Short Form:
On Putting Things Into Your Game Just Because You Think They Have to be There
Only four characters in the game need to die by Jensen’s hands, in the game’s four boss fights, and those moments are Deus Ex at its weakest.
Michael Gapper, CVG
There are boss fights. They are terrible. And they cannot be avoided.
Tom Francis, PC Gamer
It also has a few terrible boss fights where you are forced to use direct confrontation.
Tom Bramwell, Eurogamer
It sucks that they’re there at all, and it sucks more that they’re all so boring and tedious, lacking even the grace of a classic Nintendo boss fight that at least contains a logical path.
John Walker, Rock Paper Shotgun
Our choice to take non-lethal stealth options wherever possible was supported without a hitch for the opening six or seven hours, but then the game rudely deposited us via a cutscene in a face-to-face arena battle with a foe who could sustain more damage than we had ordnance to fire at him.
The “bosses,” such as they are, yield comparatively disappointing and ‘gamey’ results.
Arthur Gies, IGN
In the category of amateurish blunders, however: mediocre, grenade-spamming boss fights that don’t do much to reward ingenuity on your part.
Ludwig Kietzmann, Joystiq
It’s a shame that the game forces you into a boss fight every so often, because elsewhere you’re completely free to avoid combat altogether.
Neon Kelly, Videogamer
The boss battles are the biggest letdown in the game.
Jeremy Parish, 1UP
I don’t know why game designers stick to this trope of insisting that progress in a game is measured by boss fights, especially discordant for a game that allows, and even encourages you to avoid confrontation.
Geoffrey Tim, Lazygamer
Sure, taking the life of a big bad is satisfying, especially behind Jensen’s lethal limbs, but it also feels too videogame-y in a title that so often breaks conventions.
Matt Cabral, Atomic Gamer
Not only does forcing you to shoot feel out of place in a game that generally rewards you for keeping your foes alive, but the fights also aren’t that fun on their own terms.
Kevin VanOrd, Gamespot
Taking me out of the thoughtful planning and stealth maneuvers I had carefully crafted my augmentations to enhance to fight old-school, patterned bosses by hammering on them with heavy weapons is a major buzzkill.
Tom Price, GamePro
Combat is most disappointing in the boss battles
Andrew Reiner, Game Informer
The boss-battles are the reason why Human Revolution hasn’t quite managed to achieve our ultimate five-star grade.
Steve Boxer, The Guardian
Four abysmal, trite and utterly inappropriate boss battles against heavily augmented bad guys threaten to undermine everything the game stands for.
Tom Hoggins, The Telegraph
SPOILERS FOR GAME NOT AVAILABLE YET. lol, jk.
But whatever, I’m happy I know because now I can not play it. This informs me that stealth is the wrong path in the game, because the test is brute force, ergo, the skills the game wants you to learn are those of killing and gun handling, ergo, the game is a shooter.
I don’t want to play a shooter.
@Faye Lanks: That wasn’t the point was trying to make at all. Indeed the reviews I’m quoting from are overwhelmingly positive, and cite these 4 isolated moments of the game as mis-steps in a game that otherwise rewards playing the game exactly how you want to. If what you were saying was true, it wouldn’t even matter. People wouldn’t be mad about boss fights if they’d made the game you’re describing. But they didn’t, and so the boss fights are out of place. That’s the impression I get.
… but even that’s not the point I was trying to make. I haven’t played the game and it’d be unfair for me to say what I think of the boss battles. Maybe I’ll think they are great. But I think the reaction repeated over and over again in over half the reviews I’ve looked at is interesting. And I think developers/publishers need to stop thinking they HAVE to obey certain conventions (boss battles as an example), especially when that might be at odds with everything else.
I see what you were trying to do, but hearing that I can lose the game, (read: have the game rendered unfinishable) because I decide to play the game in a way that is justifiable and reasonable, as the EDGE quote implies tips me over the admittedly precarious edge on which my opinion already sat.
I don’t want to play a shooter and quite literally something as basic as this is the straw which breaks the camel’s back now. I’m not interested in viewing things from the first person anymore and I blame all these me-too wannabe CODs that plague consoles now. Even bioshock 2 fell victim with it’s persistent-level multiplayer mode.
