The importance of boss battles

[Zeus]

At the GDC, the developers of Deus Ex: Human Revolution said they were "sorry" for the boss battles. They farmed them out to a third party and thought of them more "as a way to break up the game than to test the players' skills"

http://www.edge-online.com/news/gdc-201 ... -ex-bosses

Is this where developers have gotten to, seriously? Up until the PS2 generation, bosses were the equivalent of plot climaxes of a game, something to look forward to, almost like a reward for playing while testing your skills instead of the monotonous same enemies over and over again. And this was the same in every genre of game too. Mega Man (and basically all platformers) was essentially designed around the bosses, there were many bosses in the Final Fantasy series that were memorable (everyone wanted to fuck Kefka up by the end of FF6), even Wolfenstein and Doom had their bosses. Now, boss fights are almost seen like a necessary evil, like it's something they have to do instead of something they try to build towards and make it like a reward and test to the player.

Sadly, this was essentially confirmed by my developer bud. He tells me that boss battles are something they were even thinking of getting rid of at Ubi (that would explain why none of their games have good ones). Too much effort for too little gain or some shit like that. And we're seeing this pretty much everywhere from all companies in all types of games. Think of all the big downloadable games. The Twisted Pixel games (Splosion Man, Comic Jumper) are traditional platformers with bosses, but they're underwhelming. I can't even remember the end boss of Shadow Complex and Limbo, the latter of which I don't even think had one (Outland did, and it was great). No different with the FPSs. They're there, for sure, but after three MW games, I hardly did anything to fuck Markov up, it was all God of War-like Simon Says gameplay (yes, I'm aware it's called Real Time Events). Both Batman games, as awesome as they were, had boss "fights" that were exactly the same as the gameplay with the same freakin' enemies and the same freakin' weaknesses (City was much better than the pathetic Asylum but wasn't "good").

And that's the other ANNOYING trend in boss fights: little bitches are EVERYWHERE. What I mean by that is we have a boss surrounded by regular enemies all over the place. So it's like you're fighting normally while having to dodge the boss until you have an opportunity to hit it. This is the ultimate in lazy boss design. Batman was particularly guilty of this, but it also appears in many other games (Duke Nukem, Assassin's Creed, etc). I'd almost rather have no boss fight at all than one surrounded by a whack of regular enemies I just begrudgingly eliminate to try to actually get to the boss fight I wanna be fighting. Probably why I thought Bioshock 2 had a pretty good ending even with no boss fight. There's some room for that but choose: do it well or do it not at all.

Maybe I'm old school (for sure I am), but I like my intrinsic rewards for playing a game. The more I'm into it, the more I appreciate these climaxes. Just seems that developers don't have the time or desire for them anymore.

[Alec]

You should play through Asura's Wrath. That game has enough epic boss battles to satisfy me for all games, everywhere, forever and ever amen.

But yeah, I agree.

[Flip]

Mmm, now I'm having fond memories of Shadows of the Colossus where the entire game is based around epic boss battles. Probably never going to see something like that again.

[Shrinweck]

Find myself agreeing with a lot of what you said. I tried to ignore the boss battles in Deus Ex: Human Revolution and chose to look at the key conversations as the boss battles. God knows they were several times more interesting than the boss fights.

[Zeus]

Mmm, now I'm having fond memories of Shadows of the Colossus where the entire game is based around epic boss battles. Probably never going to see something like that again.

One of the best games ever, and all it was was boss battles. To me, that helps prove the point that boss battles are just as important now as they've ever been

As for Asura's Wrath, I played the demo and thought it was OK. I will get it for $20-25 once it drops. It's only a 6 hour or so game from what I know, not worth the $60

[Don]

I think what they mean by outsourcing is that if you're not going to come up with something really awesome for boss battles then it can't possibly get much worse even if you let someone else do it. Your generic boss #15 probably isn't going to be memorable no matter what.

I think boss battles feel unnecessary because most of the time they're not anything really special. It's just something with more HP and have some attacks that do more damage than usual. In Final Fantasy, other than Zeromus I can't think of an epic boss because they're all easy. Not that Zeromus was hard, but his Big Bang hits hard enough that it can run you out of MP if you double heal through it but it can kill you if you don't double heal through it, so it feels more challenging.

