How Easy Should It Be to "Break" a Game?

[D.L. Yomegami]

For those unfamiliar with the term, "breaking" a game essentially means finding some combination of skills, items, etc. that completely and utterly trivializes any challenge the game might throw at the player.

For example, in Octopath Traveler the combination of the Runelord class and Tressa makes physical enemies a joke, as by using Transfer Rune followed by Sidestep Tressa can make it so every physical attack thrown at the party misses. This particular combination isn't the easiest to lock, however, as the Runelord job is locked behind a powerful boss. However, Octopath Traveler has another, more easily accessible example in the form of the Hunter job's Leghold Trap, which forces the target to move last for a few turns. Coupled with the game's Break system, there's a good chance most bosses will be spending the battle unable to move and thus not that much of a challenge.

A more general example is good old level grinding. At a high enough level most enemies will be hard pressed to really threaten the player, so by taking some time to gain some more levels the player has the means to easily get pass most of the game's challenges, at the expense of time (level grinding generally takes a while).

From a gameplay standpoint, completely and utterly stomping a game can be really fun. A lot of players get a kick out of it, especially as a reward for completing something time-consuming and/or particularly difficult. From a developer's standpoint, however, such an outcome may not be so desirable. After all, it can be seen as not experiencing the game in a way the developer intended.

The question is: how easy should it be for the player to obtain game breakers? Should it be possible at all?

My opinion, realized as I was typing this, is that the best game breakers are actually the ones the developer intended. If the developer is really clever about implementing them, the player stumbling upon them randomly can actually make them feel really smart for discovering it without actually realizing that it was intended all along. Here's a good video to elaborate on it (it's about Terraria specifically, but it can be applied pretty generally as well).

Elaborating on that, I don't think game breakers should be that easy to obtain. Sure, it's all fun and good to make it possible to allow the player to break the game over their knee, and in all honesty I do think there should be options for the player to make the game easier on themselves. But there's a fine line between "making the game easier on themselves" and "making the game impossible to lose unless the player's a total dunce." An easily obtained game breaker that turns battles into "spam the game breaker and win" is likely to make the game really boring.

Ultimately I also think it depends on the demographic the developer's aiming for. People who want a challenge probably won't appreciate a game dropping a game breaker on them with little to no work required, but people who are looking for a more casual experience might appreciate it more.

I'm only one person, though. What's everyone else's opinion on the matter?

 

[AsuranFish]

I'm personally trying to avoid gamebreaks in my game, and have actively taken measures to avoid them. I might allow something like a weapon that has Added Effect: Death, but it'll probably have a lowish proc rate.

In my game, Stun is a key mechanic, as you're going to want to absolutely interrupt certain enemy moves from going off. But because I don't want the player to have a character cast stun every turn, and render the enemy useless, everytime Stun lands on an enemy, it receives a hidden state that lasts for a certain duration. That state will trigger additional measures if the player casts Stun again, such as giving the enemy resistance to Stun, and eventually causing it to enrage and just destroy everyone. If you cast stun only when you need to, you'll be fine. Abuse it, and you'll be sorry.

I won't say my game is unforgiving - but it does (I hope!) require some strategy and understanding of mechanics. Different methods to different bosses. On the plus side - if you die but don't save, it shouldn't be a huge deal. There are random safespots in most dungeons that trigger checkpoints, from which you can warp back to town if needed. If you die to a boss fight and choose "return to checkpoint", you maybe have 1-5 minutes of lost progress. From there, you can retry, or warp back to a town.

In short, I want my game to be fairly difficult/challenging, but fun and rewarding. No need to punish the player for losing, but I also don't want them to render the enemies unable to act, or to go around hitting everything for 9999 damage.

 

[TheoAllen]

"Breaking" the game largely depends on how the game is designed as well. Providing in-game cheat imo is also count as "breaking" the game, and that is developer intended. However, some people may try to challenge the game by beating the game without using exploit at all, and that is their bragging's rights. The game, however, needs to be designed so that it's more open, so you choose your own combination and your playstyle.

"Breaking" the game is also the same as stocking up potion up to 99 and trivialize the challenge. If the developer thought that was the problem, of course, they will try to balance the economy by making whatever feature to sink the potion or reduce the potion gain. The developer can also opt to shrug off and thought "If the player chooses to stock them up, it's their choice". This goes as well as the level grinding you mentioned.

