Decline On why boss combat is shit (and why your favorite Soulslike sucks).

[JoacoN]

I think the problem isn't really boss fights themselves, but rather on what type of genre and game you apply them to.

For example, on a game focused heavily on exploration, you would want the player to never stop moving and looking around for how to progress and find secrets, to devote all their attention to the simple action of just enjoying the world you created and going deeply into it. However, if you lock them in a boss fight, the whole core of the game stops working as players are obliged to focus on one and only one thing, limiting their actions to just fighting the boss or else they won't be able to continue the exploration they so much like. In this case, the boss is just an artificial block for the exploration.

But in other cases such as for example Gradius the point of the game is to constantly be shooting and dodging stuff, using your reflexes to the max and feel the dopamine from killing enemies and getting upgrades. Bosses help promote this playstyle because you need to be upgraded to face them, and they require you to shoot and dodge even harder than before, you force the player to play better at the earlier stages of the game to be able to fight these bosses, which at the same time let's you increase the difficulty of the game after each boss fight because the player has proved itself against a bigger challenge. And it also feeds on the high octane action angle of the game, you blow up bigger enemies that are harder to kill that create even crazier effects, so your dopamine receptors go crazy when you finally beat that hard as fuck boss and you get prepared for the next stage.

But ye bosses might not be a good fit for games that are trying to make the player feel more inmersed on a game, as they can just feel arbitrary or annoying cause most of the time they are used as roadblocks, instead of a test of your skill with a huge sense of satisfaction when you beat them. If you want some good bosses Cuphead was pretty damn good at that, really fun and replayable game that made me fucking angry but also left me with triumphant feeling after each boss.

 

[JoacoN]

The problem with boss combat is that it is guaranteed to be shit. To understand why, imagine the video game version of "bosses" in a movie or a book (so called more serious and mature entertainment media). It should be pretty obvious that no kind of elegant or interesting combat is possible when one combatant is a human (or close to it), and another is Godzilla or King Kong or Superman. Given the massive disparity in health, damage, abilities and so on, no combat system can be devised for one of these to fight the other, so they have to fall back on some cheesy shit. That cheese shit might work once in a movie, but in a video where you have to do it many times, it quickly becomes a waste of time.

I would say what more devs should is that instead of doing boss fights that are the level of something like the atomic bomb vs. an ant it should something more akin to David vs. Goliath, fights that are meant to be seen as impossible to any person but were the player outsmarts the boss, mostly through the advantages of being a videogame.
Having to fight the boss using parts of the enviroment or being able to modify the enviroment to make the fight easier, using previous information found out by exploring the world, giving the boss the same properties as a normal enemy so the player is allowed to have multiple solutions to the boss fight, allowing the player to bait the boss into traps or out of it's designated area, etc...
Don't Starve does a lot of these things so it feels extremely good to pull off a flawless victory against a boss, you take your patience and think strategies before fighting the boss, maybe this time I will build walls for extra protection, maybe I will make better healing food or change my character for another one for the fight, maybe i can fight next to a river so i can use a boat to move through 2 coasts, etc... + you get some really hefty rewards that make these fights really enticing

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

The problem with boss combat is that it is guaranteed to be shit. To understand why, imagine the video game version of "bosses" in a movie or a book (so called more serious and mature entertainment media). It should be pretty obvious that no kind of elegant or interesting combat is possible when one combatant is a human (or close to it), and another is Godzilla or King Kong or Superman. Given the massive disparity in health, damage, abilities and so on, no combat system can be devised for one of these to fight the other, so they have to fall back on some cheesy shit. That cheese shit might work once in a movie, but in a video where you have to do it many times, it quickly becomes a waste of time.

I would say what more devs should is that instead of doing boss fights that are the level of something like the atomic bomb vs. an ant it should something more akin to David vs. Goliath, fights that are meant to be seen as impossible to any person but were the player outsmarts the boss, mostly through the advantages of being a videogame.
Having to fight the boss using parts of the enviroment or being able to modify the enviroment to make the fight easier, using previous information found out by exploring the world, giving the boss the same properties as a normal enemy so the player is allowed to have multiple solutions to the boss fight, allowing the player to bait the boss into traps or out of it's designated area, etc...
Don't Starve does a lot of these things so it feels extremely good to pull off a flawless victory against a boss, you take your patience and think strategies before fighting the boss, maybe this time I will build walls for extra protection, maybe I will make better healing food or change my character for another one for the fight, maybe i can fight next to a river so i can use a boat to move through 2 coasts, etc... + you get some really hefty rewards that make these fights really enticing

Well, I guess it depends on what you want to play as. Do you want to play as some kind of a smartass that's constantly outsmarting bosses? Or would you rather play as some knight/samurai/martial artist/commando/gunslinger who just uses his bad ass skills against opponents of similar power? I know I would much rather do the latter. The former gets boring enough in a 2 hour movie.

 

[Ash]

You really need to stop equating good game design to sense of realism, jesus christ boy. You're thinking about it all wrong. Especially on an RPG forum, goddamn. I play video games to escape that shit. Excessive realism faggotry is one very significant tenant of the great decline, killing games for decades now. Realism has its place, but only to a degree, some genres or styles more than others. Don't get it twisted.

 

[GamerCat_]

OP (we'll call him PtP) seems to have come to an absurd conclusion based on a failure to grasp two key ideas.

One being that different works are made for different intentions, and that things he doesn't like create distinct impressions upon an audience. PtP, you don't like the impression of being locked into a violent encounter with something unpredictable and strange. But that is not a mistake. That is a distinct class of experience. As other posters in this thread have already taken stabs at outlining, From build their games around the realisation of impressions, ideas, and experiences. They do not aspire towards the realisation of your idiosyncratic ideas of a perfect combat system. Note that I didn't describe violent situations in From games using this term. I believe that doing so leads to false impressions of what they are trying to do.

If you find yourself stuck talking about anything, a good idea is to try to outline your position again in as much new language as possible.

Second, the attempt at describing boxing and "real life" violence as following laws of "combat systems" suggests that your failure to appreciate the nuance in fictional visions and worlds is a reflection of a broader inability to recognise the natural nuance of anything. You appear to have a startlingly rigid pattern and systems oriented understanding of reality. An understanding which you apparently cannot appreciate as idiosyncratic. Leading you to classify alternatives as wrong, bad, shit, etc.

You can get by with such an understanding as the one you have, you can make your own sense of whatever you want. But I imagine this often creates awkward problems irl, and makes you a rather poor critic of media since your comfort zone is so small and particular and refuse to see value in anything outside of it. You may aspire to make sweeping and general statements on what does or does not work in video games, but you seem completely blind to your own biases. Everything you write is just a declaration of your own tastes as long as you remain ignorant of how much you're taking for granted when you speak about these things.

