And while Serious Sam: TSE’s final boss does test your core skills by summoning hordes of threatening enemies, it doesn’t do much to distinguish itself from other fights in the game, as moving around and summoning enemies is all the boss does. If the adds pose no real threat, then they may as well not exist (like the Octabrains and Protector Drones in Duke Nukem 3D’s Queen boss fight where you can circlestrafe around their attacks forever).
That said, adds don’t automatically make a boss fight good. Bosses can also appear as duos (most famously Ornstein & Smough from Dark Souls 1), trios, a collection of smaller targets, or even an entire mini-army of boss enemies. And it’s not as if a boss fight has to consist of one boss enemy accompanied by several smaller threats either. They can also be objects that the boss summons to attack you (like shadow clones, floating swords), or impede you indirectly ( mines, things that heal the boss).
By giving you more targets of varying types to deal with, more weapons in your arsenal remain relevant, and so a boss fight can test you on the skills you apply during normal combat.įor story purposes (like a rival duel) the adds don’t always have to be regular enemies. Because the adds keep respawning, you can’t just kill all adds and then take out the boss by itself. If you don’t want the adds to overwhelm you and exploit your blind spots, you need to think about which targets to focus on, which weapons to use, and where to move–like you do in normal combat. Beat ‘em ups figured this out a long time ago by supporting bosses with respawning regular enemies (‘ adds’ for short). The simple solution is to increase the amount of threats in a boss fight. Most FPS arsenals are designed for group combat, therefore it doesn’t make much sense for a FPS boss fight to be a pure 1v1. But most shooter bosses are lone, large, slow, and tanky foes, and don’t effectively test you on these skills. They test you on crowd control, target prioritization, movement, and weapon selection amongst other skills. Most shooter combat comes down to fighting groups of enemies using different weapons. This perspective is wasteful because boss fights are one of the genre’s greatest untapped sources of potential, especially now that newer shooters like Doom Eternal and ULTRAKILL are coming closer to figuring them out. When polled on why FPS boss fights tend to suck, 62% of a major gaming forum voted for the option, “It’s just that FPS don’t lend themselves to bosses very well.”. However, the absence of good FPS boss fights has led to the misconception that the genre itself is unsuitable for boss fights. Halo CE’s or 3’s Warthog runs were way more engaging than whatever Halo 5 tried to do with its bosses. Normal levels/setpieces have carried shooters in the past just fine. The simplest solution here is to just… not have boss fights. To defeat this boss in this game of managing large hordes of enemies, you must play a lap of Superman 64. And at worst you get puzzle bossesthat play nothing like the rest of the game and expect you to figure out a puzzle to beat the boss (the Spider Mastermind in Doom 1 when pistol starting, the Icon of Sin in Doom 2, Cthton and Shub-Niggurath in Quake 1, the final bosses in Serious Sam: TFE and BFE, Nihilanth in Half-Life 1). You get the inoffensive bulletsponges which you circlestrafe to death (the Overlord, Cycloid Emperor and Cycloid Queen in Duke Nukem 3D, the Skaarj Queen and all Titan fights in Unreal Gold, Fontaine in Bioshock 1, almost every boss in DUSK, AMID EVIL, and the Shadow Warrior reboot). Instead you get playing peekaboo with (hitscanner) bulletsponges (such as Hans Grosse in Wolfenstein 3D and the 2009 reboot, the final bosses of Wolfenstein: TNO, TNC, and Youngblood, Makron in Quake 2, Tchernobog in Blood, the Battlelord in Duke Nukem 3D and Forever, Splitter Crow in TimeSplitters: Future Perfect, The Destroyer in Borderlands 1). In the 28 years since grandpa Wolfenstein 3D, there has been no truly good FPS boss fight.
But then you have bosses in first-person shooters. Many genres like beat ‘em ups, platformers and shoot ’em ups all often feature great boss fights, like Credo in DMC4, Death in Castlevania 1, and the Battleship in Contra 3. Story/gameplay-wise they’re an effective way of setting the climax for a level or chapter, which is why they’re so widely used.
If you’d like to submit a guest post, contact me on discord.īoss fights involve fighting against one or more enemies that are usually harder than what came before in the game. Editors note: This is another guest post by Durandal, though I wrote most of the paragraph on encouragement/discouragement and push/pull.