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Modern "Boss" design: Why 1 high hitpoint mob and not a horde of smaller mobs?
BioNut
Member Posts: 414
This is something that has begun to baffle me over the coarse of the last few years: Why are developers still trying to create "epic" experiences using a single High Hitpoint Boss instead of pitting players against overwhelming odds?
I mean, some of the best, most epic, movies/books in fantasy/sci-fi climax with the heroes squaring off against overwhelming numbers. Very few actually have a group of heroes bashing swords on the ankles of a 20 story badguy (the balrog wasn't a fight :P).
I figured SWTOR would have been perfect for this given the massive nature of the conflict in the movies that inspired it but they instead took the route of having jedi slams sabers at the feet of giant robots and not having jedi rush into a full on battle against 1000s of enemies.
Traditionally developers used this strategy for technological reasons, as the internet infrastructure could not handle the load of 5 people fighting off 200 badguys in a desperate battle for survival (without lag and frustration). Instead they chose to simulate that experience by making really big badguys players would fight using gimmicky routines.
In 2012 we are perfectly capable of mass battles in instanced PvE scenarious (Raids,Instances, etc) and probably capable in doing it in the open world. Hell there is no reason the big guys should be excluded from the massive battles either. I would love for a game to throw 100 goblins at my small group and have a few trolls rampaging through us as well (Mines of Moria in Lord of the Rings).
So where is our Helms Deep? Why are we not manning the walls against an overwhelming force of baddies? Why does every Raid or instance end with 5 little guys chipping away at the ankles of one big guy?
Here are some examples of epic moments that are missing from MMOs (and even SRPGs).
Helms Deep (lord of the rings)
Battle of Planor Fields (lord of the rings)
Battle for Genosis (SW)
Battle for Hoth (SW)
Most of the battle scences in Starship troopers
300 (spartans fighting off persian horde)
The Alamo (Texans vs Mexico)
Braveheart (Pretty much every war scene)
and countless others.
Do we just include this as yet another casualty of MMO developers failing to innovate?
Playing: Tera, BF3, ME3
Waiting on: Guild Wars 2
Comments
SW:TOR could have went in the right direction and then it suddenly went "But WoW doesn't do that..." and collapsed.
I never understood the 1-giant-boss design thing myself. It makes sense for 1v1 but not for 40v1.
I also think the multi-boss designs don't work well with the current trinity system and balancing approaches.
It would be pretty sweet to defend a castle or something (small village?) from this huge army attacking.
1+ for the OP!
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The problem is that a lot of games use an antiquated aggro system in which heavily armored tanks have to keep mobs off of fragile healers. If you stick a fight like what you describe into a game with such an aggro system, then as soon as one player heals anyone, most of the mobs bolt for the healer, and the healer quickly dies.
The solution, of course, is to move away from such an aggro system. Then you can have your epic battles, as Spiral Knights does.
The problem is that superior masses of mobs is basicaly a zerg fest. it's not about strategy, but a massive fight with no coordination.
Dungeons are desgined to be areas for challenging content where group communication teamwork is what wins. Having 1 boss with multyple mechanics and phases is much better than dozen of mobs which just go at you and zerg.
This works better in the open world. Infact, mob invasions are nothing new at all. Rift, GW2 and TERA all have them with their PQ systems.
Because many people thought the Rathe Council in EQ during the Planes of Power expansion was too hard....
And then there bosses like Rallos Zek and Corinav......
Planes of Power /drool. Probably the best raiding expansion an any MMORPG ever, and with the way MMOs are going now (easy mode casual), we'll never see another like it.
RIP difficult / fun raiding.
Wasn't Rathe council was unbeatable for months while the developers developed PoTime? I would say that was to hard ;p I quit after a lot of elemental stuff and before rathe for RL reasons, so don't recall.
A lot of encounters have tons of mini adds or multiple boss mobs during an encounter in MMOs. It is hard to balance mobs so they don't randomly one shot squishies or are to trivial to AoE tank.
I like the controll type fights, such as SSra emporer in EQ and major domo in WoW that type of encounter was fun and was mostely about mob management.