To go back to the first point for an example. Your issue with From is that you are blind to and uninterested in their aesthetic intentions. You are interpreting a made for purpose experience of a very particular kind as a failed realisation of your preferred kind. There is also the issue of how From are actually still building closer to what you describe as ideal than most video games, but that's a whole other subject. I suppose they are marketed and described at various points as "RPGs" of a kind, so a certain kind of interpretation is invited. But I believe a discerning audience will readily recognise that the intention is not to create a balanced and realistic dungeons and dragons module.

As other posters have already said, the distinct character, meaning, and place in the world of particular "bosses" in these From games you name informs their appearance and behaviour. Makes their role in the world of the game coherent. The case one could make against this is that the game could still have been made in such a way that only humanoids running on the same strict RPG rules were the ones you encountered. But that begs the obvious question which somehow nobody has asked all thread yet, why?

Why should only one class of experience exist?

The problem seems to be primarily semantic. Somewhere down the line From games are described as "RPGs" and you take that word very, very seriously. It means something very rigid and specific and failure to do these things is a failure to be an "RPG". The easy way out for you is, "these are not RPGs". But of course you've kind of already intercepted us here by declaring that reality also runs on the laws of RPGs, which is why I made by second point, that you like "RPGs" not because you think they're an enjoyable class of contrived experience/media, but because they align with how you see reality.

This whole thread comes down to you failing to appreciate that other people can see the world differently and failing to appreciate any possible value in alternative perspectives. This leads to absurdly myopic interpretations of the world (like saying that "combat systems" are real) and it also makes you blind to anything I would call "art". The potential for "art" in video games being the application of fine artisan craft towards the realisation of new experiences.

For example, to elaborate further upon the point of "bosses" in Dark Souls. As has already been said in this thread, a Dark Souls boss is often something like a God. Yes, that's a start. But what is a God, and why should a God be in a video game and be confronted in something like a "boss fight"? If we look at all of From's games, especially those led in production by Hidetaka Miyazaki we can see certain consistent fascinations emerging over and over again which all of these games are exploring. Dark Souls is about a world with so much history behind it before you show up that even its grandest and most powerful elements are mostly dead. And to bring about any kind of future and renew life in the world what's left has to die. Your point of view is that of an interloper. The party is over and you're picking through the wreckage.

My point, you are supposed to feel lost. You are supposed to be struggling to comprehend a lot of this. You are facing forces which you do not understand because this world is alien to you. From are clearly aware of the rigid and predictable form of the "RPG", and to some extent they play into that. Especially in the more mundane elements of their world. You, the player, with prior knowledge of what an RPG is, pick a class, you have stats, gear, magic, whatever. And then you're thrown into this world where you hit things and make numbers appear, they seem to roughly play by the same rules as you. A skeleton man can drop a sword and it has its own stats and numbers. And then down the line you meet a dragon, or a sick, decrepit God, and they start doing things on a level you can't touch. But, they also make numbers appear when they hurt things. This creates a distinct impression. There is an observable kind of sense to these things. They follow rules. But they're their own class of being and it's not for you to know what exactly is going on. You can only learn as much as you can see from your ant's eye view of this dead world.

From use the form and expectations of "RPG" on one level to make you comfortable and get you to enter with a degree of familiarity, but they can also subvert this. An understanding of RPG rules and encounters will carry you, until it doesn't. And you are now dealing with the strange and unknown. This sensation is desired. They built the game around doing this. The same is true of other pre-established cultural notes they borrow. You're in a "fantasy" world, but it very quickly gets very weird and particular. You're RPG man in the kingdom falling to darkness, then a few hours later a giant man-snake is telling you that the other man-snake is a liar and you have to escape from the demiurge's will. They want you to feel confused. They want you lost. They want you bewildered.

The point of a Dark Souls boss is that he feels imposing, obtuse, mysterious, and has the weight of history behind him. This impression he makes is the point. Not the particulars of his stats, how to beat him, or the wiki's lore page on who he is or why he's there. Of course where I'm going now, I don't just believe PtP reads Dark Souls wrong, I believe that everyone does.

Like everything else, From took a piece of genre form and gave it new life by consciously building around it. In many games "boss" does mean "big thing who fights you different". Nobody uses the word "boss" within Dark Souls though. There are big things who fight you different, but the whole Dark Souls experience is built around contextualising such encounters to make them rich in meaning. The fact that so many games have "bosses" but when you say it people now think "Dark Souls" goes to show that they succeeded.

From build their games around impressions. They do not merely aim to iterate upon rote mechanical challenges and tired and now pointless narrative repetitions for their own sake. Every old form they use they make their own to serve their own ends. People who fail to recognise that are playing a different game to Miyazaki.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

There is a reason for that: realism demands a certain level of complexity and logic, so it works relatively well.

Ah yes, Call of Duty MW2, truly an fps masterpiece of the likes Doom can only dream to be



Realism != good game design
A game can be completely unrealistic but still possess a straigthfoward and coherent internal logic, as well a complex interplay of various systems
Realism highly constraints design creativity for gameplay and even level
If all game devs thought like you, some of the best games of any genre wouldn't have ever been designed

contraficting

Thanks for pointing that out

I've completed most of these games,

What, the games you mentioned in your OP?
Kek
If that's the case you've barely wet your feet

The bosses I am complaining about are obviously the ones with humangous hitpoint pools, ridiculous attacks and movesets

So you're simply talking about bad boss design
However, your OP and the very title of your thread, imply that you were talking about the concept of "Bossess" in general
So are you, by any chance, moving the goal posts ?

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

You really need to stop equating good game design to sense of realism, jesus christ boy. You're thinking about it all wrong. Especially on an RPG forum, goddamn. I play video games to escape that shit. Excessive realism faggotry is one very significant tenant of the great decline, killing games for decades now. Realism has its place, but only to a degree, some genres or styles more than others. Don't get it twisted.

No, artist formerly known as CyberP, it is YOU who are thinking about it all wrong. You see, I never argue for excessive realism, for example I hate games like RDR2 and GTA V, where they take all the wrong parts of realism: the boring drives/rides back and forth for hours, the inane 9 to 5 plots about some boring RL people, the 10 key presses needed to open a drawer or wipe ass or whatever. Obviously games are not supposed to be fully realistic, otherwise why would we need them? They ARE an escape, venues where we get to do cool stuff we cannot do in real life.

But in order for them to be effective escapes, they have to feel real in the sense of mechanics and graphics and physics and other stuff like that. Or even in the sense of writing, they shouldn't be some boring 9 to 5 stories, but they should have adult level realistic writing.

If I am playing a game somewhat based on real life combat (e.g. Warband, KCD, Battle Brothers), I always have a better, more fun experience, because real life combat is inherently complex and balanced and interesting. But when I play games with combat where developers just pull shit out of their ass, it always feels retarded, and makes me not want to play it.

OP (we'll call him PtP) seems to have come to an absurd conclusion based on a failure to grasp two key ideas.

