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I think a big reason modern boss fights tend to be underwhelming is that a lot of modern games don't use mechanics that lend themselves well to boss fights. A lot of earlier games focused on giving the player a limited, understandable number of moves and built their bosses around testing your ability to use those moves with precision. When Mega Man fires his buster, a projectile shoots straight in front of him. As a game designer, it's simple to build challenges around exploring and exploiting the possibilities of a simple move like that. In Arkham City, by contrast, pressing the attack button causes Batman to do what is essentially a procedurally-determined animation that brings his fist in contact with the enemy's face...somehow, which is a far more tricky verb to get your head around as a designer. Your player has all angles on any enemy, and so many moves you couldn't realistically "test" them all in a single fight. If a boss fight is supposed to be a chance to prove your mastery of the gameplay, the feature-bloat of modern games have made it difficult for designers to even know what "mastery" or "skill" mean in the context of things like soft auto-aim and procedural animation. Games like Assassins Creed and the Arkham series also use mechanics that work best when fighting large groups of weak enemies. When you're faced off against a single, strong opponent, it constrains what the game designers can have you do. You actual man-to-man options for fighting someone aren't as fun, because the fun of the combat is bouncing around from target to target. Shooters have an even tougher road to hoe. When your basic combat flow consists of "Auto-aim to head -> Kill" it's hard to translate that into a drawn-out fight against a single opponent that feels satisfying. Arguably these games make the player too powerful by default, so they essentially have to cheat to make their bosses challenging. (Arbitrary invulnerability, time limits, death-on-fail QTEs, etc). Certain games are just better "built" for boss fights than others. Any game can have a fun boss fight, but it takes a clever designer to make some mechanics translate well into that formula, and...well...not every designer is that gifted.
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Feb 28, 2015 09:50
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 22:52 |
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