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Inactivity of Bosses in Guild Wars 2
InkRaven
Member Posts: 26
I don't need to state how fucking excited I am for this game so with that being said, I have a small concern about bosses. One thing that has impressed me was the scale of everything in the game, including the bosses. The Shatterer being a mid-level boss is incredible and the mechanic of boss battles in GW2 are also great. However, I've watched A LOT of GW2 footage as I'm sure you have as well and there is one thing that irks me a little - the bosses seem really "noninteractive".
The Shatterer flies in like a badass but then just kind of stands there with the occasional stomp, growl, or bite. The players are all going crazy spamming attacks, dodging, jumping, etc. but when you actually look up there is nothing really going on. This wasn't just an isolated event. The Shadow Behemoth fight showed the same thing to an even greater extent. The boss just kinda stood there until it died. And once again with the Elemental Boss fight that happens in the beginning of the Human storyline: Epic scale, epic detail, epic entrance - but then nothing really happens until it's dead.
I'm wondering what are other people's thoughts on this or if anyone else has noticed this? Oh, and just for reference here are the fights I was talking about:
Shadow Behemoth:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG7MpNXaEMo&feature=related
The Shatterer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoICk5E9X7g
Elemental Boss:
Comments
I have to agree... seems very static and mechanical. I expected something more fluid and dynamic.
It's not enough to ruin the game for me... unless other aspects in the game show similar characteristics. Hopefully the idea of giant bosses was just an isolated example of where their vision was lacking.
Hopefully this is an artifact of being pre-Beta.
Tho, for the huge bosses, slow, ponterous attacked that deal huge damage would make sense, so that may be part of it as well.
Oberon
I believe the Developers already answered this concern 3-4 months ago with something about large bosses that swim/fly.
The difficulty have been scaled down for the demo
But yeah, they should look more active in the fights imo
I think I actually spent way more time reading and theorycrafting about MMOs than playing them
i think this question have been up a couple of times!
So far the answer people comes up with is that it is related to the size of the bosses , so movement doesn't make that much sense. This is hold up against the Broodmother there was a smaller boss that moved around a lot. Also there is mentioned a teleporting AOE damager boss in a dungeon somewhere
But I am quite sure its a feedback ArenaNet have taken into account already, because it has been one of the only thing that had people worried since Cologne.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/Cloudsol/
The Shatterer is static, but the players need to move around.
I think it's silly to expect the Shatterer to move a lot, he's like a weapons platform, and if he were to move then he'd not have the opportunities to line up good shots, and he'd have to move outside of his own defences. He has defences which work better from a static position, like the healing crystals, and when he feels he needs to move he'll just take to the sky and fly. But yeah, there's no worth to the Shatterer being mobile.
The Shatterer is built to take you down with its offensive powers and to keep it alive with its tough hide and healing tactics. It doesn't need to move around a lot to accomplish either. And to be honest, if I saw such a large, heavy looking thing bouncing around like a bunny rabbit, it'd look incredibly silly to me. Gravity seems to work the same in Guild Wars 2, and you're talking about a massive metal dragon, here.
So to me the Shatterer's tactics make sense.
This is incorrect. There are plenty of non-static smaller foes, look at the Broodmother in the demo video of the area outside Divinity's Reach. The Broodmother tends to move around a bit, and the reason is is that the Broodmother isn't so big and heavy as the other foes, and there are plenty of instances in combat where we see very mobile foes.
Some are mobile, some are static, ite depends upon their overall weight I think. Massive things being weighed down by gravity aren't going to be too mobile.
Has ANet even released demos of dungeon bosses though besides maybe the elemental one? The Shatterer I thought was a DE one or a maybe story line.
There has been no real dungeon demos yet and there I think is where the more challenging bosses will be. The DE ones will be less complicated as whoever can show up and no need to be grouped up.
Because of the size, its static.... but you are right, the battles aren't static.... the objectives of the bosses that needs to be attacked change during the fights...
But it would be technically to much to make these really huge bosses move around...
A lot of smaller bosses tough are very active, and totally not static
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
What I'm saying is that it feels like the bosses are just showing up so they can be killed by players. The thing I think is missing is that bosses should be trying to kill you just as much as you are trying to kill them. The Shatterer should be breathing fire, giving giant claw swipes at any nearby players, taking a player in its jaws if they get too close and tossing them across the map.
It just feels like these bosses are showing up and saying, "Hey I'm the boss, you are now free to kill me". They don't seem to have a purpose because it doesn't seem like anyone's worrying about whether or not this dragon might actually wipe out all the players, they already know it's going to die and they're going to get some loot.
Thats just what he is doing....
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
http://steamcommunity.com/id/Cloudsol/
FFXI's Kirin moved, and some of the other dragons. Sure kirin is small compare to Shatterer, but some of the other dragons come close.
But like the above posts pointed it, the way the battles are set up which OP mentioned, there does not seem a need for the bosses to be mobile. But at the same time, combat strategies are dynamic, you don't just stand and spank, there is a lot going on.
Guild Wars 2's 50 minutes game play video:
http://n4g.com/news/592585/guild-wars-2-50-minutes-of-pure-gameplay
Everything We Know about GW2:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/287180/page/1
This is a good point, but ANet has stated many times, due to the game being in demo, they have decreased the difficulties of fights.