For a game that is more like a puzzle, (i.e, less room for you to improve or experiment), breaking the game should be minimalized, and if possible eliminated. For example, you have a fixed class, fixed skill set, fixed party member, you have little control over what you gonna bring in battle. Your agency is only what will you do in the battle. Such design should minimalize the game-breaking aspect. If the game is more open and you have a choice to do whatever you want to do and express yourself, "breaking" the game should be the part of the game. Of course, there're some people who talk only about META, most efficient/effective tactic available, but some people also want the bragging's right by using the most inefficient tactic in the game.

 

[jkweath]

There's a very satisfying feeling that comes from discovering some combination of skills/equipment/etc that "break" a game. I still recall one of the reasons why Diablo 2 was so satisfying to play (for me, at least), was using some certain powerful skills or skill combinations that allowed me to just freaking destroy everything.

But sometimes game-breaking mechanics go too far and indeed make a game far easier than intended. The Vanish X-Zone combo from Final Fantasy 6 comes to mind. That was an unintended mechanic that, IIRC, got fixed in the GBA port of that game. A good example of an intended "game-breaking" mechanic from the same game was using a Genji Glove + Master's Scroll and wielding two Ultima Weapons. You had to use HP espers and grind a lot, but the result was being able to one-shot just about every enemy in the game.

From a development standpoint, I would guess that it's a better idea to implement your own "game-breaking" mechanics and balance them so that there's an equal split between that satisfying feeling of being overpowered, but not too overpowered. Of course, figuring out how overpowered "too overpowered" is is up to the developer. Diablo 2 comes to mind here again, because no matter how "overpowered" some abilities or combos could be, there were almost always enemies that had a resistance to them, so you either had to avoid those enemies or use a weaker ability - not to mention in Hell difficulty, some enemies were overpowered themselves and could kill you before you even had a chance to kill them first.

 

[Wavelength]

"Breaking" a game can be really fun for a little while, but after that little while (usually an hour or so) the fun really starts to pale, and can no longer be replaced with the fun and engagement that come from being challenged to grow in power and mastery.

You could compare it to finding a genie that all of a sudden gave you everything you ever wished for and everything you would ever want, without doing any work for it. It would be amazing at first, but soon you'd find that you didn't have as much reason to live. You wouldn't be engaged. It would all be "too easy" and our minds would just kind of reject it.

For that reason, I believe it should ideally be impossible to break a game until the postgame, or at until least the final hour of "normal" storyline gameplay (which is where many professional games indeed hide the sidequests that eventually unlock gamebreaking equips/skills).

One important note to add is that I'm using your definition of gamebreaking, which is that the challenge is completely trivialized by the gamebreaker. Where something simply gives the player a very high amount of power that merely reduces the challenge somewhat, it can be okay to include in games where the core Aesthetic(s) of Play are not Challenge ("game as obstacle course") or Competition (game as judgement of skill). For example, if the main Aesthetic of Play is Expression ('game as self-discovery"), it can be fine to allow several combinations of choices to imbalance the game's level of difficulty in the player's favor, because the fun comes from choosing and using that combination, not from finding it nor from winning with it.

 

[Aesica]

I'm trying my damnedest to avoid gamebreaking combos in my game, but I still want the player to feel like they've got some powerful tools at their disposal. If the player feels like they have some gamebreaking skills, but actually don't, then I'll have done my job well.

My game gives players things that might sound overpowered at first:

• Condemn: Instant death 100% after 10 rounds, or huge damage if the target is death immune. The balancing factor is that it takes 10 rounds to happen. Most common fights won't last this long, and against bosses, you'll want to throw everything you can at them.
  
• Metamorph: Guaranteed instant death if the target's HP is below a certain threshold, rewarding them with an item for doing so. Even bosses and enemies normally immune to instant death can be killed this way. The balancing factor is that the HP threshold is completely controllable on a per-target basis. You'll have to knock that really powerful superboss within a few inches of its life without killing it by accident if you want to turn it into loot. This can be much harder than just hitting it until it dies.
  
• There are stat debuffs, elemental debuffs, and party buffs that can all be used together to deal huge damage to foes already weak to, say, fire. The balancing factor: The encounter is balanced around this, and with different foes having different elemental resistances, some being immune to def/mdf reductions, and only a few elements having associated debuffs, this strategy isn't going to be the same against everything you fight.
• "I'm saving all my Elixirs for the final boss!" The balancing factor here is that 1) you can only ever carry 20 of them, and there's quite a bit more than 20 in the game and 2) The hardest fights will need extra healing and MP recovery from potion chucking.
• "I maxed my level, now to faceroll everything!" My only response here is, "congrats, you earned that right. Oh and by the way, the endgame superboss(es) will be designed around being max level, so glad you're finally prepared!" I don't plan on having the max level be too much higher than the endgame target level anyway.