Otherwise, I agree that the lessons of videogames past are somewhat unnapplicable in today’s culture. We have moved past boss fights, we have moved past forced sections of stealth too. And it’s the dogged adherence to historically fun and fundamental tropes or convention that holds most developers back; as well as the misunderstanding that feeling emotion isn’t what makes a game, it’s the fact that I have a controller in my hand.
@Faye Lanks: Gotta say, without having played it, it’s looking an awful lot like you’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. Here is a game which is getting near-universal praise for its encouragement of player choice in contrast with what can be expected of most modern games, and you won’t play it because reviews mention 4 single moments (in a 20-30 hour game) where choice is taken away? Just seems like bizarre behaviour, to me.
Once again, to clarify because I still don’t think it’s clear: absolutely no-one, NOBODY is saying that because you choose to play one way the game will be unfinishable. Not once did anyone say in any review that their decision to use stealth tactics for the rest of the game stopped them from being able to finish boss fights. The EDGE quote, in context, is just saying that it’s a jarring moment in the game where they had to change tactics for the duration of that fight. Consensus is that they are out-of-place, not that they are game-breaking.
I’m not saying I’m not making a snap judgement, I just can’t bear to play an FPS. I may give it a go eventually. Probably later this year or early next. I have some holiday coming up so if I get hyped enough for it, It may have a place but as of right now, the baby can stay outside being damp; I’m here playing anything but guns.
You know what I like about this? You made an awesome point with as few words as possible. I appreciate that :)
Sidebar: I was actually thinking about the games I’ve been playing lately, and how the trend seems to be (at least, for me) that there’s a really difficult mid-game fight, and the final boss is a total pushover.
@Jenny Rouse: Interesting observation. Not sure I disapprove of the trend, though. I think games need to start breaking out of the idea that difficulty has to be a linear thing which gradually increases, with a few spikes, then the hardest challenge at the end. That’s only one way to do pacing – a pretty good one, tried and tested, but it might not suit the game you’re trying to make. I like games that experiment a bit with their pacing – I thought Mass Effect 2 was quite good with its character-episode structure, although it still suffered from a misjudged climactic boss fight.
A long time ago they tried making the boss battles the most difficult thing in the world. But, probably because people were frustrated, they weakened the boss until it became a repetitive sequence until the boss fell over.
MK3 had Shao Kahn be much easier than Motaro. Quake 2 allowed you to save powerups and use them to defeat the boss (I was invincible the whole time). Quake 4 was a typical run around in a circle with the left button held down and hide behind a pillar every so often.
In Diablo 1 and 2, the endings were spot on with an equal blend of skill and luck needed to defeat Diablo, and I’ll never forget the day I killed Diablo only to have my laptop crash due to overheating, then work miraculously to show me the ending. Oh epic game!
And a special note should be added about Final Fantasy 8, where you could play the end boss for 45 min, or 20. Which was either game-breaking or a tough-as-nails challenge you longed for.
I like epic battles, and hilarious end game sequences like Halo, and episodic-natured games too. But not games which just end with no closure. Like Mirror’s Edge.
@Adushan: There’s more than one way to get closure than an epic end sequence, though, isn’t there? Mirror’s Edge had an ending that sucked not because it wasn’t epic enough (although it wasn’t epic). It sucked because it didn’t finish the story, or even take it to a natural stopping point. It just stopped.
@Faye Lanks: Way to use ergo twice in one sentence, I believe this may be a first.
Worse, one of those reviewers took out the boss using only non lethal attacks and still got the dying boss full of holes cutscene.
I’ve always thought video games placed no focus on end fmvs and end sequences because few people would get that far so why work hard? Remember the NES games which basically said,”You win, game over”? Or Tomb Raider? That game was classic, right up to the incredibly short end fmv.
I wonder how many games were forced to end abruptly because of financial reasons?
@Adushan: Well, if it can happen to KOTOR 2 …(not financial reasons per se, more like rushing/production reasons).
KOTOR 2 was oookay, liked 1 better. And why isn’t there a 3? I gotta admit the ending of 1 was good, when you find out that A is B.