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Should RPGs look at WoW for encounter/boss design?

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I don't want any of the masochistic shit that you people call playing an MMO in my singleplayer RPGs, including the poisons they already share
 

Kitako

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Any single player game with boss fights is likely to be shit no matter what they do.

I agree, all fights should be as banal and unremarkable as possible for maximum realism and grittiness

it is the final room of the final dungeon, do you want a boss? Fuck you, have six thugs instead
Or just a normal mob, with the model scaled up x2, and health scaled up x800

While the first bosses (2004-2005) were just bland tank and spank, I liked most of the fights I've seen afterwards. Many of those gimmick can't work in a single player game (based on team member doing something with each other), but there are good ideas that can definetly work good in SP games.

Yogg Saron or whatever was called the tentacle rape boss in Ulduar was a good example of many things going on in a fight. From the simple avoid the fart clouds while controlling angry minor mobs to the whole tentacles raping you in various ways, the link between players (2 players got linked and they took damage based on how far they are each other), being swallowed and fight your way out of the stomach before you're digested, and the very good "don't look at the boss while killing it" at last.

I just did last boss in Kingdoms of Amalur and I'm depressed. You made me remember good times of funny boss fight.
 

Themadcow

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I made this point a couple of weeks ago and expected to get mahoosively flamed for it, but good to see that most people seem to be in agreement. Most CRPG's are massively disappointing in terms of boss fights, but then again, I'm not sure that the average RPG'er would be content spending whole evenings 'learning' an encounter with the kind of complexity you get in encounters such as Lich King, C'Thun or Kael (TK version). CRPG's are about story progression with sub-bosses usually reduced to the status of chapter endings rather than real challenge.

For a genre I enjoy more than any other, I'm seriously strugging to recall more than 5 genuinely great boss encounters in 30 years of CRPGing.
 

DaveO

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No, RPGs should not look to WoW or any other game for encounter/boss design. We don't need more copy-pasted games like Dragon Age 2.

However, we do need better RPG settings, a LOT of better writing, and more willingness to try unique things.
 
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I have nothing against the broadest terms of "boss fights" actually, only the cliche that is probably detailed quite well on a place like TvTropes. You know, the one where there is one irrationally tough and impossibly powerful character who doesn't mesh with the rest of the game, has no in-world explanation for their abilities or why they are sitting in a room waiting for eternity, they're the size of a building in a room with one tiny little exit and a whole bunch of conveniently placed altars, and vulnerable to the one thing that the entire plot is based around finding. If you are going so far to put the challenge into the game, then either do it in a way that fits with the rest of the game/setting or forget about any kind of consistency, as really it is the consistency that separates the cliched "boss encounter" from an otherwise unique and interesting standout fight.

The cliche aside, any character who is significantly more powerful than other encounters (only to the extent that it fits with the rest of the game logic presented up until that point), who has an environment specifically built to make that encounter more challenging without making the player think "yeah if I wasn't here to kill this guy, this whole area would have no purpose and make no sense at all" is going to serve the objective well. You balance the heightened challenge with real memorability and some added depth to the conflict that isn't available in standard encounters, and you have what a boss encounter should be.
 

Kaol

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Any single player game with boss fights is likely to be shit no matter what they do.

I agree, all fights should be as banal and unremarkable as possible for maximum realism and grittiness

it is the final room of the final dungeon, do you want a boss? Fuck you, have six thugs instead

Or you could make a game where combat was actually fun throughout. I don't think bosses belong in anything but arcade games.
 

Mangoose

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Any single player game with boss fights is likely to be shit no matter what they do.

I agree, all fights should be as banal and unremarkable as possible for maximum realism and grittiness

it is the final room of the final dungeon, do you want a boss? Fuck you, have six thugs instead
Actually, six thugs that have good AI and maneuver around for positional advantage is much more tactical and fun to play against than one boss that can only one small circle of positional influence.

My favorite encounters are when the game presents an equivalent of your player party.
 

Johannes

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Any single player game with boss fights is likely to be shit no matter what they do.

I agree, all fights should be as banal and unremarkable as possible for maximum realism and grittiness

it is the final room of the final dungeon, do you want a boss? Fuck you, have six thugs instead
Actually, six thugs that have good AI and maneuver around for positional advantage is much more tactical and fun to play against than one boss that can only one small circle of positional influence.
And who says a boss has to be a lone character? Maybe it has henchmen, it can summon demons, it has its boss bro with it, whatever to make it interesting.

