Max Payne 3 - Game balance and DLC

At the time of writing this article Max Payne 3 has 1135 players currently using the online matchmaking service, which considering halo 3 currently has 18133, is somewhat pathetic for a multiplayer game wants to push its paid DLC upon consumers, especially with Halo 3’s age.

I personally think that the reason behind this abysmal player count is that absolutely horrendous multiplayer balancing, they completely buggered up in multiple aspects of the balance that combine together to make this even less balanced than MW2 on launch, a feat that is by no means easy.

First up is the peculiar take on the class system they took, not only on levelling up do you unlock new guns, gear, and bursts but you also occasionally unlock a higher carrying capacity for these things, changing how much you can carry before being classified into light, medium and heavy. These groupings determine your health and stamina regeneration, meaning that higher ranked people can carry the exact same as a lower ranker but be able to run faster, and survive longer, or in a lot of cases it means that they can just straight up carry more firepower without any sort detrimental effect to them, which completely screws the balance in itself, but that’s not all that’s broken.

Copyright Rockstar Games

The guns themselves. The guns unlock for purchase at level milestones like 10, 20 and 40 where a load of guns become available for purchase, meaning that between these levels apart from weapon attachments you will receive no significant firepower increase, unlike other games where you unlock things gradually, this lack of firepower means that someone at level 19 will be significantly less powerful than somebody at level 20, this is not helped at all by the complete lack of the weapon balance between these landmark levels. The weapons in the next unlockable tier are practically direct upgrades of the previous ones, and not small upgrades like other games, the upgrades are huge, especially in the gap between 10 and 20. You could argue that they are not upgrades because they weigh more, but the weight system completely destroys any potential balance here.

This coupled with the weight imbalance means that scenarios can and will arise where an extremely powerful semi-automatic sniper can one hit kill low levelled players because they simply cannot wear armour as well as carry semi decent weaponry and retain a bearable running speed and health regen rate, causing many one sided stomps to occur.

This then causes new players to leave the multiplayer aspect of the game to stagnate while they play better balanced games instead, with this kind of small playerbase making DLC that costs real money is pointless, the amount of users that would be interested in purchasing it is low enough as it is, and many of them may have noticed that the userbase is dying, and that the DLC would be a waste of money for them, it appears that rockstar are aware of this problem by changing the upcoming DLC from paid to free to coax players back in to the game, but sadly the balance is screwed so badly that it’s pretty much unsalvageable without a complete rework of the system which just isn’t feasible. Rockstar should quit after these planned DLC packs and reassign the employees to something not so pointless, I would say they should just quit now but that’s the problem they get into when they offer a “Season Pass” style offer.

Map Packs are cancerous anyway