Boss Fights

What was the most difficult challenge you faced in a game most recently? Was it a puzzle? Perhaps a level with some tricky mechanics? Or was it some big dude with a huge health bar and an intimidating presence? That guy would be a boss. Unlike regular enemies, boss fights are intended to be difficult and are meant to test the player with what they have learned in the game thus far. There are games with awesome boss fights and games with pitiful encounters. How do you do it right? You approach it like another puzzle.

            Let me put it this way: imagine that the boss isn’t just some beefed up version of a previous enemy, but rather an AI with a set of tactics that the player must memorize in order to avoid taking damage and finding a weak spot to exploit. Easy bosses will have obvious weak spots and may do the same tactic over and over again. Harder bosses will have more complicated strategies and will sometimes change their tactics during later parts of the fight. They also have not so obvious weak spots. In a way, boss fights are just combat centric puzzles.

            Some of the best boss fights I can think of come from two games: Shadow of the Colossus and World of Warcraft. For those of you unfamiliar with the game, Shadow of the Colossus was this PS2 title made by Team Ico back in 2005. It presented an incredible world with creative mechanics. It is often cited as an example in arguments for proving games are an artform. The object of the game is to defeat all sixteen colossi and bring your dead girlfriend back to life. Thing is, there are no other encounters. It is solely boss fights. You have to find each colossi, then figure out how to slay them. Each fight is a puzzle unto itself. The first thing you have to do is find a way to climb onto the colossus itself, then crawl around on its body to find weak spots and strike them. This is easier said than done as the colossi can shake you off if you don’t grip tightly and some fights require critical thinking to find a solution.

            As for World of Warcraft, bosses would be found in either certain quests or dungeons and raids. Quest bosses were not very entertaining to fight. They were just beefed up versions of earlier mobs. However, the dungeon and raid boss fights are epic! These fights require you to have a team of people to coordinate with and take down. I’ll use the Icecrown Gunship Battle as an example. You have ten people on your team. The object of this battle is to destroy the enemy gunship whilst also keeping your ship safe and staying alive. You have members dedicated to fighting off invading attackers, firing artillery at the opposing ship, assassinating the enemy mage who disabled your cannons periodically, and at least one guy distracting the enemy captain so he doesn’t kill anyone too quickly. This was one of the coolest fights I ever participated in. It took practice to get everyone skilled enough to know the encounter, but it was worth it. The satisfaction of taking down a gunship was immense and I would gladly do it again if I could.

            And yet, there are some lazy examples of fights. Some games have bosses that either have an easy to predict pattern that never changes or they took a regular enemy, increased its size by 5, then tripled its health. Not exactly compelling. Sometimes the game might just repeat the same method of disposing of bosses. This isn’t always a bad thing, but if it occurs too often, it really takes away from the experience. As much as I love the series, Legend of Zelda is guilty of this. Most bosses will just circle around the player, rush to attack, Link uses the new item he just got in that dungeon, stuns the boss, pulls out his Master Sword, and just swings away. Rinse and repeat at least 3 more times.

            Boss fights are also becoming more like spectacle fights as opposed to puzzles. Look at Kingdom Hearts 2. I love that game so much and it was a hit in 2006, but doing the same system it did back then today would not work. Bosses had attack animations that were just stellar to look at and they felt intimidating to stand against. However, the game had something called Reaction Commands. When you hit the triangle button during a Reaction Command prompt, you would basically gain the upper hand and knock the boss down to your level. Then you just swing your keyblade away until it gets back up again. In other words, hit triangle to win.

Puzzles and boss fights go hand in hand. Puzzles are a test of logic and reasoning that do not involve combat and bosses are a test of strategy and staying alive long enough to gain the advantage and take the enemy down. Can a boss fight look amazing and still be an engaging experience? Of course. So long as it isn’t a beefed up version of another enemy or the fight looks pretty solely to look good, give that fight a riddle with a solution and you’ve got a great boss fight.

