Is this doppleganager boss idea too crazy?

So I’m making a game not entirely unlike megaman.

You pick from 8 stages, each has a boss that gives you an item, and each stage has a health increase.

That said, I’m kicking around the idea of having a doppleganger boss that matches your build identically.

You got the scythe? They got the scythe.

You got 5 Heath pots? They got 5 health pots.

I thought it would make choosing when to take them on more interesting.

But now for the REALLY crazy part.

What if….

The doppleganger could be another player with the same build as you playing against their own doppleganger and never tell the player?

Now obviously it would need to depend on someone having that same build at relatively the same time. Maybe a 10 second window to attempt to match make, and then go to AI if there’s no matches.

And of course I would need to attempt to hide this fact and have it be like a cool little “wait a minute!” moment when players catch on.

That said, it’s not without its issues.

For starters, speed runners will need a work around to make sure it’s AI.

Secondly, reaching the boss would have 40 different potential load outs.

Lastly, I’d need to figure out how to account for health. Would this one boss restore your health before entering?

I think the idea is great, but I’m not sure it’s worth the effort.

Thoughts?

Sounds like a cool idea. I feel like the main issue would be number of concurrent players required to get it to work. Say the game takes about 3 hours or around 10,000 seconds to reach the doppelganger boss fight. With a 10 second window this would require around 1,000 concurrent players to get decent matches. With 40 loadouts you’d then need around 40,000 concurrent players.

Does sound like it’s more effort than it’s worth though. If you did add multiplayer I think it would be better to just have a coop mode or vs modes like deathmatch or escort. A game like megaman is fairly fast paced so it’s probably going to be difficult to network. I tend to avoid multiplayer games as it can cost a lot to run and maintain the servers.