1. Your post could've used some editing, bro. Maybe shortened by 40 sentences or so without losing any serious content.
2. You only think the above because you don't really get my original post. (To be fixed below).

One being that different works are made for different intentions, and that things he doesn't like create distinct impressions upon an audience. PtP, you don't like the impression of being locked into a violent encounter with something unpredictable and strange. But that is not a mistake. That is a distinct class of experience. As other posters in this thread have already taken stabs at outlining, From build their games around the realisation of impressions, ideas, and experiences. They do not aspire towards the realisation of your idiosyncratic ideas of a perfect combat system. Note that I didn't describe violent situations in From games using this term. I believe that doing so leads to false impressions of what they are trying to do.

Not really. Any combat, even in KCD/Warband/Battle Brothers against a new opponent is "unpredictable" to some degree. You don't know how he will attack exactly. The point is, stuff can be unpredictable within the constraints of realistic combat and physics (say a Karate guy facing a Kung Fu guy for the first time), or the enemy could literally do anything (pull out bomb out of ass, fart electric damage, fly, freeze time, etc). The first can lead to interesting scenarios, the second will lead to deaths and the artifical "figuring out" of the enemy that I am bitching about in this here thread.

Second, the attempt at describing boxing and "real life" violence as following laws of "combat systems" suggests that your failure to appreciate the nuance in fictional visions and worlds is a reflection of a broader inability to recognise the natural nuance of anything. You appear to have a startlingly rigid pattern and systems oriented understanding of reality. An understanding which you apparently cannot appreciate as idiosyncratic. Leading you to classify alternatives as wrong, bad, shit, etc.

But the world IS made of systems, no? And again, you are kinda misunderstanding me. I have nothing against creative outside-the-systems approach to game design, but that belongs more on the side of writing/setting/lore/visuals, etc. It doesn't belong in combat, because how would you make an interesting combat system that is NOT systemic? Even these horrible boss-based combat systems that I hate are systemic, it's just their systems are shit (die 30 times to learn new boss, continue).

As other posters have already said, the distinct character, meaning, and place in the world of particular "bosses" in these From games you name informs their appearance and behaviour. Makes their role in the world of the game coherent. The case one could make against this is that the game could still have been made in such a way that only humanoids running on the same strict RPG rules were the ones you encountered. But that begs the obvious question which somehow nobody has asked all thread yet, why?

There are many ways to skin a cat. You could do it with humanoid enemies, but you could also have important non-humanoid character that you don't 1v1. After all, Aragorn didn't 1v1 Sauron. You could have "special" ways of taking them out (hopefully limited to only a few times a game), like building a ballista to take out a dragon, or finding a special magical trinket or whatever. The point is, the way NOT to do it is having all these retarded 1v1 boss fights.

Why should only one class of experience exist?

The problem seems to be primarily semantic. Somewhere down the line From games are described as "RPGs" and you take that word very, very seriously. It means something very rigid and specific and failure to do these things is a failure to be an "RPG". The easy way out for you is, "these are not RPGs". But of course you've kind of already intercepted us here by declaring that reality also runs on the laws of RPGs, which is why I made by second point, that you like "RPGs" not because you think they're an enjoyable class of contrived experience/media, but because they align with how you see reality.

This whole thread comes down to you failing to appreciate that other people can see the world differently and failing to appreciate any possible value in alternative perspectives. This leads to absurdly myopic interpretations of the world (like saying that "combat systems" are real) and it also makes you blind to anything I would call "art". The potential for "art" in video games being the application of fine artisan craft towards the realisation of new experiences.

Your logical argument seems to be off. This thread is not about FromSoftware games, they are just a very good example, it's about games/RPGs in general, which often use the boss trope. The vast majority of RPGs use this approach in fact.

So basically, I see this shit everywhere, and I point out that it sucks. And then you accuse me of wanting "only one class of experience". Do you see the fallacy?

I'll make you a deal, once they make say 70% of RPGs not follow this shitty path, you can have the other 30%.

For example, to elaborate further upon the point of "bosses" in Dark Souls. As has already been said in this thread, a Dark Souls boss is often something like a God. Yes, that's a start. But what is a God, and why should a God be in a video game and be confronted in something like a "boss fight"? If we look at all of From's games, especially those led in production by Hidetaka Miyazaki we can see certain consistent fascinations emerging over and over again which all of these games are exploring. Dark Souls is about a world with so much history behind it before you show up that even its grandest and most powerful elements are mostly dead. And to bring about any kind of future and renew life in the world what's left has to die. Your point of view is that of an interloper. The party is over and you're picking through the wreckage.

My point, you are supposed to feel lost. You are supposed to be struggling to comprehend a lot of this. You are facing forces which you do not understand because this world is alien to you. From are clearly aware of the rigid and predictable form of the "RPG", and to some extent they play into that. Especially in the more mundane elements of their world. You, the player, with prior knowledge of what an RPG is, pick a class, you have stats, gear, magic, whatever. And then you're thrown into this world where you hit things and make numbers appear, they seem to roughly play by the same rules as you. A skeleton man can drop a sword and it has its own stats and numbers. And then down the line you meet a dragon, or a sick, decrepit God, and they start doing things on a level you can't touch. But, they also make numbers appear when they hurt things. This creates a distinct impression. There is an observable kind of sense to these things. They follow rules. But they're their own class of being and it's not for you to know what exactly is going on. You can only learn as much as you can see from your ant's eye view of this dead world.

Now you are conflating some things here. In particular, you seem to be conflating the atmosphere and themes with combat mechanics. You can feel lost in games where you fight regular enemies using same combat rules and RL physics, you know? One has very little to do with the other.

There is a reason for that: realism demands a certain level of complexity and logic, so it works relatively well.

Ah yes, Call of Duty MW2, truly an fps masterpiece of the likes Doom can only dream to be

Well, MW2 definitely has better "root" mechanics than Doom, ie weapon handling, iron sights, etc, what makes CoD games bad is the tightly railroaded corridor nature of their level design. So if you were to compare a "good" modern FPS to Doom, say something like Metro Exodus or STALKER, then yeah, it's not even close.

Realism != good game design
A game can be completely unrealistic but still possess a straigthfoward and coherent internal logic, as well a complex interplay of various systems
Realism highly constraints design creativity for gameplay and even level
If all game devs thought like you, some of the best games of any genre wouldn't have ever been designed

Theoretically, it's possible for developers to create a "straigthfoward and coherent internal logic" for combat that is not based on RL, but realistically, they almost always fail. The simplest reason being that RL combat systems were created based on millions of factors in RL, which is a lot more complexity than some developer can think up of in his head.

I've completed most of these games,

What, the games you mentioned in your OP?
Kek
If that's the case you've barely wet your feet

My feet are submerged, bre, one, because I've completed more games than anyone in this thread, and two, because I am standing in your tears.

