What made the final bosses of non-Doom2 Doom Engine games not cop outs?

I think it would be interesting to reverse the fairly common 'what made the Icon of Sin a cop out' like thread and ask what made Doom1's Spider Demon, Heretic's D'sparil, HeXen's Korax or Strife's Entity better?

I have to admit that I think D'sparil is the best Doom Engine game final boss. I guess I like that he's a character of power built up throughout the entire game and that he appears as and fights as a humanoid mage like yourself, rather than some sort of 'thing', like Korax, who I think was highly underutilized in his fight and whose power isn't really suggested at all through out the game. His taunt's at the start of each hub don't really work as well as the likes of the stain glass windows and more numerous big icon's of the order, throughout Heretic.

• It's not a Thing, like all the other monsters
  
• You can't really reuse it in normal maps
  
• It doesn't offer anything new (for the given value of "new")
  
• It doesn't pose a threat
  
• The method of beating it is fiddly, unintuitive and unfun

I don't actually agree with these points (except the last one) but I think this is the general reasoning. Most of the other bosses you listed were Things and could be reused.

Don't knock Korax :|

The only Doom engine boss that I thought was a decent boss battle was D'Sparil, though he falls victim to the invincibility+tome+phoenix rod combo pretty easily.

Korax is OK but the hugely-powerful superweapons in Hexen and the fact that most players reach him with tons of supplies means he goes down quite easily.

But really there aren't that many examples of really good boss fights in FPS games; the IoS was just worse than most I think, because it was overly gimmicky and looked like a giant wall, because it was.

All bosses in the Doom Engine games suck because the AI is not good enough for that type of encounters.

Bosses in FPS games generally aren't much good. They are more likely to work well in platformer games and top-down or scrolling shooters. In these games, you have an overall view, so that you can attack and avoid enemy attacks effectively and quite comfortably. FPS boss fights rely on the strategy "look at them all the time, shoot them until they die, hope that their attack isn't overpowered", or hide and seek game, or gimmicks like the IOS fights.

Because they weren't walls.

plums said:

The only Doom engine boss that I thought was a decent boss battle was D'Sparil, though he falls victim to the invincibility+tome+phoenix rod combo pretty easily.

Heh, try him on Black Plague. My favorite fight of all the original games.

Belial said:

Heh, try him on Black Plague. My favorite fight of all the original games.

Yeah I know, Disciples everywhere. Fun but gets kind of frustrating if he just keeps teleporting all the time.

Memfis said:

All bosses in the Doom Engine games suck because the AI is not good enough for that type of encounters.

This is...not exactly right. A big thing about bosses and how we perceive them is based on gaming skill and overall "evolution" of how we play games. Back in 1993 most people were shitty at Doom, and the cyberdemon was really a challenging boss because a small movement mistake could kill you instantly. But nowadays when we're better at strafing and most people are playing with a mouse cybers have become a joke.

Besides, bosses are very rarely a matter of AI anyway. More specifically, bosses tend to be heavily scripted encounters with interesting attacks, patterns and/or responses to player's actions. Something like that could have been easily made in Doom back in the day, for example making the cyberdemon have three different kinds of attacks and then cycling through them either randomly or in a specific order. But considering that even today we have people who think that revenants, mancubi and arch-viles are too much, then such a boss in 1993 could have been way overkill. ;)

The Icon of Sin was just a head on a stick that does nothing. A separate thing is used for the monster summoning. The wall was just there for show. You really can't use the head in maps except as a target. The only threat came from obstacles and other enemies. It was sort of like Shub Niggurath except you shot at a hole in a wall instead of telefragging it.

D'Sparil was an interesting boss. He had two forms, could summon monsters, teleport around, and his attack was painful, even if it was easily avoided. The main thing that makes him different from, say, the cyberdemon was that he used teleport spots which can be placed around in a map to more or less control where he teleported. You could even leave them out entirely, in which case he will not teleport at all. One weird quirk about this guy is strange things happen if you use more than one D'Sparil in a map. If one dies, they all die, unless they were in the first form at the time.