Basically it's just about having varied encounters. Fighting 6 thugs is not very exciting for a final fight if you've fought off several bands of 5 thugs already, no matter how deep the combat system is when fighting thugs. Neither the boss fights or other encounters should be carbon copies of each other. You might say that JA2 didn't need more than 1 basic type of enemy in most fights, but man it would've been better still if you'd had to fight guard dogs, moving tanks, cyborgs, or some D&D monsters alongside the grunts too.
 

Themadcow

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Basically it's just about having varied encounters. Fighting 6 thugs is not very exciting for a final fight if you've fought off several bands of 5 thugs already, no matter how deep the combat system is when fighting thugs.

Although, 4 groups of 99 Berzerkers on the other hand...
 

Metro

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The people saying 'no' probably aren't even familiar with some of the more creative boss encounters in WoW and are just saying it because 'lol WoW sux.' In terms of a boss encounter being multiple enemies in an interesting scenario see, e.g., the final encounter in Deus Ex HR: Missing Link -- where they actually designed it themselves rather than out sourcing it.



Now transfer that to an ARPG context and it's pretty easy to see how you can design a similar encounter allowing it to be beaten in a variety of ways: stealth for a rogue, brute force by a warrior (who would have higher damage thresholds), run and gun by a caster type, etc.
 

Xi

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(Too reiterate) I think one of WoW's strongest points, at least it was for me when I played, was the combat and boss encounters. I raided into Black Temple during Burning Crusade as a shaman healer (and while healing is very pop-a-mole with healbot) the combat mechanics are fucking fantastic and deep. There's a LOT of math and theory that goes into understanding min/max builds, how encounters affect your damage/healing ability, and what abilities/rotations you should be using to control/deal damage/survive. Honestly, no other action game even comes close to the depth that the WoW combat mechanics offered back then. The games gone through many iteration, and I've not kept up, but I imagine it's still pretty detailed.

The reason a lot of that old content was so hard is because it required 25 people to understand many aspects of the game in depth. If your group didn't you would not get very far because each role has to maximize it's potential or you increase the time it takes and the potential for errors, boss berserks, etc. IMHO, great combat mechanics. Best I've ever played.

PS, the grinding has nothing to do with the game mechanics of WoW and more to do with longevity of content (since addiction makes people blast through everything so quickly. It doesn't need to be included in single player games to such an extent.
 

Metro

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Well a lot of the encounters in WoW can be popamole to individual players because when you're in a raid of 25 people (or even 10) your role is usually boiled down to two or three repetitive actions. It's why I never really liked raiding because rarely did it rely on using all of the tools given to your class -- at least not in a way that doing the old BC heroics did. That said, the better raid encounters made up for that fact by having a lot of moving parts and relying more on situational awareness/participation than raw number crunching. Something like High King Maulgor (or w/e his name was) was arguably more involved than Gruul despite the fact that the former preceded the latter -- handling his adds relied on a lot of off-tanking, kiting, etc. Kael and Vashj are regarded as some of the better raid encounters because of how involved they were versus most raid bosses that were mind numbingly boring for the individual player and consisted of little more than popping moles and avoiding the fire.
 

Nael

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Keep your boss encounters to your Nintendo side-scrollers. And as for mentioning that... acronym you have bandied about so much in this thread you must die a really painful death.
 

RK47

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Or you can just use skill checks and tell the boss to point a gun to himself.
Fightfags can have their boss fights.
Persuadefags can persuade bosses.
Stealthfags can poison their drink or some shit.
Faggots can let him go and run.
 
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what is this actiony shit doing in my rpg
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SuicideBunny

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The people saying 'no' probably aren't even familiar with some of the more creative boss encounters in WoW and are just saying it because 'lol WoW sux.'
it doesn't matter how creative boss encounters can be. rpgs should not have bosses at all, especially those rpgs that try to be more than trivial fantasy trash. the word "boss" alone implies encounter design where everything in between is filler combat that requires much less effort and by extension trivialization of combat as such, both of which is bad design for anything but arcade beat 'em ups.
 

