Why Are Games So Hard To Balance?

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Balancing games is difficult. Really difficult. To make things worse, we don't understand a lot of the thought that goes into making games interesting to play and replay.

Who better to tell you all about balance than world renowned Wrong About Videogames Person, The Architect? It turns out, the best way to balance a game, might not be to make it completely balanced to begin with.

You Watched:

Battle Chef Brigade (2017)
Hearthstone (2014)
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance (2007)
Overwatch (2016)
Chess (about 500CE)
Half Life 2 (2004)
Magic the gathering Arena (2018)
Rocket League (2015)
Warhammer Total War 2 (2017)
Minecraft (2009)
Fortnite Battle Royale (2017)
Metal Slug 3 (2000)

Interesting Links

A series of balance articles by David Sirlin in which he is right about a lot of things and wrong about MtG: http://www.sirlin.net/articles/balanc...

Magic the Gathering lead designer talks the ethics of Colour Pies, weird but interesting: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles...

Gamasutra article on some of the challenges of making Battle Chef Brigade: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/3...

My apologies for some sliiight audio issues you can hear towards the end of the video, not sure what caused them but you probably didn't notice them until I pointed them out.