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.