The bosses I am complaining about are obviously the ones with humangous hitpoint pools, ridiculous attacks and movesets

So you're simply talking about bad boss design
However, your OP and the very title of your thread, imply that you were talking about the concept of "Bossess" in general
So are you, by any chance, moving the goal posts ?

Only if you lack basic reading comprehension. I clearly desribed what I have an issue with in the original post. All games have some kind of a powerful enemy that you gotta face (the obstacle), but in good ones, they are just another sucker like you, in bad ones, they are some fat blob of stupid with 4033 special abilities and playing by their own rules. Pay attention.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

MW2 definitely has better "root" mechanics than Doom, ie weapon handling

iron sights

completely unnecessary for Doom's gameplay

etc

what a comprehensive and carefully built argument
truly I am convinced

Theoretically, it's possible for developers to create a "straigthfoward and coherent internal logic" for combat that is not based on RL, but realistically, they almost always fail.

Except all the best fighting games are those that aren't obssed with "realism" and even among those, the best ones are those that have some "arcade" elements

I've completed more games than anyone in this thread

Sure you have

All games have some kind of a powerful enemy that you gotta face (the obstacle), but in good ones, they are just another sucker like you

False

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

MW2 definitely has better "root" mechanics than Doom, ie weapon handling

If you don't see this, then maybe you aren't smart enough to be having this discussion.

iron sights

completely unnecessary for Doom's gameplay

What is Doom gameplay exactly? Running around like an idiot and mindlessly shooting stuff? Why do you think shooters have gone away from that circa late 90s?

etc

what a comprehensive and carefully built argument
truly I am convinced

Well, I mean if you are going to just randomly quote a single word... Running out of actual arguments?

Theoretically, it's possible for developers to create a "straigthfoward and coherent internal logic" for combat that is not based on RL, but realistically, they almost always fail.

Except all the best fighting games are those that aren't obssed with "realism" and even among those, the best ones are those that have some "arcade" elements

What you mean like Street Fighter 2 and the other games little kids play?

I've completed more games than anyone in this thread

Sure you have

100%.

All games have some kind of a powerful enemy that you gotta face (the obstacle), but in good ones, they are just another sucker like you

False

That is your subjective opinion. And was already shown to be shit above.

 

[Serious_Business]

snip

I don't care nearly enough to make a comment on this issue, and I didn't read half of OP's whinning or this post, but it was certainly the best thing to come out of the thread. Real big hitter. Stay hard

 

[Talby]

Not reading all that, OP is a gay retard though.

 

[Morenatsu.]

you arent qualified to complain until youve beaten this

 

[GamerCat_]

OP (we'll call him PtP) seems to have come to an absurd conclusion based on a failure to grasp two key ideas.

1. Your post could've used some editing, bro. Maybe shortened by 40 sentences or so without losing any serious content.
2. You only think the above because you don't really get my original post. (To be fixed below).

We'll see.

One being that different works are made for different intentions, and that things he doesn't like create distinct impressions upon an audience. PtP, you don't like the impression of being locked into a violent encounter with something unpredictable and strange. But that is not a mistake. That is a distinct class of experience. As other posters in this thread have already taken stabs at outlining, From build their games around the realisation of impressions, ideas, and experiences. They do not aspire towards the realisation of your idiosyncratic ideas of a perfect combat system. Note that I didn't describe violent situations in From games using this term. I believe that doing so leads to false impressions of what they are trying to do.

Not really. Any combat, even in KCD/Warband/Battle Brothers against a new opponent is "unpredictable" to some degree. You don't know how he will attack exactly. The point is, stuff can be unpredictable within the constraints of realistic combat and physics (say a Karate guy facing a Kung Fu guy for the first time), or the enemy could literally do anything (pull out bomb out of ass, fart electric damage, fly, freeze time, etc). The first can lead to interesting scenarios, the second will lead to deaths and the artifical "figuring out" of the enemy that I am bitching about in this here thread.

Video games aren't real. Everything is "artificial".

From I'm certain could figure out how to make something like Mountain Blade. Simple spread of possible inputs mirrored between two parties. They could, but they don't. Like most people making games that aren't like this, they had something else they wanted to do. They didn't fail to do what you want. They succeeded in doing what they wanted.

Second, the attempt at describing boxing and "real life" violence as following laws of "combat systems" suggests that your failure to appreciate the nuance in fictional visions and worlds is a reflection of a broader inability to recognise the natural nuance of anything. You appear to have a startlingly rigid pattern and systems oriented understanding of reality. An understanding which you apparently cannot appreciate as idiosyncratic. Leading you to classify alternatives as wrong, bad, shit, etc.

But the world IS made of systems, no? And again, you are kinda misunderstanding me. I have nothing against creative outside-the-systems approach to game design, but that belongs more on the side of writing/setting/lore/visuals, etc. It doesn't belong in combat, because how would you make an interesting combat system that is NOT systemic? Even these horrible boss-based combat systems that I hate are systemic, it's just their systems are shit (die 30 times to learn new boss, continue).

The world is not made of systems. We impose them upon things we look at.

You can't declare something flatly "uninteresting" for all. You can only say that it's uninteresting to you. It's very interesting to me. So where do we go from here? I imagine you declare me a fundamentally broken person. A less tolerant but far more definitive solution to the question of taste.

As other posters have already said, the distinct character, meaning, and place in the world of particular "bosses" in these From games you name informs their appearance and behaviour. Makes their role in the world of the game coherent. The case one could make against this is that the game could still have been made in such a way that only humanoids running on the same strict RPG rules were the ones you encountered. But that begs the obvious question which somehow nobody has asked all thread yet, why?

There are many ways to skin a cat. You could do it with humanoid enemies, but you could also have important non-humanoid character that you don't 1v1. After all, Aragorn didn't 1v1 Sauron. You could have "special" ways of taking them out (hopefully limited to only a few times a game), like building a ballista to take out a dragon, or finding a special magical trinket or whatever. The point is, the way NOT to do it is having all these retarded 1v1 boss fights.

This is just you drawing rules around your preferences. Do you do this in all discussions?

Why should only one class of experience exist?

The problem seems to be primarily semantic. Somewhere down the line From games are described as "RPGs" and you take that word very, very seriously. It means something very rigid and specific and failure to do these things is a failure to be an "RPG". The easy way out for you is, "these are not RPGs". But of course you've kind of already intercepted us here by declaring that reality also runs on the laws of RPGs, which is why I made by second point, that you like "RPGs" not because you think they're an enjoyable class of contrived experience/media, but because they align with how you see reality.

This whole thread comes down to you failing to appreciate that other people can see the world differently and failing to appreciate any possible value in alternative perspectives. This leads to absurdly myopic interpretations of the world (like saying that "combat systems" are real) and it also makes you blind to anything I would call "art". The potential for "art" in video games being the application of fine artisan craft towards the realisation of new experiences.

