On Game Balance in Simulation Genres

General
1

For game designers in the Eldraeverse where their source material draws heavily from reality (for example milsim and the like), is faithfully recreating the source material and letting the player dynamics evolve a la real life more common, or do they prefer making game-balancing but unrealistic modifications to the source material? How much does this depend on the wants of the creators vs the wants of the players?

For an example of this we can loosely look at DCS and War Thunder, the former a game which has gone on record as prioritising fidelity to real-world performance above modifying player dynamics, while the latter can often be quite comfortable introducing somewhat a-historical tweaks to aspects of the in-game vehicles to influence gameplay dynamics.

2

I suspect that, at least for single-player/not-massive-multiplayer games, there’d be a load of configuration options, so you could slide the modifications from “realism only” to “interesting interactions only”.

I’m not sure if there’d be a large enough market so that you could segment massively-multiplayer games into groups based on how much realism config they want - of course, there might be some game design tech that lets you merge those groups as much as is possible.

3

Yeah I think I forgot to add that I was mainly thinking of multiplayer titles where gameplay balance is a lot more difficult than setting the appropriate difficulty level, a la single player as you mentioned.