And a small team means far fewer testers so that exacerbates the problem.
I guess balance in single player is about difficulty? Or are there other aspects of single player games that are considered balance?
A good example of a well balanced single player game is tetris. All the pieces are useful. It may be easier to complete a line with the straight piece, and in a tight pinch a less skilled player might hold out for it while placing down other pieces willy nilly, but if every piece was as easy to use as the straight piece then the game would have less variety and tension! At certain points in the game you may not want a straight piece because of the way you have laid down your previous pieces, the game is dynamic because the optimal strategy is changing all the time because of how you played the game, this adds even more strategy because you can also influence how the optimal strategy will change.
A good example of a poorly balanced single player game is... well in my opinion most single player games are poorly balanced. Either the game is so easy that it really doesn't require you to strategize at all or the game is easily cheesed by using one overpowered technique. This is especially evident in many RPG's, although they try to hide it with a huge skill tree (of which almost invariably a large number of skills are useless and a couple are ridiculously overpowered) or by having you learn a whole bunch of enemy weaknesses and resistances (IMO this is cheating, the challenge isn't dynamic as these stats are unchanging and typically only serve as an overwrought color matching exercise). Pokemon is a good example of this, although you have hundreds of pokemon to collect and train and it seems a variety of enemy types should force you to have a varied party yourself, the easiest way to beat the game is to overlevel your starting pokemon by giving them all the experience points and grab one or two other pokemon along the way to cover your weaknesses in the end stages of the game and load up with necessary non-combat moves.
This is a great approach to take. When you let the computer "cheat" it tends to result in less intellectually satisfying enemies. The computer should pretty much be playing by the same rules as the player.
In a sense balance is always about difficulty. But it's also about not ruining all the depth your game offers. If one of the easiest paths becomes objectively the best to achieve a goal, there's no reason for the player to explore or use any of the other paths.
This appears in all kinds of systems: if there's one class that's just the best, your class system is unbalanced and most players will barely play the other classes. If there's this "one simple trick" to earn lots of money (e.g. mine that one very common ore, like in No Man's Sky), an interesting economy becomes a boring timesink due to being unbalanced. If one of the early weapons is the best, everyone will use it and all the time you spent designing other weapons was just a waste.
Even without this, due to the rarity of items that have little penalty for benefit, you will often have to improvise, as your required item will likely not be available with exactly the right combination of compatibility and stats.
No Man's Sky was supposed to be multiplayer, originally. There can also be a notion of balance in single player games. For example, in a 4X game or an RTS in single player mode, you can still have issues of balance with regards to the relative effectiveness of ECM versus weapons. Missiles vs. beams. Fighters vs. small units.
Extra Credits covers this. What you actually want in an overall well balanced game is occasional contextual imbalance. Cue someone mentioning "Rock, Paper, Scissors" here. That game is perfectly balanced, but in any given iteration, all the power is with the winner. Another example: Chess. The moment your opponent promotes his queen, in the context of that particular game, things are massively skewed against you -- which is immensely satisfying for your opponent.
If answering the question has immediate consequence for the situation you are in, then the task of the devs is to give the player the tools to see if they can improvise their way out of the pickle they are in, or exploit the advantage they have stumbled onto.
Now it was never supposed to have a large focus on multiplayer, but they also mentioned things like a galactic economy, big space battles, a faction system... all BS.
This should've tripped everyone's BS detectors. Why would a studio do the huge work to add a multiplayer mode if it would be so rarely seen?
The sound was drowned out by the overwhelmingly non-technical consumers of the game's PR. It's the modern day version of selling snake oil.
Technology progresses, but human nature doesn't.
you are right about a lot of the claims seeming to be straight up BS, but it was all understandable imo. people had unrealistic expectations because the devs didn't take care to manage them well.
there are space battles, and there are things you could call factions and economy, they are just woefully underpar compared to expectation and marketting material.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/Games/comments...
MC is best considered as a sandbox simulation rather than a game. (Not that that's a criticism of course - it's just something I'd forgotten after a few years of not playing.)
More example of balance.
The result invariably looks about as exciting as one of those mix-and-match flipbooks: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/de/a7/7d/dea77dbbf...