Your logical argument seems to be off. This thread is not about FromSoftware games, they are just a very good example, it's about games/RPGs in general, which often use the boss trope. The vast majority of RPGs use this approach in fact.

So basically, I see this shit everywhere, and I point out that it sucks. And then you accuse me of wanting "only one class of experience". Do you see the fallacy?

I'll make you a deal, once they make say 70% of RPGs not follow this shitty path, you can have the other 30%.

From are probably a particularly bad example to emphasise since what they seek to do is so idiosyncratic. And I see no fallacy. It seems like the rules you are drawing would massively cut down on the possibilities of what can be done in video games for no real reason. I see no use in drawing criticisms of classes of media, it will just lead to confusion that goes nowhere like this thread. How about instead of quotas every game follows its own path and we criticise each one according to its intentions and our own taste?

For example, to elaborate further upon the point of "bosses" in Dark Souls. As has already been said in this thread, a Dark Souls boss is often something like a God. Yes, that's a start. But what is a God, and why should a God be in a video game and be confronted in something like a "boss fight"? If we look at all of From's games, especially those led in production by Hidetaka Miyazaki we can see certain consistent fascinations emerging over and over again which all of these games are exploring. Dark Souls is about a world with so much history behind it before you show up that even its grandest and most powerful elements are mostly dead. And to bring about any kind of future and renew life in the world what's left has to die. Your point of view is that of an interloper. The party is over and you're picking through the wreckage.

My point, you are supposed to feel lost. You are supposed to be struggling to comprehend a lot of this. You are facing forces which you do not understand because this world is alien to you. From are clearly aware of the rigid and predictable form of the "RPG", and to some extent they play into that. Especially in the more mundane elements of their world. You, the player, with prior knowledge of what an RPG is, pick a class, you have stats, gear, magic, whatever. And then you're thrown into this world where you hit things and make numbers appear, they seem to roughly play by the same rules as you. A skeleton man can drop a sword and it has its own stats and numbers. And then down the line you meet a dragon, or a sick, decrepit God, and they start doing things on a level you can't touch. But, they also make numbers appear when they hurt things. This creates a distinct impression. There is an observable kind of sense to these things. They follow rules. But they're their own class of being and it's not for you to know what exactly is going on. You can only learn as much as you can see from your ant's eye view of this dead world.

Now you are conflating some things here. In particular, you seem to be conflating the atmosphere and themes with combat mechanics. You can feel lost in games where you fight regular enemies using same combat rules and RL physics, you know? One has very little to do with the other.

"atmosphere and themes" and "combat mechanics" are not separate elements in From's games is what I'm trying to say. Each part is used for purpose to serve one vision. There is no way to optimise this game by working on one element in isolation. They could lean entirely into "atmosphere and themes" to make their intended impressions upon the audience, but then what would be the point of combat mechanics? The point of Dark Souls is its impressions. Not being an RPG. You don't know how to think like a Japanese so you should probably leave them alone.

 

[Dickie]

I remember playing one of the Rainbow Six games a long time ago. I spend the whole game sneaking through and breaching rooms, killing everyone without them being aware. These are just normal guys that die with one head shot or a couple shots to the chest. At the end, I suddenly have to fight a guy in a helicopter. How does this happen?

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

One being that different works are made for different intentions, and that things he doesn't like create distinct impressions upon an audience. PtP, you don't like the impression of being locked into a violent encounter with something unpredictable and strange. But that is not a mistake. That is a distinct class of experience. As other posters in this thread have already taken stabs at outlining, From build their games around the realisation of impressions, ideas, and experiences. They do not aspire towards the realisation of your idiosyncratic ideas of a perfect combat system. Note that I didn't describe violent situations in From games using this term. I believe that doing so leads to false impressions of what they are trying to do.

Not really. Any combat, even in KCD/Warband/Battle Brothers against a new opponent is "unpredictable" to some degree. You don't know how he will attack exactly. The point is, stuff can be unpredictable within the constraints of realistic combat and physics (say a Karate guy facing a Kung Fu guy for the first time), or the enemy could literally do anything (pull out bomb out of ass, fart electric damage, fly, freeze time, etc). The first can lead to interesting scenarios, the second will lead to deaths and the artifical "figuring out" of the enemy that I am bitching about in this here thread.

Video games aren't real. Everything is "artificial".

Dumb argument. To see why (if for some inexplicable reason you haven't yet) imagine a sci-fi show. It can be not real in setting (some imaginary planet), in the science (some futuristic scientific concepts like warp drive or whatever), and in some other stuff, but some basic stuff has to be real for it to make sense to the viewer and not to appear retarded. The basic laws of physics have to apply for example, to some degree. People have to be able to think and talk in ways similar to our real world. And so on.

Video games are already not real in most ways. But the basic stuff has to be real (or close to it) for them to be good.

From I'm certain could figure out how to make something like Mountain Blade. Simple spread of possible inputs mirrored between two parties. They could, but they don't. Like most people making games that aren't like this, they had something else they wanted to do. They didn't fail to do what you want. They succeeded in doing what they wanted.

Kind of a strawman. I am not claiming all games should be historical. There are plenty of fantasy games with relatively realistic mechanics: Battle Brothers, Witcher series, nuShadowrun games, etc.

Second, the attempt at describing boxing and "real life" violence as following laws of "combat systems" suggests that your failure to appreciate the nuance in fictional visions and worlds is a reflection of a broader inability to recognise the natural nuance of anything. You appear to have a startlingly rigid pattern and systems oriented understanding of reality. An understanding which you apparently cannot appreciate as idiosyncratic. Leading you to classify alternatives as wrong, bad, shit, etc.

But the world IS made of systems, no? And again, you are kinda misunderstanding me. I have nothing against creative outside-the-systems approach to game design, but that belongs more on the side of writing/setting/lore/visuals, etc. It doesn't belong in combat, because how would you make an interesting combat system that is NOT systemic? Even these horrible boss-based combat systems that I hate are systemic, it's just their systems are shit (die 30 times to learn new boss, continue).

The world is not made of systems. We impose them upon things we look at.

Semantics. The world can be distilled down to systems, whether or not those systems are the true reality or not, and we use that to think about it and to interact with it. Our combat approaches, governments, economics, etc are all systems.

You can't declare something flatly "uninteresting" for all. You can only say that it's uninteresting to you. It's very interesting to me. So where do we go from here? I imagine you declare me a fundamentally broken person. A less tolerant but far more definitive solution to the question of taste.

Again, this is pointless semantics. Show me a combat "system" in a game that is not a system.

As other posters have already said, the distinct character, meaning, and place in the world of particular "bosses" in these From games you name informs their appearance and behaviour. Makes their role in the world of the game coherent. The case one could make against this is that the game could still have been made in such a way that only humanoids running on the same strict RPG rules were the ones you encountered. But that begs the obvious question which somehow nobody has asked all thread yet, why?

