Fantasy Strike is an interesting case study in game balance for an asymmetric game. I did the entire balancing process without any data at all, and now, after it’s all done, we have the data. Meaning, we were collecting data, I just didn’t have a way to actually look at it until now, after the whole balancing process is basically complete.

Relying on Experts

I find it much easier to balance a competitive game by going off the opinions of experts than looking at data anyway. Experts can get to the bottom of issues more quickly, and with a much smaller sample size than a data-driven approach needs in order to be good enough quality to rise above statistical noise.

In some games I’ve worked on, I’m one of the experts (Fantasy Strike, Street Fighter HD Remix, Puzzle Fighter HD Remix). In other games, I’m not at all (Yomi, Puzzle Strike, Kongai) so I rely on players who have expert knowledge about balance. I’ve found both ways can work just fine, it’s all a matter of knowing which experts to listen to. On any given issue, you can always find someone who says X and someone who says the opposite, so it’s pretty critical to be able to evaluate which arguments actually make sense, and factor in whose opinions on such complex things have turned out to be right a lot before.

Looking at the Data

Anyway, now that we have the data, how did it all turn out?

First, a reminder about what success even looks like. Like in any such game, it’s a struggle to keep every character within a reasonable power range versus every other. It’s normal to have 8-2 and 7-3 matchups (meaning, if two experts played 10 games in a specific character matchup, we expect character X to win 8 and character Y to win 2, etc). The question is how many of those matchups there are. I tried to give some perspective about what percentage of 7-3 and 8-2 or worse matchups we expect to find in these sorts of games in this post about Game Balance and Yomi.

In Yomi, the matchup chart at the time showed literally zero matchups of 7-3 or worse, which was incredible, and I was unable to even name another game with 10+ sides that has done that. It’s unreasonable to expect that of ANY asymmetric competitive game, and would be an impossible standard to hold any fighting game to.

But…we did it. Here’s the empirical matchup chart based on hundreds of thousands of games played over the last year: