How can you tell if a game is balanced? While many different metrics can be used, oftentimes, it’s better to just “feel it out” at first. If something feels unbalanced, figure out why and adjust it. When you feel like something is balanced, you can then apply more strict metrics to it and see why exactly it is balanced. While you can use these strict metrics from the beginning to balance a game, I believe that doing so will actually get in the way of “fun” and instead leave you with a game that is technically balanced but boring. I think that Super Smash Bros.: Ultimate is a great example of a fun game that is also balanced. Super Smash Bros.: Ultimate uses the “fruity” game balance technique to obfuscate its balancing mechanics and focus on the fun, and its core mechanics use a “transitive” balance technique nested within an “intransitive” balance technique to make this fun more fair.
When a player is playing Super Smash Bros.: Ultimate for the first time, they are not immediately bombarded with “transitive” or “intransitive” game balances. Instead, they are presented with a fundamental “fruity” game balance that underpins the entire gameplay experience: the vast number of characters and the gameplay differences between them. Unless someone really understands the metagame, it’s difficult to judge if some characters are better than others. It really is like “compar[ing] apples to oranges” as the assigned article says. Of course, there are characters that are better and worse than others, but for a casual player, it’s a much smaller factor. This discourages new players from worrying too much about what the best choice is and inadvertently “optimizing the fun out of the game.”
Of course, that gameplay balancing is still there, and the game uses an “intransitive” rock-paper-scissors approach to game balancing in actual gameplay. Players have three primary non-movement options in a match: attack, shield, and grab. Shields block attacks, grabs overcome shields, and attacks break grabs. This creates a constant rock-paper-scissors matchup in which players will choose an option and attempt to predict what options their opponent will pick. Following along the “fruity” game balance that comes with different characters, some characters are better and worse at each of these options, so the way you play the game changes based on your character and your opponent’s character in addition to changing when the literal players change as well.
Within this “intransitive” game balancing is also a “transitive” game balancing technique: the different moves that each character has. In addition to just deciding whether to attack, shield, or grab, players often have multiple different attacks to choose from, multiple different movement options, and multiple different follow ups. This means that at any moment, players have to not only decide what type of move to use but also which move of that type to use next.
All of these choices are expanded upon and contextualized by all of the other outside factors in the game: what stage are you on, are there items, are there platforms, what percentage of damage am I at, what percentage of damage is my opponent at, etc. This results in a game with so many options and decisions that how “balanced” it is changes across different levels. For example, if both players are playing the same character on a flat stage with no items, then the game is perfectly balanced (technically it’s not perfectly balanced due to programming quirks, but it’s effectively perfectly balanced). If one player is playing a character with great air movement, the other player is playing a character with horrible air movement, and the stage necessitates a lot of air movement, then the game is not balanced. All of these differences are obfuscated and buried under all of the “fruity” game balance options mentioned previously, so the result is a game that is usually pretty balanced, but this is usually hidden from the players.
