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SunAndSpring posted:I've also seen articles where game journalists get upset at the concept of a boss fight. I wonder if that contributes to anything. I bet if I posted this on some shithole like NeoGAF or The Escapist, I'd find idiots coming out of the woodwork to say "Oh, boss fights aren't cinematic. They're a relic of the past." This is a big part of the issue. Thing is, there's a kernel of truth in this. Not every game needs boss fights. Deus Ex: Human Revolution would have been a better game if it entirely lacked boss fights, for example. It just didn't need them, and the ones they implemented were implemented poorly. There's a lot to be said for doing away with having boss fights just for the sake of boss fights. But then came the articles (and wannabe-intellectuals who agree with those articles) saying that boss fights as a whole are bad and shouldn't be included. They're not "cinematic," or they "don't serve the narrative," or something like that. So the idea that boss fights in general are bad game design proliferates. Then you get developers who remove boss fights (because they're not cinematic enough for their super cinematic third-person shooter) and then don't bother to replace them with anything interesting, and you end up with several years' worth of big-budget game releases with really unsatisfying conclusions. It's one of those trends that I hope passes soon so that games that should have boss fights start having them again, and games that shouldn't have something equally satisfying in their place.
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Feb 16, 2015 23:43
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Looper posted:It's funny because boss fights do serve the narrative because narrative is more than just writing, see The Boss, Claus, Jergingha, etc Oh absolutely. It's just that a lot of recent games have pretenses of being "realistic," and having a boss fight where you have to shoot some human a bunch of times, no matter how fun that is, isn't "realistic." (Let's ignore that the player character is often a bullet sponge himself and "realism" doesn't matter there, but oh well. Actually I'd love to see a game like Uncharted but the final boss is just another rear end in a top hat who plays by the same rules the player does and can regenerate by hiding behind things, but that's beside the point.) Or sometimes there are situations where the game's plot dictates that the final battle not play by the rest of the game's rules, and rather than making an awesome boss fight out of that (see MGS4), they turn it into a long series of QTEs (see a list of games too long to include here). But there are tons of boss fights, like the ones you listed, that really do make the story better. I'd say the experience of fighting, say, Armstrong in Metal Gear Rising absolutely made the overall experience of that game's ending better for me. Or out-stealthing and out-CQCing the Boss in MGS3--that entire sequence is memorable, including the fight itself. I'm sure there's a long list of Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1/2 bosses that didn't need to be there, but I think there's an equally long list of bosses from those games that enhance the entire experience of playing. Basically, boss fights work best when they're used well, which is a super simplistic way of putting it. Don't overuse boss fights, or they'll lose their meaning; at the same time, don't shun them just because other games overused boss fights if you don't have something equally satisfying and appropriate to challenge the player with.
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Feb 16, 2015 23:59
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A Stupid Baby posted:If you're playing some shooter game and your enemy is another guy you have two options for a final boss fight: Either he's a bullet sponge and takes like a million bullets to the dome or you load him into a mech suit as a reason why he takes half your arsenal to kill. Well, sure. I think there's a difference between "some boss fights are lovely and boring" and "the concept of the boss fight is outdated," of course. I find boss fights immensely satisfying, so long as they're actually done well. Like you pointed out, character action games tend to have great boss fights (they often live or die on the quality of those fights). The Souls games have (some) really great bosses. But obviously, just taking a normal enemy and making them hit harder and take more hits to kill is not a good boss fight in any game. I like the idea of "boss levels," too. Obviously some games shouldn't have boss fights, but having "boss-level challenges" is still nice. That'd be what I'd go with in a case where, to use one of your examples, the villain is a "cowardly string-puller." In that case, yeah, a face-to-face fight is going to be the wrong idea, but having one final challenge before you get to kill the villain like the cowardly little poo poo he is instead of just jamming a string of QTEs in there is going to be a lot more satisfying.
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Feb 17, 2015 18:56
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Devil Wears Wings posted:End boss fights in general suck. They're lazy game design and an artifact of the days when games were quarter-munchers. There's got to be a more interesting way to bring a game to a close than, "let's throw something big at the player and ramp up the challenge a few notches and then roll ending cutscene." In games that aren't going for some semblance of "realism," I think boss fights are wonderful. Of course, there's the caveat of "boss fights are great if they're implemented well," but that goes for just about any aspect of gameplay, so I don't think it's a meaningful distinction in this case. Many boss fights are lazy. Many games shouldn't have boss fights. Throwing lazy boss fights into games that shouldn't have them because you don't know how else to provide a climactic challenge or, worse, because boss fights are "expected"--that's bad. That's where boss fights suck. I'd also agree that, in most cases, boss fights that are major departures from the way the rest of the game plays are also kind of lovely. (I say "most cases" there because MGS4's final boss fight is a huge departure from the rest of the game and even has a completely new control scheme, but it's also one of the best and most memorable moments in the series.) I can't at all agree that "boss fights in general suck," though, because there's a huge list of games that are better for their boss fights. Now, maybe you don't play the kinds of games that tend to have good (or at least fitting) boss fights, and in that case, yes, boss fights are probably going to suck in general. But I can't imagine that a game like, to use a common example in this thread, Bayonetta would be anything but lessened for not having bosses.
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Feb 17, 2015 21:36
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