Should RPGs look at WoW for encounter/boss design?

[betamin]

Every encounter designer should have VARIETY in his head first and foremost and challenge a close second, no matter what level the fight is. Bosses are more of a DIFFICULTY thing, the most challenging fight of a chain. It also signifies the ending of something, you reaching the top. If there are bosses, normal fights may or may not be challenging or varied, so even if there are bosses it shouldn't affect them.

 

[Metro]

Boss = monster/npc more powerful (by a noticeable order of magnitude) than the typical ones you kill every few minutes. Usually they are significant to the plot (or sub plot/background story). Are we really getting so pedantic here people need a definition of 'boss?' The dragons in Gothic 2 are bosses... yet they are poorly designed. Some of you argue the solution to that would just be to remove them/not have them in the first place? Sorry, but I think the better idea would be to spend more time refining their encounters to employ a variety of differing mechanics that adapt depending on the build of the player. As it is now melee characters get lol'ed by their breath knock back and range characters can easily kill them by side stepping flame bolts or, of course, you can just summon a demon and stand there and do nothing.

 

[Kaol]

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.

I'm glad i'm not the only one who understands this.

 

[Johannes]

So, name an RPG with good encounter design that features no bosses?

 

[Kaol]

Deus Ex

 

[Aeschylus]

^ Say what?

Deus Ex had plenty of boss fights. Not in every single section, but they were there.

 

[Kaol]

I would say ToEE too.

 

[Kaol]

We would first have to define what is meant by 'boss fight'. I played WoW and 99% of mobs could be described as pure filler with a handful of bosses that actually required thought. I wouldn't class any encounter in Deus Ex as a 'bossfight'. The only issure with DX in this discussion is its not really a pure RPG, however i think the encounters were done really well.

 

[Roguey]

I would say ToEE too.

Lareth, the temple faction leaders, Falrinth and Smigmal, Senshock, Hedrack, the elemental node guardians, and Zuggtmoy were bosses. There's no way that Balor in the fire node isn't a boss.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I'd love to see a game with all it's filler combat stripped out just so I could watch everyone who rags on it squirm and try to explain why that also sucks without tripping over themselves.

Combat isn't just an abstract challenge to overcome momentarily. It serves purposes and has effects beyond just whether or not you beat it. If you had even an inkling of how to design a decent game you'd realize that.

 

[Hoaxmetal]

What is an RPG?

 

[DragoFireheart]

What is an RPG?

A cluster fuck of gay/tranny romances, ABC colored endings, quest compasses, and video game publishers sticking a dildo up your butt until you like it.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

I'd love to see a game with all it's filler combat stripped out just so I could watch everyone who rags on it squirm and try to explain why that also sucks without tripping over themselves.

Combat isn't just an abstract challenge to overcome momentarily. It serves purposes and has effects beyond just whether or not you beat it. If you had even an inkling of how to design a decent game you'd realize that.

Sorta related, VD dislikes the "running around pointlessly" aspect of RPGs, hence the teleportation mechanic in AoD. Cue a bunch of people which had the same opinion realizing they actually miss the walking around. I bet it wouldn't be different for combat, even with all the "wouldn't it be nice if every fight was really meaningful and really difficult and had deep consequences that reached every orifice of the storyline" dream-game wanking.

 

[Metro]

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.

I'm glad i'm not the only one who understands this.

Both of you all's 'understanding' is pretty flawed.

Please stop asking for a fucking definition of 'boss fight.' Just use your common sense. Deus Ex has plenty of boss fights, some are just more poorly designed than others. Gunther, Navarre, Simmons, etc. are fairly shallow straight up fights although the first two at least allow for alternate resolutions should you learn their kill codes. The Bob Page 'encounter' at the end where you have to shut down the constructors is a better example that the new developers copied more faithfully in Missing Link.

