Boss (video games)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In video games, a boss is a particularly challenging computer-controlled character that must be defeated at the end of a segment of a game, whether it be for a level, an episode, or the very end of the game itself (final boss). A fight with a boss character is referred to as a Boss battle or Boss fight. Bosses appear in many video games, particularly story or level-based first and third-person shooters, platform games, RPGs, and most shoot 'em ups. Most games feature multiple bosses, each often more difficult than the last.
Contents |
[edit] History
Early video games followed pinball machines. Since a player can never "win" a pinball machine game, video games initially were thought of as simply "video" pinball machines. Game developers therefore included no mechanism to "win" the game. Video games were viewed simply as contest against the machine, where the only goal was to accumulate points until the machine inevitably won.
For example, early Nintendo and Atari video games such as PONG repeated the same challenge, although the speed of the object (or objects) of the game would increase. Eventually, the objects moved so fast that no player could win.
The Atari 2600 game Adventure, released in 1978, had three different dragons with differing abilities. However, it was not necessary to defeat any of them to win, and there was no level advancement in the game except by manual variation selection using the Game Select switch. In the first game variation, only the 2 slower dragons appeared. In the 2nd and 3rd variations, the 3rd and fastest dragon could be encountered. However, a player might not even encounter all of the dragons during the course of a 3rd variation game due to their random initial placement. For these reasons, the dragons are not now considered as true bosses.
The first arcade video game with a boss-like attacker was the 1979 game Galaxian. In Galaxian, waves of ships would attack the player. Each wave included a few "flagships". Destroying the flagships resulted in significant bonuses. The flagships appeared at the top of the screen, implying that they were directing the attack. The flagships were thus referred to as "bosses" in the games. Although the flagships usually were defeated by a player at the end of a level before advancing to the next level, it was not a requirement of the game.
The first arcade video game with a true boss was Phoenix introduced in 1980 by Centuri. In Phoenix, a player was first attacked with several different smaller types of enemies. After disposing of the small ships, the player is then attacked by birds. After the birds are destroyed, the player faced a large mothership. Only by defeating the large mothership could the player advance to the next level.
The first console games with a boss were Vanguard and Phoenix for the Atari 2600. Both games were ported from arcade video games. The games were released almost simultaneously. Vanguard has a part number of CX2669 while Phoenix has a part number of CX2673. If the games were released in sequence, Vanguard would have been released before Phoenix.
The first known game to explicitly list an end-level, stronger opponent as "Boss" is the arcade game Renegade (which was ported to several other platforms) in 1986.
[edit] Bosses in game structure
Many single-player games have a level structure, becoming progressively more difficult as the player advances. Bosses are a consequence of this structure, appearing at or near the end of a level and being the hardest enemies to defeat, often requiring a complex sequence of actions that the player must deduce during the battle (and, usually, multiple defeats), in order to beat them. Other games have a storyline instead of a level-based structure, but still feature bosses at various points in the story.
The 'boss battle' marks the climax of a dramatic buildup resulting from the player's anticipation and anxiousness, often including design elements such as suspenseful music that enhance this effect. For example, in Metal Gear Solid, the penultimate battle (against Metal Gear REX) has been heavily foreshadowed in dialogue, and the threat represented by the boss enhanced by an attempt to disable or destroy it before it is mobile. The final scenes in Quake II are tensely quiet until the player finally confronts the Makron. In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, the cutscene before the final boss shows the world being covered in darkness and also includes the final boss of the game effortlessly reducing a previous powerful boss (Sir Grodus, specifically) into a disembodied head, foreshadowing the difficulty of the battle.
A boss fest is a game with heavy emphasis on boss battles. Examples of this style are Milestone's Chaos Field for Dreamcast and GameCube, Treasure's Alien Soldier for Genesis, and Taito's extremely rare Darius Alpha for the TurboGrafx-16. Shadow of the Colossus takes this one step further, as the game features no enemies except the 16 giant monsters the player must hunt down and slay. It is very rare for a game to be comprised mostly of what would normally be bosses. Exceptions, of course, include some fighting games in which only a few characters are selectable and the rest are not, making the unselectable characters essentially bosses.
Some games include a special mode or sequence, sometimes called a boss rush, in which the goal is to defeat a number of bosses one after the other. Famous games with this kind of features are the Mega Man series and Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. Some modes challenge the player with some kind of twist, such as in Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land and Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, where Kirby could not use his copy powers, or Kirby Super Star mode The Arena, which consists of endurance matches against a fixed number of bosses with recovery and ability change rooms between matches. Often, modes like this are unlockables that are earned after beating the game to test a player's skill.
Bosses are traditionally used as choke-points in RPGs, used to ensure a player has taken the time to level-up (raise their abilities through fighting anonymous easier foes) before progressing to a new section of the game. A player may find that they have not increased in level sufficiently to weather a boss' attacks, and must spend time gaining experience points by fighting lowlier creatures (often a very repetitive process) before attempting the battle again. This can be viewed as an effort to ensure the player has the level the designer expects before they progress, however it is one of the more common frustrations with the genre. A well-designed RPG will have the player level up enough to defeat bosses during normal play, and may provide bonuses if they have grown strong enough to defeat certain opponents beforehand.
