Bosses

[Silv3r Shadow]

What bosses do you like and what do you like about them? Do you like the boss abilities, tankyness, the 1 hit moves, the mobs, terrain, large squads, support aid, buffs/debuffs...? Etc
Drop in some ideas of what will make a good boss fight for Ember? ^.^

Ps. Leeeeroooooyyy jeennkinsss ^.^

 

[Vladplaya]

Loved giant scarab mech boss from Halo 3. It was like multi staged boss, and there were all this fighting going on around it, and you had to jump on top of it, go inside and disable it's mechanism from the inside. Seriously more games need stuff like that.

It was really fun, and I can totally see something like that working beautifully in Ember.

 

[Fillmore]

I don't know how easy it would be to do in open world dynamic encounters, but using the environment as part of battle strategy would be cool. Needing to knock bosses off of high precipices, causing rockslides to engulf the boss, etc.

 

[MattHunX]

Every damn boss-type enemy should have a weakness. Be it for a certain type of damage, or a spot on their body.

I cannot stand it when I read some info on bosses for some games and it says that it's immune to every debuff and isn't weak against any element...etc. just because it's a boss, or an end-game boss. Ugh. So what? It isn't immortal or invincible, so something has to be more effective against it than everything else, even if only a little.

Bah. I'm too busy cussing them out for every BS attack they land on me to bother looking for a weakness, anyway.

 

[MattHunX]

I don't know how easy it would be to do in open world dynamic encounters, but using the environment as part of battle strategy would be cool. Needing to knock bosses off of high precipices, causing rockslides to engulf the boss, etc.

Luring them into a pit of lava, if they're not terribly intelligent. And it shouldn't make us lose the drops from it, those should automatically appear in our inventory if such a thing happens, when something dies out of reach.

 

[SSH83]

Good bosses: Borderland. Good shooter mechanic. Consistent "language" of communicating boss gimmicks so they can be complicated without forcing player to google.

Bad Bosses: Most Warframe bosses are really bad. Poor communication where most bosses' gimmicks make no sense or are very awkward. You're often doing everything except shooting because boss is invulnerable for 90% of the fights.

Bonus: Bosses in games like Vindictus work well because they allow you to focus on the animation and timing of your dodges. It's not World of Telegraphs and there is a high skill cap on movement/defensive play than just press a button when it's not on cooldown.

 

[EricAZ4]

Hay @Torgue_Joey this is perfect for you! can you think of some really big EXPLOSIVE bosses?

 

[NitroMidgets]

How about simply a mirror image variant of the player? Whatever we go into the fight with as far as level, damage, gear is mirrored into the form of the boss we fight. It prevents a boss from being over powered or under powered depending on the player. Then again I am coming down from six cups of coffee and for all I know this is being typed into a Mandela Effect reality where it will make no damn sense and I will have thought I mentioned it only none of you will ever have seen it.

 

[SomeUnregPunk]

things that require timing. Here's a good example.

though this boss fight is on easy. Harder difficulties gave the boss different patterns and deadlier weapons. the point is that if the player doesn't time their shots well and moved appropriately then the player would die.

That video also shows what happens if the player doesn't time their shots correctly. And it also shows what happens when you don't use the weapons effectively too. The damage done to the boss is much smaller than if the player did. Stuff like that makes boss fights fun.

Actually, all of Doom 2016 is like that. If you don't time your shots well, you do small amounts of damage and if you don't move well, you'll get badly hurt.

 

[Krhys]

I would like to see a boss where there are several different ways to defeat it, depending on the environment it pops up in or perhaps the way players are engaging it. At least this way the boss is more interesting each time you fight it and has a bit more longevity before becoming totally tedious.

Another good and bad example would be Bane from FF. Although it had several phases it went through as you drained it health, these were the same every time and let's face it, the strategy remained the same - heavy dread line with a godtron, regardless of what Bane was doing. They could really have expanded that boss event and made it more interesting like they did with some of the other instances, which had different paths to follow, etc. Bane could have gone underground when his health dropped too fast and disappear down several tunnels that lead to different areas and require the players to do different things to get through. Your group could possibly have even had to engage Bane several times throughout the whole encounter, etc.

