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[...]

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Edited June 27, 2023 by lsdgbnalgdnkagdfh

[Lilith]

You liked the boss fights in Baldur's Gate? I mean, to each their own, but...

 

All I can say is that I've played through most Spiderweb games on the highest difficulty level and didn't experience the same problems that you've had. It sounds like your complaint isn't so much that SW boss fights don't require strategy, but that they require kinds of strategy that you don't like. I promise you that people who find that sort of thing fun, and actively prefer it to the kind of thing you find fun, do exist, and do play these games. Since your blog describes you as an aspiring game designer, I'd encourage you to look at the BrainHex model of gaming: you sound like you prefer Mastermind-style play, while SW games are tailored more toward the Seeker and Conqueror styles.

[Alorael at Large]

I'll agree with Lilith here. Baldur's Gate bosses are slogs using the same tricks to get through their huge immunities and resistances. Spiderweb bosses at least pull out different tricks that require different tactics. And the games have been getting more trick-based bosses, not fewer. In early games bosses really were bags of health with powerful normal attacks. Now at least they're interesting.

 

Ultimately, it's a matter of taste. But since the type of fights Jeff makes seems to have won him a playerbase, he's unlikely to abandon the style.

 

—Alorael, who much prefers hard fights to the kinds of fights before A4 in which you buffed and then just slugged it out, slowly. At least there are more rapid reversals in fights now, especially when bosses pull out the real surprises.

[Student of Trinity]

So far I haven't particularly minded Jeff's bosses, but I have gotten to a point where I can kind of see sea's point. Even if you've got different styles of play and preferred strategy and all, I think there's a point at which anyone can recognize that a game has done what it does smoothly and elegantly, even if what it does isn't their favorite thing. Conversely there's a point at which you have to wince a bit at just how something is done, even if you basically like the thing itself.

 

With some of Jeff's bosses, it somehow just gets a bit too blatant, that Jeff has simply flipped every switch in his monster control panel. You can begin to get the feeling that you're not fighting [bOSS NAME] any more, but you're fighting Jeff, the designer, and his finite palette of boss tricks.

 

Mostly the problem is just that the tricks get a bit over-used, because Jeff's engines can only do so many things. Some of the problem is graphical. Monsters that appear out of thin air are more obviously scripted by the designer than monsters that slither smoothly out of the swamp, or whatever.

 

Ultimately these problems are just time constraints. They're unavoidable in a one-man-show like Spiderweb. Jeff does keep upgrading his engine, including his graphics and his range of boss tricks. If he upgraded faster, he'd have to cut some content in his games, in order to keep putting out new games fast enough to stay in business. It's a trade-off, and sometimes it shows.

 

Since the trade-off is unavoidable, though, I prefer to think of this as a genre convention for small-shop old-school games, and just overlook it.

[Juan Carlo]

The fights that boil down to pure attrition tend to bore me as well. But I do think that, at least from the few SW games I've played, the newer ones tend to be way better than the older ones. So I think there's evidence that Vogel has gotten much better at this the more games he's made. Geneforge, for example, is a good game but I can't think of a single memorable fight in the whole thing. It seems like with that game so much time was spent setting up the world that populating it with interesting combat was a total after thought. Maybe it's just because I was playing as a solo agent, but it seemed to me like most of the enemies were just placed around the maps in haphazard masses, so any strategy just consisted of trying to lure them off from the crowd so you could eliminate them in more managable chunks.

 

I do think Avadon has very good boss battles, though. There are a couple attrition type battles (Redbeard and the dragon, mostly), but other than those two I thought the boss battles were mostly pretty varied and well done requiring a good deal of thought being put into party placement and movement and such. And a few were even almost puzzle like. Plus most (except the two mentioned above) were fast. Beloch, for example, was hard on torment, but not necessarily because he had thousands of hit points. That fight was hard, but you could also win or lose it in like 5 minutes or less--which is how higher difficulty fights should be. I actually thought Avadon handled difficulty well as a whole mainly because, for the most part, it seemed to avoid the trap of making things hard by giving enemies tons of hit points.

