The Hero Shooter is all the rage when it comes to First Person Shooters. Overwatch, Rainbow Six, Valorant, and even Battlefield uses this model in their design. The premise of a hero shooter is creating unique characters for players to connect with on a more personal level. These characters tend to have loadouts and abilities exclusive to them. Which has been proven to connect with players, so developers keep doing it. However in tandem with the rise of the subgenre is a new model for video games. Just like how DLC was all the rage 5-10 years ago, Games as a Service has since become the dominant way for developers to continue making money off of a title after release. The idea being that by providing new content, players will be incentivized to spend some cash, either to support the devs for all the ‘free’ work or because there’s an advantage to be gained from that new content. But the combination of these two concepts, the Hero Shooter and Games as a Service, has a fatal flaw that only rears its head in the long term. The game’s balance becomes secondary to the constant churn of content. Given a long enough timescale this creates unrepairable damage to the state of a game.
The problem with hero shooters is that they’re part of an industry that expects constant growth and additions to a game. You can’t just have a complete game, there needs to be new maps, new characters, new guns, new cosmetics, new everything. More often than not this stems from the responsibility of games studios to make money rather than the game needing constant updates. The idea is that new things serve two purposes: each addition is something new to sell, another potential purchase, and the constant updates keeps the game in the public sphere.
It’s no secret that online culture has a short attention span, how many memes get cycled through and go from hilarious to overused in the span of a day or three? The corporate counter to this phenomenon is to simply force their product to remain shiny by constantly adding new things to it. NEW characters. NEW maps. NEW lighting and balancing. It’s all to keep the game in the public sphere, and frankly is the only reason Siege is still alive. The constant updates kept the game afloat when it truly was a diamond in the rough.
The problem is that game balance is hard. Using drones and Mute’s jammer as an example, make drones too powerful and Mute feels useless as a supposed counter. Make Mute to powerful and vice versa. Adding a new character to this dynamic makes things harder to predict. Mozzie highlights this. On his own Mozzie was pretty balanced. 2 good, but not overpowered weapons, a good but not overpowered gadget, solid secondary utility and a secondary shotgun. A very useful kit that’s easy to slot into any Defense, but not absolutely necessary to take every round. But combined with Mute, Mozzie becomes a terror because of the synergy. Mozzie’s pests and Mute’s jammers combined to be able to deny information for up to 7 lanes of the map. Used well this meant that the Defense could create layered setups with constant information denial at every part of the map. This synergy is what helped SSG create the original Clubhouse roam in 2020.
Every new character and update has the potential to cause this kind of synergistic problem, but a game doesn’t have the luxury of taking its time to really iron out the balancing of new and existing characters, they have to keep pumping out content. Was Lion always going to be overpowered? Maybe with a little more time in the oven he would have been in a much more balanced state than he originally was, but Siege needed Operation Chimera up and running. The constant grind for new content means that balance becomes secondary. Was buffing LMGs really a good idea? Finka already had a surprisingly good kit, maybe thinking a bit more about who had access to powerful guns and important utility would have been good. Even if things are thought through, can you really axe a character or map that’s been in development for months or years just because they’re broken? From the developer perspective you need to recoup that cost, even if the game suffers a *little*.
Over a long enough timespan this kills every hero shooter. Too many characters and maps get added. Balance becomes a mess because it was never a priority, and playing damage control can’t fix fundamental issues. Characters like Blackbeard are inherently binary: either the face shield blocks too many bullets and is overpowered or it has no effect and is useless. You can’t fine tune a gadget that so thoroughly messes with a mechanic like 1 shot headshot. Add in that a constant feed of new characters means increased depth every update and the skill floor is constantly raised. It becomes hard to bring in new players because there’s such a backlog of characters to unlock and things to learn, the game becomes work to even play.
This is the flaw with the hero shooter, not its inherent concept but its execution in a world where the game is simply a service to sell more and more product. The characters are products, the skins are products, the maps and balance patches are nothing more than ways to keep you happy enough to keep buying. Without balance being the primary focus every hero shooter dies under the weight of its own constant growth.