Meekrob

I wonder if they even considered Mark Hamill. He at least has the voice down pat, and I think he could have pulled off the live action version. I'm anxious to see what Ledger can do with the role, though.

Third party support is huge. Look at the Nintendo 64, in many ways considered a failure. The first and second party titles were incredible, better than anything else on the market at the time. How many 'Best Game Ever' titles appeared on that system? Mario 64, Goldeneye, Ocarina of Time...

Sony was propelled to the front on the backs of a dizzying number of quality third party titles. Nintendo needs to win those back, and solid first party titles alone won't be enough.

@Staticneuron

Perhaps I was a little unclear. I didn't mean to say that balance wasn't important. What I meant was that it's not the most important thing. A game should not be built with the mindset of "first, we need to make it balanced, and after that we make it fun." Balance should be one of the very last things you look at. Otherwise you end up with a fighting game of nothing but Ryu clones.

With Starcraft, I seriously doubt they started with one race, and slowly divided into three, maintaining a balance at each stage. Instead, I imagine that they had really cool ideas for the three races, and upon first implementation, the balance was completely out of whack. Then, through a series of testing and retesting, the game was balanced with as much caution as possible so as to not dumb down the spirit and uniqueness of the races.

And sure, you can have great games that have major balance issues. Take a look at Marvel vs. Capcom 2. Some of the characters and teams are so out of whack to go beyond "imbalanced" and be utterly broken. However, there is so much to do and so many different ways of countering, that the game is still one of the best 2D fighters ever made.

I disagree, to an extent, with the roles idea as well. Sure, some classes may be more suited for a role than others, but that doesn't mean they should be relegated to them. In Shadowbane, for instance, I had a priest that was a pure healer. Yes, that's what the priest "role" was. But a friend of mine built a priest that had no practical healing ability at all. Instead, he discovered an interesting combination of skills and subclasses that turned him into one of the strongest melee damage dealing characters I had ever seen. He was able to do this because of the sheer diversity in the game. Was it balanced? Hell no. But the balance was based on the player's decisions, not the games. It was deep enough that the onus was on the players to figure out how to counter things, not the developers. Sometimes it may not have been possible, but the game was still fun.

Balance is still important, I don't mean to say that it's not. It's like graphics. Some of us would like to say graphics don't matter, but of course they do. If I can't tell whether a gray blob on the screen is a power-up or an enemy, then that hurts the gaming experience. Balance is like that. It's a key ingredient to a solid game. I just feel that there has been an overemphasis from both the player community and the developer community on balance over depth. They have the order backwards.

Back in my WoW days, and in fact during the early days of WoW itself, I made an impassioned post on the official forums entitled something to the effect of "Balance: The Golden Calf of Game Design." The post spawned from my realization of where Blizzard was leading the game with its patches and updates. Each set of changes only further sterilized an already beige game that needed, if anything, more variation. These patches were fueled by the constant outcry from the player base for more "balance." And indeed, the patches addressed what were called "Balance Issues."

I spoke out against these changes, and argued that what the game needed was less balance, not more. There was quite a bit of response, even from Blizzard forum mods, and most disagreed with my points. But I still hold by them.

Game balance is not the be all and end all of game design. People do not play a game because it is well balanced. If this were the case, then gaming reached its pinnacle with Pong. No, games have gotten better because of diversity. Overcoming this diversity to create an advantage is what challenges the gamer and forces them to think.

The above "argument AGAINST balance" doesn't even address balance. In multiplayer, it's balance. In single player, we call it "difficulty." Here, instead, is a short argument against balance.

Take a look at some of your favorite multiplayer games, and ask yourself if they're fun because they're balanced, or because there are so many unique challenges. I'm willing to bet it's the latter.

Now I'm not saying that balance isn't important, and that it shouldn't be a consideration in multiplayer game design. I'm saying that it shouldn't be the biggest consideration. That should always be 'fun'. Games should be challenging first.

Diversity and balance are not mutually exclusive. Look at Starcraft, arguably the best RTS game ever made. They were able to achieve three distinct, complety unique races, and yet none had an advantage over another. In any matchup, the player that won was the better player. This is the holy grail of multiplayer game design.

However, the more variety you put into a game, the harder it is to balance it all. What game designers need to remember, though, is that perfect balance is not important. Get it close, but don't go overboard. Keep it varied, but make it fun for everyone.

The most fun I ever had in an MMO was in Shadowbane. Now, that game was not balanced in any sense of the word. And the majority of players built characters using the strongest races and classes. But not me. I built the weak classes and made them strong.

The character development process was so involved that there were literally thousands of builds that had never even been tried before. So I dug and dug into the guts of the game until I planned a workable build that I had never seen attempted before. Sometimes, it failed miserably. Other times, it worked beautifully. Suddenly, I had taken a class thought to be weak and was able to defeat stronger classes. Fun for me wasn't dominating others, and winning all my fights. It was challenging the system, defying the consensus, and surprising people.

The feeling of accomplishment I received from that is not possible in a "balanced" game. You'll never be able to achieve that in a game like WoW. Balance is most definitely not the key to game design. I just wish the rest of the gaming community would realize that.