 

Although, Avadon does also have the perfect example of how not to design higher difficulty battles in the Redbeard battle. It has everything I hate: an enemy with tons of hit points (And even worse, a mechanism that limits your ability to damage him), repetitive action (you are basically only doing one or two things for most of the fight), a battle of attrition that can go on up to 30 minutes (or longer), cruel math so that sometimes depending on which random attack Redbeard decides to employ (terror or charm) you can lose a party memember at the 25 minute mark and be rendered entirely inneffective, or if you make one slip up you can get so far behind on soul jar managment that you basically have to start over. That fight sucked enough that even though I loved Avadon up to that point,it left me with a sour feeling on the game when I finally finished it.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Juan Carlo

Although, Avadon does also have the perfect example of how not to design higher difficulty battles in the Redbeard battle. It has everything I hate: an enemy with tons of hit points (And even worse, a mechanism that limits your ability to damage him), repetitive action (you are basically only doing one or two things for most of the fight), a battle of attrition that can go on up to 30 minutes (or longer), cruel math so that sometimes depending on which random attack Redbeard decides to employ (terror or charm) you can lose a party memember at the 25 minute mark and be rendered entirely inneffective, or if you make one slip up you can get so far behind on soul jar managment that you basically have to start over. That fight sucked enough that even though I loved Avadon up to that point,it left me with a sour feeling on the game when I finally finished it.

OK, yeah, I don't think anyone defended that fight. The sad thing is it would have been so easy to fix, too: just have him take a decent chunk of scripted damage every time he creates a new soul jar (dude's making them from his own soul, after all). Makes the fight go faster, and lets the player feel like they're actually making progress instead of just putting out fires while they're destroying jars.

[Student of Trinity]

Jeff's games do often tend to have one or two things that can really bother you, because they suck as they are and would be easy to fix. When I was a beta tester I would sometimes try to argue about these, but Jeff never took my suggestions for fixing egregious flaws with easy changes.

 

Maybe Jeff's just unreasonably stubborn, but maybe the problem is that if he took even the slightest pains over the flaws I considered egregious, he'd have to pay attention to all the other flaws that other people considered egregious, and it's a slippery slope to perfectionism that would see him go bankrupt. So once again it's an unavoidable limitation on small but durable company, even though its unavoidableness is less obvious, because any one flaw could easily be fixed.

 

I personally still think it ought to be possible to file off the few outstanding rough spots that Spiderweb games often have, and then quit and ship. But I think Jeff just doesn't want to go there. He has a higher toleration for flaws than me, and that might be why we're in different lines of work.

[Randomizer]

Jeff goes into scripted fights with a preconceived ideas of how the fights should go. However most players don't think like him and that really leads to discontent.

 

Avernum 5 fighting as a Darkside Loyalist in the final boss fight, Jeff's plan to lure the boss out had a major flaw in that some player characters had to remain in the room to deal with regenerating pylons otherwise the boss became immune again. You were forced to stay in the room to protect which ever characters dealt with the pylons as well as fight the boss.

 

Avadon fighting Lady Anje had me luring her all through the place because I didn't see the Spirit that was protecting her and thought you had to get her away from her power place to win.

 

Avadon's Redmark fight is pure torture because if you don't have enough resources and Hands for the fight you won't last in a battle of attrition.

[Slariton]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

With some of Jeff's bosses, it somehow just gets a bit too blatant, that Jeff has simply flipped every switch in his monster control panel. You can begin to get the feeling that you're not fighting [bOSS NAME] any more, but you're fighting Jeff, the designer, and his finite palette of boss tricks.

THIS.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

I personally still think it ought to be possible to file off the few outstanding rough spots that Spiderweb games often have, and then quit and ship.

AND THIS.

SoT makes some good points about why these things may be harder to avoid than they seem. Nonetheless, there have been a handful of truly egregious design choices that should never have made it past the beta testing process.

Something like the Redbeard fight, that I can understand the story's creator being invested in and stubborn about. So I'd sort of give that a pass.

The Geneforge 3 boats continue to be the perennial example of bad design. The fact that in AEFTP, dual-wielded swords have nearly twice the damage output of polearms with no legitimate penalty, that's another great example. I find it hard to believe that beta testers never brought that up.

But maybe they didn't. Maybe part of the problem is that Jeff needs better testers, who are more sensitive to what makes games fun and what gets in the way of fun.

[...]

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Edited June 27, 2023 by lsdgbnalgdnkagdfh

[Randomizer]

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S

The fact that in AEFTP, dual-wielded swords have nearly twice the damage output of polearms with no legitimate penalty, that's another great example. I find it hard to believe that beta testers never brought that up.