There are many ways to skin a cat. You could do it with humanoid enemies, but you could also have important non-humanoid character that you don't 1v1. After all, Aragorn didn't 1v1 Sauron. You could have "special" ways of taking them out (hopefully limited to only a few times a game), like building a ballista to take out a dragon, or finding a special magical trinket or whatever. The point is, the way NOT to do it is having all these retarded 1v1 boss fights.

This is just you drawing rules around your preferences. Do you do this in all discussions?

No, not at all. Please don't bring in some weird "relativism" into this. It is patently obvious to anyone above 12 that a movie/book with constant epic dragon/giant/Godzilla/whatever fights will not pass for a serious work, and is just campy tripe. But in games, this is ok because they are still maturing.

Why should only one class of experience exist?

The problem seems to be primarily semantic. Somewhere down the line From games are described as "RPGs" and you take that word very, very seriously. It means something very rigid and specific and failure to do these things is a failure to be an "RPG". The easy way out for you is, "these are not RPGs". But of course you've kind of already intercepted us here by declaring that reality also runs on the laws of RPGs, which is why I made by second point, that you like "RPGs" not because you think they're an enjoyable class of contrived experience/media, but because they align with how you see reality.

This whole thread comes down to you failing to appreciate that other people can see the world differently and failing to appreciate any possible value in alternative perspectives. This leads to absurdly myopic interpretations of the world (like saying that "combat systems" are real) and it also makes you blind to anything I would call "art". The potential for "art" in video games being the application of fine artisan craft towards the realisation of new experiences.

Your logical argument seems to be off. This thread is not about FromSoftware games, they are just a very good example, it's about games/RPGs in general, which often use the boss trope. The vast majority of RPGs use this approach in fact.

So basically, I see this shit everywhere, and I point out that it sucks. And then you accuse me of wanting "only one class of experience". Do you see the fallacy?

I'll make you a deal, once they make say 70% of RPGs not follow this shitty path, you can have the other 30%.

From are probably a particularly bad example to emphasise since what they seek to do is so idiosyncratic. And I see no fallacy. It seems like the rules you are drawing would massively cut down on the possibilities of what can be done in video games for no real reason. I see no use in drawing criticisms of classes of media, it will just lead to confusion that goes nowhere like this thread. How about instead of quotas every game follows its own path and we criticise each one according to its intentions and our own taste?

They are free to follow their own path, and I am free to point out that this path is juvenile and moronic.

For example, to elaborate further upon the point of "bosses" in Dark Souls. As has already been said in this thread, a Dark Souls boss is often something like a God. Yes, that's a start. But what is a God, and why should a God be in a video game and be confronted in something like a "boss fight"? If we look at all of From's games, especially those led in production by Hidetaka Miyazaki we can see certain consistent fascinations emerging over and over again which all of these games are exploring. Dark Souls is about a world with so much history behind it before you show up that even its grandest and most powerful elements are mostly dead. And to bring about any kind of future and renew life in the world what's left has to die. Your point of view is that of an interloper. The party is over and you're picking through the wreckage.

My point, you are supposed to feel lost. You are supposed to be struggling to comprehend a lot of this. You are facing forces which you do not understand because this world is alien to you. From are clearly aware of the rigid and predictable form of the "RPG", and to some extent they play into that. Especially in the more mundane elements of their world. You, the player, with prior knowledge of what an RPG is, pick a class, you have stats, gear, magic, whatever. And then you're thrown into this world where you hit things and make numbers appear, they seem to roughly play by the same rules as you. A skeleton man can drop a sword and it has its own stats and numbers. And then down the line you meet a dragon, or a sick, decrepit God, and they start doing things on a level you can't touch. But, they also make numbers appear when they hurt things. This creates a distinct impression. There is an observable kind of sense to these things. They follow rules. But they're their own class of being and it's not for you to know what exactly is going on. You can only learn as much as you can see from your ant's eye view of this dead world.

Now you are conflating some things here. In particular, you seem to be conflating the atmosphere and themes with combat mechanics. You can feel lost in games where you fight regular enemies using same combat rules and RL physics, you know? One has very little to do with the other.

"atmosphere and themes" and "combat mechanics" are not separate elements in From's games is what I'm trying to say. Each part is used for purpose to serve one vision. There is no way to optimise this game by working on one element in isolation. They could lean entirely into "atmosphere and themes" to make their intended impressions upon the audience, but then what would be the point of combat mechanics? The point of Dark Souls is its impressions. Not being an RPG. You don't know how to think like a Japanese so you should probably leave them alone.

I completely disagree. In terms of atmosphere and themes, FromSoftware games have gotten worse over time, in the same opposite proportion to bosses becoming more challenging and important to the game. Demon's Souls and Dark Souls were much more atmospheric than say Roll Souls 3 or Elden Ring. How much atmosphere can you have when you are constantly ripping out hair after dying a bunch of times to some annoying sadistic boss?

 

[GamerCat_]

Video games aren't real. Everything is "artificial".

Dumb argument. To see why (if for some inexplicable reason you haven't yet) imagine a sci-fi show. It can be not real in setting (some imaginary planet), in the science (some futuristic scientific concepts like warp drive or whatever), and in some other stuff, but some basic stuff has to be real for it to make sense to the viewer and not to appear retarded. The basic laws of physics have to apply for example, to some degree. People have to be able to think and talk in ways similar to our real world. And so on.

Video games are already not real in most ways. But the basic stuff has to be real (or close to it) for them to be good.

I see where you're coming from, but effect and intention must always be considered. Incoherence is a tool. Irrationality is a tool. Surprise is a tool. Even absurdity is a tool.

What you seem to have meant when making this thread is that you don't like it when games establish mechanical rules and then break them. That's probably fair and correct in most cases. You just chose some very unfortunate examples in your OP. Most games that break their established rules and patterns with bosses probably aren't doing anything creative or interesting and are in fact just doing something retarded for no good reason. As I said last post, we should talk about this case by case. There are games with rule breaking bosses that use them interestingly. Just like there are shows and movies that break with reality and sense in ways that are interesting.

From I'm certain could figure out how to make something like Mountain Blade. Simple spread of possible inputs mirrored between two parties. They could, but they don't. Like most people making games that aren't like this, they had something else they wanted to do. They didn't fail to do what you want. They succeeded in doing what they wanted.

Kind of a strawman. I am not claiming all games should be historical. There are plenty of fantasy games with relatively realistic mechanics: Battle Brothers, Witcher series, nuShadowrun games, etc.

My point is not that From games could be more historical. My point is that they could be more mechanically consistent and sound. These games are seriously thought out top to bottom. When they get weird and unwieldy it's on purpose.

Semantics. The world can be distilled down to systems, whether or not those systems are the true reality or not, and we use that to think about it and to interact with it. Our combat approaches, governments, economics, etc are all systems.

This is now an irrelevant digression on Platonism. Someone else can take this up if it's of interest. It's not to me.