Korax was another interesting one, although a very easy one. I have killed him before he had a chance to open the door behind him, meaning I couldn't exit the map without cheating. However, he had far more customization options than D'Sparil even dreamed. He also had two "forms". The first half he walks slowly walks around shooting things at you. Lots of things, but they can be avoided with little trouble. After he loses half of his health, he starts teleporting around, while he continues shooting at you. But the really fun part are the scripts he uses. You can make your own scripts and he could do just about anything you want. He's a lot more complicated to use in a map than D'Sparil, but possibilites are immense. I haven't seen very many really good Korax battles though, but that's not the fault of the boss.

Other notable bosses:

Cyberdemon: The classic. The moment you hear the loud roar, you know you're in for a rough time.

Maulotaur: Basically the cyberdemon of Heretic. He's not as nasty though, but his attacks are more varied.

Heresiarch: Now this guy is a fun one, and sometimes very annoying. He has a wide range of attacks, most of them weak though, but that shield is what can really mess things up if you're not paying attention. You're firing away with your wraithverge and then he puts up that shield. Guess what happens next. He had a nasty bug in original Hexen where if he got distracted by other enemies (i.e. the bishops he summons), he would go through his alert phase again, which added more of those floating balls over his head, cause them to spin faster (I think), and decrease his attack casting time. After a while, he might have about twenty of those balls over his head and he will take maybe a tenth of a second to cast a spell, which knowing my luck is the shield just as I'm about to use the quietus on him.

Death Wyvern: Another fun one. This one is even more complicated to use in maps than Korax. He uses waypoints to fly around and tends to get stuck on walls quite easily, especially if he gets stuck in the pain state at the wrong time. He will continue to move in one direction while in the pain state, and he won't start turning until it's over, and by that time it might be too late to clear that wall, making him easy pickings. Still, he is quite fun to fight (Brackenwood is one of my favorite maps with four of these things roaming around) and satisfying when he dies. Same goes for most of these bosses.

I think that, for the time, the Cyberdemon was an excellent boss. It was large and menacing, its attacks were devastating, and most importantly, it took all the skills you'd learned in the game up to that point and made a challenge out of them. To me, that's the point of a boss - you learn various skills and strategies while playing a game, and a boss is like a final test, combining all those skills into one encounter to see if you've mastered them. That's why the cyberdemon isn't a challenge anymore - after all these years, pretty much all of us have mastered those skills to the point where the test is meaningless. Doesn't mean it's a bad boss, though.

Comparing it to the Icon of Sin - the IoS wasn't really a culmination of the skills and strategies you had learned while playing Doom 2, it was a simple puzzle, with random enemy encounters thrown in to distract you. Maybe you could argue the random encounters were the test, but even if that's the case, it's kinda cheap, as it really does nothing to put a new spin on the challenge. The cyberdemon took the skill of strafing and dodging projectiles and brought it to the next level - now the projectiles were faster, deadlier, and had splash damage, so your margin of error was greatly diminished. However, if you had mastered projectile dodging, it was still doable. The IoS didn't really bring anything like that to the table, it was just everything you had done before, but repackaged.

The lack of the Mother Demon in this thread saddens me

Or Entity. I haven't played it long time, but I think it is pretty okay endboss. Probably the only gripe is that it can be hurt with Sigil only, plus it drains your hitpoints. (Hope you are packed with surgery kits/med kits! :V ) But if you sustain your fire, it goes pretty easily down, if you keep moving.

Inquisitor is the Cyberdemon V2, in some sense. It has hitscan weapon, dual grenade launchers, and to top its crown being asshole (mini)boss, it can jet over and get out from pits, and once it sees you, it starts firing like no tomorrow. Friggin' piece of trolling shit...