One of the most important things within video games that sometimes can be overlooked by gamers unless they’re smacked in the head with it is balance. A balanced video game means that there is a challenge to it, but it’s not an overwhelming nightmare obstacle that you struggle to get through. After all, not everything has to be like a FromSoftware title. For fighting games like Super Smash Bros Ultimate, if you don’t have things balanced, you will have “broken characters,” which will turn the player base against the dev team. That’s something that Masahiro Sakurai fought hard to not have in the latest entry of the beloved fighting franchise.
In the latest video of his “Creating Games” series, Sakurai noted that there might seem like a “clear way” to keep things balanced, and that’s by “averaging out” all the characters so that “no one is special.” However, as he wisely notes, “average is the same as mediocre.” What’s the point of playing as different characters if no one is special?
However, Sakurai also knows that if things aren’t tailored a certain way, then a character could be broken. Thus, for Super Smash Bros Ultimate, the dev team went deep into accentuating the pros and cons of each character so that things would balance out. That might be why you sometimes hear one player saying, “This character sucks,” and then another person saying, “This is the best character on the roster.”
To further highlight just how balanced the game is, Sakurai revealed something gathered from the “Win Rate Data” from across the world. Within the game’s roster, the highest win-rate percentage for a specific character, one that obviously wasn’t named, was over 51%. In contrast, the character with the lowest win-rate percentage was at over 47%.
That means that the game is so balanced that you can pick basically any character on the roster to play as, and you’ll have a 50/50 chance of coming out on top, depending on your skill and your opponent’s skill.
Obviously, this isn’t the “only metric” to consider when attributing wins and losses. However, this is data from the entire globe. So, it’s a good metric by which to measure things. It also shows that Sakurai’s team did a great job with Super Smash Bros Ultimate, as there is no “dominant, broken character” that is mucking up things for other players. Everything appears to be even.
