Kind of a random thought here, but am I the only one who really hates the “boss” concept in games? In some cases I feel they can nearly ruin an otherwise good game (Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I’m looking at you).
I literally had a Pong console growing up, so I’ve been around video gaming more or less from the start, and I’ve been trying to remember approximately when the concept showed up. It feels like something I think of as “artificial difficulty”.
Like most concepts, it depends on how it’s done. Obviously at this point we’ve managed to come up with a ton of different styles of bosses (or “bosses” as they may be). Can you elaborate on why you think it’s artificial?
Bosses have been around almost as long as games that rely on a character progressing through a level. At its core, it’s about pacing; it adds the last, more difficult hurdle to a compartmentalized challenge as well as a mechanically climactic event that is satisfying to overcome.
According to the Wikipedia article for bosses in video games, the first one was in 1975’s “dnd”, and was named the Golden Dragon. It was actually the last enemy the player needed to defeat. I suppose it just came naturally by following the game’s mechanics (fighting enemies in a dungeon) and wanted the end of the game to be as a typical climax, and so they made a bigger, badder bad guy.
Are you sure you dislike the concept as a whole? Or do you just dislike shitty out of context bossfights like those in Deus Ex? I usually don’t like bossfights either because most of them are more of a chore than anything else to me. But I remember that Devil May Cry (the reboot one that apparently the hardcore fans don’t like, I haven’t played anything else in that series) had some bossfights where I was surprised and thought “wow, I really liked that fight”. I can’t exactly put my finger on the reason for that though. Maybe they were just a better “spectacle” than something like the Deus Ex bossfights, and less frustrating? In Metalgear Rising: Revengeance I was frustrated by most of the bossfights. I didn’t even beat the final one, I just gave up because I wasn’t having fun and couldn’t be bothered anymore.
The catch 22 with bosses is that you are trying to create something that feels like a departure from regular play, but not such a departure that it’s a completely unrelated style of play. Then there is also using bosses as lessons, where you are in a controlled environment and can study the mechanics better, and tests.
The best bosses are usually tests that cover a very specific slice of mechanics, and to make it interesting, this combination tends to not be found in regular play (or alternately hasn’t been used much up to this point, sort of making it a lesson). In DMC (not the reboot), there is a lot more emphasis on location. Where you should or shouldn’t be is the most important factor in a boss fight, while making sure you aren’t surrounded is the only major issue in regular play. The boss fights put a bigger emphasis on defense, which rarely is a concern normally.
NES was my first console and Mega Man is the most prevalent example I can think of. the entire levels were themed around the powers of the boss. the level gradually gets more and more challenging then if you’ve learned the tactics necessary to get to the boss you usually need those skills to defeat them. its like the game is teaching you then you have a final test. It seams so natural I don’t see how not having boss fights would be appealing.
I’m having a hard time thinking of a games that don’t have a boss fight. Even Counter-Strike follows this model the boss fight being either rescue the hostages or defuse the bomb. It takes all the skills you needed to get to that point of the game then it puts you in an extreme circumstance to test how good you really are.
You’d like Shovel Knight. It’s very similar to Mega Man, actually. The way it introduces mechanics in a level is as follows:
1: Show a mechanic in a safe environment that you can’t actually fail at (A “training wheels” challenge)
2: Show a mechanic with an easily-avoided way to fail (usually pits/spikes.) (I call this the ‘base challenge’.)
3: Show a mechanic with enemies that can help kill you (For me, “Lethal challenge”)
4: Show a mechanic in a fricking ridiculous form (In my words, a “Mastery challenge”)
…Then you fight the boss who uses aspects of the base challenge.
That’s a good way of putting how I feel about them.
I suppose, too, I play video games more to see the story and appreciate the overall experience than to chase the feeling that I have developed some sort of Super Elite Skillz, so forcing me to work even harder to finish something I’ve already poured a bunch of time into is usually more annoyance than satisfaction. I can’t begin to count the number of games I walked away from because I hit some boss fight and just got tired of grinding through it. For some reason I did finish Deus Ex HR, but those buggy boss fights have to be some of the worst I have ever seen.
@Hyblademin , funny that “dnd” would be one of the earliest video game examples. After I posted this I realized many tabletop RPG adventures culminate in what amounts to a boss fight. I suppose when I was thinking there was an era where they weren’t popular, I’m thinking about early console games and early arcade games. Something like Defender gets along just fine without “OH NO FIGHT THIS CRAZY OVERPOWERED SPACE SHIP” drama every few minutes.
I love well made boss fights. I’d like to mention a few very good examples:
All those have 2 things in common: The boss fights are unique and challenging. They are the ultimate accomplishment that those games offer and it is worth to retry them until you finally beat them. Also they often have the classic ramp up where they challenge you more and more the longer the fight goes.
I think it just boils down to different taste in games. I have a hard time with heavy story in a game. I play to be challenged and prove something to myself. others play to be entertained or experience a detailed story. I like how WildStar tried to divide the game in to three paths Explorer, Settler, and Soldier based on your preferred gaming style. The game ended up pretty terrible but at least they addressed the fact that people play for different reasons.
