What would you describe as a bad boss?

[Margaret Thatcher]

My example is Super Pierrot from Rainbow Islands Extra on the Genesis/Mega Drive (a different genre of game, but hear me out). In RI, you take one hit (ala Action Doom), and you die. Enemies and Bosses are designed around this, giving you room to maneuver through the vertically-scrolling playing field. Your main attack is shooting rainbows on a horizontal plane at a limited range. These rainbows stay on the screen, giving you the opportunity to walk on them and get to higher ground. What's more, you can jump on them and make 'em fall on enemies below. This breeds a specific type of gameplay, where you have to balance "I need to get to the top" and "I need to not die".

 

Enter Super Pierrot. (This guy's good at the game)

 

 

He takes up a large amount of space, so mobility's down. He also bounces around the room faster than Jimmy Savile running to the children's hospital, so good luck following that. When the fight starts, he summons 4 Pierrots (the smaller versions of him)that respawn once you kill them, so you're kinda fucked. You want to avoid the Pierrots, but SP blindsides you. You fire away at SP, but a Pierrot comes the fuck outta nowhere and claps your ass before it can even say "Nothing personnel, kid". You try to avoid both, but then you can't rainbow his clown ass and you get cornered. Also, when you spawn, your attack is one rainbow long, and you'r slow as shit out a sloth's ass. I fucking hate this boss and I want to put him into a woodchipper.

 

or maybe im butthurt romflao

[[McD] James]

The final boss of They Hunger. 

[BladeWolf]

Calamity Ganon - Breath of the Wild. Just a plain disappointment.

Edited March 13, 2021 by BladeWolf

[Murdoch]

Every boss in Quake.

[Margaret Thatcher]

All two of them?

[BladeWolf]

4 minutes ago, Murdoch said:

Every boss in Quake.

I wish Quake had better boss ideas, and I can understand why they haven't implemented them due to the lack of technology. But about Quake as a series, the only boss fight I thoroughly enjoyed was The Makron from Quake II. Sadly, none of the other bosses in the series were fun for me. 

[Doom_Dude]

Haha, in Quake I crashed the game trying to axe murder Shub-Niggurath.

 

The asshole helicopter guy at the end of Soldier of Fortune II.

[BladeWolf]

1 minute ago, Doom_Dude said:

The asshole helicopter guy at the end of Soldier of Fortune II.

Speaking of Helicopters.....

 

SURFACE TENSION FLASHBACKS INTENSIFIES

[Margaret Thatcher]

Can't you just pistol it?

[continuum.mid]

Can't talk about bad bosses on Doomworld without someone mentioning how disappointing all of the boss maps in Doom and Doom II are. The only exceptions are Dead Simple (if you consider that a boss map) and maybe the Tower of Babel for its ambience. Unfortunately, Freedoom seems to have imitated the disappointing bosses. I hope that its E1M8, E2M8, and MAP30 are replaced before 1.0.

 

Sticking to non-Doom bosses: Boktai is one of my favorite dungeon crawlers of all time, but there's one reason I've never beaten it, and that's the final boss.

 

Spoilers if you want to play it someday (you should):

Spoiler

The concept is really nice, having one of the early villains join you to fight this ultimate personification of evil. There are even a few good gameplay ideas. The issue for me was that the hands were way too hard to dodge, and took longer than I would have liked to defeat. From what I could gather, in order for this boss not to feel like an absolute drag, you have to have found some secret weapon parts. I didn't, and there was no way to backtrack after the final boss rush.

TL;DR - designing a boss that is basically impossible without finding secrets in areas you can't backtrack to, and which you'd have no idea are mandatory, isn't fun.

 

edit: Now that I think of it, this isn't unique to Boktai either. The final boss of Morrowind's expansion Tribunal has this issue, as does that of Final Fantasy XV and plenty of others. Maybe I'm just bad at games.

Edited March 13, 2021 by northivanastan

[BladeWolf]

1 minute ago, Margaret Thatcher said:

Can't you just pistol it?

Kid me wouldn't have understood, I just forgot about the pistol by the time I got the MP5.

Edited March 13, 2021 by BladeWolf

[I Drink Lava]

Every boss in Devil May Cry 2, with special mentions to the Infected Tanks and Helicopter. Watch S-rank DMD runs to see just how broken some of the bosses are.

