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WHY END-OF-LEVEL BOSSES ARE THE Peter principle OF VIDEO GAMES

8/4/2019

24 Comments

 
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Bosses, eh? What's that Peter Principle thing they say about bosses? That everyone is promoted to their level of incompetence, so that - in time - every position in an organisation will be occupied by somebody who is too incompetent to fulfil the role?

I sort of get it.

But also... it's one of those concepts I have an issue with. I think it's only partially true. I mean, I've had plenty of bad bosses, who seemed completely out of their depth, but also some good bosses. Though, also, I suppose, everyone has their own definition of a good and bad boss. Some people need a boss who micromanages. I prefer one who trusts my ability to get something done, hates meetings, and lets me go home at 3pm. 

Back when I had "proper" jobs, I displayed such a wilful lack of ambition, such utter disrespect for authority and disdain for anyone with a thirst for promotion, that I was only once promoted to any sort of management position, more or less by accident. 

I hated it. I hated the responsibility. I hated the sense that I was somehow implicitly better than some people I worked with. I hated having to tell people when they weren't doing their job properly. 

In fact, around that time I had an anxiety dream about disciplining one of the two members of staff I was responsible for, in which I recommended to my line manager that we should "Throw him out by the rear skin flap".

I don't know what that meant, but my sleeping brain found it so funny that I woke myself up by laughing. Which pretty much sums up my entire career.

Anyway, get this: I'm going to look really smart and clever now, because I've realised that The Peter Principle also applies to another type of boss: the video game boss.

Wha... wha... whaaaaaaa?!?
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PLAYED TO COMPLETION
In the past week, because I'm such a super-skilly cool dude gamer person, I have completed not one but two video games; Yoshi's Crafted World and Pikuniku. Admittedly, neither of them are particularly challenging, and yet I probably enjoyed my time with them more than I have many other recent games.

Both are relatively traditional platformers - albeit imbued with a ton of original ideas and loads of character - and both featured boss battles. And I generally hate boss battles, and I don't understand why they are still a thing in 2019. 

Here comes my brilliant re-application of The Peter principle: because of bosses, I generally only play a video game up to my level of incompetence.

Do you see?

I've lost count of the number of games that I've never completed, because I got frustrated by boss battles. It's not even difficulty that will end my time with a game, but the repetition, and the sudden leap in challenge.

So many games have a gentle difficulty curve - where the challenge increases in direct correlation to your mastery of the skills and abilities you collect over the course of the game... and yet occasionally they'll still force you to suffer these spikes that feel like they've been ripped from a completely different game. 

It's like having a lovely conversation with somebody on a park bench, but every now and then they'll jump to their feet and start screaming, and ripping grass out of the ground, and throwing clumps of mud into the sky.

The reason why I don't mind the bosses in Yoshi's Crafted World and Pikuniku is because the boss battles are stupidly easy and brief. I mean, I still groaned slightly when presented with them, but not to the point where I gave up. 

Bosses, to me, often feel like a holdover from gaming's arcade origins - a vestigial nub of a tail, that hasn't quite yet evolved away completely... the gaming equivalent of a coccyx. 
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MASSIVE COCCYX
We're a diverse bunch, us human beings, so I realise there are plenty of masochists among gamers who love a good boss battle.

I mean, Destiny and Dark Souls felt, to me, like an almost endless parade of damage sponge boss-style grinding - the gaming equivalent of those animatronic tails that furries wear - which might be why I never got along with them. 

Other games - the Devil May Cry series, God of War... even the recent Spider-Man et al - insist on interrupting the flow of their gameplay with those abrupt shifts in play style. 

For me, a boss battle is a chore, an immersion-breaking burden that will either be something I suffer through, or the point at which I give up on a game. It feels like a fake way to increase a game's level of difficulty, akin to the sudden introduction of a dance competition as the fourth question in a maths exam. 

Whatever arguments exist for bosses - whether they're there as a degree of extra challenge, a bit of additional spectacle, or as a way to add some variety - I can't help but feel they've had their time, that all the things which could be argued in favour of bosses can be better integrated into the main body of a game. Much like the dated concept of "lives" - the gaming equivalent of wisdom teeth - now that we evolved out of the arcades, it's time for the boss battle to evolve too.

If we are going to have them, can't we at least do better than the usual learn-the-pattern/shoot-the-glowing-thing/repeat-three-times formula?
24 Comments
colincidence link
8/4/2019 10:22:20 am

If you keep up with Sonic, 1. seek help, 2. this is a thing. Sonic Generations emphasised it by having very high-quality platforming levels and dull bosses, especially the final one. Was it Sonic Colors DS where, after a pretty fluent game, the final boss ended with a "hit this button as fast as you can despite your carpal tunnels"?

