Happy Thursday, everyone!
I've been spending Steam Next Fest the way a lot of you have been: throwing back Coke Zero, watching video essays on Youtube, and trying desperately to cobble together an infinite combo that keeps me from losing to the boss at the end of the level. If you’ve been hanging around the roguelike deckbuilder community lately, you’ve probably noticed a recurring, low-level anxiety humming in the background. It's a fear I see popping up in Reddit threads, Discord servers, and Steam forums alike: the fear of the "Aggressive Balance Patch."
Players are terrified that developers are going to take the fun, wildly overpowered combos from their games and nerf them into the ground in the name of "balance." To developers, this is pretty intuitive! You want your game to have friction, to be challenging, you want it to be hard for players to beat the hardest difficulty modes, and that means tamping down on the easier to construct combos that can trivialize runs. But for players, it's a completely valid fear! Part of what you're looking for in a single player experience is emergent ways to beat the devs at their own game. To find the most powerful synergies and exploit them all the way up to the final boss. This puts players and developers at crossed aims-- developers want their games to be challenging but fun, players find a lot of their fun by minimizing the challenge.
Well, as we gear up for the release of our own roguelike deckbuilder, Montabi, I want to take a moment to pull back the curtain on our design philosophy. And I want to make a promise to you right here, right now: We are not going to balance the fun out of Montabi. In fact, we want you to break it.
The Spreadsheet Trap
Here is one secret to the balance discussion: it is incredibly easy for developers to fall into the "Spreadsheet Trap."
There's a version of this story that you've probably heard when it comes to PvP titles. You find some metric, some number that you care about, and you balance everything in a big, giant spreadsheet until that number is where you want it. Maybe it's winrate. Maybe it's pick rate. Maybe it's something specific that only your game cares about. When you’re making a game, you have access to a ridiculous amount of data and you have the power to change systems to make that data point where you want it. You can see exactly which choices players are picking, which paths they are taking, and what they're finding success with, so you can tune your games to that number.
Well, I'm sure some of you have guessed, but roguelike deckbuilders aren't esports. They're single-player, puzzle-solving power fantasies. Every turn is a little, procedurally-generated puzzle that asks you to figure out how to win (or failing that, how to set yourself up for a win) while expending as few resources as possible. There is no competitive ladder to protect. There is no opposing player sitting across the screen having a miserable time because you high-rolled an insane combo. It’s just you, the deck, and the game, which means our philosophy around balance needs to be different. When developers aggressively nerf powerful cards in a single-player game, they aren't "fixing" the meta—- they are robbing the player of their agency and their reward.
The Anatomy of the "God Run"
And this brings us to how single player roguelike deckbuilder players approach the games they devour ravenously. There are times when I have a run, even a good run, where I leave it on the cutting room floor and start over because I'm not picking up the synergies I was hoping for. That hunting for the God Run is a huge part of what motivates us-- and that means, we need the game to provide us the tools to break into that next level.
The God Run needs a tight loop. Ten or fifteen cards that combo together to make incredible things happen. Some synergy that you get one in a thousand times that makes for a truly unbelievable end result, where you're one-shotting bosses in a single turn. There are few things I love more than getting on that insane God Run, but-- here's the thing: The God Run isn't rare. It's uncommon, sure, and when you get that run it feels like you hit the jackpot. But that's the secret to the God Run. Every great Roguelike has dozens, hundreds of God Run synergies buried in its code, and it's up to players to find them.
This requires imbalance. In other words, if a game is perfectly, symmetrically balanced, the God Run cannot exist. If every card's capabilities are narrowed to the confines of balance, the game becomes a flat, predictable math equation. To have those incredible, euphoric highs, the game fundamentally needs to be capable of being broken.
The Montabi Philosophy: Player-First Tuning
All of that is to beg the question: How are we handling that in Montabi?
Well, our philosophy for Montabi is pretty simple. We call it Player-First Tuning. We're interested in you guys, how you're playing and what you're experiencing, not what the math in the spreadsheet says. If you manage to find a ridiculous, game-breaking combo that lets you sequence a one-turn kill on our hardest bosses, we don't panic and eliminate the overpowered synergy. Instead, our goal is to make sure that combo is hard to pull off. We want you to really work for it, so when the engine finally clicks into place, it feels incredibly satisfying. Frankly, I'm hoping that you join the Montabi Discord and share a screenshot because that sounds awesome.
Of course, this isn't to imply that we're not going to tune the game. Far from it. But when we’re looking at tuning something, here is the golden rule for our development team: We rarely balance synergies; we balance individual pieces of content.
If you manage to combine three perfectly fair, balanced cards into a thermonuclear, world-ending combo, we celebrate that. The synergy stays! However, if a synergy is only overpowered because one specific card is an automatic, brainless "I win" button on its own, that's when we step in to adjust the individual card.
Why? Because we want your choices to actually matter. When you're offered a card reward, we want you to stop and think. We don't want there to be one universally obvious choice that you click without looking. We want three equally viable options where the "best" pick completely depends on the current state of your deck. If one card is so universally powerful that you auto-pick it every single time, you end up ignoring the rest of the game's mechanics. We want you to explore everything Montabi has to offer, and that means ensuring that all the content is comparable and interesting.
This is a process we've already been undergoing with our playtesting. We have plenty of data, but part of what we're looking for is that spicy feedback from our playtesters on what feels cool, awesome, and unique.
One of the conversations that the development team has internally is: When is it OK for this to be broken? Recently, there was some discussion about the card "Hydro Clone," a legendary card for the Montabi Washette, which lets you copy a card in an ally's hand and they can play it for zero AP. Objectively, this card is wildly good. Just off the top of my head, it lets you double up on Exhaust passives, like Kobonkey's 720 Ollie, letting you turn every move into a 10 damage AoE firehose. It lets you cast Yipao's Meteor Arc, a huge single damage nuke, entirely for free. I used it once on a run with Kyuchi for an Obtain Slash build and it was the stuff of legends.
Hydro Clone is exceptionally powerful-- and we want it to be! The fact that it combos so efficiently with other cards to make for incredible builds is the point. Because it relies on having the right allies and the right setup, it requires thought. We want you to have that fun. We want you to break the game because we understand how amazing that feels.
As always, if you want to share your favorite Montabi synergies, share your most ridiculous high-rolls, or just hang out with the devs, hop into the Montabi Discord! We are constantly taking feedback and we’d love to have you in the trenches with us.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go boot up another run. I swear I'm going to make Tygo's resonance build work this time.
