Interview: Dragon Ball: The Breakers Producer Ryosuke Hara shares how they are balancing the game

Prior to this year’s Tokyo Game Show, we got a chance to interview Dragon Ball: The Breakers Producer Ryosuke Hara alongside other members of the SEA gaming press.

In case you missed its announcement back in November 2021, Dragon Ball: The Breakers is an upcoming asymmetrical multiplayer where a group of players must survive against one powerful foe. Instead of the typical 4v1 setup, the matches will be 7-versus-1, with the lone player playing either Frieza, Cell, or Buu.

Dragon Ball: The Breakers Interview – Ryosuke Hara, Producer

An asymmetrical multiplayer game is something that’s rather unexpected for a Dragon Ball title. When asked about how the idea came about, Hara said:

“This part of the Dragon Ball world is something that hasn’t been explored a lot in the Dragon Ball games that we have created before. We show you a lot of Dragon Ball fighting games and we have shown Dragon Ball history. Because of this, we wanted to let players experience the Dragon Ball world but as normal citizens. That’s the first thing that came in at the start of the development.”

Aside from giving players a fresh Dragon Ball game experience, Hara also mentioned an interesting fact about why the game features a 7-versus-1 setup compared to the more typical 4v1 style of other games:

“The game itself features a character with superpowers versus normal people, right? So, we want more players on the normal people’s side to make it more balanced. And as you know, there are seven Dragon Balls, right? So, with that in mind, we want it to have a specific meaning, like seven people for seven dragon balls. That’s what we’re aiming for with the number of the players in each match.”

Having seven players on one side is a nice ode to the seven Dragon Balls. But this definitely adds to difficulty balancing the game. After all, it’s easy to make the seven-player side too strong given that there are a lot of them. On the other hand, making the solo player too powerful won’t be a fun experience for the opposing team.

Here’s how the developers are approaching balance in The Breakers as explained by Hara:

“If one side, whether it’s the Raider side or Survivor side is too strong or if the other side is too weak, that’s what we don’t want. We have been thinking a lot regarding this game’s balance. The most important aspect of the game is to let players experience the superpowered versus normal people scenario.

But in order to keep the big difference between the superpowered and normal characters balanced, we have two points that we consider to be the most important. The first one is the data that we have from players. We will analyze the winrate, the number of skills used, and others. We can change things based on those data.

The second point is the opinion of the players. Like the feedback that we receive. We highly value player feedback and we deem it to be really important for balancing.”

As Hara mentioned, the balance of the game will continue to be tweaked as more player feedback is released. This is going to be important, especially if the team wants Dragon Ball: The Breakers to have a healthy player base.

Dragon Ball: The Breakers will release on PS4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC on October 14, 2022.