These are just ideas but in essence we need bosses that are interesting, not just bullet magnets that react the same way all the time that you just end up speed running and getting bored of.

 

[Daynen]

Bosses are meant to be more involved than regular grunts and backliners. Bosses work best when they have multiple tactics, are enough of a threat to seriously damage you when you screw up, and don't just stand around letting you shoot them. When I first beheld the Necronus in launch Firefall, I was impressed. Then I started shooting it. After dodging the same 4 or 5 moves twenty or thirty times, I was no longer impressed. first impressions good, actual encounter bad.

I think they key to making bosses interesting is to unleash them. By that I mean not imposing lots of arbitrary restrictions on location and behavior. Take Baneclaw, for example. The beta Baneclaw spawned in exactly one location (if memory serves) and never really moved but to cross his little arena. How much more exciting would it be if he burrowed underground and moved to a different location in the world, causing tremors, triggering insane spawns and threatening whole towns? What if you had to use your scan hammers to track his location like a moving resource node to catch him when he popped up to recover? It would be orders of magnitude more challenging and fun and he wouldn't have to be such a boring, immovable pile of health.

The biggest mistake in designing epic encounters in online games is to just say "okay, we'll make sure this guy has twice as much health as the last boss so it takes twice as long to take him down. Also he'll do 40% more damage so getting hit is even MORE punishing than before." No. Bad. Wrong. This is not encounter design. This is a gear check. Low-geared players will die and do no damage, top end players will speed through the encounter because their DPS is through the roof. Either way, the encounter will not be quality content.

The best part about a game dedicated to horizontal progression is the above mistake and the above suggestion are essentially impossible to ignore; the game in fact demands observation of these things by design.

 

[Omnires]

I want to see at least one dialogue boss in the game. That would be great. And one the best things about dialogue bosses is they don't have to be evil, they can just be normal people whom opinion about you can change based on your actions. I love it when games give me the option to fight or not. Maybe I don't want to kill everything in my path like a psychopath, maybe want to try and save/help people. Maybe I can do more with my words to change the world than I can with weapons. The pen at times is far mightier than a sword can ever be.

For the people who don't know
Dialogue bosses are the kind of bosses you have to talk and hold a conversation with. Going by how the conversation goes anything can happen. If you upset them they'll fight you, but you don't upset them you can avoid a fight, in some games you can even get the boss to like you and become an ally. But the best dialogue bosses don't exist in a vacuum, they are aware of the world and of at least some of the things you have done. In other words where and how the conversation start can change based on things you did and why, and how much the boss likes you or trusts you could be affected long before you even meet. For example, let's say you were on a mission near a farm but you let the battle spill over into the farmland ruining most of the crops of the boss's best friend. So before you even met the boss may already dislike you for ruining his/her best friend's life.

 

[Nakiato]

Ohhhhh. The Halo boss mentioned above gave me an idea. What if there was a giant raid boss that wrecked havoc. You have to disable its defenses so you can then board it. Then push the "core" to destroy it, kind of like a Titan from 2142.

 

[Omnires]

How about simply a mirror image variant of the player? Whatever we go into the fight with as far as level, damage, gear is mirrored into the form of the boss we fight. It prevents a boss from being over powered or under powered depending on the player. Then again I am coming down from six cups of coffee and for all I know this is being typed into a Mandela Effect reality where it will make no damn sense and I will have thought I mentioned it only none of you will ever have seen it.

Lol, I don't know why you reminded me of this but doppelgangers are unique monsters that are able to mimic their enemies in various ways. In some games in quests/missions where they appear they will copy the appearance of you or someone else in your team. And every time the person they are copying talks they'll say the same thing at the same time, so you can't even use the chat to tell who is who. They even turn on friendly fire for the person they are copying, so if you are not careful you can end up attacking your teammate by mistake. This can become a real pain when large groups of them show up.

