PorkyThePaladin
Arcane
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2013
- Messages
- 5,183
There is a whole cult of gamers who think Dark Souls, Sekiro, Elden Ring, and similar games like Nioh represent the height of video game combat or action RPG combat. I will now proceed to explain to you why they are wrong.
Boss combat didn't start with these games of course, it has been a fixture in video games ever since the days of game arcades in the 80s, and almost all RPGs feature some kinds of bosses. My personal guess is that this is due to several factors:
1. It is a legacy of video game history. Arcade games were some of the earliest popular offerings in the industry, so it seems natural for other games to borrow some of their elements, including a procession of bosses increasing in difficulty.
2. It is one of the easiest and laziest ways to structure a video game or an RPG: at key points of the game progression, have the player face some "boss" with arbitrarily more powerful abilities/stats, make them beat it to progress, test their skills, etc. Almost any other way to structure a game into segments would involve more effort: e.g. you would have to design a world with multiple segments thematically/structurally/narratively... Much easier to just take some NPC, increase their model size, change hitpoint variable by a thousand times, and give them a few OP abilities.
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.
To put it another way: actual real world combat systems are fascinating, whether we talk about historical sword fighting, archery, martial arts, boxing or special ops. That's because they involve combatants with roughly similar abilities, and thus become high speed games of chess. A boxer keeps throwing out feints, watching his opponent react, then on the basis of this reaction, anticipates where to throw his next punch in advance of the opponent's movement. A swordfighter chains a parry into an attack, at the same time moving his feet to get out of the way of the response.
But with "bosses", none of this matters. Since their abilities and stats do not parallel your character's, but are vastly inflated, you cannot engage with them on a level field. Instead, they have all the initiative, and the only thing you can do is "figure them out". Learn their patterns, and then respond to them. A boss being harder just means they have more patterns to figure out (more phases, more types of attacks, etc). That's why RL combat is designed for you to face someone you don't know and do well against them, because it's based on general principles. But boss based combat is based on dying a bunch of times to learn the boss patterns.
Mostly, boss combat reminds me of you (the player) jumping through hoops for developers, like a nice dog. Which should be the opposite of fun for most normal people.
Games with combat based on general principles, on the other hand, can be absolutely fantastic (for example Kingdom Come: Deliverance, once you remove master strike, or Mount & Blade games). There are no bosses in these games, they have characters who are stronger and more important antagonists in the story, but they are sure as hell aren't "bosses", and play by the same rules as you do.
It's time for developers to stop using the shitty boss trope, and instead introduce general principle combat, ideally based on RL fighting arts to some degree.
Boss combat didn't start with these games of course, it has been a fixture in video games ever since the days of game arcades in the 80s, and almost all RPGs feature some kinds of bosses. My personal guess is that this is due to several factors:
1. It is a legacy of video game history. Arcade games were some of the earliest popular offerings in the industry, so it seems natural for other games to borrow some of their elements, including a procession of bosses increasing in difficulty.
2. It is one of the easiest and laziest ways to structure a video game or an RPG: at key points of the game progression, have the player face some "boss" with arbitrarily more powerful abilities/stats, make them beat it to progress, test their skills, etc. Almost any other way to structure a game into segments would involve more effort: e.g. you would have to design a world with multiple segments thematically/structurally/narratively... Much easier to just take some NPC, increase their model size, change hitpoint variable by a thousand times, and give them a few OP abilities.
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.
To put it another way: actual real world combat systems are fascinating, whether we talk about historical sword fighting, archery, martial arts, boxing or special ops. That's because they involve combatants with roughly similar abilities, and thus become high speed games of chess. A boxer keeps throwing out feints, watching his opponent react, then on the basis of this reaction, anticipates where to throw his next punch in advance of the opponent's movement. A swordfighter chains a parry into an attack, at the same time moving his feet to get out of the way of the response.
But with "bosses", none of this matters. Since their abilities and stats do not parallel your character's, but are vastly inflated, you cannot engage with them on a level field. Instead, they have all the initiative, and the only thing you can do is "figure them out". Learn their patterns, and then respond to them. A boss being harder just means they have more patterns to figure out (more phases, more types of attacks, etc). That's why RL combat is designed for you to face someone you don't know and do well against them, because it's based on general principles. But boss based combat is based on dying a bunch of times to learn the boss patterns.
Mostly, boss combat reminds me of you (the player) jumping through hoops for developers, like a nice dog. Which should be the opposite of fun for most normal people.
Games with combat based on general principles, on the other hand, can be absolutely fantastic (for example Kingdom Come: Deliverance, once you remove master strike, or Mount & Blade games). There are no bosses in these games, they have characters who are stronger and more important antagonists in the story, but they are sure as hell aren't "bosses", and play by the same rules as you do.
It's time for developers to stop using the shitty boss trope, and instead introduce general principle combat, ideally based on RL fighting arts to some degree.
