In The Outfit, weapons, squad commands, resources, vehicles, characters, and maps were the main areas that needed tuning to make the game fun and balanced. It took a lot of people, a lot of gaming, and a lot of numbers to get it right.
When we balanced the characters and vehicles our priority was to ensure that each had a clear role. Tommy Mac is the best at mid and close range combat versus infantry. JD Tyler is great at evading enemy fire, capturing points and sniping people at long ranges. Deuce is great at purchasing emplacements and vehicles, controlling areas, and slamming bazooka rounds into enemy vehicles and fortifications. By giving each hero specific roles, we ensured there's always a reason to choose each character, depending on how you want to approach an encounter.
Each hero has two weapons (and a thrown weapon) which suit their roles best (Tommy Mac, for example, has a flamethrower, a sub-machine gun and sticky bombs). Like the heroes, most vehicles come equipped with a main weapon and a secondary weapon. Add the complexity of our anti-tank and machine-gun emplacements and you can see we have a lot of armament in The Outfit, each with firing rates and damage values that need to be balanced! One of the cooler changes we made late in development was making Tommy Mac's gun fire much faster, but with slightly lower damage per shot. A slower firing, more powerful weapon didn't feel nearly as cool as one that spits out 10 bullets per second.
Tuning and Balance Force
Josh Mifflin (or Miffbert, as we loved to call him) was the designer responsible for tuning the health values and attributes on the thousands of environmental objects found in The Outfit. He "loved" it when someone came up to him saying, 'Hey Josh, we need the shotgun to blow up that oil barrel faster' or 'That low wooden fence shouldn't stop machine gun bullets.' Believe me, tuning a fully destructible environment isn't the most exciting of jobs, but it had to be done!