 

[Tai_MT]

I'm not sure how different my opinion on the subject really is. But, I'll add my two cents.

How easy your game is to break largely depends on what you want to set for the "balance" of your game.

Let's talk about "Warframe" for a minute. Yes, it's a super light MMO, but hear me out. "Balance" in Warframe is being able to one-shot large groups of enemies with your weapons and abilities. If you are not doing this, you are not geared up enough. The game itself throws very large amounts of enemies at you who can likely one-shot you, if you aren't geared up enough. The game is designed around the player one-shotting these large groups of enemies. Because it is the only way to truly survive for long periods of time, breaking the game is highly encouraged. At least... up to a point. The devs have "nerfed" things from time to time when it has resulted in "AFK Behavior". That's where they draw the line. When you are doing nothing and the game is playing itself.

That being said...

I think it's important that a game dev does not rely on pure stats to handle encounters or bosses. This is the easiest way to let players steamroll your content without effort. If the only thing that stands between a player is bigger numbers... that player will find a way to exploit that system and use those numbers against you. Unless, that's your goal.

Personally, I prefer to add in gimmicks to my fights. Things that can happen that aren't reliant on stats. Just being, "A few levels above the enemy" won't result in an easier time. Being far beyond the enemy will (you've earned that right, if you're that leveled up... to not be hampered by small amounts of XP and Gold and bad drops) let you steamroll them. But, 5-8 levels... not necessarily. I like gimmicks. Most of the skills in my game are a gimmick of some sort. I even have skills that use your own high stats against you.

See, that's the thing. You should be playtesting your game. Letting others playtest your game. Letting them try to break your game. If they break it in an unacceptable way, you need to figure out a way to keep that method from working. It's also something I do. I do it from the opposite perspective, however. "The player can do X, how can I have my monsters turn doing X into a liability for the player?". There are about 3 major ways to "lock up" combat in my game. Just three. What do I mean by "lock up"? I mean, you keep the enemy from acting at all. You hit it until dead. Every boss in the game (with a few rare exceptions) are immune to these three methods. Encounters passed a certain point are immune to these three methods. They are a way to cheese my game, and I let the player have them... up to a point. Because, when I reveal that I've known they were "locking up" my enemies that whole time by having it never work again? It's going to surprise and stun the player that I thought of it and left it in the game for them to use. That I knew how to counter it the whole time. That I may suddenly also be using this method AGAINST THEM and they have to come up with a counter for it.

I think it's okay to let the player have their "easy wins" every now and again. To feel smart for having figured out simple ways to steamroll your content. I think it's bad to let them do that through your whole game, without them having to put forward a bit of effort to do it. There is nothing wrong in letting a player feel clever for a while. Letting them feel powerful for a while. Then, telling them that their toys no longer work, they have to grow up, and find new toys to keep doing the same thing.

A mindset like, "how can I mess with the player?" helps quite a lot a stopping their behavior of breaking your game. You need to balance it for the monsters as well. Give the enemies the important task of making a player feel threatened. Like the player could actually lose. Because, unless you go into creating a combat system with this in mind... that you're going to kill your players quite a lot... Then, it doesn't really matter if they find "an easy way to win combat". If they never experience the fear of losing combat, or the possibility of losing combat through a poor decision, or an unexpected result... Then all these methods are for the player, is a means to end combat more quickly. They can whittle them down regardless, unless those monsters have a real shot at wiping out the party.

I go into combat with that mindset. "If the player can't figure out the gimmick, they will die here." I'm more lenient with "regular encounters", but I keep that mindset. The player will lose a lot of resources in regular combat if they don't figure out the gimmick. With bosses, is it two-fold. "If the player doesn't figure out the gimmick, they will lose. If the player also does not remember to use past gimmicks on the boss that were learned through regular combat... they will lose here."

I think that's important for players. Let them feel powerful... but remember to stop them using a single way to be powerful through your whole game. They need to find newer and newer ways to feel powerful so that such power feels "earned". So that the players fee

 

[Wavelength]

Metamorph: Guaranteed instant death if the target's HP is below a certain threshold, rewarding them with an item for doing so. Even bosses and enemies normally immune to instant death can be killed this way. The balancing factor is that the HP threshold is completely controllable on a per-target basis. You'll have to knock that really powerful superboss within a few inches of its life without killing it by accident if you want to turn it into loot. This can be much harder than just hitting it until it dies.

