SHUPPET wrote:
Insectum7 wrote:@ SHUPPET: Sadly I don't have time
atm to properly respond to the above, but in the meantime: A: Ok, thanks for the response, that's nicely layed out. B: I'd say that we're potentially looking at different types of complexity. I'll say one is more technical/explicit, and one is more . . . Abstract? Deep vs. Broad? And the differences have effects on what is realistically achievable balance.
Something like that. Maybe I can do a better job with this tomorrow.
Which is which? And no worries. I don't quite get what you mean, but I'll still be checking the thread tomorrow.
Delayed because super busy. Checked watched Guilty Gear a bit, but I have essentially no experience with fighting games beyond playing a bit of Street Fighter II like three decades ago.
So feel free to educate me if it becomes necessary.
I categorized the complexity of the two games as "deep" and "broad" primarily on the basis of the choices that occur before a match takes place. Listening to people talk about Guilty Gear on the youtubes was definitely interesting, and very intimidating from the standpoint of a guy who's really not into fighting games. Obviously there's a lot to learn and a lot to master going on in that game. I wouldn't dare challenge the notion that it's a complex game. However I describe the complexity as "deep" rather than "broad" because the arena of the game is very tight. A player picks a character and fights another player who has picked their character, and they fight on a very limited 2D plane. Each character that can be chosen has a ton of abilities and the interaction between opposing characters can get very nuanced, and the skill involved is obviously extreme. But despite having an exponential amount of combinations and potential meaningful interactions between fighters, all of those combinations still happen within a tightly bound design space. The potential characters are finite, the match space is very finite, the goal is finite. The parameters defining the game are deceptively simple, "choose a character, beat up the other players character". But it's like looking at a small puddle in the road, if you stepped into it you'd be in way over your head. The complexity is all happening after a few relatively simple initial choices.
On the other hand, we have
40K, which I labeled as "broad". The basic premise of
40K can likewise be easily described("choose an army and fight your opponents army"), but there's a ton to do in between saying you're going to play the game and any actual battle occurring, and all of those decisions have an effect. Is this narrative or competitive? How many points/power level? What factions are involved? What combination of units are involved within those factions? What do those units have? What additional rules will they have on top of that (subfactions) What is the board going to look like? What are the win conditions? All of that needs to get sorted out before a game even happens. The design space is really open-ended in comparison to Guilty Gear. It's also important to note that a lot the design space for any particular match is defined by the players. Players choose their army, they choose the type of mission played, they choose what table they play on, etc. Relative to Guilty Gear this is a huge amount of agency. Then the mechanics on the tabletop itself are relatively simple. The rules themselves being simple doesn't necessarily mean that the interaction between armies is also simple, but pretty obviously the actual mechanical interactions aren't even close to Guilty Gear. I'm sure some people will make the opposite analogy for
40K, that it looks like an ocean but it's only inches deep. I'd argue against that, but it's really beside the point.
And anyways in the original conversation, the comparative complexity wasn't really the point. The point was that one game was better balanced than the other, even though they both were complex.
The difference in difficulty for balance in
40K has to do with it's much more open design space. For the sake of focus/clarity, I think we should avoid talking about narrative vs. competitive, mission types, ITC rules, army value/battle size or anything like that, because I think we can agree that all of that could be standardized if
GW wanted it to be. I think I can make my point with just terrain. Even if all of the other stuff was controlled for, you'd still have to contend with terrain. Terrain, even with the sorely lacking terrain rules as they are, is fundamental to
40K, is up to the players to choose, and it's impact on any balance is huge. A lot could be written about this, but I'm sure you can recognize the following to be true:
Different units will have a different value on the table because of the terrain setup, regardless of any other factors. Not only that, but because of the nature of the game itself, this is by design and we don't want that statement to be untrue. In effect:
40K would be a worse game if terrain mattered less. So we have a game in which the battlefield has a direct effect on unit value, but the battlefield is completely under player control. Thus,
40K is inherently difficult to balance. You can make rules for setting up terrain, and tournaments set up terrain for you in order to mitigate potential imbalance, but
40K can't (and shouldn't) get away from the basic truth that terrain is highly varied, and affects the value of units chosen.
