This is going to be long. I was posting about game balance and how I felt about it in another forum, and realized that (coming right on the heels of the Esper and Short Blade nerfs) it might be interesting to some people here, too. I should mention that I'm not going to specifically talk about those changes here (I've already weighed on them elsewhere, and the Esper patch is of course also a content patch, so I recognize that it's much more complicated and was intended to preserve a lot of the depth I talk about below) - this is about the more general idea of balance as a game-design focus in a game like this.

Obviously some semblance of balance is needed for the gameplay to hold together. I'll get that out of the way first. That said, I feel that the industry is far, far, faaaar too fixated on it. I feel the vast majority of single-player games (RPG-style ones, anyway) are over-balanced in a way that actively harms their depth and gameplay.

(There are also a lot of really badly balanced games, of course. But even those often have the worst of both worlds - sacrificing depth for balance and then failing to achieve it. I feel that more games would benefit from taking the deliberate, intentional perspective of "we're not going to worry very much about this aspect of balance.")

Balance has gameplay costs. Really, really, big costs. Since every potential interaction adds new ways to break the game, the only way to reliably balance things is to reduce interactions and generally make the game simpler. Beyond that, it's important to realize that players generally like breaking the game. Discovering interesting combinations of powers is part of the fun. Feeling like you're getting away with something is part of the fun. Sometimes that fun wears thin after a while, yes, especially when the game feels "solved" - it's not good for a game to break too easily. But no game (no matter how deep its procedural generation may be) lasts forever. I feel that the players who say that they're bored with a game that they've "broken" would, most of the time, have gotten bored even sooner if they hadn't been able to break it.

Partially I think the problem is that RPGs tend to import things from tabletop games and, more recently, MMORPGs (or Diablo-style multiplayer games), where balance is a more serious concern. But either way, it sucks and IMHO generally hurts the genre by constraining developers behind much more tight balance-limitations, ones that aren't really relevant to a single-player game. (Granted that games inspired by earlier editions of D&D benefit from the fact that older editions of D&D were extremely unbalanced in lots of interesting and exciting ways... but that's something else.)

The fact that Qud is unbalanced is a huge part of what attracts me to it, perhaps the main thing that I like about it. I do not want it balanced. I actively dislike the idea of having it made any more balanced than it is now. (I would like more options - including taking some currently-useless choices and buffing them to make them viable - and I can concede that in a few cases it might be necessary to reduce the power of something overpowered just to make alternatives viable. But even then, I don't like to think of it as balancing, because again - the whole point of having options is to find new ways to break things.)

I can list games and series that have been diminished, in some form or another, by misplaced balance concerns in the past. Just off the top of my head, my favorite examples:

1. The Elder Scrolls series. Overall, Skyrim is a great game, and overall I feel the series has improved over time, but a few parts have clearly gotten worse. The series has steadily weakened its crafting and spell-making over the course of the series, while also removing many interesting things you used to be able to do with spells (some of the latter was for technical reasons, but they said it was also about balance - they didn't like people being able to break intended dungeon progression.) Does anyone think that this has made the series better? For me, at least, a major aspect of it that I liked was lost, and I don't feel it really improved things at all.

2. The Puzzle Quest series. No game in that series has ever come anywhere remotely close to the first. And it's entirely because later games have always obsessed over that MMORPG-style balance. The first game was incredibly easy to break in all sorts of bizarre and exciting ways - nearly every new ability did something weird or strange that could be combined with others to accomplish crazy stuff, and you had so many choices and options that you could employ multiple ridiculous strategies at once. Every game in the series since has had more limited options, less character customization, fewer spells and effects and abilities, more on-the-rails progression, and so on, all clearly structured around giving people this balanced, unified experience. And it sucks. The game isn't as deep, isn't as broad, and isn't as fun.

Let players break your game. They'll have fun. Don't worry about it. Most of the time, don't listen to the people who complain about it (there are a lot of people in the community, especially when it comes to roguelikes, IMHO fetishize Difficulty and Challenge a bit too much. It's a game. It should be fun. Worrying too much about balance isn't good for that.)

...I mean, I feel that Qud is mostly made from that perspective anyway. Again, that's what first drew me to it. I hope that a lot of this is stuff that people here already knew.

But I realized that the only voices the devs are likely to hear are people reviewing and liking the overall game, or people complaining about specific issues (including, sometimes, balance); there's not likely to be many people saying "no, I like it unbalanced." And when it comes up in the context of a specific proposed nerf or whatever, it's easy to dismiss it as people who are just complacent about wanting their favorite build to keep working or whatever or just knee-jerk resistance to any nerf.

So I wanted to make it clear that there are some people, at least, who are opposed to (excessive) balance as a general principle. Yes, of course I recognize that it can't be completely discarded - nobody would want the early game to regularly kill you with no warning, to become a cakewalk, or for balance to fluctuate too absurdly; the game does have to present some sort of sensible difficulty curve.

But there's another side to the argument, too, which I feel doesn't get presented enough. I feel that a game should be well-balanced enough to not fall apart at a touch; but if it doesn't at least bend severely under pressure, that's a sign that it may have been over-balanced and lack the depth or flexibility I'd want. (And breaking entirely when a player is deliberately trying to do so is, itself, not necessarily a bad thing. It can be fun.)

What I like about Qud is that it is, on the whole, relative to other games in the genre, not very balanced. I do not want to see that change.