What makes a good last boss?

I'm building some levels but I don't know what the last boss should be, I wanted some opinions on what you think makes a good last boss, some examples:
Hordes of low to mid level enemies in a large arena type area
A single strong enemy with lots of scripting (e.g. when health below certain level teleport in a load of demons)

Any other ideas would be appreciated as would any monster recommendations from the Beastiary etc.

I'll have a 'quick' say. I think the last boss should change the gameplay towards a radical direction, to differ from the typical flow of the maps. You could have a siege map where you have to defend hordes or bosses for a certain amount of time or find a creative different way of using baphomet rather than typical map30s (I tried to be slightly different for my CC4 map so I hope I'm not coming off as hypocritical). Single strong monster bosses are pretty typical of most maps nowadays, for zdoom/skulltag that is; maybe add more spices to the map, maybe make the structures spontaneously change while battling the boss to force the player to change their maneuvering or make his/her defeat strictly conditional like the soulcube on Doom3's last map. Just food for thought even though they're probably crappy ideas.

For Bestiary monsters, the first one that comes to my mind is the Moloch. That guy does not go lightly. Thamuz is also cool.

AFAIC a good final boss will have something up their sleeve that you would not have seen during the rest of the game, eg a specific attack or summon spell. In ZDoom it's possible to have them interact with their surroundings via ACS, which is also cool. A couple of good examples of that can be found in Agent Spork's Ultimate Simplicity. There are also those "core" types of boss which have specific (usually static) things you have to destroy whilst being attacked from elsewhere (Tormentor667's UTnT). That said, I do feel that there is still merit in the "huge-badass-with-tons-of-health" type of boss.

I'm probably not the guy you want to listen to as I dislike most ZDoom wads and never found a custom boss that I liked yet, but if you go for the "badass with tons of health" approach, I believe it's important to have a hit point counter like some wads do. Nothing is more frustrating than fighting something that can obliterate the player in two or three hits without even knowing if your own attacks have any effect.

I like bosses with many (random) attacks. Huge size, lots of health. Maybe he can summon other small minions.
Normal attacks drain a medium amount of health, but it must have a annihilating attack: one attack that can kill anyone in a single hit. Of course, this attack needs some time to load. Something like a BFG attack.

But some attacks i would like to see in a boss are:
- immediate-hit attacks (attacks like railguns or bullets)
- Area of effect attacks, i.e. missiles, granades, etc...
- Fast projectile attacks, such as lasers, arrows, or whatever.
- Final attack: kills anything in a single hit (unless avoided).

But I dont like tracer attacks in a boss. It's frustrating to being killed by a tracer missile when you stuck in a tree, in a linedef cliff or something else... after being fighting the boss for a long time.

Phml said:

I'm probably not the guy you want to listen to as I dislike most ZDoom wads and never found a custom boss that I liked yet, but if you go for the "badass with tons of health" approach, I believe it's important to have a hit point counter like some wads do. Nothing is more frustrating than fighting something that can obliterate the player in two or three hits without even knowing if your own attacks have any effect.

I disagree.

In my opinion, one of the good points of a boss is to not know when he is going die.

Karnizero said:

- immediate-hit attacks (...bullets)
...
- Fast projectile attacks, such as lasers...

doom meets star wars

Lots of long unskippable uninteresting scripted dialogues peppered throughout the battle.

Maybe a boss where he's invincible (shield or something) only if you're x feet away, so you have to stay close. Or maybe similarly, fireballs rain down outside a 'safe zone' surrounding him so you have to stay close. Then maybe he does a quick visual signal to let you know he'll unleash projectile waves in certain patterns and you have to quickly react to the signal and react appropriately to the coming pattern (like sometimes your correct response would be to jump,duck,jump.. another might be duck,jump,duck, another dodge left, another dodge right etc. So you get hit if you react wrong or slow. And maybe he has trick signals that are slightly different, making you initially expect a different pattern.

Maybe something that runs as fast as you and constantly chases you so you have to constantly battle while running backwards facing it.

Multiple 'part' bosses are cool, like heretic's rider + serpent.

Maybe using acs to make the boss gradually show more and more damage (like mutoid man from smash tv).

Since doom is 2.5 d, its hard to make a giant being out of sectors (like you can't have a giant arm in the sky because that would be double ceilings/double floors for that area).

maybe something where you have to stun it then shoot it in the back while stunned (only loses life from shooting back).

Or something that you have to bfg cyber style (really close 2-hits), but it has 100 hits or so worth of life and he only takes damage if you do it close like that.

I disagree.

In my opinion, one of the good points of a boss is to not know when he is going die.

Well, I guess I once again showed my disconnect with the ZDoom crowd. I honestly didn't think anyone liked that. Ignore my post then.

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.

I thought the Icon of Sin was an awesome boss. Better than a huge fight, actually

Interesting ideas creaphis, you've obviously put a lot of thought into this (perhaps too much :P) I think I know what I must do now thnx

Without wishing to give too much away, the final boss I have been working on for my project changes his attack patterns when his health falls below a certain percentage, thus giving the player a clue as to how much work is left to do, and helping to create a sense that the boss is becoming desperate in his attempts to put you down. I currently have a pretty rudimentary health display, but I'm still deciding if I should keep it in.

