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K8.0 posted:Modern boss fights suck because actual game design, coming up with and implementing good mechanics, is no longer a part of most games. If you don't have solid fundamentals, there's nothing to build something climactic that requires you to combine all the techniques you've learned, the resources you've gathered, the executional improvements you've made into a demanding and enjoyable challenge. None of that is actually true, and I would gently suggest that you spend more time looking for and playing games you actually enjoy.
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Feb 17, 2015 21:06
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 21:28 |
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Edit: God... god dammit, Chris. This entire topic seems like one of those discussions you sometimes get from people who have hit their mid-twenties or later, and who are somewhat disillusioned by their preferred hobbies because they aren't quite as excited about them as they could manage to be when they were younger. The amount of actual quality design going into video games right now is more or less consistent with what it's always been, although more of the marquee creators are heading towards small studios and Kickstarter now as the larger developers become more risk-averse. (It's not that they're more or less profit-driven, as they always were, but a modern A-list video game is an expensive enough proposition that they aren't going to green-light every stupid idea that flies through a designer's skull anymore and they're going to carefully boil out anything that might limit a game's potential audience, which is also why A-list games protagonists have become a nearly-indistinguishable gray fog of brown-haired stubbly white guys with anger issues.) The difference is that you're comparing what's coming out right now, with all its faults and problems, with a rose-colored assessment of the past twenty years. When you compare something like Dying Light, where the last "boss fight" is essentially a platforming sequence leading up to a quick-time event, with a carefully chosen who's-who of great boss fights in video game history, Dying Light is going to look awful. Of course it's going to look awful. It's like comparing every film made in 2014 with the AFI's 100 Greatest Films list and coming to the conclusion that modern films are awful; you're sinking your own average. For every great boss fight you remember because it was challenging, graphically spectacular, or intricately designed, you're choosing not to remember a half-dozen which you bulldozed over, glitched past, burned all your resources on, or slowly chewed through over the course of twenty painful minutes. The past isn't a golden age. You were just younger and/or dumber then, and you've edited your memory so you aren't sitting around all day thinking about all the time you wasted trying to kill Ruby Weapon or whatever.
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Feb 17, 2015 21:24
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swamp waste posted:I know this is reductive but I'm kind of feeling it. I don't see a single core mechanic in let's say Assassin's Creed that is dynamic enough that they can really "test" you on it; if you place your guy within the collision frame and press the right button he will rictus into the same canned animation in the same way as every other time. it's not something like Mario where split-second differences in your inputs affect trajectory and momentum in a way that a player can get significantly better at manipulating. I feel fairly comfortable calling the King of Beggars mission in Assassin's Creed: Unity a "boss fight"; it tests your knowledge of the environment, your arsenal, and your navigational tools, as well as elevating the difficulty because you're suddenly up against a prepared target. The target himself is no tougher than any geek off the street, but getting to him without being detected or killed is the trick. One of the relatively recent innovations in game design is in the construction of a level so some secondary challenge is the actual boss fight. In Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the run up to the final encounter, during which you don't have the time rewind anymore, is the "boss fight"; the later game Forgotten Sands, where you're forced to wall-jump between temporary walls of water, pulls a similar trick. In the older Resident Evil games or something like Zombies Ate My Neighbors, the "boss fight" is managing your inventory well enough so that you have the ability to participate in the fight at all, and if you've done that well enough the fight itself is trivial. It's useful to remember here that given the relatively slow pace of game design compared to other forms of creative endeavor, we're actually not that far into exploring what a games narrative can really do. Boss fights in the traditional sense are a relic of earlier stages of design, and in a more narrative-focused environment such as what we have now, they're often unnecessary. I do wonder if they're included at times because some marketer or another thinks you have to have them or you don't really have a video game, and the result is some dickhead bullet-sponge who didn't need to be there.
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Feb 18, 2015 23:02
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Have you considered that maybe you should pick up a new hobby for a couple of years and come back when you aren't quite so cynical about everything? You don't seem to enjoy this, and I doubt there's anyone holding a gun to your head and forcing you to do it.
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Feb 18, 2015 23:08
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