I suppose I should apologize for being a year late to this particular party, but Erich Schaefer's odd remarks about balance rub me the wrong way. Today the "balance is boring" speech continues to serve as the ideal landmark identifying the flaws of Torchlight which Runic "didn't even bother" to address in Torchlight 2. As you can see from the title, someone needs to play Danica McKellar to Schaefer's Gucci-obsessed Paris Hilton.
It only takes a few afternoons with Torchlight 2 to see that it's a fine loot-centric action RPG with a lot going for it, in general and compared to Torclight 1: great aesthetics with smooth-running graphics that look great on low settings on mildly outdated machines, responsive controls, vastly improved style and variation in level design, more and better bosses, online and LAN multiplayer capability not present in Torchlight 1, and the return of the trademark pets who run your shopping errands for you. But what may turn out to be its saving grace is its extensive modder friendliness.
Indeed, Torchlight 2 comes with the Guts mod editor (so called because it lets you modify the "guts" of the game to your liking). Mods are kept in a folder kept separate from the canonical patch version of the game, and any number of them may be chosen for inclusion whenever the game is launched.
The reason I call this a potential "saving grace" of Torchlight 2 is because of, well, balance issues. Oddly enough, the balance between the player and the enemies is good, but the overall play experience is currently a bit of a spam fest fueled by a never-ending supply of overpowered health and mana potions.
It is a compliment to the game that I think it's even worth modding in the first place, though!
The potions problem
I was only in Act 2 before I broke down and started working on a potions nerf mod, and I'm finding it to be a vast improvement so far. It is difficult to exaggerate how overpowered potions are in Torchlight 2 and the damage it does to the game experience. They are both potent and spammable, restoring health or mana at a fast rate and having little downtime before becoming available again. Mana costs are way too high, but it literally doesn't matter. And health potions? The player has to walk into the proverbial Mordor if he or she is expected to die while under the effects of a health potion - and the game tempts the player to do just that, since potions bolster the player's cockiness up until the critical point at which enemies are overleveled enough to burst the player from 100 to 0 in half of a second, catastrophically breaking the sustain barrier. Barring this circumstance, the net effect of health potions is that the player is unkillable as long as she doesn't play too far ahead and is quick on the potion keys. Runic may as well cut the middleman and simply put up a big golden bar representing the player's wealth which fills up as she gains loot and empties as she casts spells and/or takes damage. Hopefully the reader is as bored by the prospect as I am!
I would go so far as to say that the unbalanced state of potions makes the game more boring. In other words, sometimes unbalance is boring. Anyone who's ever played a first-person shooter with cheat codes for more than ten minutes is likely to agree. Schaefer "doesn't even try" to balance Torchlight 2? Maybe he should try. It's somewhat astounding that potion balance has been totally overlooked when most modern games (see World of Warcraft's cooldown timers, or League of Legend's gradual potion effects) keep them in check. Even Baldur's Gate had this under control!
Let's talk about cooldown timers
Not satisfied with a simple potions nerf, next I set out to break up the monotony of skill use by balancing around cooldown timers. As my examples of the problems I am faced with, I am using my Torchlight 2 remakes of two League of Legends champions - Anivia, recreated as an ice Embermage, and Leona, recreated as a sword-and-shield Engineer.
My Torchlight 2 Anivia has a right-click attack that shoots several bolts of ice in a cone, sometimes (but not always) stunning or immoblizing enemies it hits. She also has a hotkey skill which drops a comparable AoE of ice on the cursor, doing about the same amount of damage and applying roughly the same crowd control effects with similar likelihood. This hotkey skill has a measly four-second cooldown. In other words, I have a second copy of my right click on a short cooldown that adds almost nothing to the game.
I hope this looks like a problem to you too. Imagine if the hotkey skill did several times as much damage, always applied crowd control effects, and had a cooldown timer of something like 10-20 seconds. The result would be that I would have to make a meaningful decision about when to use the hotkey skill. If it also cost a sizeable chunk of non-refillable mana, then things really could get complicated - why, Anivia would become a character having skills different from each other who depends on the precious resources of health and mana! In other words, Torchlight 2 would be a fully-fledged action RPG as advertised, rather than Farmville with mild fantasy violence.