made

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The people saying 'no' probably aren't even familiar with some of the more creative boss encounters in WoW and are just saying it because 'lol WoW sux.'
it doesn't matter how creative boss encounters can be. rpgs should not have bosses at all, especially those rpgs that try to be more than trivial fantasy trash. the word "boss" alone implies encounter design where everything in between is filler combat that requires much less effort and by extension trivialization of combat as such, both of which is bad design for anything but arcade beat 'em ups.
Nonsense. Variety is good no matter what. Even if you had a tactical combat system where trash fights are rare and challenging (yeah, keep dreaming), inserting a unique boss fight now and then keeps things fresh. Say a bandit hideout where you fight through a series of ambushes that all have a different setup requiring different tactics to avoid repetition (ie. grind), then at the end you face the bandit leader with his minions, perhaps with some traps and shit to add another layer of complexity. He doesn't necessarily have to have 10x the hp of a normal mob, it's still a bossfight that bring satisfying conclusion to the whole dungeon and makes sense in the context.
 

SuicideBunny

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Nonsense. Variety is good no matter what.
i'd rather have variety in the form of much less but more deadly combat against individually designed enemies that have names and connections to the gameworld beyond being nameless bandit #3 from ambush #2 with different outcomes and consequences than have a game full of scenarios with series of distinctly different encounters against disconnected nameless goons usually culminating in a boss encounter with a 1:1 chance of being just as disconnected as his underlings or actually integrated into some other parts than just his scenario...
especially when those scenarios make little sense to me personally, like why the fuck the leader of gang smart enough to rig their hideout against law enforcement would wait around idly until a group of dangerous vigilantes makes it through all of his gang's traps and ambushes to suicide against them.

stuff like that is ok for heroic fantasy (aka trivial fantasy trash) and hack'n slash (aka beat 'em up rpg) but not for rpgs in general, imo.
 
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the word "boss" alone implies encounter design where everything in between is filler combat that requires much less effort and by extension trivialization of combat as such, both of which is bad design for anything but arcade beat 'em ups.
[...]
a game full of scenarios with series of distinctly different encounters against disconnected nameless goons usually culminating in a boss encounter with a 1:1 chance of being just as disconnected as his underlings or actually integrated into some other parts than just his scenario...

Uh, no? "Boss" just implies a tougher fight against someone or something that has an advantage other enemies didn't. You're having a kneejerk reaction caused by bad experiences with "bosses" in the past, to the point where even mentioning the mechanic makes you think of irredeemable shit.

edit: If the above gang leader example bothers you for some reason, then think of the same scenario, but instead of the leader personally commanding the attack you have another generic thug, except this one is more experienced so he was given the best weapon the gang had laying around. There you have your boss.

in before "but why didn't your character call the guards to begin with"
 

Mangoose

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the word "boss" alone implies encounter design where everything in between is filler combat that requires much less effort and by extension trivialization of combat as such, both of which is bad design for anything but arcade beat 'em ups.
[...]
a game full of scenarios with series of distinctly different encounters against disconnected nameless goons usually culminating in a boss encounter with a 1:1 chance of being just as disconnected as his underlings or actually integrated into some other parts than just his scenario...

Uh, no? "Boss" just implies a tougher fight against someone or something that has an advantage other enemies didn't. You're having a kneejerk reaction caused by bad experiences with "bosses" in the past.
No, it's more like you should specify what you mean by the very generic term of "boss" that can imply a variety of meanings.
 

made

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Nonsense. Variety is good no matter what.
i'd rather have variety in the form of much less but more deadly combat against individually designed enemies that have names and connections to the gameworld beyond being nameless bandit #3 from ambush #2 with different outcomes and consequences than have a game full of scenarios with series of distinctly different encounters against disconnected nameless goons usually culminating in a boss encounter with a 1:1 chance of being just as disconnected as his underlings or actually integrated into some other parts than just his scenario...
especially when those scenarios make little sense to me personally, like why the fuck the leader of gang smart enough to rig their hideout against law enforcement would wait around idly until a group of dangerous vigilantes makes it through all of his gang's traps and ambushes to suicide against them.
...maybe he's busy sending off a shipment and just wants to delay you until it's gone, maybe he's scared shitless because he knows you're coming for him and he's bound to die, maybe it's all just a ploy to lure you into a trap.* There are many plausible reasons for a boss being at the end of the dungeon other than just sitting on a pile of loot and feeling like a boss. Can all be tied into the narrative and part of a big picture. As CK said, you probably haven't seen it done well before so you'd rather dispense with the concept entirely.

*fuck, put it on a hidden timer: if you take too long to clear to him, the bandit leader is gone when you get there and you just fight the leftovers of his troops. OR he had time to summon in reinforcements, making the encounter twice as hard.
 

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