On the other hand, recent developments have subverted this view. With action-RPG games, where the game system employs the RPG system of improvement through levelling alongside real-time control of the characters as in the action genre, it has become a mark of gaming skill to defeat a boss at a lower level than expected.
In modern MMORPGs bosses are often used within game dungeons or instances, though these bosses do not result in the game ending as a traditional RPGs do. These bosses are often referred to as "End Game" bosses but still allow the players to continue on in the game. For example, in World of Warcraft, the instance Uldaman has a number of small boss encounters, many of which are avoidable, and a highly dramatic final "End Game" encounter.
Most games with bosses often have one as the last obstacle in the way of victory. This "final" or "last" boss is often the most difficult enemy in the game. A notable exception is the Gradius and Grandia series, where the last bosses don't defend themselves and are defeated quite effortlessly.
Sometimes, bosses may not be used as choke-points but be hidden away in a manner opposed to their traditional usage, unmentioned or inconsequential to the plot. These secret bosses, which must be actively hunted out, may be even stronger than the final boss but give equipment of unparalleled power as a reward for their successful defeat. The best example of these types of bosses are summoned monsters in the Final Fantasy series, which often must be defeated before the summon spell can be cast.
Some games have multiple encounters with the same boss. In such occasions, they will traditionally grow stronger with every subsequent encounter, so as to keep up with the growth in power of the player character's abilities. This is popular in the survival horror genre, and a notable example would be the namesake Nemesis from Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. A subset of this kind of boss is one where these bosses become "normal" enemies later into the game, not showing a lifebar when they appear and doing so alongside standard grunt-types like Hell vanguard, of Devil May Cry 3. Yet another subset is a boss which cannot be defeated during the first encounter with it, but can be defeated in an encounter later in the plot, an example being SA-X from Metroid Fusion. Taking this even further are bosses that when defeated, instantly come back to life and attack again, even stronger than before. The boss Sigma from the Mega Man X series became highly notorious for doing this, and as a result any boss that does this is said to be "pulling a Sigma."
In most games with bosses, there may be creatures that serve as choke-points during the stage proper rather than at the end. These beings, known as mid-bosses, minibosses or sub-bosses amongst other terms, may or may not be lesser versions of the boss.
Although bosses are a staple of action games, they are also present in other genres. Some racing games, such as those in the Need for Speed series, feature some races in which the player has to race with an especially challenging opponent to continue. Once the player conquers all blocks of a district, he has to race the the local crew's boss to take over the district itself.
[edit] Bosses by type
The most common manifestation of the boss is an entity (much) larger than the player character, with great attack power and endurance superiority over the player character's own attributes in the relevant fields. Sometimes, such bosses have distinct vulnerable and invulnerable phases that the player must recognize and respond appropriately to for success.
A type of boss seemingly antithetical to the above notion, commonly seen in action and fighting games, is a being not much bigger than the player character (or is a duplicate of the character), with correspondingly minor boosts of strength and endurance. In these cases, the boss is superior by virtue of its great speed of movement and attack, using multi-hit attacks to compensate for its lack of raw power and evasive maneuvers to mitigate its lack of raw defence.
Some bosses are immune to indiscriminate conventional attack. These may have a vulnerable spot that must be targeted to damage them, or otherwise the player must solve a puzzle in order to trigger a series of events that will damage the boss.
It is common for bosses to have several different stages of challenges by either changing tactics midway through a battle, or by changing forms (as "Castlevania's Dracula does), eventually giving way to some 'true form'. A multi-tiered format is very popular for bosses in role playing games (such as Chrono Trigger's Lavos).
Some bosses are not intended to be defeated during the first encounter or at all. Usually this is either to help illustrate just how powerful they are or presented as a challenge of survival with the player, The player has to not lose to the untouchable foe for a set time period. In rare cases, the game may have a new game feature which allows the player to replay from the start but retain the levels they had when they beat the game or start over with powerful equipment, this can mean a previously unwinnable fight is now winnable and the player may be rewarded with a rare item or special alternate ending.
Some boss fights take place under timed conditions, with the player suffering defeat or crippling disadvantage should the timer run out. These encounters can put the player at a psychological disadvantage, because the pressure to defeat the boss within the allotted time can make the player desperate or careless. Such encounters are often seen as frustrating to complete. A variant of this is a battle where the goal is to survive until the timer runs down, with the boss getting more aggressive and/or powerful as the countdown nears the end.