But maybe they didn't. Maybe part of the problem is that Jeff needs better testers, who are more sensitive to what makes games fun and what gets in the way of fun.

Jeff's view when you mention something positive/negative like dual wielding over pole weapons is to nerf the positive. I mentioned that you could move within sight of an enemy and start buffing before combat and Jeff made combat start the next round after the first buffing spell.

Jeff's been pushing since Avernum 5 to remove exploits to level the playing field. The reward for finding innovated tricks is to see them gone.

[Triumph]

Originally Posted By: Randomizer

The reward for finding innovated tricks is to see them gone.

Does this cause playtesters not to report stuff? Or just lead to the elimination of tricks and exploits?

[Slariton]

What I don't understand is how this wasn't completely obvious -- to Spiderweb, if not to every single tester. You have two options for close range combat, one of which is just twice as good as the other one. And nearly twice as good as the ranged combat options. I mean, what the heck?

 

And honestly, nerfing dual-wielding would have been FINE. In my view, if you notice these things as a playtester and don't report them, you are being dishonest and hurting the final product.

[Tracer Bullet]

In Geneforge, at least, I can speak for boss fights. If you walk in and start hammering on them, yes, they're hard. But it is my experience that if you're the sort of player who likes doing that, then the difficulties that sea has outlined shouldn't bother you.

However, I have difficulty naming a boss fight in the Geneforge series that did not have a major loophole. Therein lies the real fun of the fight, knowing that you come in with him already crippled though he doesn't know it.

For Trajkov, in G1, you could

Click to reveal..

convince him to send his creations away.

For G2, assuming you end up against the Takers, there's

Click to reveal..

a neat little trick involving an exploding Geneforge.

And not all tricks need be mechanics/diplomacy based, either.

In Geneforge 3, there is a monster (I forget his name) who can summon every other hostile in the area to his aid - a useless tactic if you've already sourced out every roaming beast on the map before confronting him.

Sometimes you can get to camps to start fighting each other and then get out of the crossfire.

 

There's always another way.

 

Now, about the second point. I, unlike some of you, do support the "He's a poor indie designer, cut him some a lot of a ton of slack."

 

Play Warcraft III. Major studio, major graphics, major engine, major potential. Bad mission design. Every scenario was the same old thing. Sure, maybe sometimes you were resisting the attack maybe sometimes you had to hunt someone down, maybe sometimes you had to escort a charge across the map, but no matter what you were doing, it felt like the same thing.

 

Then, once you're full of that, come back to Spiderweb and appreciate the inverse. Unlike Blizzard, Jeff makes no claims to variety in his boss fights, but where you're not looking for it, you can find it.

 

Take, as examples, the wonderfully designed and executed Dhonal's Keep fight. It was generic, to be sure, but it was the little tweaks that gave it life, like the imprisoned drakon and the secret passage. Blizzard is proud enough of itself that it doesn't feel the need to add such individuality to its fights.

[Necris Omega]

While it's really untrue, I've always been big on blaming the MMORPG for converting the idea of a Boss Battle from a question of fighting a very powerful and well equipped but otherwise standards respecting monster to something more of a spectacle, puzzle, or, to use my usual negative description, dance routine.

 

Somewhere along the line the big bad couldn't just be a big bad, he had to be a big bad with a gimmick. And that gimmick couldn't just be a unique attack - it had to be something that was the entire focus of the fight. The Fight was less about fighting and more about pushing the right buttons, or standing in the right place at the right time. For my tastes, this shouldn't be.

 

That's why I didn't like most of the bosses in Avadon. Hop on one foot over to this button/add, press it three times with your nose, and NOW I'll let you touch the boss. Once. Granted, there were some fights I've no complaints about, but to me it really represents what happens when you OVER design a boss.

 

But I do think Jeff's getting closer to the sweet point in that.

 

I honestly didn't think A:EftP had anywhere near the kind of annoying, MMORPG raid-boss type bosses as Avadon - sure, there were some "interesting mechanics" but I never really felt anything quite like having to dance for that stupid Drake, or, God forbid, fighting Redbeard. There the "special boss" mechanics never seemed to eclipse the actual fight, and for my entertainment, that's exactly how it should be.

 

Yeah, I realize it's kinda hard to expect to go back to the days when Sss-thsss was just an XXL Slith Chieftain with a heaping helping of adds, but a tasteful use of non-standard mechanics, and ones that don't completely trivialize my attempts for turn after turn after turn... That works, and I think the latest Avernum is a great step towards proving and perfecting that.