Guild Wars 2's 50 minutes game play video:
http://n4g.com/news/592585/guild-wars-2-50-minutes-of-pure-gameplay
Everything We Know about GW2:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/287180/page/1
I can't remember the interview but they did bring up that when they were creating the shatterer encounter they asked themselves should it move around and if so how far should it go. The size makes it really hard to move because of the terrain. Something that big is never going to have all 4 legs on the same level.
Also would it really be all that fun if it did stomp around killing everyone who got close? The job of any mob is to entertain the players not out right kill them with out a way to beat it. I think the big bosses will have to be experienced first hand in order to see if it's seems static and waiting to die or is an awesome fight to remember.
You also have to consider what happens when you create bosses that show up to actively kill all players.
Most people will be playing this for fun, they want to kill that boss with a decent amount of challenge.
You don't want bosses so strong that every mistake results in starting all over again, that's just frustrating.
You don't want bosses flying over half a zone to pre-emptively kill players who are heading that way, that's just frustrating.
You don't want bosses dropping from the sky and killing you before you even knew what was going on, that's just frustrating.
You don't want bosses to kill you every time they glance your way without having some form of defense, that's just frustrating.
You want to kill a boss and not feel like it was too easy. That's what bosses are for. At the end of a boss fight the boss should be dead and the players feeling like they did a good job. If the boss doesn't die then the players should feel like they could do better next time if only they did it differently.
Bosses are there for dying the hard way, not for killing players the easy way.
We are the bunny.
Resistance is futile.
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(")("),,(")("),(")(")
I thought all of the above was obvious and the OP did not really mean what he said to the above extent.
Guild Wars 2's 50 minutes game play video:
http://n4g.com/news/592585/guild-wars-2-50-minutes-of-pure-gameplay
Everything We Know about GW2:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/287180/page/1
This isn't what I am talking about. The Shatterer just sems to be standing around causing damage every few minutes whereas I think it should be going insane tyring to kill every damn thing in its path. That being said, I'm not advocating that the difficulty of bosses should be cranked up so that you get 1 hit KO'ed every time you're not paying attention. In the videos we've seen, it seems the players are taking a good amount of damage and I'll also take into account the fact that the battle was reduced in difficulty because it's a demo. I just feel like there is something inherently wrong with looking up during a boss fight and seeing the Shatterer standing there chilling.
And some of the attacks the Shatterer does perform are pretty cool, it's just that he does that growl thing and then waits for a minute. Then he stomp attacks and waits a few more minutes. It seems unengaging to me.
I kind of feel the same way, but it's still better than a lot of MMO's large bosses which have the opposite problem; they spin and bounce around like they weight absolutely nothing. Check out the 0:29-32 mark of this video to see an example what I mean:
Still, it's kind of annoying to see a large boss take a swipe and then just sort of stand there for 10-20 seconds before doing anything again...
Most of the bosses in GW1 are just the "stand there and take it" type too.
With the combat system, one would most likely want the bosses to not be stuck in one spot.
I don't think the shatterer is a typical boss in the game. Besides, the demo with him was created 9 months ago (August 2010 for GamesCon) and GW2 is still half a year from release. Worrying about the AI of a boss over a year before the game releases is having too big expectations, there are reasons that the game isn't released yet.
You will have to take in account that a boss that over 100 players could team up on must act differently for a boss for soloplayers or groups as well.
GW actually have one of the better AIs and GW2 must beat that, since the players neither have dedicated tanks or healers must the bosses be smarter than in the average game. We will have to spend a few days in the game to see if they succeded there or not, a 30 minutes convention demo 15+ months before release just isn't enough information.
I think it's pretty easy to tip the balance so to speak and cause frustrating encounters by adding a few extra special attacks. If times between the special attacks were reduced or extra ones added it's easy to lose it's charm and just become annoying.
Take the dragons in DAO for example. They had quite a lot of movement, with massive attacks that knocked back characters and flying around to land on top of ranged characters etc. And the first few times you fought them it was fun. But, to me, it soon became annoying. I knew the dragon wouldn't wipe my party. I knew I would kill the dragon. It was just a matter of time before it happened and each special attack and movement was stretching the fight out without actually making it harder.
If you've got your guild gathered there and by the way the fight is going you know you're going to take out the dragon eventually. His health is steadily going down, people are always rezzed as they fall and overall everything's going smooth. But every ten seconds the dragon does some impactfull special attack that flings half your guild away and you spend time running back to start killing it again. Every half a minute the thing flies up and you have to run around again to catch up to it. Every now and then it stuns your entire guild and you have to wait for that to pass.
In the end I think there's a very fine balance between how much time a boss spends doing cool moves and how much time he spends just getting killed. Likely ANet is still tweaking things and there might be an increase, but I doubt we'll ever see incredibly active bosses that really attack with the force that their size would give them.
In the end the boss fights really are a puzzle. The boss throws his special attacks at you for you to 'solve' and once solved you get to kill him a bit more. At a certain point players will have figured the boss out and know how to 'solve' all his special abilities and each extra one added can become a chore as you have to 'solve' it again and again and again.
We are the bunny.
Resistance is futile.
''/\/\'''''/\/\''''''/\/\
( o.o) ( o.o) ( o.o)
(")("),,(")("),(")(")
The elemental is ok, I mean, they are bloody hands that only attack through spells, what the hell you expected?
It was already said that gigantic bosses (like the shatterer and beyond) will be static for practical reasons, so basically is, the bigger the boss, the less he moves, the harder he hits, about the time between these boss attacks, well I dont know, the game have not launched yet, things could change
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