The Future of Boss Battles

Originally Posted by Next Generation

FEATURE: The State and Future of Boss Battles
By Edge
Prehistoric but in no danger of extinction, do boss battles deserve such prominence in modern gaming?
Admit it: if you’re a long-serving gamer, you’re almost definitely au fait with the Rage Punch. That sudden, explosive venting of anguish after shuffling off your virtual coil for the Nth time, where the only course of action is to unleash a wild, incensed fist into a nearby cushion, pillow or sofa, accompanied by a piercing animal shriek.

Variations include the Pad Slam (flinging the controller to the floor, sometimes accompanied by a dismayed screech as it bounces back into your face) and the Angry Wrestler (standing bolt upright and shuddering your whole body with primal tension). If Sony or Nintendo wanted to put their motion-sensing input devices to innovative use, introducing adaptive difficulty based on detection of the aforementioned techniques would be one giant leap for gaming kind. The Rage Punch comes on the back of a relentless and ‘unfair’ string of deaths. Perhaps a double-jump that asked millimeter precision or a deathmatch where a rocket-hogger is in full-on spam mode. But anecdotal evidence would suggest that the most common cause is boss fights.

Again, everyone must have at least one nemesis that they’ve never conquered, one boss that turned them away from a game that they were otherwise savoring, and turned them away for good. Careless boss design can be ruinous. Rote boss design can be a significant mood killer. And good boss design won’t necessarily count for much, in the grand scheme of an adventure. No one seems to consider the ‘future’ of boss fights. When was the last time you were recommended a game on the strength of its bosses? They’re the elephant in the room, albeit one that can – and often does – gore you with its tusks. Their persistence is reptilian, and cold-blooded in manner. No one has ever said that boss gauntlets are a great idea, and yet you’ll find one in a game as self-consciously accessible as Devil May Cry 4, where it feels like a habitual, reflex inclusion.

Halo, Grand Theft Auto, Animal Crossing, Katamari Damacy: whenever a game abandons traditional boss fights, the absence isn’t lamented. Developers seem to reach for them as automatically as cinemagoers reach for popcorn. Bosses cheat. They lie. They repeat soundbites over and over, and sometimes come prefaced by an unskippable speech that, swiftly, makes layers testily jab at the buttons, even though they know they can’t break the patter. They conceal multiple energy bars or, worse, they only reveal their ‘true’ form once you’ve expended all of your resources defeating their ‘pretend’ form. Talk about entrapment.

Consider this recent example, taken from THQ’s Conan, and how familiar it may sound. For the overwhelming wealth of the game, you’re given freedom to explore the combat system, flex your combo biceps and expand your skill as you mulch your way through streams of thugs and minions. With your abilities list and instinct for counterattack timing at their peak, you reach the final boss. Suddenly, you’re nothing but a hamster running on a treadmill, jumping and ducking spinning tendrils, waiting to activate a switch – and having to repeat the process three times – in order to win the day. Despite your powers being at their zenith, you’re made to feel weaker than ever before, trapped in a piece of design that feels plastic and demeaning. It undermines the majority of what you’ve experienced – and likely enjoyed – up until this point. Or consider BioShock, who’s closing skirmish is one of its least flattering moments, threatening to unbalance its efforts to craft an intelligent, absorbing adventure.

Beat ’em ups, for all their gratifying technical possibilities and achievements, have been especially guilty in recent times: think Jinpachi from Tekken 5, Alpha-152 from Dead or Alive 4 or Mizuchi from Neo Geo Battle Coliseum, each one seemingly determined to punish rather than challenge, snapping the difficulty curve into a vertical wall down which buckets of tar and feathers are poured. Street Fighter II, now 17 years old, realized a much more elegant difficulty gradient in terms of its end-game confrontations. As a player, the final curtain is your crowning moment, the climax you’ve been drilling towards, and many a game seems eager to confuse glory with a stultifying impasse of a slog, such as the Mizar battle in Jet Force Gemini.