This is tangential to the topic, but I wanted to bring it up because I've tread the same ground in the past, and realized I made an error: I once had a skill in a game I was making called 'Transmute', which did the same exact thing as you mention above (except the threshold was 25% of their Max HP)! (Great minds think alike, I guess ) It sounded so cool in theory, and I thought the balancing factor would be - as you mention - that against bosses and tough enemies, you'd still need to wear them down to low HP levels to use it.

What I realized through a lot of further thought, and then playtesting, was that it simply meant that having the character with Transmute in the party meant that the boss' HP was, for all intents and purposes, 25% lower, and that (since the player couldn't see an enemy's exact HP numbers) when I tried to use Transmute on an enemy that was actually a bit above the threshold, it failed and felt horrible.

I eventually reworked the Transmute skill to simply deal damage to an enemy, and reward them with that same item if that damage killed the enemy. From a balance and "feel good" point of view, this worked a lot better for me. If you want to encourage using this skill near the end of a fight, and make it a little easier to avoid leaving the boss with a few HP, you could have your Metamorph skill's damage scale with the target's Missing HP.

There's one other concern I've come up with about such a skill (which I haven't been able to playtest for since that game never made it to a fully-playable demo state) - I'm concerned that players will slow down the end of any relatively easy battle to make sure that this one character is continually using this move to finish off every enemy (having their other characters guard/heal/pass to make sure that they don't kill an enemy before the Transmuter can). I thought of adding a cooldown to it, but that means even more turns of idling at the end of a battle! Since I plan on adding a few different versions of this skill (for Items, Gold, extra EXP, or some other bonus if the skill kills an enemy) to an upcoming game, my current plan is to allow the player to gain rewards from Transmute-type skills 4 times per in-game day (total shared amongst all such skills), meaning that the player should only stall the end of battle out to use a Transmute if they see something they really want. Boss-class enemies don't count toward the 4 times (you will always get the bonus reward from Transmuting them), so the player doesn't need to anxiously hoard their charges throughout a dungeon in anticipation of using it for bigger rewards from a Boss enemy.

 

[Prescott]

I'm a player who LOVES, and I mean LOVES to break games. I know that's not fun for everyone, but if you don't find breaking games fun, you don't have to do it. There is just something so satisfying about finding ways to break things. Whenever I find enough diamond in Minecraft, I immediately rush to the duplication station and get a chest full of diamond pumped out. In DmC, you can jump, pull an enemy toward you, and repeat until you are high in the air where no enemies can touch you, then beat them up. In pretty much every game I play I find a way to "fudge" things, as my friends and I call it (I've been dubbed Fudge Lord lol), and I just really love exploiting games as much as possible, which is also why I'm really into speedrunning (but I suck at going fast so RIP).

In my own game, I've tried to go with an almost Nintendo-like design philosophy for the battles. Simple and easy on the surface, pretty accessible for anyone to get used to and have fun with, but with a little bit of extra sauce underneath that more experienced RPG players with have fun messing around with which will ultimately give them an easier time in battles. It's incredibly rewarding to find these things out, and you may have to find out new combinations in different areas where the enemies have different attack patterns and are of different elemental types. I'm the type of player that just likes to grind for hours while listening to/watching YouTube videos and then buy a bunch of good equipment and destroy whatever is in my path, and I've certainly left that option open as well for anyone that wants to take it.

My ultimate goal is to try to let the player decide as much as possible what their idea of fun is. It is an open world game and there is lots to explore, but if you want to just take on the main story and be done, that's certainly a possibility. If you want to 100% the game and take a deep dive into the game's lore, absolutely go for it! It may seem like a cop-out, but I've also included a rather large difficulty scale that players can mess around with if they find that their strategies are too easy and want to introduce some more challenge, or if they level up far beyond the enemies by doing a load of side quests, they can always increase it to match their level. Maybe players just want to mainly experience the world and the story and don't care much for the battles, so they can drop the difficulty down to the easiest one (where all the enemies have 50% of their original stats). I want players to be able to have fun with the game at the end of the day, and so I've tried to include a lot of different ways to play, INCLUDING ways that could potentially lead to things being broken.

