#4: Is the Boss Battle Outdated?

Games have evolved in a great variety of ways over the years. Graphically speaking, there is no comparison between the games of today versus the games of yesteryear. Voice Acting and Music have evolved from beeps and boops into amazing vocal performances and sweeping orchestral scores. The advent of motion capture technology has greatly improved animations. Games have also become a great and immersive medium for storytelling. And while gameplay has also evolved along these lines, one holdover from the old days may be beginning to overstay its welcome: Boss Battles.

Every person who plays video games knows about the Boss Battle. After the player has completed the level/dungeon, he/she encounters an enemy more powerful than any other seen before this point. The player is forced to defeat this challenger (whether a person or a creature) in order to advance through the story or on to the next level. Done well, these fights with larger than life enemies can be satisfying while keeping the player immersed in the game world. Poorly executed, they frustrate the player and break a games flow and immersion. These encounters should also serve as a test for all of the skills the player has learned, over the course of either the game or the level in question. The question remains: Has modern gaming outgrown the old Boss Battle, or is there still a place for them? Many games that have been released in the past few years have had poor Boss Battles, but I think that it is possible for Boss Battles to do well: The designers of the game simply have to take the type of game they are making into account.

In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the player can play the game with a variety of styles. In any given situation, the player will usually be able to:

• Fight his/her way out by killing or knocking out the guards.
• Sneak his/her way out of the situation completely undetected.
• Hack through security, clearing out a path or obtaining vital information.
• Talk to people in order to gain information or clearance to explore.

This enables the player to tailor the game to his/her personality or preferred playstyle. In general, the game succeeds at letting any style get through any level. Then the game's boss battles happen. During a boss battle, the player had the following options:

• Fight the boss.
• Go back to a previous save and look for weapons, because he/she has to fight the boss.

The game has gone from four viable play styles, to one. The old school boss battle feels annoying and out-of-place to the vast majority of playstyles.

A boss battle could work in a game like Deus Ex, but it must allow for the breadth of approaches that a player might want to use. It should be possible for a player to sneak past the boss and seal the door behind him, forcing the boss to give up the chase. It should be possible to use hacking skills, either to disable the boss's equipment or to use the environment against him. Lastly, the player should have the option to convince the boss to let him go or even to side with him. These approaches are allowed to vary in difficulty, but they must all be viable methods of defeating/bypassing the boss. It requires significantly more effort to pull this off, but it transforms a frustrating and potentially difficult chore into gratifying test of skill. Other modern games like Alpha Protocol are equally guilty of similarly poor design choices.

Some other games have different problems with regards to bosses. In Assassin's Creed 2, the player character has been exceptionally trained in combat, stealth, free-running, and several different types of weapons such as hidden-blades, swords, smoke bombs, poison, a hidden-gun, throwing knives, and daggers. Throughout the game, even the most stealthy and merciful player will slaughter thousands of unnamed, faceless guards who get in his way. Then the game reaches the last part of the game where the player, for story reasons that make sense in context, fights an old man for control of a powerful, ancient artifact. This old man is fat and frail in the game's story. However, during the fight, he has the more health than any enemy in the game, he is immune to poison, the hidden-gun, and instant assassination using the hidden-blade. Also, he summons guards after the player beats him and then the player immediately has to fight him again at full health with the guards and is quite capable of dodging attacks on occasion. While the fact that the game pigeonholes the player into using the sword or the dagger is a problem, it is not the underlying issue as a decent player will have no trouble getting through this fight even with low-level weapons and armor. The problem in this case is that this fight makes no sense from a plot standpoint. The player is immediately thrown out of the experience and thinks “Ugh. This is a typical video game boss battle.”. A frail old man is stronger and more agile than someone who has trained from most of his life in order to kill the corrupt. No one could believe this. This could be fixed by a little preplanning on behalf of the writers and game designers, but this confrontation did not need to happen.

Boss Battles can work. With a bit of forethought, bosses can present an adequate challenge and test the abilities that the player has learned while making sense from a plot standpoint. That is the key: A boss has to be tailored to test the abilities taught to the player and it has to make sense that the boss would be challenging. Game designer should keep this is mind when making trying to think of boss battles in their games.

#2: Story Versus Gameplay: An Assassin's Creed Anecdote

(Spoiler Warning: This article discusses the first two Assassin's Creed games in great detail.)

Story and gameplay are two essential parts to current generation games. People play games not only to have a good time, but also to be immerse in breathtaking narratives and interesting worlds. Many developers struggle to find a balance between these two core pillars of game design. Hideo Kojima has been criticized for his over-emphasis on the storyline of the Metal Gear Solid series and many people believe that the most recent games in Bioware's Mass Effect and Dragon Age series had weaker plots than their predecessors, in exchange for vast gameplay improvements. In this article, I will be using Assassin's Creed and Assassin's Creed 2 as my examples for story emphasis and gameplay emphasis because while I believe Assassin's Creed 2 is a better game, the first one had a much better plot.

But before I get into that, it is important to provide background information on the premise of Assassin's Creed. The series takes place in September of the year 2012. Most of the action takes place in a machine known as the Animus, which allows its user to relive the memories of his/her ancestor in a computer simulation program. In the first game, protagonist Desmond Miles is kidnapped by the Abstergo Corporation to access the memory of Altair Ibn La-Ahad, an Assassin who fought against the Knights Templar the Third Crusade, for an unknown purpose. Altair is at first shown to be an arrogant and egotistical Assassin with a blatant disregard for his order's ways. After his transgressions allow the Templars to find the location of the Assassin brotherhood and attack, Altair is disciplined and brought down from Master Assassin to Novice. To restore his rank and his honor, he is assigned nine targets who bring harm to the people of the Holy Land (modern-day Syria). These people are later on revealed to be Templar Knights on both sides of the Crusades and who have their own designs upon the Holy Land. During the game, it is revealed that Abstergo is the modern-day front for the Templars and that the war between the two factions never ended.