You can't declare something flatly "uninteresting" for all. You can only say that it's uninteresting to you. It's very interesting to me. So where do we go from here? I imagine you declare me a fundamentally broken person. A less tolerant but far more definitive solution to the question of taste.

Again, this is pointless semantics. Show me a combat "system" in a game that is not a system.

I simply can't recognise your line of thinking here.

No, not at all. Please don't bring in some weird "relativism" into this. It is patently obvious to anyone above 12 that a movie/book with constant epic dragon/giant/Godzilla/whatever fights will not pass for a serious work, and is just campy tripe. But in games, this is ok because they are still maturing.

My idea of a serious work is fineness of craft and fullness of expressed intention. From have just about everyone beaten here. In most forms of media today.

From are probably a particularly bad example to emphasise since what they seek to do is so idiosyncratic. And I see no fallacy. It seems like the rules you are drawing would massively cut down on the possibilities of what can be done in video games for no real reason. I see no use in drawing criticisms of classes of media, it will just lead to confusion that goes nowhere like this thread. How about instead of quotas every game follows its own path and we criticise each one according to its intentions and our own taste?

They are free to follow their own path, and I am free to point out that this path is juvenile and moronic.

I disagree very strongly, and find your objections juvenile.

"atmosphere and themes" and "combat mechanics" are not separate elements in From's games is what I'm trying to say. Each part is used for purpose to serve one vision. There is no way to optimise this game by working on one element in isolation. They could lean entirely into "atmosphere and themes" to make their intended impressions upon the audience, but then what would be the point of combat mechanics? The point of Dark Souls is its impressions. Not being an RPG. You don't know how to think like a Japanese so you should probably leave them alone.

I completely disagree. In terms of atmosphere and themes, FromSoftware games have gotten worse over time, in the same opposite proportion to bosses becoming more challenging and important to the game. Demon's Souls and Dark Souls were much more atmospheric than say Roll Souls 3 or Elden Ring. How much atmosphere can you have when you are constantly ripping out hair after dying a bunch of times to some annoying sadistic boss?

My favourite From games are Evergrace and Evergrace 2. Those are arguably barely mechanically functional at all. They're still among the beautiful works to ever be called "video games".



Elden Ring is a walk in the park compared to beating both Evergrace games. But even in Evergrace's case the atmosphere was the most powerful and striking sensation at virtually all times. It's just that good. Elden Ring I also found quite enthralling. You weren't one of those people who got obstinate about using all provided tools to kill bosses were you? Elden Ring's strength is in its scale and its organic unfolding. It's a weird fiction mystery story which you explore from the inside. Your aesthetic impression of it is rather contingent upon your ability to appreciate this. Most people got it wrong and so aren't really able to appraise it properly.

 

[Reinhardt]

what is hunting bear or lion 1 vs 1 with a spear if not real life boss fight? op is fag.

 

[3 others]

broke: Duolingo subscription (unused)
woke: six month language immersion school exchange program
bespoke: "Pero soy el Primer Penitente, y vos son el ultimo!" repeated 170 times

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Video games aren't real. Everything is "artificial".

Dumb argument. To see why (if for some inexplicable reason you haven't yet) imagine a sci-fi show. It can be not real in setting (some imaginary planet), in the science (some futuristic scientific concepts like warp drive or whatever), and in some other stuff, but some basic stuff has to be real for it to make sense to the viewer and not to appear retarded. The basic laws of physics have to apply for example, to some degree. People have to be able to think and talk in ways similar to our real world. And so on.

Video games are already not real in most ways. But the basic stuff has to be real (or close to it) for them to be good.

I see where you're coming from, but effect and intention must always be considered. Incoherence is a tool. Irrationality is a tool. Surprise is a tool. Even absurdity is a tool.

Yes, those can be tools, but if you want out-of-the-box approaches for video games, try something like Disco Elysium or Return of the Obra Dinn, having 30-130 bosses that you overcome by dying over and over is not artistic absurdity, it's an absurdity of design.

What you seem to have meant when making this thread is that you don't like it when games establish mechanical rules and then break them. That's probably fair and correct in most cases. You just chose some very unfortunate examples in your OP. Most games that break their established rules and patterns with bosses probably aren't doing anything creative or interesting and are in fact just doing something retarded for no good reason. As I said last post, we should talk about this case by case. There are games with rule breaking bosses that use them interestingly. Just like there are shows and movies that break with reality and sense in ways that are interesting.

Dude, please stop putting words in my mouth. I meant exactly what I said, which is that boss trope in games is obsolete and needs to be done away with, since it brings nothing but decline.

From I'm certain could figure out how to make something like Mountain Blade. Simple spread of possible inputs mirrored between two parties. They could, but they don't. Like most people making games that aren't like this, they had something else they wanted to do. They didn't fail to do what you want. They succeeded in doing what they wanted.

Kind of a strawman. I am not claiming all games should be historical. There are plenty of fantasy games with relatively realistic mechanics: Battle Brothers, Witcher series, nuShadowrun games, etc.

My point is not that From games could be more historical. My point is that they could be more mechanically consistent and sound. These games are seriously thought out top to bottom. When they get weird and unwieldy it's on purpose.

That upside down unicycle wheel on a stool, that passed for post-modernist art, was also very thought out. Doesn't mean a thing, do it?

Semantics. The world can be distilled down to systems, whether or not those systems are the true reality or not, and we use that to think about it and to interact with it. Our combat approaches, governments, economics, etc are all systems.

This is now an irrelevant digression on Platonism. Someone else can take this up if it's of interest. It's not to me.

You can't declare something flatly "uninteresting" for all. You can only say that it's uninteresting to you. It's very interesting to me. So where do we go from here? I imagine you declare me a fundamentally broken person. A less tolerant but far more definitive solution to the question of taste.

Again, this is pointless semantics. Show me a combat "system" in a game that is not a system.

I simply can't recognise your line of thinking here.

You took it here, I just pointed out the conclusion.

No, not at all. Please don't bring in some weird "relativism" into this. It is patently obvious to anyone above 12 that a movie/book with constant epic dragon/giant/Godzilla/whatever fights will not pass for a serious work, and is just campy tripe. But in games, this is ok because they are still maturing.

My idea of a serious work is fineness of craft and fullness of expressed intention. From have just about everyone beaten here. In most forms of media today.

The best thing about FromSoftware games is also the thing they have been working away from: beautifully designed and crafted gameworlds with an interesting mythology, stuff to find and discover and so on. But as we go from Demon Souls and Dark Souls to Dark Souls 3/Elden Ring/Sekiro, all that stuff is mostly sacrificed to focus the game on a progression of hair pulling bosses. So there you go.

From are probably a particularly bad example to emphasise since what they seek to do is so idiosyncratic. And I see no fallacy. It seems like the rules you are drawing would massively cut down on the possibilities of what can be done in video games for no real reason. I see no use in drawing criticisms of classes of media, it will just lead to confusion that goes nowhere like this thread. How about instead of quotas every game follows its own path and we criticise each one according to its intentions and our own taste?

