Jumpgate Evolution Dev Talks Class Balance

Hermann Peterscheck recently made a post on the Jumpgate Evolution developer blog about NetDevil's strategy for balancing the various classes of ships in the game. They seem to be taking a different approach from most MMOs in letting the PvP side of the gameplay set the baseline, rather than allowing PvE concerns to override that. From the section titled Combating Combat: "Early on our lead systems designer, Jay Ambrosini, came to the correct conclusion that all of the preliminary balancing was best done in a PvP context. The reasoning is that in PvE, the player needs to feel powerful, but in PvP the fight needs to feel balanced. Once ship classes are balanced in PvP, its not as hard to make the player feel powerful in PvE, but the opposite is not true. We spent many weeks playing just the first class of ship, the light fighter, in teams of 5 or 6 in order to evaluate what it was that made those ships fun to fly and fight. After daily battles, you begin to see what makes those ships work. We also started with the mid level ships as opposed to the low or high level ships. This is primarily because you can find the center point and then work upwards and downwards from there. ... It's very tempting to just throw a bunch of classes of ships together in order to say things like "our game has 15 classes of ships!" but this, we believe, is the wrong direction. People want meaningful and strong choices and not lots of meaningless, empty choices. Currently we plan to have 4-6 classes, but they will each have nearly endless possible configurations within those groups."

Comments

Re:scratching head

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see what is hard to understand in TFS. It's standard, basic, gaming vocabulary. I wonder what you're doing in /. gaming section if you don't know theses words.

PvP : Player vs Player. All that relates to fighting between players.

PvE : Player vs Environment. All that relates to the fights between a player (or group of players) and computer-controlled opponents.

Class : A category of avatar that can be played. Each having strengths, weaknesses and powers/abilities. For a fantasy-based game that could be Knight, Wizard, and Healer. Here it's different kind of spaceships.

PS : posting as AC to avoid karma-whoring.

JGE v EVE

[castironpigeon]

EVE is good at what it does, but there's a reason it doesn't have more players and that's not because of the scifi theme. I pull this opinion out of my ass, but consider for a moment the plethora of MMOs (or even single player games) with a fantasy background. Any style of MMO fantasy gameplay that you could possibly want is covered. PvP, PvE, free, paid, large group, small group, free-for-all, instanced...

Now what about a space sim MMO? Aside from a few no-name indie offerings or a Freelancer hack to play multiplayer on a server with a few other people, your only option is EVE. One shard, PvP centric, click-orbit-wait navigation, learning curve like an overhanging cliff - love it or leave it.

Now maybe I give the JGE team too much credit, but I fully expected for them to deviate from this. It would only make sense that they not go for the exact same niche that EVE fills. Duh. So we get collision detection and some sort of real navigation - great. But now they're balancing around PvP? C'mon, seriously? So now we'll have EVE with point & click navigation and EVE with something else. And you can play the former in a universe already several years old with many bugs worked out or you can start in a fresh universe that's completely empty. This is seriously the most retarded thing I've heard from JGE to date.

And no, I don't believe JGE can properly balance PvP and PvE. It's never been done. You either focus on one or the other and whatever you don't focus on becomes some half-assed wannabe minigame that players will complain about until the end of time. See PvP in WoW and PvE in GW as examples...