[Frozen Feet]

... MMORPGs?

 

Yeah, you admitted yourself it's untrue, but the whole idea is just so absurd I have to adress it. There was a time when bosses in MMORPGs were just slugfest too. The real culprit for dance routine boss fights is action games, and those go back to early Zeldas, Metroids and the like. (Potentially even further into the past.) Though the idea of puzzle boss fights was present in p&p roleplaying games from which the whole CRPG genre inherits many of its mechanics.

 

The whole idea is to make a fight more involving to the player, so it isn't just "click button X times" and/or "roll dice X times until you win or lose". I support the movement whole-heartedly, though I admit it's possible to create basic combat mechanics that will themselves be enough to provide enough tactical challenge to make further "gimmicks" needless. (See: Chess, Space Hulk)

[Slariton]

How do "early Zeldas, Metroid and the like" have anything even remotely resembling gimmicky boss fights?

 

Both the NES and SNES Zelda incarnations had pretty straightforward bosses. A few of them could only be damaged on certain parts of their body, or had to be weakened with an item or spell before you could damage them... however, the exact same thing was true of some regular enemies. That was just part of the basic mechanics of the game. (And I've never heard anyone complain about those boss fights being annoying or gimmicky.)

 

Metroid (and Super Metroid), even more so -- as I remember it, most if not all of the boss fights were very basic, "shoot the enemy while dodging attacks" setups.

[Frozen Feet]

Those "can only be damaged at a certain part at a certain time" and "need to use item/weapon X at proper time" are precisely what I'm talking about. And then there was that one midboss Moblin you had to feed in order to get past.

 

Looks pretty straightforward, but it's the clear precursor both mechanically and spiritually. You, as the player, have to X things in Y sequence to get past the boss, and bossess often are unique in some respect.

 

Once you get to Zelda II and later, it becomes even clearer, with bosses being even larger deviations from ordinary enemies and requiring increasingly more imaginative and specific sequences to beat.

 

My experience with early Metroids is limited, but didn't they too have "shoot this part first, then that second, rinse repeat"?

[Slariton]

1) Feeding the Moblin was not a boss battle, it was a "you need this to pass" hold-up. If you want to criticize RPGs and Action-RPGs for that, it is probably legitimate. But that has nothing to do with the criticism of RPG boss battles discussed in this topic.

 

2) I really disagree with your characterization of the bosses in these games.

 

3) However, I think the more important point is that those were ACTION games. Action games with a few RPG-like elements, yes; but when it comes down to it, the fact that you have to hit Aquamentus in the head while dodging his fire breath, rather than just standing next to him and hitting his immobile body 10 times, is how battles work in action games. The parallel in an RPG would be adjusting your positions and tactics to buff, heal, strike forth, and otherwise respond to what the boss does. The idea of "run and push this button, then defeat that imp, then you get one hit" is something else entirely.

 

Whether or not you agree with point 3, I hope we can agree that there is a substantive difference in how people received the sort of Zeldatroid fights you're talking about, versus the reaction that Redbeard type battles have been getting in this thread.

 

For example, it occurs to me that the final battle of Super Mario Bros. 2, against Wart, is a perfect example of this: you have to catch vegetables that come out of the Dream Machine and then throw them into Wart's mouth when it opens so he can spew bubbles at you. Put into words that sounds strange, but at the time it was epic; I think it was one of the most memorable fights of the NES era. It would never have occured to me to call it a gimmick, however. It was a challenge that fit perfectly into the play-style mold of that game.

[Frozen Feet]

"The fact that you have to hit Aquamentus in the head while dodging his fire breath, rather than just standing next to him and hitting his immobile body 10 times, is how battles work in action games."

 

Hold that thought. When I claimed CRPGs inherited "gimmick fights" from action games, I meant in part that CRPGs have come to emulate action games.

 

Let's take a fight from Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. In it, there a genie boss that hides in a jar. To defeat it, you have to pick the jar up and throw it, so the genie will come out. You have a chance to get few blows in, then it gets back in the bottle. Rinse and repeat.

 

Now translate that into a turn-based combat, and you have something that very much resembles the Redbeard fight.

 

Like the OP said, the reason why fights like this are "gimmicks" in CRPGs is because for that one fight, the game "breaks" its ordinary rules for combat. And it specifically "breaks" them by shifting closer to the manner action games work.