In the sequel, the modern-day Assassins rescue him and recruit him. To acquire Assassin training, Desmond relives the memory of Ezio Auditore da Firenze, an Italian noble who joined the Assassin order during the Italian Renaissance. His character arc begins with the death of his father and brothers as the cover up for some sort of conspiracy. Ezio embarks on a quest for revenge beginning with the men directly responsible. During his journey, he is made aware that his father and his ancestors were in the Assassin order and that his father's death had something to do with the Assassin/Templar war. Ezio's quest for revenge eventually becomes a quest for truth and he finds himself traveling to many major cities in Italy and bringing many cruel people to justice by killing them.

In my sincerest opinion, the first Assassin's Creed has an excellent story. One reason is that the player is given sufficient motivation to go after his targets. The way they do this is fairly interesting. Because Assassins are never allowed to just go out and kill their target, they first need to gather information on their target. Before each kill, the player learns both the why as well as the how: The crimes these people have committed as well as the method in which to dispatch them. This gives the player a context for their actions and begin to empathize with the Altair and the people whose lives are to be enriched with the death of his intended victim. This also highlights another reason I love this game's plot: There is a distinct moral ambiguity between the two factions. As Altair slays his targets, he learns many things from the conversations he has with them as they succumb to their wounds. What they say reveals the big dichotomy in the game. Both factions wish for world peace, yet they disagree with the methods with which to attain that peace. The Assassins believe that peace must be earned by educating the people and celebrating the diversity of the world while removing the arbitrary labels that separate us. To this end, they would murder prominent figures who seek to keep people divided and fan the flames of war. They will also vehemently protect those who would spread knowledge. The Templars, on the other hand, believe that it is impossible to dissolve the barriers between people through normal means. They believe that people cannot know true peace so long as free will exists. To that end, they try to find ways to force people to adhere to a strict order so that they might find peace. Because the player is an Assassin, the story will obviously be told from that viewpoint, but at no time is the player ever told that either side is right or wrong. In fact, it is made very clear that both sides are in the right. This allows the player to ask himself the question: Is it possible to obtain peace and if it is not, is it worth the price of free will? Any story that can get people to think has, at least in some way, succeeded in telling an interesting tale.

On the other hand, where I found that the first game had a strong story, the sequel's plot was much weaker in comparison. First of all, the Templars in Assassin's Creed 2 lack the ambiguity of their predecessors. While the Templars are seen committing many of the same crimes the Templars in the previous game, they are never given any redeeming qualities that justify their actions. Not once is it mentioned how these things further the cause of the Templar order. Furthermore, when Pope Alexander VI (He is the leader of the Templars and the final boss. Just go with it.) eventually tells Ezio why he is going to all this trouble, he tells him that he was hoping to open a vault underneath the Vatican and, using a super advanced mind-control device, bend God to his will and conquer the world under the Templar banner. This is a stupidly evil and ridiculous motivation that could never possibly make any sort of sense. Which transitions nicely into the other gripe, many plot points in the game are completely, ridiculously rife with plot holes. Take the Carnival segment for example. Ezio has to kill his target, but he will only come out during his party in Carnival. The party he is throwing is a masquerade ball with special golden masks. He cannot steal a mask because they have numbers on them (Which does not make sense, but I digress.), so he has to win a mask by winning four games. The games are stupid games like Capture the Flag and footraces (Which are not really fun either, but again, I digress.). When the games are rigged and someone else wins, he has to STEAL the mask to get into the party, which he should not be able to do, because they are numbered. And during the segment, Ezio is a wanted man, so he blends in by putting on a silver mask, despite not changing his absolutely, flamboyantly, bright white robes. It was the eyes that gave him away, not the distinct and very easy to see Assassin's robes. This is the most extreme example, but there are others like a fistfight with the pope, etc. Bottom line, I find the first game's story to be much better.

With that in mind, it is time to compare the gameplay of the two games. Assassin's Creed laid out a good groundwork for the game, but it was not perfect. The investigations, while they helped flesh out the story, began to grow repetitive around the time of the third assassination. The player quickly begins to realize that they are playing the same five or six missions over and over again, only in different locations. Players with low tolerance for repetition will be immensely turned off by these missions. This is not the only issue that crops up. Towards the end of the game, the combat system begins to grow tiring and the guards WILL attack the player at the slightest provocation. It can take a very long time to get through fights because the player can easily have over twenty guards fighting them at once. Fights like this can take several minutes and running away from them can be almost as long, if not longer because other guards will spot the player as he/she runs away. This is exacerbated by the end sequence where they throw waves of enemies at the player and enclose the area so that he/she cannot run away.

The sequel did well to improve many of these aspects. There is a variety of missions throughout the game so that it never feels repetitive to the player. There are platforming sections, chariot chases, theft missions, beat-up events, etc. Assassin's Creed 2 also improves the guard detection system of Assassin's Creed. The game features a notoriety system so that the player is not bombarded by guards unless he/she deliberately goes out of their way to attract attention. Items like smoke bombs can allow for quick escapes when the player feels overwhelmed and can also be used offensively to blind enemies, leaving them vulnerable. Other new tools like poison, throwing money, and a hidden gun also give the player options when dealing with encounters and assassinations. Combat has also been overhauled and the guards are far less likely to swarm the player. The sequel's gameplay is vastly superior to the first game's gameplay.

While Assassin's Creed has a much better story, Assassin's Creed 2 greatly improves upon the gameplay. While being in the same series and telling similar stories, the two games each have separate things to add to the table. Both are great games in their own right and future game designers should study these games to perfect their craft.