One of those things is actually a core concept of the game, which is the fact that EXP is gained through action, not at the end of battle or upon killing an enemy. If you level up, you regain all of your HP and SP. This means that, given the right setup, you can live a reaaallly long time. I actually had a tester, right out of the gate go to the second area of the game rather than the first one (you can take on any area in whatever order you wish, think Breath of the Wild). He was pretty underleveled for being there, one of the characters DRASTICALLY so, and during the boss battle all but that character died. Because she was getting so much EXP for miraculously staying alive and getting perfect RNG on the enemy's attacks, she kept leveling up and regaining max stats right as she was about to die and he actually beat the boss, practically with that character alone. I was astonished but it was really cool to watch him freak out every time he got close to dying but also really close to leveling up. In a normal RPG he definitely would have died and had to go and grind some more or take on the first level before the others, but that wouldn't have been nearly as cool or memorable as what ended up actually happening.

I guess, due to that experience, I'll echo the sentiment of making sure you have people test you game and see whether they can break it in ways that are helpful or hurtful. Even some glitches that can be hard to accomplish but end up granting something absolutely insane should, in my opinion, always be available for people who want to use them. If it isn't going to hurt the average player's experience, leave it in, for sure.

 

[Aesica]

This is tangential to the topic, but I wanted to bring it up because I've tread the same ground in the past, and realized I made an error: I once had a skill in a game I was making called 'Transmute', which did the same exact thing as you mention above (except the threshold was 25% of their Max HP)! (Great minds think alike, I guess ) It sounded so cool in theory, and I thought the balancing factor would be - as you mention - that against bosses and tough enemies, you'd still need to wear them down to low HP levels to use it.

What I realized through a lot of further thought, and then playtesting, was that it simply meant that having the character with Transmute in the party meant that the boss' HP was, for all intents and purposes, 25% lower, and that (since the player couldn't see an enemy's exact HP numbers) when I tried to use Transmute on an enemy that was actually a bit above the threshold, it failed and felt horrible.

I eventually reworked the Transmute skill to simply deal damage to an enemy, and reward them with that same item if that damage killed the enemy. From a balance and "feel good" point of view, this worked a lot better for me. If you want to encourage using this skill near the end of a fight, and make it a little easier to avoid leaving the boss with a few HP, you could have your Metamorph skill's damage scale with the target's Missing HP.

There's one other concern I've come up with about such a skill (which I haven't been able to playtest for since that game never made it to a fully-playable demo state) - I'm concerned that players will slow down the end of any relatively easy battle to make sure that this one character is continually using this move to finish off every enemy (having their other characters guard/heal/pass to make sure that they don't kill an enemy before the Transmuter can). I thought of adding a cooldown to it, but that means even more turns of idling at the end of a battle! Since I plan on adding a few different versions of this skill (for Items, Gold, extra EXP, or some other bonus if the skill kills an enemy) to an upcoming game, my current plan is to allow the player to gain rewards from Transmute-type skills 4 times per in-game day (total shared amongst all such skills), meaning that the player should only stall the end of battle out to use a Transmute if they see something they really want. Boss-class enemies don't count toward the 4 times (you will always get the bonus reward from Transmuting them), so the player doesn't need to anxiously hoard their charges throughout a dungeon in anticipation of using it for bigger rewards from a Boss enemy.

I'm considering having sort of visual indicator to show the player how close they are, so if it bounces right off with little effect, they'll know they have to do a lot more damage, but if it appears to be almost working, then fails, they're nearly there. Also, since it's flexible in terms of thresholds, I can make the player really work for it, like 1% hp or less for bosses. I even have a few intentionally low-damage, non-lethal skills specifically for getting the target as low as possible. Meanwhile, the player still has to cope with the boss's angry "I'm almost dead so I'm going all out" attacks, or they might also have to contend with an enemy that heals or damages itself.

Your approach (damage and give reward if it deals the killing blow) is pretty cool though, and I might try it out too to see if I like it if my current plan turns out to be...less interesting than I'd hoped.

 

[jonthefox]

The short answer is, I think: not too easy. If it's too easy to break the game, it might give a temporary surge of joy, but very quickly the fun is gone.

Now with that said - if the player had to WORK for it (not in a grinding, boring way - in a way that feels challenging/engaging/satisfying), or was able to figure out some crazy creative strategy that gives that "i'm a genius and the dev probably didn't realize this was possible!" feeling, AND that strategy doesn't come TOO early in the game (ruins the challenge of the rest of the game), then I think it's something a lot of players really love. I know I personally love games that make me feel like I'm on the cusp of breaking the game, if I can just figure out "one more combination of skills then I'll be unstoppable" - even if I never quite get there.