Boss Rush (Destiny)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Tuesday, June 17, 2014, 23:58 (3821 days ago)

What are the characteristics of a perfect video game boss? In my opinion:

1. Challenging - Bosses need to be harder than regular enemies.
2. Intensity - Bosses need to provide a challenge that is intense, rather than mundane.
3. Novelty - Bosses should have unique properties that make them fun to fight.
4. Crescendo - The intensity of the challenge should increase throughout the fight, with the maximum at the moment you kill a boss.

If you have these four things, then you have a great boss in my opinion.

But why? Well, I've always seen bosses as sort of the climax to a level or segment. Like in a movie, everything builds to that one moment, releases, then comes down. And just like we love seeing films whose intensity increases throughout to the climax, I think most players enjoy having a steadily increasing intensity throughout their play session.

This has been done in simple ways for a long time. The easiest way is the make a boss get quicker and more powerful the closer to death he gets. The majority of arcade games did this, and it's a simple and fairly effective way to up the intensity and add a little tension.

Better still, were the games that gave bosses various forms or changed up their attack patterns. As the boss is damaged, it switches to new attacks that are harder, ramping up until it's nearly dead. Cave shooters were really good at this, and bosses had notches on their lifebars dividing it into 3,4, or sometimes 5 segments. After each segment was depleted, parts of the boss would explode, and it would start new attacks or change forms, each more powerful than the last.

Most boss fights end up being relatively short, under 3 minutes. This helps keep things intense, since if things drag on too long it can lead to boredom. However, short length is not necessarily a requirement for a good boss, so long as the boss keeps you on your toes throughout. See Seven force in Alien Soldier / Gunstar heroes.

Destiny has major problems with intensity and crescendo. Boss fights in Destiny are not intense, seeing as how they do not change forms, and there is little penalty for dying. There is no Crescendo since the attacks are the same throughout, and the stakes are never raised.

I think Bungie can keep the long boss fights, so long as the bosses change into tougher and tougher forms as time goes on. Let's say you want Sepkis Prime to take 10 minutes for a properly geared fireteam. If he had 5 segments to his lifebar, that's 2 minutes a segment, which is kind of the sweet spot. Provided he have 5 different, ever tougher attack patterns / forms, then a 10 minutes fight could be very enjoyable.

I realize not a lot can be majorly changed when the game has to go gold in less than 2 months, but since content is going to be added for ten years, I think Bungie should prioritize more intense multiform bosses.

You want that steadily increasing rush. You want your player to say 'Yeah! I did it!' not 'Finally…'