PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale lead designer Seth Killian discusses balancing the fighter

PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, the fighting game supersaturated with a large roster of PlayStation notables, presented the developers with challenges for balance, controls and character selection, the game's lead designer, Seth Killian, told Push Square.

Killian, who left his position at Capcom earlier this year to work with developer SuperBot Entertainment, arrived late in PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale's development. His focus became "polish and some presentation," as well as "character details and balance."

Early on, each character's divergent control scheme concerned him. He initially resisted the decision to have moves mapped differently for each character, but came to understand and accept it.

"A lot of individual designers put a lot of work into each character to make them represent their parent IP, so each button is built around a specific kind of attack," he said. "That's a different way of looking at things. Obviously I come from many, many years of Capcom experience, where they have their own way of doing things. But that's not the only way of making fighting games, so I really can value some of the genius behind the SuperBot approach."

The size of the levels also presented a challenge for balancing the fighters.

"The other thing that was new to me was the sheer size of the play space," he said. "It really makes a difference in terms of the directionality of the attacks. So, for example, some characters are strong on a horizontal plane, while others are very proficient at vertical attacks. As such, this game has been all about balancing in a traditional sense - the moves, damage, and AP gain — but also, the character's types of attack. We needed to constantly ask ourselves, ‘Where does this character need to be on-screen in respect to the others in order to take full advantage of his moves?' I've got to say, that's been a really interesting aspect of making this game. Space control is one of the things I love most in video games, so I've been really excited about working on that."

Though the game has been released, Killian also expects the balancing and character selection challenges to continue.

"I'm certainly familiar with it, and it's still on-going, because, of course, we're hoping to add characters with the DLC."