[Triumph]

Originally Posted By: Frozen Feet

Let's take a fight from Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. In it, there a genie boss that hides in a jar. To defeat it, you have to pick the jar up and throw it, so the genie will come out. You have a chance to get few blows in, then it gets back in the bottle. Rinse and repeat.

 

I understand your point, but I think you're misremembering the genie (boss of the second dungeon, Bottle Grotto, IIRC). In that fight, you must actually BREAK the genie's bottle (by picking it up and throwing it several times) before you can do ANY damage to him. If the analogy fully applied to Redbeard, he wouldn't make new Soul Jars after you destroy them the first time.

[Frozen Feet]

I said "very much resembles", not "is identical".

 

Yeah, I misremembered. Had to actually look up a video to see how it really went. You first have to dodge the genie's fireballs, then hit the jar, pick it up and throw it. Repeat until it breaks, then hit the genie.

 

A better analogy could be Flaaghra from Metroid Prime. In that fight, you have to knock off solar panels to stun the enemy, then turn to a ball and bomb its roots. If you're too slow, the boss will recover and knock the panels back on.

[Xaiya]

While I do somewhat see your point, sea, I do believe you are exaggerating how Spidwerweb boss fights are. Your issues and problem with that there's a lack of tactics is, well, you haven't been able to figure them out. I've hardly ever had much problem with most spidweb games I've played. There's some things I bet many overlook. Also, I rarely use potions or any consumable items.

 

That said, the combat systems of the spidweb games aren't my favorite. They do have flaws as well. But in themselves, the games are pretty solid.

[Necris Omega]

What Slarty said, pretty much - especially the comparison about Wart.

 

When I said MMORPGs, I meant genres of RPGs, where battle is mostly a question of numbers rather than positioning, reflexes, and puzzle deduction. When a boss in a game that's based around such mechanics is focused around such mechanics, like a Zelda of Metroid, then that's fine. But when the primary focus of the game isn't, yet the bosses are, it creates an unnecessary disconnect.

 

There's nothing wrong with letting the boss of a turn based RPG function and shine as the boss of a turn based RPG. It doesn't HAVE to try and be something out of a World of WarCraft raid. That's not what we're here for. That's not what makes the game great. The standing an existing system is what makes the game great, and there shouldn't be the need to supersede or undermine the system, if that's the case.

[...]

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Edited June 27, 2023 by lsdgbnalgdnkagdfh

[Lilith]

Can you tell us which boss fight this was? Because while there are some fights that have their issues, I can't think of any that are as you describe.

 

Since you asked, though, you can, in fact, have your money back: all Spiderweb games come with a one-year no-questions-asked money-back guarantee.

[...]

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Edited June 27, 2023 by lsdgbnalgdnkagdfh

[Lilith]

That fight does in fact have a trick to it: it sounds like you just didn't find it. Explore the area around Drath more thoroughly and you'll find something to help you win.

[Slariton]

1) Drath is not a capstone fight. He's not even in the same league as the game's final quests.

 

2) In this case, there really is a good reason the fight is set up like that. Did you even read the dialogues that pop up during the fight? You have the chance to let Drath go, and there are at least three different ways you can handle it, depending on what you want to get out of it.

[...]

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Edited June 27, 2023 by lsdgbnalgdnkagdfh

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: sea

You mean the secret passage that leads behind him and lets you bypass the trash mobs? Yeah, I found that the first time. As I said, the trash mobs are easy to deal with and have zero impact on the outcome. The fountains in that passage also only work temporarily, and have little bearing on the second half of the fight; I don't think it qualifies as a "trick" at all.

If your party is at an appropriate level for the fight, you should be able to kill the boss before the invulnerability wears off. It sounds like you were just underlevelled, or else had poorly-built characters.

[Slariton]

What level ARE you? And what difficulty level are you using? I seem to recall the entire Drath fight taking about 2 minutes.

 

If you go to the Crypt of Drath when you first get a boat, you will be way too weak. Save that dungeon for much later.

[Randomizer]

@Slarty - You finished Drath in 2 minutes? That fight takes me about 15 to 30 depending upon difficulty. Although a singleton can get through it without a problem.

[Slariton]

To be fair, I may have waited longer than necessary before going there. And I wasn't on Torment. And maybe it was 3 or 4 minutes, but I remember it being short and painless.