Creaphis
I will deliberately take a contrary position just for the sake of writing incredibly long arguments
Posts: 3953
Registered: 10-05 |
This looks like a chance for me to espouse more of my personal "game theory"...
The role of a boss fight in a game is as the "final exam" for the skills that the player has spent the whole game practicing. As such, it's poor game design to force the player to learn and master some brand-new game mechanic just to pass the final fight, while the player's well-trained skills go untested. Doom 2's map 30 is the perfect example of this sort of indiscretion; after 29 maps of strategically slaughtering hordes of monsters, he is faced with, of all things, a timing puzzle, while monsters teleport all around him with a randomness that stymies any attempt to strategize. Instead, what the game designer should do is identify the skills that have been emphasized in the game thus far, and then force the player to prove his mastery of those skills, one more time. Doom 1 is largely about surviving small encounters (eg. up to a dozen "grunts," or one or two big monsters) with simple tactics (eg. strafing), and as such, the "bruiser brothers" at the end of episode one and the cyberdemon at the end of episode two are perfect tests of the skills the player's picked up so far.
However, the skill of the average Doomer has increased since then, and modern Doom is now more about surviving large encounters and complex situations. This means that the modern Doom mapper has to be much more creative when designing a "boss fight," because these complex large-scale skills aren't tested by a fight with just one single monster. A solution that many modern mappers take is to forgo the traditional "boss monster" and end their project with some final hordes, or a challenging level. This works - it makes perfect sense to end a project full of big, hard fights with some that are even bigger and harder - but not every mapper will want to end their projects this way, which is perfectly understandable. The gameplay is only half of the game, afterall, and what the "boss fight" needs on top of its status as "final exam" is a dash of epicness, of significance, of etc. A simple (but cliche) way to make a final battle with a horde of monsters more epic is to dress it up as an "escape the exploding base" sort of challenge. A subtler method, also common, is to let the architecture itself give a sense of epicness to the proceedings. The final level is the best time to really show off your architectural chops and build a level chock-full of hellish grandeur.
If those solutions aren't good enough for you, and you absolutely need a boss monster in your project so as to put a face on evil, then you'll have to get very, very creative. The boss fight that ends a modern Doom project should ideally test the player's abilities to strategize, to manage multiple threats simultaneously, to maneuver, and so forth. Unfortunately, I can't tell you how to pull this off - it's your problem, not mine - but, I can list a few things to avoid:
-Bosses with too many forms of attack
A key aspect of combat in Doom is its predictability. Aside from not knowing ahead of time whether a revenant's rocket is going to be homing or not, a Doomer always knows what he's up against. Therefore, when throwing a Doomer against a new monster, he should be able to quickly figure out the monster's method of attack so that he can then account for it. If a boss just keeps unleashing randomly different attacks with no rhyme or reason to them, then a Doomer will either find that fight to be cheap or dull, depending on whether those effects are unfairly powerful given their unpredictability, or just weak and spammy.
However, multiple forms of attack are fine from a boss monster, as long as they follow roughly similar rules (eg. all attacks could be projectile based, which the player has time to see and to avoid) or as long as the attacks which deviate from the formula are less of a danger (eg. if a boss has 3 projectile attacks and one hitscan attack, the hitscan should be weaker, rather than a super-strong railgun) OR as long as the boss' multiple attacks are attacks with which the player is already familiar (eg. if the player meets a boss, and that boss has thrown three different projectile attacks already, and THEN the player hears the BFG's charge-up sound... he'll know what to do).
-Monsters that function radically differently than anything else the player has seen thus far
gggmork's post, two posts above mine, has a number of interesting ideas for boss fights. The trouble with all of them is that they punish the player for following his prior instincts, or they require knowledge that one can only gain from the boss fight itself. That's not to say that these ideas are unworkable, but they require that the player be given an extra bit of training. For example, if a boss is only going to be vulnerable at certain times, or while stunned, or from certain angles, then there should be monsters or minibosses earlier in the wad that give the player experience with this mechanic. If a boss is going to fire an attack that requires some specific dodging pattern to avoid, then this attack shouldn't be so fast and destructive that it kills every player who didn't already know what he was up against - the player should get at least one chance to learn about the attack and how to deal with it before being handed the death sentence. If a boss is only going to be vulnerable from within a certain range, then the player should be given some special melee or short-range weapon and it should be made obvious that this is what should be used to attack the boss. If you tell a Doomer that he needs to use his long-range weapons at close range, that'll just confuse him. However, Doom players are more than used to berserk-punching monsters when the situation demands it.
RE: Health bars...
Giving a boss a "health bar" is often appropriate, especially if the boss in question has an extremely high amount of health, or if the boss has specific strengths and weaknesses. Then, the player can look to the health bar for a clear visual sign of whether or not he's actually making progress. However, in the case of Doom mods, it's probably ideal that custom bosses be designed without health bars, for aesthetic consistency (cyberdemons and spiderdemons don't have health bars either), but, then it has to be made extremely visually obvious when the boss is taking damage and when he isn't, with blood splats, pain states, etc.
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Last edited by Creaphis on 03-10-10 at 03:36
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03-09-10 13:31 