(Forum-goers have also reported that Prismatic Bolts, Anivia's left-click skill, is so overpowered that I could just level that up and let its over-the-top DPS and crowd control more than make up for it being a single-target spell. Much like the Ricochet skill from Torchlight 1, it's a skill that's just too good at everything, so the player can just spam it all day every day - from now until someone releases a better-balanced game, presumably.)
My Torchlight 2 Leona has Shield Bash on right click, naturally. The trouble is that it's too good at everything: zero cooldown, hits in an AoE, applies stuns about half the time, and does more damage than her sword attacks. It's an AoE attack and a DPS attack a crowd control attack all at the same time. I can just spam it all day every day and forget that I even have a left mouse button or... anything else other than my potion keys, really. Shield Bash needs a cooldown timer, and preferably, Leona would have a more appealing left-click option to compensate; the "Sword and Board" passive goes totally unused because it is utterly outscaled by Shield Bash. Boring? Very. Balanced? Not at all.
League of Legends
In League of Legends, Leona would be looking at a cooldown timer of 4-11 seconds, depending on skill level and item bonuses. Anivia has two burst damage skills and a damage-over-time skill which are clearly differentiated from each other. Either of them can use potions to gradually restore health and mana, or buy slower permanent items to do this even more gradually. All game long, each player makes hundreds of decisions which have a real impact on the outcome of the game. Thanks to the balanced state of the game, countless different team compositions can and do win games at every level of PvP play, and they all play differently in meaningful ways. Balance is an important factor in making variety possible in PvP. While a PvE game can afford a little cheese and excess here and there, a PvP MOBA game with an international championship league simply can't afford to have genuinely overpowered skills or champions.
League of Legends has 100+ champs who are balanced and fun to play, but each champion is restricted to a single axis of viable play. Many of these champions have fun-but-not-viable variations that simply can't be used in competitive play. AP Master Yi is no more; AP Lucian was nerfed to the ground before released instea of made into a balanced alternative; Taric's mana-scaling basic attack damage was nerfed into afterthought teritory; Alistar was nerfed into the ground after he won a couple tournament games in mid lane a while ago and has hardly seen tournament play since; supports released after Season 2 are never viable in mid. It is still up to debate whether LoL is overzealous in role restriction, or if it really is impossible to balance along extra dimensions (but they're not there yet).
In any case, PvE games have more freedom to liberate the player from a single pre-defined path. In PvE, all that matters is whether progress is possible and fun. Fluctuations in the power curve don't make a dramatic win vs lose difference before anything else can even be considered. A wobbly game has more chances to balance out in end.
Is balance boring?
It is true that Schaefer's examples were more along the lines of saying that cheese and excess can add excitement to the game as long as it's all balanced in the end:
I could expound on the complexity forever, but it’s pretty dry to discuss and probably not that much different from any other RPG, so let me digress to where I think our methods are different, and where it gets fun, for me, at least. I don’t even try to balance the game! … There are too many systems and too much randomness for my puny brain to deal with. But the more important reason is that I think balance is boring. I specifically want you to find a weapon that’s just too good. I want you to discover a skill combo that makes killing certain monsters seem too easy.
A few levels deeper into the game, you might be struggling to find a replacement weapon, your skill combo won’t work as well against the new monster varieties and your pet will start to seem weaker. The multiple, overlapping systems and heavy randomness work to my benefit in this respect … So all my spreadsheets and assumptions become less important as we finish development, and I concentrate on playing over and over again, getting tons of feedback, and ironing out the really crazy peaks and valleys. Fun always trumps balance.
The trouble is that his remarks, on the whole, feel like a false dichotomy. He says "balance" when he means "completely homogeneous blob-like state of never-ending same-ness". I personally prefer to think of Shaefer's ideal game state as a form of dynamic balance, a balance which the player labors to tip in her favor in order to achieve progress and complete objectives, as opposed to static balance in which everything is indistinguishable from everything else and it's all just a matter of clicking enough times.
Incidentally, Schaefer's idea of "balance" describes Torchlight 2's world of never-ending potion spam and cooldown-free, mana-unrestricted AoE/DPS/CC all-in-one right-click skills.
On his own terms, maybe Schaefer is right. Maybe balance is boring. Maybe Runic needs to let fun trump balance.
I'll be working on my mods. See you around.
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