Such sticking points obviously aren’t exclusive to the closing moments of a game. In the oft-overlooked Urban Reign, for example, its keen, accurate and rewarding brawling system topples in the face of Golem, a cruel juggernaut of an opponent that grinds all but the most bloody-minded of players to a halt. Or Metroid Prime, which saw forums echo with grumbles regarding Omega Pirate, as players vented their irritation at being held back from progressing further into an experience that they were otherwise deeply relishing. Or Fire Leo from Viewtiful Joe. And so on. You could even factor in a certain coherence-ruining foolishness for some examples; militaristic action games with human-soldier opponents and ‘realistic’ violence have no business squaring you off against an enemy general whose energy bar allows him to weather a dozen headshots. At least ‘boss’ is an ideal name for such uncaring, bottom-line-obsessed obstacles.

Why do we tolerate them still? Are momentum and familiarity the only reason they endure? If a switch could be thrown to drop them into gaming’s room 101 and erase them outright, would we miss them? Despite myriad witnesses for the prosecution, yes, we would miss them. Boss fights harbor bad design principles, citing accepted convention or technical showboating as an excuse for lazy underlying construction, but they aren’t intrinsically rotten. Making a boss fun to fight seems to play second fiddle to the effort needed to make a boss fight happen in the first place, which is why they can so regularly feel outmoded or outdated. It’s a question of considering design as a resource.

In many combat-led games, you’ll spend the majority of your playtime tussling with cronies and cannon fodder; bosses are a minority, but each is bespoke and industrious to manufacture, an epic creation that moves and attacks in unique ways. Hulking though each may be, the slim interval of presence perhaps makes it economically difficult to lavish great attention on fine tuning. They become more palatable, these swollen problem children, when their appetites can be better fed. Shadow of the Colossus turns boss battles into a primary concern and, despite its confrontations focusing ultimately on the exploitation of weak spots, the result is far from ungainly.

Good boss fights have three key roles, that aren’t mutually exclusive – showboating, gatekeeping and jury duty

Side-scrolling Mega Drive game Alien Soldier is little else but a sequence of boss fights, but such emphasis allows each encounter to feel both grand and wieldy. Sega’s Blood Will Tell, a lengthy hack ‘n’ slash escapade based on Tezuka Osamu’s Dororo manga, profits from a bigger-picture context: The game contains 48 ‘fiends’, boss fights that aren’t fantastically designed, but the defeat of each rewards your character with a new body part. Each of these examples points towards two distinct concepts at play behind those leviathans that punctuate your progress: boss characters and boss fights. Just because a developer can craft intimidating monstrosities that both fill the screen and shake it, doesn’t mean it can make the ensuing struggle feel like a suitably blockbuster collision.

Good boss fights have three key roles, that aren’t mutually exclusive – showboating, gatekeeping and jury duty. Showboating is the most common success, injecting visual drama and chestbeating feats of technical accomplishment into proceedings. Of those boss fights that have ever driven a player to the Rage Punch, it’s extremely unlikely that the setting and enemy involved feel weedy and underwhelming. This grandeur intersects with gatekeeping, a function felt most consistently in RPGs and shoot ’em ups, but regularly occurs elsewhere. Bosses are a plump full stop to bring a stage to an end, open up a new area or provide the next widget fragment in your quest to reunite the mystic widget medallion. They’re the reason to conserve medikits, special attacks and fancy-pants ammo, and hone your skills. When the beast topples and the chaos settles, it’s a definite crescendo-closure that lets you breathe out a heavy sigh before hungrily breathing in whatever fresh treats await around the next corner.

This connects with the idea of boss-as-juror, passing judgment on the abilities you’ve amassed and your capacity to adapt. This is your chance to showboat. The weak-spot principle, while often lamely applied, is a vital exam – being able to thread the needle under pressure is a fine rite of passage. A boss defeat is trophy-style proof of your potency. We like to be pushed – paying a certain price is an important aspect of feeling worthy – but not pushed away. You want to be David slaying Goliath, but you don’t want to have to dumbly run in circles while Goliath spins around with his fists outstretched for a minute, waiting for him to dizzy so that you can get some feeble, opportunistic hits in, before retreating to a safe distance and repeating. That’s not empowering. It’s glorified, choreographed powerlessness.