 

[Grimlorn]

If you want to play a single player RPG that's like a MMO, go play DA2 on Nightmare. That's basically what I thought when playing it and it sucked hard. (At release prepatched) Controlling 4 characters at once while you're trying to burn down mobs with tons of HP isn't fun or good combat. It just proves that PvE combat in games like WoW has always sucked. That's why they have "gimmicks". Solid combat doesn't need gimmicks to be challenging. And a lot of the gimmicks I've seen simply require 5 players working together. You can't replicate that kind of challenge in a single player game.

 

[Edward_R_Murrow]

I'd love to see a game with all it's filler combat stripped out just so I could watch everyone who rags on it squirm and try to explain why that also sucks without tripping over themselves.

Combat isn't just an abstract challenge to overcome momentarily. It serves purposes and has effects beyond just whether or not you beat it. If you had even an inkling of how to design a decent game you'd realize that.

Methinks your definition of filler combat is different from others' definitions, or perhaps you play different games than others. Most people probably dislike combat encounters that are trivial, inconsequential, where the probability of failure was infinitesimally small. These sorts of pointless encounters are what people probably classify as filler, and for good reason...they serve no purpose. Take Dragon Age: Whorigins vs some sort of hardcore dungeon crawler (e.g. Wizardry, Nocturne, etc). Both will have you fighting a lot of relatively generic encounters. You'll see that group of vampires and level 6 priests or Titanias and Trolls as much as you might fight derpspawn and shit shadows, but the dungeon crawler's foes won't be "filler" in the way that those from Dragon Age will be. Even disregarding the fact that a hardcore crawler like Wizardry or Nocturne has random encounters that can kill you if you get careless, there's a point to them in the overall scheme; they deplete your resources. You have to use spells, items, and perhaps take damage. Even though you won, there are different gradations of victory (coming out unscathed, taking minor damage, heavy losses, or rarely coming out better). But when you fight derpspawn krew #252 and stomp them into the ground, there's no impact beyond the binary because your characters all all 100% after the fight. The fight, being boring and of trivial challenge, served no purpose other than going OMMM NOMM NOMMM to your time and allowing DOUCHVELOPERS to squawk madly about 50++++++++ HOURS OF HAWKESOME GAMEPLAY AWWWWW YEAH DICK RIDE ME FUCKERS! That's filler, and the pointlessness of playing through it (besides for DAT EXP and DAT LEWT) is why people don't like it. I mean, I don't mind generic encounters if they have an over-arching point, and I'm not going to be hard on a dev for not handcrafting every encounter to be an intricate affair, replete with detail, but for God's sake don't stuff your game full of them if they have no point besides "HI HO FREE EXP YO!"

 

[Damned Registrations]

I agree with you mostly. I think most people talking about filler combat are including fights that deplete their resources however. They figure that if they can fireball the enemy to death in a single round, it was just filler combat... even if that action made the next fight twice as difficult. Of course, this ties in with difficulty a lot. If the average moron has to use a potion to get through every fight, but being above average means you never do (and everything besides items is replenished afterwards) then your combat just went from engaging to banal filler. Obviously better systems avoid this kind of thing more often, but even a shitty system can play well for some people while being crap for others.

Aside from that however, even truly nonthreatening filler combat still serves a purpose in regards to pacing (just because I don't need to think about the combat doesn't mean my brain gets shut off, I can be thinking of other things, like the plot or my party build) and atmosphere and such. Chysallids in X-Com wouldn't seem nearly as scary if not for all the sectoids and floaters you've effortlessly murdered up until that point. Throwing in some mooks to crush serves to make their boss seem a lot more powerful. An enemy that takes 20 rounds to kill is a lot more impressive when you've just murdered a half dozen guys that took 1-2 rounds each to kill. Though the difference between having a half dozen of those mooks and 4 dozen of them won't have much impact in that regard.

That's not to say there aren't any games that could do with less combat. There's plenty. And there are certainly devs that use fights to pad length instead of adding atmosphere or weakening the party or adjusting the pacing, which is stupid. But you can't throw all combat that is 'trivial' in the sense that you don't have to think much about what to do under the bus because such encounters get misused sometimes.