Meh. The basis of every boss fight in Dark Souls is A) find out the tells, B) find counter-strategies for every attack, and C) don’t get greedy. Only one of those isn’t specific to every individual boss. The only boss that can be used to demonstrate the player’s mastery of the combat is the final one, simply because you can cheese the whole fight by parrying.
That is like saying: “Meh, you just have to find out how to win the game and then do it”. It is the difficulty of finding the patterns and the difficulty of executing the solution that makes these fights challenging and great. My examples are all very challenging boss fights where only one of a million players will not find them challenging and beat them on their first or second try.
I suppose I don’t mind boss fights (even bad ones) that don’t just drag on and on… one of the most annoying game mechanics I’ve seen recently was the Fallout 4 mutation thing. Yay! Fight that same idiot twice! I can’t tell you how pleased I was to learn that if you shoot their legs off they don’t magically reappear when the mutation rejuvenates everything else. (Not that the mechanic was specifically for bosses but it did apply to enemies who were already very powerful, so it’s pretty close to the same concept.)
There’s nothing wrong with this, obviously. However, if this is really the way you feel, then it isn’t about the concept of boss fights being a bad one, it’s just about you enjoying a different kind of game. You may not be the target audience, in other words.
That said, how you define “boss fight” in the context if your post is super important, since bosses can exist in many forms if you just consider them to be any challenge that steps up difficulty to serve climactic pacing, or any mechanic that represents a momentary departure from typical gameplay.
There are typical boss fights where you need to fight and conquer an enemy or enemies that is/are more difficult than other enemies in the game, there are level-bosses where navigation around an area is the primary mechanic, puzzle bosses that usually require the player to perform some unique action in order to force an enemy to become vulnerable or otherwise cause direct damage to it, etc. All of these are legitimate and fun when done well, and can be (have been) mixed together in the same game. If you want to blur the lines some more, you don’t really need a target to kill for something to be a boss under the above definition.
There are poorly designed boss fights that suck, to be sure, but the term “artificial difficulty” seems inappropriate when sweepingly applied to all boss fights when it really only comes down to preference. I wouldn’t imagine anyone would use that term unless they are referring to some part of a game that unfairly introduces luck/probability as a major mechanic or just otherwise suddenly removes major player abilities that they’ve had access to the whole game without any kind of compensating mechanics.
It seems like a stretch to apply the term “boss fight” to things like puzzles. A better term is probably something like “climax” – of which a boss fight is just a subtype. And I certainly have no problems with story arcs or levels that have some sort of climax.
The point I was trying to get at is that the most important factors in the boss fights are relevant only to those fights. Outside of the boss room, the knowledge you gain from the fight itself is useless, and the entire challenge is learning this otherwise useless information, usually involving taking a shot to the face and dying immediately. This is why people think it’s a lot of trial and error.
Beyond just saying it’s challenging, ask how its’ challenging. There is plenty of challenge out there that is just bullshit.
Bosses solve a lot of problems- In terms of pacing, you will eventually need a climax. Even in Pong, there are times of more tension and times where tension is released. Your gameplay, story whatever is going to need to hit high notes, and bosses provide the perfect opportunity to do that.
Bosses grant the creative freedom to put together a really stand out moment where your game can shine it’s brightest. Regular baddies don’t warrant that kind of time investment- getting really creative and putting extra work into the art, animation, backstory, mechanics- it’s just not worth it if he’s only going to be on the screen for a short time.
They also function as a great way to measure progress and put together all the things you’ve been teaching the player to that point.
Lot’s of narratives feature a villain- a character who directly opposes the player who can give dialogue and interact with the player inside the story- what better way to resolve that conflict than letting the player face the villain with the skills he has developed?
Bosses aren’t really necessary, but it’s easy to see that they provide a nice, compact solution to a variety of tasks.
Maybe I don’t hate them, but you have to wonder if, at a certain point, they’ve become a cliche? In a straight action game you have to have boss fights because they punctuate the rising action and keep the difficulty curve going. But in a game that isn’t action/super-action… I do wonder if there has to be a “very hard part” at the end of each stage. I quite remember enjoying reaching the end of a Kirby’s Adventure level knowing that it was not a big ante up moment but rather a gentle slide into home plate. Granted, Kirby’s Adventure had bosses but they weren’t the intense, take-no-prisoner ball breakers that we have today. They were more like zany characters who wanted to play. Sure, the last boss was somewhat of a challenge but there were harder mini-games. They’re not necessary, really. Like many things our generation does, it has become part of the mythology of gaming that we simply accept with out much skepticism.
I wouldn’t hand my daughter a game with punishing boss fights, or my wife. And quite frankly, I’m turned off by the whole macho boss fight thing… now that somebody else brings it up.
Regular enemies are for the most part going to be a breeze, and without a boss there wont really be any challenge.
I don’t mind climax fights or hard enemies.
I really don’t like it when boss fights have some kind of unique mechanic that doesn’t generally match the rest of the game.
When boss fights are essentially little mini games with unique mechanics I tend to find them annoying. But as long as the boss follows the same basic rules as the rest of the game, I enjoy harder challenge points.
I love bosses 
Simple as that. Action films have bosses too. Most of the human race enjoys this concept, so if you’re not going to have bosses, then you need to add more uniqueness to the general play to compensate ie most things become bosses. Dark souls series kind of pulls this off well with each enemy requiring fresh tactics.