[BladeWolf]

1 minute ago, I Drink Lava said:

Every boss in Devil May Cry 2, with special mentions to the Infected Tanks and Helicopter. Watch S-rank DMD runs to see just how broken some of the bosses are.

DMC 2 in general was pretty shit, so its no surprise.

[Loud Silence]

Xaero (final SP level) on Nightmare in Quake 3.

[Varis Alpha]

Space Mama from Rayman 1 is a pain and a huge difficulty spike from previous bosses, and even later ones. her attack patterns are very hard to read the first time you encounter her, and even when you know how to deal with her, having only 3 hitpoints to whittle down her 12 hitpoints is very hard to do without losing tons of lives, especially with it being unclear when exactly you can damage her. the penultimate and final boss are nothing compared to her, she sucks.

 

the stage leading up to her fight is fairly tricky too, meaning you might not even reach her with full powerups (which gets taken away after you die anyway, so their usage is only good if you know exactly what's coming up ahead), which could've given you a bit more of a fighting chance.

[GraphicBleeder]

45 minutes ago, northivanastan said:

Can't talk about bad bosses on Doomworld without someone mentioning how disappointing all of the boss maps in Doom and Doom II are. The only exceptions are Dead Simple (if you consider that a boss map) and maybe the Tower of Babel for its ambience. Unfortunately, Freedoom seems to have imitated the disappointing bosses. I hope that its E1M8, E2M8, and MAP30 are replaced before 1.0.

 

Sticking to non-Doom bosses: Boktai is one of my favorite dungeon crawlers of all time, but there's one reason I've never beaten it, and that's the final boss.

 

Spoilers if you want to play it someday (you should):

  Reveal hidden contents

The concept is really nice, having one of the early villains join you to fight this ultimate personification of evil. There are even a few good gameplay ideas. The issue for me was that the hands were way too hard to dodge, and took longer than I would have liked to defeat. From what I could gather, in order for this boss not to feel like an absolute drag, you have to have found some secret weapon parts. I didn't, and there was no way to backtrack after the final boss rush.

TL;DR - designing a boss that is basically impossible without finding secrets in areas you can't backtrack to, and which you'd have no idea are mandatory, isn't fun.

 

edit: Now that I think of it, this isn't unique to Boktai either. The final boss of Morrowind's expansion Tribunal has this issue, as does that of Final Fantasy XV and plenty of others. Maybe I'm just bad at games.

Tower of Babel is a genuinely intimidating map for someone who's never played any other Doom game and has just got up to that point.

 

 

While it's not a great boss now, in 1993 it was intimidating and powerful.

 

 

And that's what bosses should be imo.

[ReX]

2 hours ago, Margaret Thatcher said:

What would you describe as a bad boss?

One that prohibits an employee from taking a pee break during the work day.

 

But I jest. I'm with @northivanastan - bosses that can only be defeated when a bunch of prior objectives have been accomplished but allowing the player the player to enter the final arena without accomplishing them and preventing the player from backtracking to accomplish them. [To be fair, this problem is more one of game design than enemy boss design.]

 

If the question was about disappointing bosses, I'd rank the Spider Demon in DooM E3M8 at close to the top. The thing is, it's not a bad enemy; it was just used badly in that sad excuse for a map. [This is another example of bad game design decisions, in this case bad map design.]

[almostmatt1]

I'm generally (there could be exceptions) not a fan of RPGs in which all enemies stats adjust based on your level. In Skyrim for example, getting to the end of a dungeon at a different level than a different playthrough and having just a stronger/weaker variant of the same enemy be the boss, well... it serves its function well enough I suppose, but there's something about the system that just feels cheap and leaves me feeling a bit disappointed. There's not really an obviously superior method in a lot of games though. 

[Margaret Thatcher]

1 minute ago, ReX said:

I'd rank the Spider Demon in DooM E3M8 at close to the top. The thing is, it's not a bad enemy; it was just used badly in that sad excuse for a map.

I agree, but with one caveat. 

 

Why does the Cyberdemonhave 4000 health, but the Mastermind have 3000? Were they swapped mid-development?

[BladeWolf]

1 minute ago, Margaret Thatcher said:

I agree, but with one caveat. 

 

Why does the Cyberdemonhave 4000 health, but the Mastermind have 3000? Were they swapped mid-development?

Actually, I like the concept of a secondary boss having much more health than the main one. Maybe that's why "Tyrants" were nerfed to all hell in Eternal.

