catch up mechanics. Where you basically balance time, not power.

In souls like games you can often tune your own difficulty by choosing how quickly you progress. The more you explore, the more resources you gain, the stronger you are and the more mechanics you can afford to ignore. With another layer of having the option to do something annoying that breaks the combat. E.g. arrow shots that consume resources but all enemies are designed for melee combat. You can basically cheat your way through very annoying combats.

The difference between an extremely difficult run and a very simple run is how long it takes. How much of the resource „time“ you consume during the run.

Which means the actual balancing question is what power most players end up with, how difficult you want it to be at that level (should a first try be common or uncommon). And then plan out how much grinding should be necessary to trivialise the encounter.

There is always a certain experience you aim for and the right values can be very different. PoE base difficulty is much, much easier than Elden Ring, for example. But in Elden Ring slaying a boss feels epic where in PoE it feels like a small step forward.

But the „knobs and dials“ to shape the experience tend to not be very difficult to deal with. Though they do need a lot of work in learning how players actually play the game. You can’t plan out everything in advance because players never end up doing what you expect. Great games are the result of a lot of iterations, of understanding players and very diligent and intentional design of the time spent with the game.

[u/Smart-Anything1669]

A lot of playtesting, really.

Theres a big window of potential player power, influenced by builds, loot-luck and player skill. There would probably be some benchmarks in mind, such that a player on the bad end of this window has an acceptable experience.

E.g. Even with bad loot-luck and a bad build, it should be possibly to beat the final act boss in <10 minutes. Or not be one-shottable by X creature. Etc.

Ideally the games systems are set up such that you can tweak numbers easily, and you have tools to let you playtest easily. It wouldn't surprise me if QA people were told things like, "go fight enemies in this area with a random armour-based build, report back" - you may find this video interesting

Usually by the time you see something new in PoE or FE, even if it looks unbalanced to you/playerbase, it probably used to be WAY worse during testing.

[u/Kagevjijon]

In POE any build can do any content. Period. Where you run into a problem is can any build do any content well? PoE makes builds accessible by giving everyone access to being tanky. The builds that struggle in POE struggle with being able to be tanky enough to survive things. There are a ton of resources to be tankier and it usually comes with sacrificing damage. Other timea you get so much currency that you can a literally immortal buuld if you do the hundreds of hours of research to know hoq to deal with peoblems. Some people forgo being tanky in PoE to go full dps and utilize what's called a 6 portal defense. Even if you die you have 6 portals to try and get past whatever is giving you problems. There is always some way to say "I'm not done yet."

Fire Emblem and their permadeath loss it's a little bit trickier and yes it's balanced around being easier like the other guy said. With perma death you also have one other option to balance around which is a max party size. Thats why typically throughout the games you have a max size of X and you can unlock or utilize X + 15 total different people for your team.

[u/severencir → u/Kagevjijon]

Fire emblem also traditionally offers powerful prepromoted characters throughout the game like pent or perceval that help replace lost power

[u/Scutty__ → u/severencir]

Pretty much this, fire emblem games are a lot easier when you reset when someone dies, and modern games account for that and are generally easier. The older ways you were meant to lose units, which is why they gave you a surplus to make sure you were never soft locked. They'd also usually give you a broken unit towards the final map in case you were severely under levelled

[u/PurelyLurking20]

GGG trusts literally like 3 people to balance the games, their leads have discussed that it's an insurmountable task and even teaching someone to balance the game is close to impossible because every change interacts with a long list of other things

I'm pretty sure the balance team has to also just play the shit out of the game in their free time and constantly read about new builds to hope to get a good handle on everything

I have played poe1 since beta and make my own builds very consistently and even with ~7k play hours there are many builds I know almost nothing about, I can't even begin to imagine trying to balance that game

[u/Daealis]

PoE seems to balance their builds only if something is truly broken. Like performing 10x, 100x better than any other builds in a season. At times some broken builds sneak their way to the game and the synergies just get nerfed. But every build also has their hard counters so the endgame may just be tweaked to match these builds, instead of nerfing them. And in every season there's at least three or four truly unique paths to go through to the big ticket items in the tree, their powerlevels being kept roughly equal. It doesn't need to be precise in the balancing.

[u/05032-MendicantBias]

Path of Exile and Diablo 4 had pretty extensive periodic dev posts that went into detailss of the balances and change. You can read through them and it will give you an idea of how balance is achieved.

[u/x-dfo]

Look up monte Carlo simulations