I think it has more to do with conditioning and being used to a certain monetization model than anything.
If you look at single player games, you'll see gamers largely prefer asymmetry in encounter design as well. Enemies are almost always bigger, stronger, faster, with different abilities than the avatar you control as the player. Multiplayer has obviously shifted to asymmetry as well. Literally everyone likes it when it's implemented properly.
I actually don't think most people take issue with it in terms of Star Citizen either. I've genuinely never heard a Star Citizen hater say "I'll check this out once they give everyone access to all the same ships all the time." I don't think that's ever been said because people know how naturally cool it is to board the Death Star as Luke Skywalker.
The dynamics we're pitting against one another are "competitive integrity" vs "fun".
Fun wins 10/10 times. Nobody wants to play Olympic Karate Championships with the same character in order to see who's the best at pressing buttons. True competitive balance isn't that fun.
Again, you can always take an effective strategy too far. Proper implementation can lead to poor implementation and vice versa. I'd have to see extensive League of Legends player metrics over a length of time and talk to a few Riot developers before I could confidently make the claim you're making here.
I wouldn't label a company as resource rich as Bungie to be "bad at balance". The problem with Destiny is that they were working on a unique problem...putting PvE weapons from it's most popular mode into significantly less popular PvP modes. They won't have that issue with Marathon. In no world do I think the Escape from Tarkov, or Hunt Showdown developers are "better at balance" than a company like Bungie.
Sorry for the delay in replying here. Was down building a new rig yesterday, this ended up being a bit of an essay / ramble.
Fun is a weird thing to define or quantify because it will differ for each person.
Fun could represent the old Halo mindset of a 30 second gameplay loop that is engaging, repeatable, and variable. Fun could be an emergent gameplay sandbox were dynamic elements come together and create epic moments you half to describe to your friend the next day (Think Helldivers). Fun could be smashing your face into a Dark Souls / Elden Ring boss for 3 hours straight until you emerge victorious, but to another person fun is a really epic on rails boss fight sequence that is half cut-scene / half gameplay and heavily scripted. Fun could represent a veteran flexing their skillset so hard they go 25 - 0 against a new player, but to another player that could be boring as hell as they want to engage someone who can actually compete with them at their level. I don't think you can blanket appeal to "fun" as a vague concept. It's like saying games are best when you enjoy them.
I think you have to quantify fun into more specific subgenres, concepts, and ideas and then find people who align with those ideas. Players who enjoy action, players who enjoy multiplayer, players who enjoy puzzles, players who enjoy story, players who enjoy difficulty, etc. So the questions in this case are more along the lines of:
1) Can being locked into a specific character / class / weapon for a game be engaging as an idea? Is the limitation itself compelling in ways that open up depth in different ways?
2) Is there a large enough audience for it? This is a triple-AAA high budget game and niche won't cut it.
I think question 1 starts to get into questions about depth, growth, etc. Is this a character that has 3 abilities or is this a character that's as deep as a Street Fighter / Tekken character? If it's just a 3 ability character what are the options for depth? I could see large skill ceilings for a character with a teleport or grappling hook but it's going to depend on level composition, positioning, etc. On the other hand a character that has some dumb charge ability might have fuck all for depth. Can character A equip sub machine guns while character B can equip assault rifles and is one of those classes of weapons just straight up superior to the other... If yes, that's going to feel like dogshit immediately. Then you get into growth. Outside of skill and knowledge is there any inherent change in this character at 50 hours, 100 hours, etc or is it all skill ceiling? There's so many ways this can go and could be speculated but I would argue whatever way it goes, the depth has to be there and execution has to be flawless. This is not impossible but it is a high bar to clear.
Regarding question 2... I think most players aren't going to consider depth up front unfortunately. I think any multiplayer game today needs to be compelling in the first 15 minutes. People might stick with it and discover that depth but I think this is going to work against the game and the perception of the game in almost every scenario. $40 a character will be seen as greedy, even if Bungie executes perfectly. So I don't think the audience for this depth exists because they don't know who they are... This could become a new sub-genre but I would expect Marathon to rely heavily on other aspects of it that appeal until it cements itself.
I still personally think the competive integrity aspect is huge and an existing expectation amongst players. The expectation today in the western audience is that gameplay content is complete / included and cosmetics can be microtransactions. This is something Marathon would also have to compete against. So while the initial premise is possible, I think it's 100% an uphill battle to try and go down this route. It's going to require a lot of trust and good will from the community and execution has to be nailed.
Few side notes:
- It is true that some games are un-balanced on purpose just to rotate the meta, keep the game the feeling fresh, and promote characters / weapons that might be under utilized. This just increases the importance of availability and competitive integrity though. The community can stick with what they've mastered or rotate to and learn the new best thing. Keep doing this a few times and you end up with a player base that prefers a wider range of characters, weapons, abilities, etc. This makes matches feel different / dynamic and increases the overall health of the game. If you start to lock people into $40 purchases you'll end up with a lot of people that googled that X was the best character before buying them and now they're stuck on them. Every match has that character, 50% of players are playing that character, etc. I don't that's a healthy direction for any game to go.
- It's possible that the market closest to what you're suggesting is the Asian MMO market, where people invest heavily in their characters, everything is pay to win, etc. I would say the western gaming market has clearly refused that direction of things. Lost Ark came here and flopped hard the second people realized just how stupid leveling your gear was when upgrade success rates got into the 5% window and just how tedious investing in one character was. I'm not saying you won't find a niche audience that might be interested. I'm just saying I don't think the average gamer will be.
- I would absolutely blast Bungie for how they responded to their meta and handled crucible. You can not leave seriously unbalanced weapons to dominate the meta for 4+ months before a patch under or over nerfs them. You need to respond to your community at the very least bi-weekly in today's market. The crucible was constantly plagued by some dumb gimmick and Bungie would move like a snail to address anything. The year of stasis was hilarious especially because everyone saw stasis being an issue well in advance of the expansion coming out. Any other exploits were swiftly handled within hours though. Let's not forget Bungie treated PvP like trash, removing half of the maps from the game, promising reworks, delivering nothing, and then telling players who were paying $100 a year for the expansion + season that they just didn't have a single PvP map in the budget that year and hopefully next year we might get 1 map despite having 1000+ developers. I don't even know how you take a game with millions of players handing you over the cost of a deluxe edition new standalone game annually while producing barely any content for it that is heavily recycled assets and somehow end up in a position where you're not profitable. Bungie is an absolute joke of a Studio and should not be an example for the industry.
