As the fighting game genre evolves, major fighting franchises are expected to have bigger and bigger rosters, especially once DLC and updates come into the picture. Some modern fighting games, like the upcoming Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, have a whopping 65+ characters. But is a bigger roster necessarily a better roster?
A common argument against big rosters is that the game gets harder to balance, as you have to worry about each character each time you balance the game. However, I believe the opposite is true. Bigger rosters are actually easier to balance than smaller ones, simply due to counter picks. Counter picking is a huge component of fighting games, as it let's you change your strategy to exploit your opponent character's weak-points to gain an advantage, adding a flavor of Rock-paper scissors to the game. This means that as a roster gets bigger, a character simply gets more potential counters to their weak-points, thus the invisible nature of counter-picking does most of the game's balancing itself. Meaning the developers can focus more on buffing low-tier characters, or nerfing ones deemed too powerful by the community with each patch.
While not technically a fighting game, Blizzard's Overwatch shares many elements of the genre in its core gameplay, and counter-picking plays a much bigger role there since the game allows you to change characters mid spawn, thus letting you change your strategy on the fly, while you have to wait until after the match to swap off in most actual fighting games. Several new characters were added, and the meta has changed so much because the inclusion of more new characters created new counter pick possibilities, thus not as much work needs to be done when balancing.
A common argument against big rosters is that the game gets harder to balance, as you have to worry about each character each time you balance the game. However, I believe the opposite is true. Bigger rosters are actually easier to balance than smaller ones, simply due to counter picks. Counter picking is a huge component of fighting games, as it let's you change your strategy to exploit your opponent character's weak-points to gain an advantage, adding a flavor of Rock-paper scissors to the game. This means that as a roster gets bigger, a character simply gets more potential counters to their weak-points, thus the invisible nature of counter-picking does most of the game's balancing itself. Meaning the developers can focus more on buffing low-tier characters, or nerfing ones deemed too powerful by the community with each patch.
While not technically a fighting game, Blizzard's Overwatch shares many elements of the genre in its core gameplay, and counter-picking plays a much bigger role there since the game allows you to change characters mid spawn, thus letting you change your strategy on the fly, while you have to wait until after the match to swap off in most actual fighting games. Several new characters were added, and the meta has changed so much because the inclusion of more new characters created new counter pick possibilities, thus not as much work needs to be done when balancing.
