In the MMO shooter Destiny, some weapons are considered too strong, but why is that?
During the development stage of Destiny, a bug snuck into the Gjallarhorn, the cluster rockets left no trace and there wasn’t that colossal feedback like with the current Gjallarhorn. Testers didn’t say: “That looks funny, not as spectacular as before,” but rather: “The weapon is not strong enough.”
And that is typical, says Destiny’s gunsmith Sage Merrill in an interview with Game Informer. Because “overpowered” is a matter of the overall perception. As a designer, one should not trust the “cold mathematics,” the “damage per second” values of a weapon; it’s all about the players’ overall impression.
“I can make a weapon overpowered just by tweaking the sound,” Merrill says. “One day players say the weapon is useless, then I give it this powerful sniper shot effect and the next day players find it completely overpowered.”
It doesn’t matter how strong a weapon is mathematically, it’s about how it feels
It doesn’t matter whether a weapon is really balanced, Merrill says; what is important is only how it is perceived. One can design a weapon that is far too weak to feel like an absolute badass, like a killer gun, because it feels that way. Merrill thinks that if everyone believes the weapon is way too strong, then that too weak weapon also needs to be “balanced,” that is, nerfed.
Sage Merrill is the gunsmith at Bungie and also responsible for balancing. With the “King of the Taken,” there come some changes to the weapon balance, both to the general weapon types as well as to the exotic weapons. It’s not just about sound, but also about the percentages.