 

[Vladplaya]

Ohhhhh. The Halo boss mentioned above gave me an idea. What if there was a giant raid boss that wrecked havoc. You have to disable its defenses so you can then board it. Then push the "core" to destroy it, kind of like a Titan from 2142.

You mean kind of exactly like the Halo boss that I have described above?

 

[NightStroke]

I have a boss concept: Kraken

Visually: There is a normal-sized bipedal-form Tsihu with special colors to indicate how special he is. His forearms disappear into
those purple portals. He floats in mid-air surrounded by a shield.

Surrounding him are 5 giant portals(one above/behind him, 2 on each side/behind him). Out of the top portal is a large Kaiju's head, and the remaining portals connect to the Kaiju's tentacles/claws. The Kaiju arms are razor sharp(I'm split between making the "beast" part of Kraken a Kaiju or crazier version of the Tsihu's beast mode).

Gameplay: This varies, depending on whether this boss would be open world(unpredictable number of players) or instanced(5 player). The boss is essentially invincible. The Tsihu and the portals hover in place, but the tentacles extend infinitely from the portals. Each tentacle will choose one player randomly to "chase". The tentacles extend at sprinting speed and running into any section of a tentacle(razor sharp, remember?) will result in instant death. The boss essentially becomes a cooperative version of Tron. If the tentacle captures the target player, it will kill the player and seek out a new target. If a player starts running out of the range of the boss fight, the Kraken head will snipe the player with noxious acid, slowing them down and leaving them vulnerable to attack by the tentacles. If there are a lot of players, more mini-tentacles emerge from the ground to chase them

How to fight Kraken: Players who aren't being chased by the main tentacles are primarily occupied by collecting scrap parts to build bombs and distract the Kraken away from the main 4 players being chased. Parts will spawn all over the battlefield, and the untargeted players can shoot at the Kraken to gain aggro(for the acid sniping) while bomb parts must be carried to specific locations. Once a bomb gets built, 1 of the 4 targeted players can run through the bomb to destroy the tentacle. Once all four tentacles are destroyed, the Kraken completely enters the world and the Tsihu vanishes(for later player-driven events). The Kraken spews fire, snipes with acid, etc. and acts as a bullet sponge until killed.

Possible Addition features: Perhaps to make the open-world fight more vertical, the spawning of the Kraken causes large rocks and boulders to hover above the ground as normal terrain that players can jump and run on.

 

[Nakiato]

You mean kind of exactly like the Halo boss that I have described above?

Never played it. I was referring to 2142's mechanics specifically.

 

[Vedemin]

IMO best bosses were in Patpon 2. You had an army and you were trying to defeat it. Bosses had attacks that either done massive damage or applied status effects like sleep. Each attack had it's "warning" move like lifting tail etc. Bosses also had ultimate attacks, that were eating your patapons if they were caught in range no matter their defenses. Bosses also ate your hero first if he was in range.

For example, we had close range units for fighting Majidonga. We also had a hero, who was giving invulnerability to all attacks (only when you had perfect timing) except for eating ones. That required you to act carefully.

We could also add "berserk" mechanic from Patapon 3. When boss has less than 25% hp and all of his attacks (except for eating one) have no warning. This made the game really hard if you weren't fast and careful enough.

As an example, we have Bane in Firefall. Line of dreads is standing in front of it, electron is like your Tatepon hero (giving 100% resistance on BS). They are invincible unless bane will prepare an eating move that could even be AoE. Also, it would spam it as it is the only way of defeating an army with 100% resistance (it works like that in Patapon 2)

What do you think?

 

[Earth_Soldier]

For me the hardest boss in a game I've played so far , as far as I can remember I only could kill him 1 time...

God this video brings me a lot of awesome memories playing with my N64

 

[Omnires]

I giant plant monster boss. Just because I love this video.