Making sure any game is balanced and fair without anything being too overpowered is exactly what you want in a game that has multiple ways to play. You never want a player to pick something because it’s ‘the best’ or ‘the easiest’ way to play. You don’t want someone picking to use a sword over a staff because the sword is very clearly better than the staff in every possible way. Rather you want players to pick the sword because that’s what best suits their play style or what they’d find the most fun. However this is extremely hard to do in any game. Regardless of how much internal testing you do, someone will find something you didn’t think of and use it to break the game and be overpowered. This is especially true of competitive games. Any time a new weapon or character is released for a game the community is going to look over every little thing and find something there to exploit. It might not happen instantly but it’ll happen eventually. Or the community won’t find anything like that because this new option is extremely under powered and no one wants to use it. Which is also a problem. But at least in that case people will continue to play the game as usual. When it comes to using an overpowered new option, it can really affect people’s enjoyment of the game as said option is abused to get an edge over other players who either don’t have that same option, because that new option is paid DLC or something, or just don’t want to use it.

And when this happens, just about every developer does one thing. They nerf that option.

Now I’m sure some people aren’t exactly aware what a nerf is so I’ll quickly explain since it’s pretty simple. Nerfing something is a term in the gaming community that is used when a developer takes an overpowered option and makes it worse. For example, maybe the sword is doing way too much damage compared to the staff, so the developers of the game will nerf the damage of the sword to make it more reasonable so the sword is no longer the obvious choice. You see this the most in competitive games or any game with a Player versus Player mode. Games like Overwatch, Street Fighter, or even Elden Ring which does indeed have a PvP element but it isn’t really the focus. Games like Elden Ring doesn’t tend to get nerfs as frequently as more competitive focused games do which makes sense. It also makes sense why developers nerf certain options in games like Overwatch and Street Fighter. Let’s take Street Fighter as an example though, since I actually like playing that game.

For fighting games, especially modern ones, releasing new characters is very important for keeping players engaged long term with the game. This is why most fighting games will have a season pass announced that detail upcoming characters coming to the game before the game even launches! Street Fighter 6, a game released back in June, already has it’s first DLC character out, Rashid, with another new character right around the corner. And while releasing a new character is always exciting, there is also a very high chance said character will be overpowered or completely break the game with how good they are. This can happen as well with the starting roster of characters but DLC characters are far more likely to be overpowered as they can be made in response to some already powerful characters in the game. The struggle to make sure new and old characters stay balanced and playable is a rough one. So much so that there probably isn’t a single fighting game that has a completely balanced cast of characters. Which players are generally fine with so long as there isn’t one or two characters that are clearly better than the rest. So knowing all that now, nerfs probably make a lot more sense! If a character, weapon, or any option is better than the rest in the game, the answer is to nerf it down to fit the rest of the options, right? Well yes and no. While nerfing something is the quick and easy solution, it’s not the only solution!

Now when it comes to purely competitive games I can’t deny that nerfing the current overpowered option is the best solution. But for other games? Not so much. You rarely see nerfs in purely single player games or games that don’t focus on PvP but it still happens and that’s what really annoys me. This topic of nerfs came up because of a recent patch to Diablo 4, a game that does have a PvP element but it is far from the focus. I actually had to look it up just to double check it wasn’t just a single player/coop focused game. The patch focused mostly on nerfing classes and options for said classes, even classes that the community felt were already under powered… A lot is wrong with this patch in particular but it got me thinking about how much nerfs suck and how they don’t technically even need to be a thing.

Having there be a clearly ‘best’ option in any game isn’t a good thing. If a game is meant to have choices, even a single player game, you don’t want one choice to be the obvious best one. But the solution isn’t always to nerf that ‘best’ option, I think it makes far more sense to buff every other option instead! _{Buffs are the opposite of nerfs by the way, it’s a term used for when developers make an option stronger instead of weaker.} Now I get that this isn’t a very practical solution, especially for competitive games that need quick solutions to their overpowered problems, but hear me out!