Kirby goes this way a good bit too, with its 21st century final bosses becoming self-parody in their many stages, and increasing emphasis/amplified versions of the Boss Rush mode. And yet there's something endearingly compelling about it, as long as it doesn't go any further. I guess these games retain the principle of simplicity to some degree.

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Wapojif
8/4/2019 10:45:30 am

I'm bored of them and find they often bring games to a grinding halt. Or, worse, make it impossible to progress. I had that with The Messenger recently - great game, but I don't have the spare time needed to "git gud" and defeat those laborious boss battles.

Half-Life 2 and Breath of the Wild got it really right. Sparse boss battles for the latter, barely any in the former.

But it's such an industry trope now I think a lot of devs just stuff them in there because that's what games do.

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Sean McErlean
8/4/2019 10:46:02 am

I think bosses are ultimately just another challenge in the fruit salad of challenges a game can throw at you to vary the gameplay loop, just like an escort mission or timed challenge or whatever. Some games like DS build the whole experience around it, and that's fine.

The problems I think are:

1. They can turn into a giant difficulty spike rather than a moderate, fun challenge.

2. They tend to gate progress, so if you can't do it, you are stuffed.

I ran into this with Sekiro recently. The first boss is an absolute nightmare. From games have hard bosses as USP but to date they've all had crutches you could use - grind some enemies and get a bit more health or damage, and it becomes more summountable. Summon someone else to help. Get Sekiro essentially strips away all the help and leaves you on your own to bang your head against the wall.

The boss really wants to teach you something - this isn't Dark Souls, block don't dodge, except it wants you to dodge some of the time too. Then it throws in more stuff for badness. The message gets lost, and frustration creeps in. Plus the game has allowed you to stealth to get there mostly - great fun - but it's left you unprepared for the challenge. It's not the boss innately that's bad per se, but the fact the overall design of it is a bit confused and it's positioning in the game is way off.

There were other paths available, but the game had sort of funnelled you in that directjon to get an item to help with another nightmare mini boss that it was also easy to get stuck on. Hopefully they'll patch it a bit.

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Kara Van Park
8/4/2019 11:13:39 am

The best ones are the ones that act like an end of term test and ask you to apply the skills you've been shown or the new items you've recently acquired.

The worst ones - the end of game boss in the first Gears of War being an example - are where the difficulty level ratchets up and some unintuitive strategy is required that you've gone through the previous ten hours without ever coming to any situations where those kind of skills would be hinted at or developed.

Kind of like spending six months being taught about the Industrial Revolution and then the GCSE paper asking you to explain the plotlines of all the Bourne Identity films. In French.

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RichardM
8/4/2019 01:30:42 pm

Matt Damon ne se souvient plus, et parle de tirer sur des gens! Aussi: Jeremy Renner.

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Floop
8/4/2019 02:37:38 pm

Le pompt de treadstone

sonicshrimp
11/4/2019 06:35:58 am

Mat Daaaamonn

HdE
8/4/2019 11:48:25 am

I'm personally of the opinion that bosses in video games - modern ones, anyway - need to be handled with a good deal of judgement. They're basically a form of punctuation in games, rounding off a particular section or drawing a line under narrative events with their appearance.

But I have to say, something that REALLY baffles me is when a game reaches a point where a huge boss battle seems only inevitable and reasonable to expect... and it either fails to materialise or recycles something from earlier in the game with just a tiny twist.

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Neptunium
8/4/2019 12:32:23 pm

"I hated it. I hated the responsibility. I hated the sense that I was somehow implicitly better than some people I worked with. I hated having to tell people when they weren't doing their job properly."

Are you me, Biffo? :-(

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Dominic
8/4/2019 12:42:58 pm

I THOUGHT IT WAS JUST ME!!

I was loving Metroid Prime until that damn rock dude...

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RichardM
8/4/2019 01:34:43 pm

Some bosses - Mizar, Metroid Prime - are just too hard, and should have been playtested more. But surely this means they have been promoted to the point of acute competence in foiling the player!

I think there is an interesting plot device in a real incompetent boss, I who’s lackeys roll their eyes when being told what to do. Must be an example of this somewhere.

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Shish link
8/4/2019 01:45:47 pm

Personal choice for worst boss ever: Every boss in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It's a stealth-RPG, where they contracted the boss battles out to a third party company, who delivered a collection of unrelated action-FPS set-pieces -_-

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MenuWars
8/4/2019 05:53:19 pm

Agreed, Deus Ex had no use for them really and they all felt shoehorned in.

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MenuWars
8/4/2019 05:52:13 pm

I love a good boss battle and hate a bad one, a good one increases immersion by presenting me with a formidable challenge so my character feels like it's grown when it's overcome, a bad one, is just there to elongate proceedings or spike difficulty to artificially increase playtime. But the bad ones are rarer than the good ones outside of platformers. DMC5 does it brilliantly, GoW usually does but it didn't feature enough variety in the last instalment. Most RPGs, Brawlers and rofuelikes and lites, just wouldn't be as good without them.