[Shrinweck]

Also the Deus Ex boss battles weren't terrible as much as they didn't fit the game in any way whatsoever. I mean, the first boss is as cut and dry as it got - stay in cover and don't let him get near you. The problem with him was that until him you didn't have to carry a single lethal weapon and that's clearly not an intuitive jump. The second boss was kind of cool with the cloaking and watching for ripples in the water to tell where she was. Third was annoying but ultimately still satisfying to overcome especially if your augs were disabled. The last one was also pretty neat.

But killing them really didn't fit the themes of the game if you weren't playing it as a thug. In fact it's hinted at pretty heavily that there are circumstances that were left out of the game where you could spare the second boss.

My problem with boss battles is when they unceremoniously interrupt the flow of the game. Done right, a level should have you learning a technique and then a boss battle should have you displaying that you have mastered it. Done incorrectly and just thrown in it's a little too much like a middle finger to the gamer.

[Zeus]

I think what they mean by outsourcing is that if you're not going to come up with something really awesome for boss battles then it can't possibly get much worse even if you let someone else do it. Your generic boss #15 probably isn't going to be memorable no matter what.

I think boss battles feel unnecessary because most of the time they're not anything really special. It's just something with more HP and have some attacks that do more damage than usual. In Final Fantasy, other than Zeromus I can't think of an epic boss because they're all easy. Not that Zeromus was hard, but his Big Bang hits hard enough that it can run you out of MP if you double heal through it but it can kill you if you don't double heal through it, so it feels more challenging.

I never wanted to fuck up any boss like I did Kefka. It wasn't overly difficult, but it was neat with 3 different parts and after 30 hours of that clown fuck taunting me, it was satisfying to blow him to smithereens.

Boss battles don't have to be hard to be good. It helps, a lot, but not necessary

[Don]

I think what they mean by outsourcing is that if you're not going to come up with something really awesome for boss battles then it can't possibly get much worse even if you let someone else do it. Your generic boss #15 probably isn't going to be memorable no matter what.

I think boss battles feel unnecessary because most of the time they're not anything really special. It's just something with more HP and have some attacks that do more damage than usual. In Final Fantasy, other than Zeromus I can't think of an epic boss because they're all easy. Not that Zeromus was hard, but his Big Bang hits hard enough that it can run you out of MP if you double heal through it but it can kill you if you don't double heal through it, so it feels more challenging.

I never wanted to fuck up any boss like I did Kefka. It wasn't overly difficult, but it was neat with 3 different parts and after 30 hours of that clown fuck taunting me, it was satisfying to blow him to smithereens.

Boss battles don't have to be hard to be good. It helps, a lot, but not necessary

Kefka was cool since all the guys you lose you don't get them back but losing a guy wasn't so crippling that you'd have to immediately start over. It was also the last FF game where you can't just instantly recover from a Fallen One type attack with Megaelixirs. Sure Kefka wasn't hard but there was actually something different about the whole fight compared to the generic battle. If you have a final boss that's just like any other boss battle, it'd have to be hard in some memorable way (and not in a bad way). For example take something like Sephiroth. Other than the music being cool, it's just one long drawn out fight with no real way you can lose (use all your Megaelixirs).

Note that they tried this on FF8 and it definitely doesn't work. If you have one of your characters with all the Junction get sucked into timestream or whatever you might as well restart over immediately unless you're so powerful that you don't care about losing anyone, but in that case you should never lose a character to that mechanism to begin with.

[Alec]

Asura's Wrath is realistically around 8 hours.

Also, Bayonetta has some amazing boss battles.

[Eric]

mmmm Bayonetta

[Zeus]

Asura's Wrath is realistically around 8 hours.

Also, Bayonetta has some amazing boss battles.

That's probably a good comparison, actually. Both games are all about the style over substance and ain't too long. I paid $20 for Bayonetta and got 2/3rds through it so far, Asura's at that price sounds about right