Chardish Games

I said earlier that I wanted to talk about the dynamics of Team Fortress 2, and here it is. In my earlier post about Star Trek Online, I discussed the challenges of designing a class-based team multiplayer game.

I will define a “class” as being a pre-configured set of abilities (or ability options) designed with the intent that a) most abilities are unique to configurations, b) most abilities cannot be switched between configurations, and c) no single configuration can adequately fulfill every role on a team.

Making Games Classy

So what are the design challenges surrounding developing a fun, class-based team multiplayer game? I believe there are five:

- Balanced necessity. Every class needs to be (about) equally necessary to the team’s success.
- Balanced responsibility. Every class needs to exhibit enough flexibility so that if one class fails, the entire team does not fail.
- Balanced potential. Every class needs to have (about) the same maximum power, so that a master player of one class is not significantly more valuable than an master of another.
- Balanced involvement. Every class needs to have something important to do at all times.
- Balanced fun. Every class needs to be fun to play - if one is tedious or boring, the game suffers.

And how does Team Fortress 2 address these design considerations? First, we must look at the game itself. I’m going to be ignoring the game’s Arena mode for purposes of this discussion, because not only is it radically different from the rest of the game, but it doesn’t exhibit all of the positive qualities I’m describing here.

Team Fortress 2 has a number of different play modes, but all of them center around a common scenario: You and your team start on one side of the map, and the enemy team starts on the other side. Your objectives require you to eventually get to the enemy’s side of the map without dying. We could be nitpicky and observe why this definition isn’t quite accurate for certain game modes, but the fact is that TF2 is a game about controlling territory.

Envision this: territory you can safely move around in without dying is your team’s territory. Territory you can’t enter without a high risk of death belongs to your enemy. There is, of course, a sizeable “no man’s land” that exists between these two regions. You win when the objectives the enemy must protect (the “flag” in capture-the-flag games, the control points in control point games, etc.) are no longer within their own territory. These demarcations are not in any way enforced or even delineated by the game engine: they exist purely within the realm of our philosophizing.

Primary Roles and Balanced Necessity

With that in mind, we can take a look at the nine classes of the game in a different light. Three classes are best suited for combat: the soldier, demoman, and heavy, who all excel at direct fighting and survivability. Their primary role is to push forward into the enemy territory. Another three classes are experts of disruption: the scout, pyro, and spy. Their primary role is to conduct hit-and-run operations: find ways behind the enemy line and quickly take out opponents before they realize they’ve been compromised. The final three classes, the medic, sniper, and engineer, are well-suited for positional support. Their primary role is to ensure the security of friendly territory by aiding the combat team. There is a balance of necessity here: a good combat team could win an entire match by themselves, but they will be more likely to be defeated by a balanced team, and will have a hard time dealing with certain specific threats best suited to other roles.

Secondary Roles and Balanced Responsibility

Another requirement, that of balanced responsibility, mandates that if one class fails, it cannot doom the entire team. Developer Valve accomplishes this in two ways. First, when a player is killed, he is removed from the field for a short time (usually less than 15 seconds), during which time he has the opportunity to switch classes. Thus, if a sudden crisis emerges (for example, an expert sniper on the enemy team is causing problems), the player can quickly change classes to rectify the situation (switching to spy and attempting to assassinate snipers.) Unlike a game such as World of Warcraft, which locks teams into a single class formation for the duration of an encounter, in Team Fortress picking the wrong class is a very low-impact decision: if the player made a mistake, he can quickly rectify it at low penalty.

Second, each class is tuned to have secondary roles. For instance, while the pyro is a natural chaos-generator best suited for intrusion, if the enemy has too many spies, he can be employed to defend friendly territory by hunting them down with his spy-revealing flamethrower. Though the medic is naturally a healer, he is equipped with a syringe gun that allows him to participate in combat if he is caught without a friend. In contrast with games that lock classes into specific duties during the game, Team Fortress 2’s philosophy is: “you can fulfill the duties of another class, just not as easily as that class could.” Most MMOs won’t let your healer character suddenly become a tank if the primary tank dies.

In the next part, I’ll look at the requirements of balanced potential, balanced fun, and balanced involvement. See you then.