They are free to follow their own path, and I am free to point out that this path is juvenile and moronic.

I disagree very strongly, and find your objections juvenile.

"atmosphere and themes" and "combat mechanics" are not separate elements in From's games is what I'm trying to say. Each part is used for purpose to serve one vision. There is no way to optimise this game by working on one element in isolation. They could lean entirely into "atmosphere and themes" to make their intended impressions upon the audience, but then what would be the point of combat mechanics? The point of Dark Souls is its impressions. Not being an RPG. You don't know how to think like a Japanese so you should probably leave them alone.

I completely disagree. In terms of atmosphere and themes, FromSoftware games have gotten worse over time, in the same opposite proportion to bosses becoming more challenging and important to the game. Demon's Souls and Dark Souls were much more atmospheric than say Roll Souls 3 or Elden Ring. How much atmosphere can you have when you are constantly ripping out hair after dying a bunch of times to some annoying sadistic boss?

My favourite From games are Evergrace and Evergrace 2. Those are arguably barely mechanically functional at all. They're still among the beautiful works to ever be called "video games".



Elden Ring is a walk in the park compared to beating both Evergrace games. But even in Evergrace's case the atmosphere was the most powerful and striking sensation at virtually all times. It's just that good. Elden Ring I also found quite enthralling. You weren't one of those people who got obstinate about using all provided tools to kill bosses were you? Elden Ring's strength is in its scale and its organic unfolding. It's a weird fiction mystery story which you explore from the inside. Your aesthetic impression of it is rather contingent upon your ability to appreciate this. Most people got it wrong and so aren't really able to appraise it properly.

I have no problem admitting Elden Ring, etc are aesthetically beautiful. But the focus on stupid boss fights negates this to a large degree. And I feel like those things appeal to different audiences anyway. The aesthetics/lore appeal to one set of people, the twitchy boss fights appeal to the less mature crowd.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

what is hunting bear or lion 1 vs 1 with a spear if not real life boss fight? op is fag.

One time, I hunted yo momma with a spear. But it wasn't a boss fight, cause I was the boss, and the spear was made of flesh.

 

[GamerCat_]

I see where you're coming from, but effect and intention must always be considered. Incoherence is a tool. Irrationality is a tool. Surprise is a tool. Even absurdity is a tool.

Yes, those can be tools, but if you want out-of-the-box approaches for video games, try something like Disco Elysium or Return of the Obra Dinn, having 30-130 bosses that you overcome by dying over and over is not artistic absurdity, it's an absurdity of design.

You consider it absurd. But you can't make your opinions fact by calling them "design".

What you seem to have meant when making this thread is that you don't like it when games establish mechanical rules and then break them. That's probably fair and correct in most cases. You just chose some very unfortunate examples in your OP. Most games that break their established rules and patterns with bosses probably aren't doing anything creative or interesting and are in fact just doing something retarded for no good reason. As I said last post, we should talk about this case by case. There are games with rule breaking bosses that use them interestingly. Just like there are shows and movies that break with reality and sense in ways that are interesting.

Dude, please stop putting words in my mouth. I meant exactly what I said, which is that boss trope in games is obsolete and needs to be done away with, since it brings nothing but decline.

I am not putting words in your mouth you autist. I am making inferences, which is necessary because you are so bad at communication. What you have said is not incompatible with what I said. In that quote I am making your point but more developed and articulate to the point you apparently can't even recognise it.

From I'm certain could figure out how to make something like Mountain Blade. Simple spread of possible inputs mirrored between two parties. They could, but they don't. Like most people making games that aren't like this, they had something else they wanted to do. They didn't fail to do what you want. They succeeded in doing what they wanted.

Kind of a strawman. I am not claiming all games should be historical. There are plenty of fantasy games with relatively realistic mechanics: Battle Brothers, Witcher series, nuShadowrun games, etc.

My point is not that From games could be more historical. My point is that they could be more mechanically consistent and sound. These games are seriously thought out top to bottom. When they get weird and unwieldy it's on purpose.

That upside down unicycle wheel on a stool, that passed for post-modernist art, was also very thought out. Doesn't mean a thing, do it?

Again, we should talk about actual hard examples to make our points. Plenty of "post-modernist art" does have its own kind of sense. And plenty doesn't. Whether or not something means anything requires investigation on a case by case basis. As I've already covered in this thread and elsewhere, From have very rich and readily discernible intentions behind every element of their games.

No, not at all. Please don't bring in some weird "relativism" into this. It is patently obvious to anyone above 12 that a movie/book with constant epic dragon/giant/Godzilla/whatever fights will not pass for a serious work, and is just campy tripe. But in games, this is ok because they are still maturing.

My idea of a serious work is fineness of craft and fullness of expressed intention. From have just about everyone beaten here. In most forms of media today.

The best thing about FromSoftware games is also the thing they have been working away from: beautifully designed and crafted gameworlds with an interesting mythology, stuff to find and discover and so on. But as we go from Demon Souls and Dark Souls to Dark Souls 3/Elden Ring/Sekiro, all that stuff is mostly sacrificed to focus the game on a progression of hair pulling bosses. So there you go.

What do you mean sacrificed? It's there every time. The fights get harder to scale with the experiences and expectations of the audience, but the added complexity in every game still errs on the side of favouring the player. You have so many tools in Elden Ring that you can completely break the game in your favour with minimal skill. This reached the point where the most popular meme after the game's release was a reaction to this. "You did not beat the game." This stuck because there were so many ways to "beat" Elden Ring with minimal skill that people got upset.

If you're too dumb to figure out the bell I'm surprised you can work a forum.

I have no problem admitting Elden Ring, etc are aesthetically beautiful. But the focus on stupid boss fights negates this to a large degree. And I feel like those things appeal to different audiences anyway. The aesthetics/lore appeal to one set of people, the twitchy boss fights appeal to the less mature crowd.

I believe that anybody who views these elements in isolation (everyone but me and a few of my friends) is an idiot who is missing the true extent of From's vision.

 

[NecroLord]

what is hunting bear or lion 1 vs 1 with a spear if not real life boss fight? op is fag.

The mammoths in the prehistory era.
They were the dragon type bosses, yes?

 

[orcinator]

what is hunting bear or lion 1 vs 1 with a spear if not real life boss fight? op is fag.

The mammoths in the prehistory era.
They were the dragon type bosses, yes?

The dragon type boss was the real dragon Saint George killed.

 

[Hellraiser]

what is hunting bear or lion 1 vs 1 with a spear if not real life boss fight? op is fag.

The mammoths in the prehistory era.
They were the dragon type bosses, yes?

MMO raid bosses more like it.

 

[Odoryuk]

Wanting to get rid of flashy bossfights, reminds me 2010s game journalism discourse, before Dark Souls got popular with normies.