While not always, overpowered options are picked not just because they are overpowered but because they are also more fun. A lot of times this is the case when said option isn’t just simply overpowered, like a certain character just does more damage than all the other characters, but when it’s overpowered because of how it works. For example, in an RPG maybe one character class has access to abilities that make them overpowered when used in a certain way. Like if they use a certain sword in combination with an ability they have that raises their critical hit damage, they are able to do massive damage as a result because the developers overlooked that exploit. That’s the fun kind of overpowered! And it’s what I feel is the difference between something being overpowered instead of just ‘broken’. It’s pretty normal to hear someone call something overpowered and broken but I feel like there is a big difference. To me, something is broken when it isn’t working as intend or is even glitching the game. While something being overpowered is more like the player either found a design oversight or is using the overpowered character in a way the developers weren’t expecting. It’s these kinds of cases where I feel like developers shouldn’t nerf that option. Because the players are picking said option not just because it’s more powerful but mainly because it’s more fun. This is what really upset people about the Diablo 4 nerfs. It felt like the developers were taking fun out of the game by nerfing some characters and options when they really should have been focusing on buffing other characters to get them on the same level!

Whenever this topic of nerfs vs buffs comes up my mind always goes to one game that, while being very much a single player game with no competitive elements, proves that buffing everything can be the right option. And that game is Bravely Default 2. I’ve actually done a full review of Bravely Default 2 where I talk about this exact thing, about how the fact that everything is overpowered is what makes the game so fun. But let’s talk a bit more about that right here since it’s very relevant to this topic.

Bravely Default 2 is a turned based RPG very much in the style of classic Final Fantasy games. In fact Square Enix, the company that makes Final Fantasy, makes Bravely Default! However, the game manages to stand on it’s own and set itself apart from Final Fantasy and other turned based RPGs by giving you so much freedom when it comes to setting up your party and how you go about combat with said party!

This insane amount of freedom comes in the form of the Jobs system. Now a lot of RPGs have Jobs or classes. They usually will have standard ones like Monk, Mage, Thief, or anything like that. Even Diablo 4 is set up like this. And Bravely Default 2 is no different! But it is different in two ways. Those ways being just how creative the developers got with those Jobs and the fact that you can have a main Job and a sub Job. I’m going to try and keep this simple though since this post would be crazy long if I tried to explain every little thing about the Jobs and how they work. And while I would love to sit here and explain how creative and wacky some of the Jobs are in the game, it’s probably best if we focus on talking about what makes them so overpowered and, more importantly, so fun.

What makes Bravely Default 2‘s Jobs so overpowered is the fact that you can technically have two for every character. As I mentioned before, each of the four main characters can have a main and sub Job. How it works is that a character’s main Job is what affects their stats, so if a character’s main Job is a Black Mage they will have stats that work best with that, so higher magic points and lower defense and so on. Not only that, every Job has it’s own Specialties, two to be exact! One is unlocked from the get go and the other you get when the character using that Job levels the Job up completely. These Specialties provide unique skills for those Jobs, for instance the Black Mage’s first Specialty allows it to gain some magic points whenever they Default, or defend, that turn. And you only get the benefit of these Specialties for the Job that is your main Job. _{Unless you use a specific Ability but we’ll get to that later!} So with all that in mind, it’s pretty obvious why a character’s main Job is so important. It sets up how the character will work basically as a character’s stats and what weapons they can use really dictate how they’ll play and the Specialties help enforce that play style. Their sub Job won’t affect nearly as much as the only thing having a sub Job does is allow you to use the commands of that Job. For example, if you’re main Job is a Monk and you’re sub is a Black Mage, you can still use commands like casting Fire or Blizzard despite a Monk not normally being able to do that. This can be a massive game changer as it can allow certain Jobs to act very differently given what they have access to. Not only that, mixing and matching Jobs can be a lot of fun! Especially when you find a good synergy between two Jobs. Like combining the Shieldmaster Job, which is all about defense and protecting the party as a whole, with the Swordmaster Job which is all about counter attacks. When you combine these two, you can make a character that is able to not only keep the entire party safe, but can also counter attack all the time as they are taking every hit. Is that overpowered? You better believe it, and that’s what makes it awesome!