Oh! OP you are mistaken, the hoards of foes are the trash mobs that need to be cleared before reaching that boss, Vex Thal and Temple of AQ for example had tons of trash ;p I h8 it
Although movies/books often have large battles going on, they are really just the trash mobs and supporting characers that surround one hero facing one villain. In MMOs, this gets translated as a tank-vs-boss dynamic.
A singular boss gives you a clear personification of the adversary and a well-defined moment of victory.
I'm not a fan of boss fights personally - they tend to feel like a war of attrition to see if my attention will wander off or my below-average reflexes will slip up before the giant pool of hp runs out.
EQ2 has number of raid encounters where add control is the primary trick to wining the fight but that is probably a bit different than what you are suggesting.
I think what it comes down to is a single high hit point mob gives the developers a degree of control over how the encounter pans out much more so than a horde of mobs would. I have also seen some insane burst AOE dps capabilities by raids built for it which would likely trvialize the encournter or require a very specific build to accomplish.
This might sound strange but Global AGenda raids are like this and I think they are rather fun.
Because a horde of smaller mobs is either:
Trash. Screen clutter that serves no purpose than to be AOE'd down. Causes performance issues and completely wrecks your screen, making any 'strategic' boss mechanics near impossible to notice or respond to. There's also no strategy or skill involved in spamming AOE so the entire pack dies.
Powerful and uncontrollable: Many MMOs do not separate PVP and PVE skills (like GW1 does, for example). This causes a problem where since the game's skills are balanced for PVP, AOE crowd control becomes nerfed (because it would be too powerful otherwise). Add in the trinity, and you have an uncontrollable mess that will splat your raid unless you bring a specific set of classes / skillsets / whatevers into the raid, pidgeonholing builds - the exact mindset that Blizzard and ArenaNet has been trying to move away from.
Actually TERA has some boss encounters that involve defending against (3-5) waves of oppponents and a few fights where there definitely are more than one boss (sometimes dozens) that as a healer you have to kite/evade until the primary boss is downed by the rest of the group.
TERA also is supposed to have invasions of NPCs of the main cities, and I recall hearing about one event during the US CB4 but I was too low to participate. I think they tried implementing it over in the EU a few weeks ago with less than spectacular results.
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20 enemies, 20 health health each, 5 armor each....all taken out in one swoop with one AoE spell.
1 enemy, with 20*20 health, and 5*20 armor....takes less damage, while requiring more damage to kill, thus giving it more time to wipe the people attacking it.
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Multiply that enemy by 10x and have the horde be near endless and you can aoe all you want buy you might still be overwhelmed without the right strategy.
There are ways to do it to limit the zerg (or limit the "wave" nature) but I think people have pointed out the inherent flaw. Until games ditch the holy trinity completely it wont work .
Playing: Tera, BF3, ME3
Waiting on: Guild Wars 2
Why do we have 1 high hitpoint boss? Honestly I have no clue.. Only the devs can tell us why, IF they know how to be honest.. I suspect it's because it's easier to do.. Lazy programming!!.. That is one thing I did like about Rift was the invasions.. Swarms and swarms of mobs tearing up the countryside.. Sadly Rift focused too many resources on instancing gear grind, and I cancelled.. TOR is following the same design.. I already cancelled and only have a few days left... I play an MMO so I can be part of a living breathing OPEN world .. not this instance grind we have now..
I, on the other hand, tend to prefer the one single, monolithic creature to an army. To me, it feels a lot more climactic. That and I just hate those damn annoying adds that come out of nowhere.
I guess it has to do with the notion that back in the middle ages, the "king" (or appropriate figurehead: shogun, khan, kaiser, warlord, whatever) was the ultimate representation of everything in a nation; you kill the enemy king and you win the war, no questions asked. The army was there to protect the king and to enforce his will unto other nations and lands, and nothing else.
While the battle of large armies or a valorous last stand may actually be more meaningful and epic in scope than the defeat of the king itself, it is the conflict against the "ultimate foe" that brings about the greatest idea of an ultimate resolution. Take "The Silmarillion" for instance: although the Nírnaeth Arnoediad (the huge battle between the forces of the Elves and Men against Morgoth's hordes) was a lot more important to the overall plot, it certainly does not match the sheer force and epicness of Fingolfin's one-on-one duel against Morgoth.
