Bosses in videogames
I’m starting to hate Dead Rising. Some parts of it are excellent - a huge shopping complex filled with zombies, where you need to survive. Killing the zombies in hundreds of ways, finding and rescuing and escorting survivors. Even the storyline is fairly engaging.
Why-oh-why do I feel that the game is ruined by pointless boss battles?
Take the guy in the gunshop - You have to hide behind shop displays. He fires a shotgun at you 6 times, then reloads. In those seconds you can dart out, aim at his head (or try to, the Dead Rising gun aiming is a joke) shoot, then duck for cover again. To beat him you have to shoot him in the head about 20 times with the sniper rifle. That’s right, 20 or so shots to the head with a sniper rifle - he’s not a zombie, just a regular human who owns a shop that survives several shots to the head.
I’m not expecting realism here - the games is a zombie infested mall where you cure yourself by drinking orange juice, and learn new combat skills by taking photographs. So, realism is already out the window.
But there are several boss battles, and they are just TEDIOUS. You build up a nice momentum, hacking your way through hundreds of zombies with swords, sledgehammers, knives, all of whom are impervious to pain and die after a few hits, then the game slows to crawl while you fight a human. Hit them. Hide. Hid them. Hide. Repeat.
To me, the game reeks of lack of focus testing. What is focus testing? Focus testing is where you take groups of people with various skills and get them to play your game, then modify the difficulty of the game to suit them. You can’t use normal testers for this because after playing the game for a year or two years they know how to do everything. Normal testers know how to play the game, normal gamers don’t.
That’s the thing about boss battles, once you figure out how to defeat a boos, it’s not hard, just tedious, boring and meaningless. Boss battles serve to piss players off until they have learned a sequence, then serve to bore them.
September 26th, 2006 at 12:19 pm
Couldn’t agree more!
Nintendo seem to rely on boss fights and I can’t think of a single fight I enjoyed. They serve to slow down game play, interrupt game “flow” and force you to learn a sequence of moves like a muppet in order to progress. Failure to learn leads to frustration, which at times forces people to abandon play rather than continue in the face of adversity.
Generally, Ninty are pretty good at offering players multiple avenues to complete sections of their games, except for boss fights.
I grew bored of FPSs because the single player modes relied on the general story of “kill 1,000s of bad guys, then EV1L BO55 to winz0r”. Halo was fun to play precisely because it didn’t rely on “end of level boss fights”.