But it doesn’t stop there! Jobs not only have access to specific commands, leveling them up will give you access to certain Abilities specific to those Jobs. Now the important thing about Abilities compared to commands is that Abilities are always passive, they work in the background and some work outside of battle, and you do not need to have the Job that Ability came from equipped to use them! Every character has access to five Ability slots that the player is free to add any Ability into regardless of the two Jobs that character has. These Abilities can range from pretty useful to insanely overpowered for some Jobs! For example, one of the first Abilities you’ll unlock is the Divining Rod which will have the game tell you how many treasure chests are in an area you are currently. Pretty useful! But then late in the game you’ll unlock Abilities like Sub-Job Specialty 2, which allows your character to use the second Specialty of your sub Job! Which can get absolutely insane… Another one is Surpassing Power which allows you to deal damage passed the normal limit of 9999 damage and combining that with Critical Amp, which increases the amount your critical hits do, you’ll be chopping up bosses in just a few hits!

So! Taking the Abilities, Job Specialties, and having a main and sub Job into consideration, you can probably imagine just how overpowered you can make yourself in Bravely Default 2. And I’m willing to bet that’s exactly how the developers want it to be! Because not only is it very obvious how quickly these systems will get out of hand if a player is smart enough, the developers seemed to actually design the game around that fact! Which brings us to my next big point. Something that nerfs can help prevent is making a game too easy and not as fun. After all, if you’re just steam rolling over every single obstacle what’s the point? Luckily, Bravely Default 2 also gives us the answer to that problem too!

Just make all the enemies more overpowered.

While basic random enemy encounters rarely pose much of a threat in Bravely Default 2, the bosses are a different story! This is mainly because bosses will also have Jobs themselves! Beating a boss with a Job like Thief is actually how you unlock that Job for your party. And as I was saying before, a lot of the Jobs in Bravely Default 2 are pretty overpowered! Which is true for when the bosses have them too. It actually works as a really good showcase for what a Job can do funny enough. However even after getting all the Job classes for yourself the game still manages to give you lots and lots of tough boss fights as the bosses get some crazy powers like being able to counter anything. Like, even just using a simple potion will make some bosses counter attack. Not only that, some of the late game boss fights will have you fighting previous bosses but you’ll have to fight them while they are teamed up with other bosses too! This shows that the developers really understood how overpowered certain Job combinations could be. And while that probably sounds terrible on paper, in practice it’s a ton of fun! After all, you are just as overpowered as the bosses are so it’s really up to you and how you play to beat them. When everything is overpowered, nothing is, you know?

And that right there is exactly what you want! Rather than nerfing one option that players are very clearly having fun with, developer should instead strive to have every option be that way! And while I know that isn’t possible for every game that suffers from overpowered options, like PvP focused games, it is certainly a solution for some games and one that isn’t explored nearly enough. Mainly due to the amount of time and effort it would take but wouldn’t that be worth it if it results in a more fun experience that players really enjoy? While Blizzard, the developers of Diablo 4, probably wouldn’t want to put the time and effort in to do something like that with Diablo 4 I have to imagine they are wishing they did a few more buffs over nerfs in the recent patch given how upset the player base is! Especially since a lot of the nerfs weren’t in an attempt to make the game fair or balanced but rather that players were figuring out smart ways to make their classes overpowered. So they basically just sucked out the fun for a lot of people instead of buffing some of the other classes and making the enemies harder. A solution that would have taken more time and money but they are also Blizzard so they can probably afford it!

Ugh…

It really is annoying that most developers simply fall back on nerfing things instead of realizing that players are having fun with the overpowered options they are planning to nerf. Because, again, Bravely Default 2 has proven how effective that approach can be. It’ll take far more time and effort but it’ll also result in a much more fun game. Which is exactly what all game developers should strive for! So, in the end, after all that if this post convinces you of anything… It’s that you should play Bravely Default 2! _{Serious I feel like I’m the only person who actually played it and it’s so good!} Oh and that nerfs suck and can make a game boring even if it results in a more balanced experience. That too.

But those are just my thoughts! What are some of yours? How do you feel about nerfs? Have nerfs ever ruined your enjoyment of a game? I’d love to hear your thoughts so don’t be shy!

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