Quests: How to and how not to do it

            Quest is defined as “to search for something.” In the gaming world, quests are tasks that may vary from a short walk to another NPC or killing a huge boss monster. In a way, they do involve searching for the objective associated with the task, so it stays true to the original definition of quest. Thing is, quests are huge in RPGs and are becoming more common in other genres of games. They are a list of instructions for the player to read in order to understand what must be done at their current state. There is a right way and a wrong way to use quests. 

            The right way to do quests are to make them revolve around something important. Give players a quest to gather an artifact of demonstrable power and they will go after it. Is the task to fight a creature terrorizing a nearby town? Perfect! They will go kill it. How about a job that involves finding a location? Just point players in the right direction and they can take it from there. Need an NPC escorted? Sure. Just don’t make it tedious. Trouble with these quests is you don’t just hand it to a player and expect them to complete it. If they want to progress, they don’t have much of a choice. If you want them to enjoy it, have it tie in to the main story or have its own story and make it feel essential to the game. Make it seem as if this task is not finished, the story cannot go on.

            Quests don’t have a ton of variety to them. It’s either kill something, collect something else, or locate an object or person. Therefore, developers have to implement their own form of variety. The earliest quests in World of Warcraft were highly repetitive with tons of slayer quests, item gathering, and talking to people. In later expansion, they made slayer quests fun by adding in quests that involve various methods of disposal. One such example has you mounted on an airship gun and firing upon Alliance soldiers. You finish the quest after killing 80 targets, but you secretly want more. Firing that machine gun and downing many mobs at once is so satisfying. Why? Because players are used to the traditional method of taking down one enemy at a time or only a few at once. This quest offered an unusual means of completing a slayer quest and it worked wonderfully.

            Unfortunately, quests are easy to abuse and can make a game highly repetitive or tedious. An example of this is in Assassin’s Creed. There are side objectives that involve saving citizens from abusive guards. The first few times it feels heroic to save a defenseless villager from the Templars. After the fifth time, it starts to feel like a chore with a negligible award that isn’t worth the effort. Plus the player can come back later and that person will still be there. These side objectives are everywhere in the game and they are the exact same objective: fight the guard to free the citizen. There is no special versions of this quest that have you saving multiple victims at once or using a unique weapon to dispatch the guards.

            The worst kind of quest in existence? The escort quest. So far, I have never seen an escort quest done in a good way. An escort quest has the player standing next to an NPC as they walk from Point A to Point B. They might get attacked along the way and it is up to the player to protect them. Should the NPC die, the quest fails and must be tried again. First off, these NPCs never run as fast as the player, so the player has to move slowly. Second, these NPCs cannot defend themselves. They are just a liability that annoys the player. Third, why is the distance between Point A and Point B the length of a football field, but feels like you have to trek the entire Sahara Desert to actually get there!? Avoid implementing the escort quest. As it stands now, there is no way to make it work.

            There are some awesome quests I’ve run into. They typically have multiple steps and might be called “meta-quests.” One of my favorites is in Skyrim. It starts off with you talking to this NPC who says he lost his dog. You agree to search for him and within a minute of walking along the road you run into what you assume to be the lost dog. Its name is Barbas and it talks! This is highly unusual, but fits in the universe. The dog asks you to follow it to its real master, Clavicus Vile. After several minutes of running (Barbas runs slightly faster than the player), you are standing before the shrine of Vile. His voice speaks and he asks you to retrieve an axe. You get the axe and kill the previous owner, return the weapon to Vile and he says you can keep the axe if you kill Barbas or hand it over and let Barbas live. I chose to hand it over and Barbas lived to be reunited with his master.

            That quest took over 30 minutes to finish as the details of the quest involved lots of walking and fighting. It was kind of an escort quest, but more of a follow quest as Barbas was technically escorting the player and could easily fend for himself. The quest itself is important because the dog is looking for its master and the primary objective is to reunite it with the owner. The player gets attached to the dog and is therefore more obligated to follow it all the way to the shrine of Vile. The task also offered more than one possible outcome. You could win that axe for killing the dog or a mask as an alternate reward for sparing the dog. That is how a quest is meant to be done.