So whilst I can empathise with your feelings, I feel like calling them relics simply because of your own distaste for them is kinda disingenuous. But perhaps I'm overlooking better ways of presenting these epic encounters?

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RetroDave
8/4/2019 07:18:35 pm

Hmm, I’m not sure bosses really fit into the template for most modern games. Back in the 8/16 bit days, they were often a great way to finish a level with a bit of spectacle. Nowadays the spectacle is usually the scale of the game world or the visual fidelity - where you do get bosses, they’ve probably been shoehorned in as the developer probably feels that they would be breaking some unwritten rule that says that you simply must have them because that’s what games have always done.

I think it’s pretty telling that all the best bosses I can think of are from over 25 years ago. Surely nobody can deny that the likes of Contra 3, Gunstar Heroes and R-Type had absolutely incredible bosses?

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James Walker
8/4/2019 11:44:50 pm

Y’all don’t like bosses cos you’re just a bunch of pussies!

PEACE!!!!!!!1!!

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colincidence link
9/4/2019 02:11:15 am

this is why the video game adaptation of Horrible Bosses (2) didn't sell and wasn't made

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RM
9/4/2019 09:19:47 am

I agree that in platform games that have a boss that feels like a box ticking exercise or something it feels like a tiresome rigmarole that you could do without, and there have been a few times playing metroid prime games where (having got all the collectibles etc) i just haven’t bothered beating the end boss because it’s not the part of the game i care about.

On the other hand, more so than other “metroid-vanias” (whatever that’s supposed to mean), I think that Hollow Knight is a masterclass in the “exam” style of boss. The bosses bar your way to exploring parts of the world but don’t completely block your progress, most of the time, and most of them act to test the skills you should have been learning from exploring and fighting the normal enemies. A lot of the time getting stuck on a boss is the key to realising how to play the game and gets you deeply invested in the process of getting better at it. A lot of them are optional and so you keep plugging away at trying to beat them through bloody-mindedness alone. The bosses are an essential part of what makes the game so fun and rewarding to play.

Cuphead is another recent game that is all based around boss battles but I’ve not really got into it that much yet because it doesn’t have the same organic feel to it as Hollow Knight, instead being just a succession of “here’s a boss, figure out how to kill it”. But generally it feels like we are in a bit of a boss golden age at the moment, if you look in the right places.

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Taucher
9/4/2019 09:23:44 am

Yes! I really enjoyed Bayonetta. Until I had to fight another witch on the wings of an aeroplane and I just couldn't beat her. Many times I tried until I just gave up. I returned to it once a day for a week or so but still no luck. And now I remember every six months or so and give it another go but I've become even worse at the game and cant remember what the controls are.


And that's my over-riding memory of Bayonetta.

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Mr Bass
9/4/2019 11:57:46 am

I think the end of level boss in a game only works if the game is trying to tell you a story, where (in the classic trope of good versus evil) you are the protagonist fighting against an army of which the boss is the commanding force (think Sauron for Mordor, Megatron for Decepticons) which you will inevitably have to face to ensure a persistent victory for your cause.
However, on the balance of things, I agree that most end of level bosses tend to be tacked on as a sudden spike in the difficulty curve of any given game level and I've also got a collection of games I've abandoned because the lethargy of having to try time and again to beat an irritatingly tough boss has worn me down to giving up.

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sonicshrimp
11/4/2019 06:46:24 am

Boss battles can be a proper climax *comedy noise* if the plot builds up to them and I think that can still be enjoyable. Some different ways of achieving this I remember are
sonic 2 where the level design and background made it clear you were battling toward dr robotnikkers’s space ship in the sky.
borderlands and bioshock - the brilliant narration that goes through the games builds up your encounter and it feels like your progressing.

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Omniro
9/4/2019 03:05:00 pm

This feels like something that's needed to be said for a long time. I've never understood why many people seem to think boss battles are so fantastic, I've always found them to be a chore and a bore (with rare exception).

The worst bosses are the ones where you have to employ some completely different playstyles than you've just been using for the rest of the game. I'd rather have a basic bulletsponge boss than one where I sudenly have to jump around dodging mega-attacks that can end the game in one hit, or do some tedious target matching like the final boss in Metal Gear Rising. At least with a basic bulletsponge you're using the skills you've been honing over the course of the game.

The raids in Destiny are like a giant boss battle extended over the course of the whole level, and I always found them incredibly annoying to play.

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Alejandro
9/4/2019 10:03:15 pm

Talk about difficulty spikes, but bosses can be too easy as well.

By the time I got to the end boss in Bioshock I was so overpowered I beat the shit out of him in 60 seconds without taking any damage.

Disappointing. I kept waiting for him to come at me and then had a 'was that it?' moment.

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Peter Almond link
19/4/2019 10:41:54 pm

Final Boss of Metal Gear Rising...all I'm saying...

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