My ideas for boss battles have been as follows:

-Wave of monsters that needs to be survived in a situation that is obviously the end of the map.
-Well placed or difficult to beat Cyberdemon or Spider Mastermind (these are usually mid-bosses).
-An interesting take on the standard idea of an Icon of Sin variant (see Scourge MAP21).
-Survive for a certain period of time against never ending attacks (Quicky2.wad's final section, with the brain behind the forcefield).
-A scripted battle with some form of high end objective (ZPack E2M0's final section with the high health Mastermind and the various attacks).
-Monsters that you only encounter once that can one-shot you if they hit you probably count as bosses, particularly if used as one (cyberdemons, for example).
-High health (3000-4000 for example) monsters with some form of special defense or behaviour and multiple attacks. Examples:
--Ignis Locus (in Warpzone and Quicky3.wad) uses multiple attacks such as homing and unhoming streams of fireballs, and an area of effect spray attack, plus it shoots two fireballs when it goes into the pain state and dissappears for a breif moment as if it's teleported somewhere.
--Nautilus (water resource wad) has a shield when it attacks and fires a spread of shots, plus when it moves it has an area of effect damage.
--The Leader in Virus is constantly reflective, and has three attack sequences, plus, in the level you face it in, it has a scripted invulnerability that you have to deactivate before taking it out.
--The Land Carrier in Virus constantly fires shots in a spread whilst it moves and has multiple monster spawns (including monsters that spawn yet more monsters) it releases over time, plus a proper attack of it's own.
--The Felix in Virus has a variety of attacks it uses based on range, and when it's on low health it fires off all of it's different attacks in one go before going into an overheating animation.
--White Light 2's boss monster has a variety of weak attacks, and one completely devestating attack it has to charge up first - plus it has the same lack of visibility as the Aeon from the first White Light.

Now I won't say if these are good ideas or not, as that's all objective, but it shows that there are plenty of ways to make varied boss fights even before you start being particularly adventurous. I will point out that this is all in ZDoom though (although Scourge's boss could easily be done in vanilla, as it essentially boils down to an icon of sin spawning set up and a trigger sequence leading to a switch to activate a crusher which kills the Romero head).

I was thinking about a boss like this:

1.- The boss itself is invincible. Weapons cannot harm it.
2.- The moving part (this is, the actor) of the Boss is not the boss itself. Think in invincible Cyberdemon.
3.- In the room where the boss is, there are four buttons. When you press all four buttons, a metal protective cylinder opens in the middle of the room, exposing the "boss weak point" for a moment. This is where the player has to shoot to kill the boss. It has a high amount of life, but not 9999999. The player has a relatively small time to press all 4 buttons. If that time passes, and all of them are not activated, they deactivated again.
4.- When the player exposes it, something occurs, like spawning minor monsters, a powerful omnidirectional attack or similar.
5.- The moving part of the boss (we called it "cyberdemon") attacks normally. It has a certain amount of health points. When we kill it, it seems to die (this is, death states) but after some seconds, revives and comes back to combat.
6.- We can hurt and kill the boss only by exposing and hitting the weak point.
7.- Each time we expose the weak point, it's attack changes: first, a plasma attack, then a bfg multi attack, then railgun attacks, etc...

I think I saw something like this somewhere in a film or a game, but I cant tell exactly where...

Basically that's the Boss.

A variation can be that instead "revive" the moving part, spawn another one.

Damn, I think I want to implement this and try it out.

Karnizero said:

I was thinking about a boss like this:

1.- The boss itself is invincible. Weapons cannot harm it.
2.- The moving part (this is, the actor) of the Boss is not the boss itself. Think in invincible Cyberdemon.
3.- In the room where the boss is, there are four buttons. When you press all four buttons, a metal protective cylinder opens in the middle of the room, exposing the "boss weak point" for a moment. This is where the player has to shoot to kill the boss. It has a high amount of life, but not 9999999. The player has a relatively small time to press all 4 buttons. If that time passes, and all of them are not activated, they deactivated again.
4.- When the player exposes it, something occurs, like spawning minor monsters, a powerful omnidirectional attack or similar.
5.- The moving part of the boss (we called it "cyberdemon") attacks normally. It has a certain amount of health points. When we kill it, it seems to die (this is, death states) but after some seconds, revives and comes back to combat.
6.- We can hurt and kill the boss only by exposing and hitting the weak point.
7.- Each time we expose the weak point, it's attack changes: first, a plasma attack, then a bfg multi attack, then railgun attacks, etc...

I think I saw something like this somewhere in a film or a game, but I cant tell exactly where...

Basically that's the Boss.

A variation can be that instead "revive" the moving part, spawn another one.

Damn, I think I want to implement this and try it out.

I'm thinking DSV5 Cyberdemon. It becomes invincible on it's fire state, and it fires a lot.