[Margaret Thatcher]

1 minute ago, BladeWolf said:

Actually, I like the concept of a secondary boss having much more health than the main one. Maybe that's why "Tyrants" were nerfed to all hell in Eternal.

Instead of saying "go sex you are wrong", I would like to hear why you think that.

[ReX]

2 minutes ago, Margaret Thatcher said:

Why does the Cyberdemon have 4000 health, but the Mastermind have 3000?

Yes, this makes no sense. I didn't know about the enemy stats until much later, but I do remember having a frustratingly difficult time against the cyberdemon but a relatively easy time against the Spider Demon. [It probably also has something to do with the differing pain chance of these two enemies.]

[BladeWolf]

5 minutes ago, Margaret Thatcher said:

Instead of saying "go sex you are wrong", I would like to hear why you think that.

Well, for one, it was pretty unique. I was just as surprised when I found out the Mastermind has a much lower health pool. And considering its attack pattern, I can deal with cybie having fairly-easy-to-dodge projectiles, with an extra 1000 health vs spiderdemon's hitscan. 

[silentzorah]

These fucking things.

 

 

I can't say enough nasty things about them.  They're hard to hit, difficult to predict, and one of them just outright cheapshots you from the background.  God help you if you stop paying attention for one second.

 

These things were definitely designed by a sadist.

[Remilia Scarlet]

Everything in the original Doom games ^_^;  Except for the Mother Demon, that one wasn't too bad.  But overall, "shoot until dead" just feels like a normal fight to me, just extended (and not by that much).  They all work better as simple top-tier monsters IMO.  Even the IoS is pretty silly.

 

I prefer bosses that have a few phases associated with them, where I have to learn something each phase.  Also ones where I actually feel like I have to stop and take a breath before starting the fight because it's about to get tough as nails.  Things like the raid bosses in WoW or like I've experienced in Souls-like games come to mind.  Also the bosses in shmups like Touhou (lol how many health bars does Flandre have?  Nine I think?).

 

This is one reason why the boss fights I've done for my Doom levels tend to be drawn out affairs with multiple phases, lots of health, and some gimmicks to learn.  Each death you tend to get a bit better, and you can feel yourself progressing, like it's an arcade game.  That's what I prefer.

Edited March 13, 2021 by Remilia Scarlet

[Margaret Thatcher]

2 hours ago, BladeWolf said:

Well, for one, it was pretty unique. I was just as surprised when I found out the Mastermind has a much lower health pool. And considering its attack pattern, I can deal with cybie having fairly-easy-to-dodge projectiles, with an extra 1000 health vs spiderdemon's hitscan. 

yeah, but the final boss is supposed to be challenging

[Nootrac4571]

Oh man, I haven't played Rainbow Islands in years. Back when I was a younger, better man, there was a time I could complete Bubble Bobble without continues. I still think it's one of the best games ever.

 

Anyway, I've definitely said this before, but: The only thing wrong with e3m8 and the SMM is that the BFG makes it trivial. It was clearly designed to be played from a pistol start, and if you do so it's a great map. It's almost a puzzle boss: You're given just enough ammo to take it out, and the baron and cacos are there purely to distract the SMM via infighting while you gather up the rockets round the edge of the map. It's a great bit of Doomy fun. If you've never tried it UV from a pistol start then I'd recommend giving it a go.

 

Continuous play absolutely ruins it though. Same goes for e2m8.

[Margaret Thatcher]

TBH the boss order makes more sense when you take into account the original level progression (Techbase>Hell>Stortbase, Barons, Mastermind, Cyber)

[Gaia74]

There are quite a few points that make a bad boss

-Repetitive without any interesting attack pattern

-When is not really a challenge for the player, a boss is supposed to be made to test everything you know and to be the most difficult thing until the moment of combat with the boss

-Completing the previous point, it is not only to try the new thing that he has learned in previous levels, it is also to test the ability of the player himself and that he can adapt to the new mechanics of the boss

-Very fragile and the battle is very short, being painful with attacks that you can't dodge, making the battle one where it is who kills first who (i'm watching you tchernobog)

 

There are many more points, such as the story or what you get by defeating the challenge.

[Yugiboy85]

Any boss that brings minions into the fight. You are already fighting a boss, giving it your all, and for some reason, you also have to fend off anoying fodder enemies.