An interesting battle on why Boss Battles in a video game are the make-or-break of the game itself.
It’s partly because a boss battle is the most mythopoeic part of gaming. An adventure game, after all, typically puts you on some dread quest in which the foes get bigger and nastier until you face one final, hellish climactic baddie. This is a pure apocalyptic narrative — the same story line that has obsessed the West for millennia, from the Bible to Das Kapital to the Epic of Gilgamesh. Boss battles make games seem cosmic.
But personally, I think the allure is much more straightforward than that, and also, in its own way, more complex. We love boss battles because they represent game design at its purest and trickiest.
Thinking of the CoX, the bosses/monsters/AVs are the classic finales of adventures — TFs, arcs, the final big Praetorian missions. Where they work is when there’s something to make them interesting. A single AV alone in a room provides one of three choices: you can grind them down, you can be ground down, or you get into a stand-off. All three are not all that interesting in and of themselves, because CoX tactics are, in most cases, a matter of what powers the participants have and how they slot them (and, with less impact, how they employ them). So you go in with a plan and it either works or it doesn’t.
The “good” AVs are the ones where it’s not that simple. Infernal is the classic example — how do you balance the gate, the demons in the room already, and Infernal himself? Who keeps the AV busy while other folks shut things down while other folks keep the team alive? It’s a skin-of-the-teeth battle, much of the time, with enough variables that tactics spell the difference between disaster and success.
The end of the first CoV Strike Force has some variability, too — two AVs, with a variety of interesting tactics that can be employed (many of which have to do with getting them to fight each other) to maximize advantages or minimize weaknesses.
The “bad” AV battles, though, are the villain who stands there and either dukes it out with you or goes down hard. There might be a surprise (a massive attack last ditch nuke by the AV that knocks some of the party out, suddenly changing the balance), but too many of the AV battles are grinds, settled before the first punch is thrown.
The “bad” AV missions can be a useful climax to a long story, but too often they’re disappointing. That’s because, really, there aren’t a lot of strong active tactics that take place in most battles — the decisions have already been made, the powers chosen, and the only question is whether variables of luck, or a sudden mapserv, will take the decision out of the players’ hands. The player mix can spell a huge difference — but that’s already decided by the time the battle rolls around.
Interesting.