The thing that really makes Boss fights suck is that you have honed your skills and tactics throughout the game, only to have the game replaced by a boring, stupid and repetitive mini game that has *nothing* to do with the gameplay leading up to it. It’s like having the Stanley Cup finals replaced by 433 rounds of rock, paper, scissors.

We have computers to do boring and repetitive things for us, not the other way around.

When I have played a game and reach a climatic moment in the game I want to make use of the skills and upgrades I have aquired. Make the boss smarter, tougher, faster – so I can beat him by being even smarter, tougher or or faster. Force me to develop new skills and tactics (and don’t dare to call “run in circles for five minutes, shoot a geyser, repeat ad nauseam” a tactic). But don’t change the rules of the game.

I threw the control away in disgust after ten minutes with Magruder in Gun, but I spent days (or was it weeks?) getting the “International A license” in Gran Turismo.

Bosses are not a challenge, just a waste of time. And lazy game design.

People who like Hideously Difficult Bosses are generally adrenaline junkies. Note the poster above who likes the “tension” they add. Said adrenaline junkies are a core group of gamers, but I think most gamers are like me ó I want to have fun. I’m not a teenager anymore, I have quite enough tension in my life, thank you. I also REALLY do not believe frustration should be a major goal of game designers. If you’re designing games, and all you can come up with is to torture the game-players, you’re short of ideas and imagination. There’s a big difference between being legitimately challenged and being driven to a desire to throttle the game designer and throw the controller at the screen.

I’ve always thought the best RPGs are the ones in which the really tough bosses are optional. If you beat them, you get special bonuses, rare weapons, etc. What I hate is games in which you have to beat insanely difficult bosses to progress farther in the game.

Personally, I liked DK 64. It was a bit easy, but the animations were fun. I’ve always liked the challenge of making difficult jumps in platformers, but there you go ó different strokes for different folks.

As to the poster who claimed “games must have goals,” well ó exploring is a goal. Wandering around aimlessly in a well-designed environment is a goal (in Super Mario 64, I loved dicking around in the park in front of the castle, doing long jumps, triple jumps, and dives into the pond, for the sheer joy of utilizing the best game controls ever).

Hopefully, that person (and you) work for Rareware, in which case I am compelled, by law, to tell you to hurry up and make Banjo Threeie already.

Funny story: I’m sitting in the same office as one of the guys who worked on DK64, and quoted this to him. He shrugged and said, “still sold 5.4 million copies”. Touche! Incidentally neither he nor I were aware of the universal acknowledgement, something of an exaggeration methinks!

That said, I agree with quite a lot of what you say. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within was utterly ruined by two completely pointless, tedious, insanely difficult and illogical boss fights in which all the fun things about the rest of the game, and all the skills and tricks you had learned in order to progress, were thrown out the window. Not only did you have to learn a new method of playing, but you had to get it right hundreds of times in a row to take off their health, while they could hit you three or four times and it was all over. It was excruciatingly painful and I hated it, intensely, with a passion, I wanted whoever came up with the idea of doing it to die horribly and spend the remainder of eternity in Hell. Gah, Bosses suck. Give me a boss ahead of a Boss any day!

1) The boss’s in order of Hierarchy
~ Like it or not they are the core of the game. There are exceptions but they are at most usually only exceptions.

2) Distractions
~ A game with Distractions is a good game. This is pretty much anything from side quests to minigames and even those traditional pesky conversations between NPC’s. (You know the ones that have you going back at forth between NPC’s with different tid bits of information for them etc)

3) The Goals
~ Live by it games must have goals. This is the point of a Game to win or lose. For example in the horrible and evil game boy pokemon series you had two major goals 1) To be the best…cough cough and 2) To catch em all. This was frustrating for most of us and most just gave up however a few stuck 2 the game despite its many and I say many floors. heh. Goals are in everything if it is to get to the other side of the road, maybe to destroy the evil space monkey reeking havoc in downtown L.A. or maybe just stopping evil aliens on an massive Halo: P. Live by it learn by it.

I also noticed that allot of you were both saying you enjoyed the thrill of killing a boss but hated the monotony of breaking it down. In the old days of gaming this wasnít such a big issue but developers should be using technology as it currently is to their advantage. The main problem back in the old days was AI. We no longer have that problem so why are there so few really intense and good fights with “Boss’s” now?

As a final thought strictly as a game designer myself there are many flaws associated with the “Boss” issue. Of course the moves etc will loop and almost always there will be some sort of weakness or move that does more damage/etc. This however does not excuse the evil boss stereotype of a boss that steps forward shoots 3 bullets steps back waits three seconds does a special and then move left and right shooting randomly in your direction before returning to step forward and shoot 3 bullets.

I try to make my boss fights in my games more complex then a simple slugfest. Mainly in my RPG’s. In such one I just coded in a scene where you have to avoid the enemy elementals by jumping to different platforms and switching off crystals. Add this to the fact of water eruptions that move your hero great distances over the map. And when you finally disengage the crystals and think your safe only then does the boss emerges who chases you and although not impossible 2 avoid it will eventually catch you. When it does only then does the real hack and slash begin…

So really the main thought is to all you game designers or project coordinators to motivate your programmers to develop your boss’s a little more. Give the AI some very hellish things 2 do. And NEVER have all the moves on a timed sequence completely. A good boss will interact with the environment in some ways (because most likely it will be THERE environment and you will be the Intruder) they will also have a large cycle of moves anywhere from 15-30 different styled moves that it does in random sequences. This combined with overall strength and speed of the Boss makes a hellish fight. But at the end you can sit back put the controller down and just say “Bet you I could do that again and lose no health”…of course then the playability of the boss comes into it and the player will feel that they get more bang for there buck quite literally. This has been Cronius just mumbling lol. So yeah.

Cronius
Game Dev

Zelda well I am a totally certified Zelda Fanboi so I’m not going to say anymore (I bought a gamecube for windwaker)

The bosses of Devil may cry was actually the only thing that kept me going thru that game since the essentiall game mechanics was utterly tedious. Other than that I will say the Seeker worms, and Thorn no to mention the Kernel himself from Tron 2.0 was A ok in my book. Now the bosses from Doom3 Ressurection of Evil was a little Arcade like, but it felt good to finaly kick Bertrugers Demonic ass.

On the other hand Far Cry provided with an incredibly fun, interesting, involving gaming experience until the completely blindside the player by throwing in a helicopter that takes at least 8 missiles to shoot down, and this after the player har destroyed countless of these exact same choppers with a singel missile, or a couple of ammo clips, shees.

Now the Theif games had more of the type of boss puzzles rather than any conventional bosses, the best game of the series being Theif II: The metal age and the final level in the mechanist tempel.
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