Fallout: New Vegas director reveals that game balance is 'mostly vibes based', says he only used a weapons spreadsheet 'for maybe a couple of months'
It would be nice to live in a world that makes sense, wouldn't it? One where you could easily reduce the issue of weapons balance to points on a spreadsheet, defeating the issue of game design with the raw power of maths. Unfortunately we don't live in that world, as backed up by Fallout: New Vegas' director Josh Sawyer—who recently dispensed a grain of wisdom: Balancing is «mostly vibes based».
This uncomfortable reminder was delivered via a recent YouTube video on the developer's channel (thanks, GamesRadar). Responding to a question he'd received on Tumblr, Sawyer gave a big shrug, stating that he doesn't «really believe in spending a huge amount of time, prior to people playing the game, in 'simulation land'. Because it doesn't really matter.»
Sawyer recalls that, during development of Fallout: New Vegas, he'd set up a spreadsheet to tweak the game's weapons. However, it was more a case of sketching before drawing the rest of the game development owl: «I made a spreadsheet [that] listed out weapons by ammo type, and then I did some relative comparisons to damage threshold values … I used it for, maybe, a couple of months.»
Sawyer says that the last time he accessed the doc was «March of 2010» which, as he says, was «well in advance of the game shipping.» New Vegas released in October 2010, meaning the veteran dev was flying by the seat of his irradiated pants for over half a year.
«Ultimately, it's about the practical effect of it in the game,» Sawyer argues. «You just play around with it.» While he doesn't completely scrap the idea of making dedicated test levels to rinse the numbers, «most of what I did I would do within [actual] game levels. I would run around in the area around Vault 3, and then go into Vault 3 and test the weapons against the enemies in that area.
»To me that's really the important thing, to see how those things feel in practice."
This isn't exactly new wisdom. Earlier this year, Doom (2016)'s creative director Hugo Martin responded to a
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