Not all boss fights are one-on-one affairs. Some involve fighting two or more enemies simultaneously. These enemies may or may not be identical. If they are not identical, each enemy more often than not has abilities that complement its partner's. In some cases, these boss enemies share a life bar and killing one is merely enough to win, but this is rare. Even rarer still is a "team" boss battle where defeating one enemy makes the other(s) gain the powers of the fallen one. This type of battle poses a different sort of challenge to the player, forcing him/her to choose between depleting the health and facing the attacks of the multiple foes at a consistent rate so as to minimise the lifetime of the enhanced enemy or killing off the enemies one by one so as to focus on the single "superpowered" enemy. A unique subset of this occurs in multiplayer beat-them-up games, where a boss appears as a single entity against a lone player but "clones" itself an appropriate number of times to take on a group of players. Another special type of boss fight which is commonly encountered in beat-em-ups involves the boss backed up by a (sometimes infinite) number of weaker henchmen, so that the player must choose between attacking the weak enemies first in order to attack the boss freely, or just attacking the boss and avoiding the lesser enemies, as they will usually respawn indefinitely.
It is very important to note that these categories are not set in stone. More often than not, bosses will show characteristics from different categories. A boss may be fast in attack and movement and still be strong offensively and defensively, for example.
[edit] Criticism
 |
This article or section may contain original research or unattributed claims. Please help Wikipedia by adding references. See the talk page for details. |
Bosses have recently fallen out of favor with some videogamers and specific game designers; it is argued by them that they are a hangover from pay-to-play arcade games, and inappropriate for current games. Poorly engineered bosses may simply be an enemy which absorbs or deals an exasperating amount of damage without providing especially engaging gameplay, existing purely to slow the player's progress. Particularly boss-heavy games may lack coherent segments between the bosses; this is frequently an issue in 2D shooters.
Some gamers have complained that bosses can break the suspension of disbelief by disrupting the level of realism. In games which attempt for a "realistic" atmosphere where the player character and the enemies can survive about as much damage as a "real" human (albeit perhaps one wearing body armor) could, it can be quite jarring to suddenly encounter an enemy who can survive superhuman amounts of damage, especially when this enemy is apparently human - this is particularly noticeable, for example, in Max Payne. Developers have tried to justify these occurrences by various (sometimes far-fetched) means, like providing the player's opponent with extremely advanced body armor (such as the final boss in the otherwise (gruesomely) realistic Soldier of Fortune), or causing the boss character to undergo severe mutation, changing them into a Supersoldier or superhuman who can take large amounts of damage, as in Command & Conquer: Renegade, or having an Undead boss (with the famous zombie near-invulnerability). An interesting justification for a human character's extreme resistance to damage (or, more likely, the pain it causes) is found in Hitman: Codename 47, where a "boss" character snorts a preposterous amount of cocaine before engaging the player in a gunfight (although otherwise, in the Hitman series, all targets the player must assassinate are as human as the player himself, and even that boss can be killed easily if the player can find a way to kill him before he snorts the cocaine).
Also, the incongruously drawn-out boss battles in Red Faction II and other similar games were derided by many as repetitive, awkward endings to otherwise dramatic, coherent games. However, the frequent lock-in battles of some games which claim to be without bosses are often just as problematic for suspension of disbelief, since they require the player to accept that, for example, a character with a rocket launcher could not destroy a flimsy door barring his escape. Some games attempt to overcome this by using energy-based barriers in place of physical obstructions.
Games may instead have various scenarios which serve as boss "replacements," however, such as requiring the player to defeat a larger-than-normal number of (often strong) enemies in a limited period of time or a confined space with little cover. This kind of 'boss room' is especially common in first person shooting games, with its origins in the Doom series. A common version is to force the player to remain in one location while waves of enemies attack them; the player being forced to fight them all to progress either because they are locked in (a frequent occurrence in Black, where such a situation occurs at least once on most levels, and the Serious Sam games which consist of little else) or because there is something in the area they must protect for a fixed period of time (possibly the most well-known example being the infamous sequence in GoldenEye 007 where the player must guard Natalya; the Pegasus Bridge and Pavlov's House sequences in Call of Duty are other examples). In World 4-1 of Super Mario Bros. 2, there is no boss. Rather, the boss music plays and Mario/Luigi/Peach/Toad must go through a room with a large number of Autobombs. This also happens in Kirby: Canvas Curse where the player needs to clear falling rocks, bombs and enemies in some parts on a level before moving on.
It is also worth noting that the line claimed to exist between these "replacement" scenarios and a true boss is not a clear one, and many consider these situations just as much boss encounters as any other type; as an example, the final boss of Serious Sam: the Second Encounter, Mordekai the Summoner, has no means of directly attacking the player and can only summon other enemies. He is thus effectively an object the player must destroy to end a "boss room"-type battle, much as some such battles would end when the player destroys a bunker or computer in the room. Certain games combine the "puzzle" and "army" boss variants to form a situation reminiscent of a boss fight, attempting to perform a complicated sequence of actions while under assault from endless waves of enemies, without technically having a boss present.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- General-purpose Boss Fighting Guide
- Who's the Boss? from Wired News
- Boss battles – article discussing good boss design
- Ban The Boss – article criticising the boss concept
