"The Assyrians were the first people to start using iron weapons instead of bronze which, to put into a modern perspective, is sort of like showing up for a knife fight with the Death Star. Using iron made the Assyrians so near-invincible that, really, the other guys might as well have been swinging around bananas."
An often controversial element of gameplay that unexpectedly trumps all others. Depending upon who you ask, it may or may not be considered cheating. A Game Breaker is a legitimate element of the game used in an unintended way. The Meta Game ends up revolving around who can get the Game Breaker (or use it on the other) first, resulting in Gameplay Derailment.
A Game Breaker can boost a pre-existing strategy or character and make it overwhelmingly powerful against things it would normally be balanced against — Scissors crushing Rock, so to speak. One fan term for it is "cheesing."
For example, in a game where the player's capabilities are meant to be limited by their access to currency, an easy trick that reaps a lot of money for little effort can become a game breaker. Or a particular gun having extreme firepower, high accuracy, and a high ammo capacity; or a Fighting Game character having a fast, unblockable move with very high priority (the ally equivalent to the SNK Boss). In games with a choice of playable characters, one may be much easier than the others and allow for skipping parts of levels that other characters would have to wade through slowly.
Another example is the potentially convoluted win/make-then-sell exploit, which is common in games with customizable items. A borderline example may be the trick of saving your game before a random item appears and reloading until you get the particular item you want, also known as Save Scumming.
Patches will often seek to rectify this. However, this often leads to an outcry among players who favored the original tactic. Worse, sometimes the nerfing of one Game Breaker results in another Game Breaker being discovered as a result, prompting the developers to consider whether they should apply a patch for the second one, or undo the previous patch so the two Game Breakers will balance each other out as they used to.
Game Breakers are often controversial and subjective. Rarely do people actually agree on what is and is not game-breaking. Heated debates (or worse) over Game Breakers spread like wildfire on the Internet, or even around the house. It's obvious that the extremes of the Munchkin or the Scrub are wrong. However, there are techniques whose power is hard or even impossible to call.
Banning glitches and "unintentional" moves is often not an easy thing to do. Sometimes it can be hard to tell whether something is a glitch or not, sometimes a glitch happens so often that you'd have to go out of your way to have it not happen, and other times it can be argued that a glitch adds more depth to a game rather than less.
The upshot is that you should probably take most of the below examples of multiplayer games with a Examples:
Universal- Any game with a finite number of states and which does not make use of randomness may be mathematically solved
, resulting in a guaranteed win or draw ("perfect play") for whomever has the correct starting conditions. "Perfect play" does not mean "good play," such as top-level human players might execute. It means having god-like knowledge of every state of the game and choosing the absolute best move at each point. Thus, there really is only one way to play these games "perfectly," except when choices are pretty much equivalent. Once a strategy for perfect play is discovered, the game can be considered completely broken, unless played by naive players. The most well-known example of this is Tic-Tac-Toe, which any skilled player can play perfectly to a draw. Connect Four and Checkers have also been solved, though in these cases, the correct strategy was found by computers and is far too complex for most humans to memorize.
- Connect Four is a first player win for perfect play. To two sufficiently advanced programs playing the game, the game comes down to who wins the coin flip for first turn.
- Checkers may be the most popular solved game. The game has 500 quintillion possible states. No human can comprehend all that. From a sufficiently advanced computer's point of view, Checkers is as trivial as Tic-Tac-Toe. Perfect play results in a draw. Because humans lack this perspective, we cannot play Checkers perfectly and don't grow bored of it like we do Tic-Tac-Toe.
- Chess and Go, the quintessential games for geniuses, are both theoretically solvable for a sufficiently advanced computer, as both games have a finite board and no random elements — though a computer powerful enough to perform the necessary calculations would be many orders of magnitude better than anything available with our current level of technology (the high branching factor in Go makes it intractable to analyze with the methods used for Chess, since you rapidly get too many options to explore via lookahead in any reasonable timeframe, with no obvious way of pruning 'bad' choices quickly). For a hypothetical intelligence far beyond our capacities, Chess and Go are as trivial as Tic-Tac-Toe, but no human creation as of 2016 - not even Deep Blue - is even close to having such a level of computational power. For some perspective, there are more possible chess games than we estimate there are atoms in the observable universe.
- On a double-meta level, the strategy-stealing argument, which can prove for many games that perfect play isn't a win for player 2, without anyone having to figure out what perfect play actually constitutes. It works on any game where the players start in the same scenario, and getting an extra turn can never harm you. Notably, this does not include Chess or Go, as there are scenarios in Chess where every possible move weakens your position, but passing isn't allowed, and Go traditionally gives player 2 some extra points to compensate for the known advantage player 1 has.
- Additionally, as Go's metagame has evolved, the points given to player 2 has risen over time, as players have found going first to be more and more advantageous.
- Tic-Tac-Toe, Connect 4, and Chess also help introduce some ideas about why a game might be easier or harder to solve. Consider Tic-Tac-Toe. At first, it seems like the first player has 9 options for where to place their first mark, but that isn't the case. The play space is symmetrical. Each corner square is functionally identical, as is each side square. Thus, there are really only three options: side, corner, or center. Suppose first player chooses the center square. Now second player only has two options: corner or side. The number of meaningful choices in the game is surprisingly small, and it can be broken with a brute force search through those possibilities with a sheet of scrap paper.
- Connect 4 has a symmetrical seven columns the first player can place their piece in, so really they have only four choices for first turn: center, one away from center, one away from the outside edge, and outer edge. If they drop into the center, the second player has the same number of choices (4), but if they drop into any of the other columns, then there is now a difference between all of the columns and second player has 7 choices, and so on. It takes a computer to use brute force to go through that many possible moves.
- The chessboard is not symmetrical, and there is a difference between moving the king's bishop's pawn one square and the queen's bishop's pawn one square. White has 8 distinct pawns that can move to one of two squares and two knights that also could move to two different squares each, for a total of 20 possible initial moves. Black has the same options, for another 20 distinct responses. That's four hundred possible states for the game after two turns. While the number of valid moves a player could make in chess is always in flux, they never are equivalent, so a computer trying to solve chess via a brute force search encounters a staggeringly large number of possible games. The lower bound of possible games is usually given as the Shannon Number (a number that estimates the lowest possible right answer for "How many games of chess are possible?") This number is 10^120 - a googol followed by twenty more zeros. That's why no computer as of 2016 can solve chess via a brute force search. The numbers for go are even more staggering.
- Connect Four is a first player win
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