That and I'm a huge J-RPG fan. In most of those, you usually end up facing an ultimate ruling deity, or a being of similar power, and it's either one, single foe, or multiple parts comprising a greater whole... and not an army of creatures.
The holy trinity isn't something developers set out to create so much as it's something they simply acknowledge is going to happen anyway as people min/max and seperate into roles. Every game degenerates over time in to a smaller and smaller number of viable archetypes. You can either shake things up by continuously tweaking the mechanics/gear/fights to change the optimal builds or just accept there will be rock/paper/scissors specializations and build around them.
So I tend to see different dynamics for encounters as the way of shaking up the holy trinity, not the other way around.
An encounter involving large numbers of foes can be just as tactically deep as one involving a single massive boss.
Actually such encounters have much greater potential for rewarding coordinated tactical play than is the case in a boss fight.
Its all about how the developers design it.
When all has been said and done, more will have been said than done.
If you think all the boss fights in a good dungoen MMO is just fighting 1 mob with high hitpoints, you never really played WoW. Does WoW have the 1 boss with alot of hit points? Yep but they also have the wave of mobs bosses, they have the three part bosses, they have the dodge bosses, they have the one mob with lots of friends bosses, there is the chase boss, etc... A good game have all kinds of bosses not just one. If every game just had hordes of mobs as bosses peopel would then ask why there anit just 1 high hitpoint bosses.
I will not play a game with a cash shop ever again. A dev job should be to make the game better not make me pay so it sucks less.
OP, have you played TERA yet? Really perhaps you should check it out! Amazing game indeed, Just don't read much into the quests......cause they suck but everything else....freakin cool!
I don't know why, but the point should not be to have a boss-mob or a horde, but to have an interesting fight.
Boss fights are a battle of attrition my having to repeat the fight over and over because you hi the button a split second too late. Hordes are a battle of attrition through sheer numbers.
I hate boss mobs that play by entirely different rules, like, ignoring stun, always stunning/damaging you, can see you even while you are invisible without anything about the boss saying ""can see invisble", or who circumvent damage reduction because they don't do damage (meaing, substraction), but rightout set your HP to a new value. Like, one HP.
Or give them really unreasonable mechanics that are only there to prolong the fight, like, you can only hit them once evey ten seconds, even though they are not doing anything different in the rest of time, or if it's completely weird because you are playing a western and your enemy is just another gunslinger, not some giant alien mecha where you need to recalibrate your weapons after each shot, where it at least is explainable in universe.
I also hate hordes with trash mobs that appear without any possibility where they might come from because you cleared everything. And the dungeon is even said to have only one entrance. Or it's a vault (for money, or people - designed to be impenetrable), and still, on your way back to the town or even to the party members camping in the first room, you meet new enemies. Or worse, they appear in plain sight, horde after horde. Maybe even right next to your party members, like in Dragon Age 2.
Make them sneak (but not only them. make sneak detection viable the whole game ), or place some wizards that can teleport if they have a line of sight or something, but don't spawn them where i can see it.
The worst offender are usually though unskippable cutscenes you have to watch every time you failed and stupidly placed savepoints (either you need to redo half the dungeon, or at the start of the battle, where you have a split second to decide which character to save from untimely death by the boss first attacks that kills everybody if you do not follow a specific set of applying protection spells etc.
Combine both for extra affect.
I'll wait to the day's end when the moon is high
And then I'll rise with the tide with a lust for life, I'll
Amass an army, and we'll harness a horde
And then we'll limp across the land until we stand at the shore
What do people think about bosses assembled from an existing monster template plus some random add-on abilities? (diablo3 elites, UO paragons, etc) Do you enjoy such encounters? Do the occassional imbalance issues bother you? Do you find you much prefer the actual bosses in all their scripted glory?
Sowhen i read this title i totally thought of the infamous Leeroy Jenkins scenario in WoW, and that would be why we do not see hordes of mobs vs. 1 big baddy.
Lolipops !
One thing that I feel is that such a type of encounter could be made better a lot better if games started employing collision detection. But that's just me.
Most players cannot react to the moves of a single boss in time. How do you expect them to react to several targets? Since the fights have to be accomplishable if not even easy the aoe of a player must always be enough to kill the group of mobs. Overburden the typical player and you lose subs.
Want tough fights? Don't go to mainstream MMOs and try the niche games.
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Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.