This week’s Fullerton chapter was “Functionality, Completeness, and Balance”.  The author discusses how games are complex systems, and users often find unexpected ways to do things you may not have anticipated, which is why playtesting is extremely important.  While reading this, I became reminded of what Riot Games is doing with their beta for their upcoming game VALORANT. They have decided to release access to some players for playtesting before they release the full game in the summer.  During this playtesting time, players have already discovered unintentional “features” the game has. One of the champions, Cypher, has a camera that watches enemies. Players found a way to get a gun on the camera and shoot with the gun in camera-mode.  This is definitely not what Riot Games intended, but if they hadn’t had playtesters, they never would have known it to be an issue. This goes to show how difficult it truly is to test games, especially extremely complex ones. Another thing the chapter talks about (and what we talked about in class) was spawn points in a game.  There are multiple solutions to campers at spawn points, such as a force field, which many shooters utilize. However, there are pros and cons to every single option. Every shooter game is different when it comes to spawn points, and while some may work better than others, they all have their negatives as well. It is hard to come up with a completely balanced game, especially when considering variety with characters you are allowed to play.  For example, some characters have abilities that are seen as too “OP”/annoying for players to tolerate. An example of this is Clash in Rainbow Six. She was banned in ranked for a period of time but has since been unbanned. Because of this, she is always getting voted out by players in the initial ranked banning phase due to the annoying nature of her ability.

Overall, there is a difference between a loophole and a feature in a game, as expressed earlier with the VALORANT example.  This is why it is super important to get as many playtesters as possible and try to perform actions that aren’t intended in your game to see if you get the desired outcome.  It is hard to identify every bug, however – even the biggest game developers struggle with this.

Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: a Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games. CRC Press, 2019.