I don't really view balance in single player games any differently than I do a multiplayer game. A well balanced game has a wealth of options open that promotes dynamic gameplay. A poorly balanced game degenerates into stagnant gameplay because one or two options are much more powerful than the rest.
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.
I don't really view balance in single player games any differently than I do a multiplayer game
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.
>I guess balance in single player is about difficulty?
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.
One of the things that I'm going to do in my game, is to make entire categories of items unusable or gimped across entire bands of space. So as you progress (the leaderboards are mainly based on how far in "the direction of difficulty" you can get) you will eventually get to a point where you have to abandon your favorite strategy and come up with a new one.
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.
Balance is a two edged sword. Sure, you don't want singular dominant strategies, especially in a multiplayer environment, but in many modern games I get the impression that all my decisions as a player are completely irrelevant, because the magic of careful balancing will make sure that every immediate advantage/disadvantage will be countered by some precisely equivalent disadvantage/advantage somewhere down the road. If the answer to the question has no consequence, why even bother asking?
tldr; Good overall balance means momentary imbalance!
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.
It was never meant to be multiplayer in real time afaik... just that you would see the impact of other players in the world... however confused the marketing became
That is not true. It was said that you could run into other players and interact with them in real time, but that it would be exceedingly rare due to the size of the galaxy. Well, happened on day 1 and, nope, not true.
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.
And much of the expectant player base didn't want to hear anything negative. Reddit was a complete echo chamber, praising the devs in every post. I suppose it's still an echo chamber, but the conversation has... drifted the other way.
yeah, i think this was a mistake made under obvious pressure.
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.
My game is just as vast, practically speaking, and it has 70 client multiplayer, worst case. (That is, all directly interacting in the same spot. If 1000 clients were in the same star-system instance, but not interacting, that would be fine.)
Progression rate mainly. Simple Minecraft example (imagine it had more game bolted on, because I can't think of many proc-gen worlds off the top of my head)... Diamond is only available below X depth and at Y rarity. The depth is a hard limit, because it would screw with the intended progression of player crafting if a diamond vein had spawned a block or two under the surface. (Although this example is slightly flawed because you need to craft better equipment to mine diamond, blah blah blah)
I recently dusted off Minecraft for the first time in a few years and was surprised, in retrospect, at how little effort the game makes at any semblance of balance or progression. One world might start you right next to a village with a chest full of diamonds, while another might start you in a vast desert - with no trees, meaning no wood, tools, or torches, meaning a long walk (and probably many deaths) before progression per-se can begin.
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.)
This reminds me: as fun as the sandbox nature of the game is... I enjoy the crafted adventure maps more. Or the challenge maps where you are just on a floating island and need to figure out the correct progression without wasting resources.
I had a moment like this when I first played Factorio (an excellent game, by the way) and it started me out on a tiny island. It was a much bigger challenge there, considering that Factorio doesn't have swimming or boats!
A recent (few months ago?) update added a landfill item, which is made from stone and can be used to convert water to land. I think I'm playing the beta channel, so I'm not sure if it's in the default version of the game or not.
Hah, yes! Except it's more directly influenced (creating the recipes and what pickaxes can mine which ores) than the indirect influence on the procgen world by defining ore distributions.
I guess balance in single player is about difficulty? Or are there other aspects of single player games that are considered balance?