BALANCING CHALLENGE AND HYPE

Imagine you're playing Final Fantasy IV for the first time. You've made it through the final dungeon and are ready to confront the last boss. After a long cutscene ending with the entire party brought to near submission, Cecil alone manages to stand back up to confront the villain. Battle begins. Cecil starts alone with 1 HP and everyone else KOed. However, one by one, the party members pick themselves up from the ground and stand with him. The spirits of those that helped him along his way heals the group and brings them back into fighting shape. Cecil is granted a crystal to reveal the true form of the last boss. Now the true final battle begins. "Alright," you think to yourself, blood pumping, hands shaking in anticipation, "I'm gonna beat this guy and save the world!! YEAH, LET'S KICK HIS ASS!"

Except you don't. Four turns after the battle begins, your party is wiped out. And now you have to go back through those cutscenes again to get another shot at the boss. Only this time, the hype is only a fraction of what it was the first time.

Or even worse, failing the battle two or three more times and realizing you have to go back and grind a few more levels before going through that long cutscene for the 5th time. By then, the game's pacing has been completely shattered, the adrenaline has run out, and you're just interested in beating the boss, screw the plot.


Just like a well timed scare in a horror game, the impact of a well executed pivotal plot moment in an RPG can evoke a powerful emotional reaction from a player. However, that impact is very often at its height only once. Seeing that same scene again would, in most cases, not be nearly as memorable as it was the first time. However, we are making GAMES. And games, after all, are supposed to CHALLENGE a player in some way. What happens if players fail the challenge and have to go through it again? If an RPG places its story front and center, then should its gameplay be easier in order to move the player through the tale? Though in that instance, the fight wouldn't be as memorable if you could breeze through it with no problems.

In the event of a game over, it'd be easy enough to add an option to skip the cutscene or even to retry the battle. But no matter what sort of solution devs come up with, there's no reinvigorating that initial hype.

What I'm asking is, if this is even a concern to you, what do you do to make the fight challenging without losing the magic of that initial hype? Do you just make the fight easier than you would normally? That would certainly keep the flow of the plot going, but you wouldn't really have the satisfaction of beating a really tough enemy. Personally, I've been thinking about giving bosses multiple phases. The first phase would be simple enough and mostly to keep the adrenaline flowing. Then, as their HP wears down, have the boss adapt new tactics and gradually up the challenge.

Maybe you don't care and just want to let the players get by the fight so they can watch the rest of the cutscene? Or maybe you want to give players the satisfaction of beating a really hard enemy? If they fail once or twice of ten times, tough. What are your thoughts?

author=LouisCyphre

• Have the boss attack only occasionally, but for massive damage. Bonus points for dealing a percent of the party's maximum health (say, 80%). This makes the player feel the pressure of the big, impending hit, without actually being in danger of a loss due to the periods to heal in between. Most memorably, this is the precise attack pattern of Magus of Chrono Trigger

I like this approach. I remember the fight with Magus as being really tough and tense, but now that I know this approach was used, I was making it more tough and tense than it really was.

It's important to re-evaluate your pacing around the battle, as well. Why is there a long cutscene before the fight? Offload some of that plot into the fight itself. Banter with the boss every 10% HP, every few turns, or whatever suits your game. Build hype as the battle progresses and you can circumvent a large amount of the issue. Do you have your cutscene before the boss because your game needs one, or just because "that's how things are done?"

Good point. While it's best not to infodump, sometimes a lengthy scene is required. If you've played Tales of Symphonia, there's a decently long cutscene before the third Yggdrasil fight, including another boss fight. But stuff happens in that scene, stuff that couldn't have occurred at any other point in the story. And if you lose to either Yggdrasil or the prior boss, then you have to go through that all again.

It didn't help that there was a save point right before that fight that made it impossible to go back and level up if you needed to, but that's beside the point.

author=LightningLord2
Switch out the phases - make the first part of the boss the real battle and the cutscene/hype thing in the second. Like fighting Sephiroth for real in his one-winged angel form and finishing him in style after the actual battle is over.

Hm... That would give hype back to the player after the main fight, but until then, wouldn't it be a slog for the player? Say you lost to Safer Sephiorth. That means you have to go back through those scenes again, including the other two fights, just to get another shot at Sephiroth again. That would be rather frustrating, though I'd agree that finishing him off in style would certainly be worth that frustration.

author=CashmereCat

author=LockeZ
Honestly, I don't think dying and redoing the fight several times kills the pacing at all. I think it just creates a different type of build-up for the fight - one created by the gameplay instead of by the cut scene. It adds even more hype to your victory.

I agree, but I think the point is not that you have to re-do the fight. The point is that you have re-watch the cutscene, which, if it's especially long, would get annoying if all you want to do is defeat the boss after it.

It's both. You have to redo the fight and rewatch the cutscene.

Dying several times wouldn't kill the pacing if that's how the game was designed. Take the Souls games. They're designed with lots of death in mind, so the game doesn't bother with giving you lengthy cutscenes of character development and hype. If you were saddled with scenes that rival FFXIII at length and frequency at the beginning of every boss fight, that'd wear down the player and would probably make them quit the game.

Yeah, that's a bit of a strawman, but the idea is there.

author=Rine
I think skipping the cutscene is pretty much a requirement nowadays for most modern games. Unless the cutscene is extremely short, you should be able to skip it before a boss fight.

I'd take it a step further and allow players to just start at the beginning of a battle if they lose, not just a game over. You'll lose some hype, but being able to do that would do wonders to pacing.

Hype-wise, it is extremely hard to balance boss difficulty as challenging, and yet not frustrating. The absolute best boss battles are hard, but you can struggle through them and beat them the first time if you are adequately prepared. The worst design is trial and error, where you have to die to the boss before you know how to kill them. It tends to break the suspension of disbelief, after all, if you couldn't possibly know that the boss will do that one attack without warning and kill half your team, how would your characters?

There's quite a few variables that would make this design work or not. If there was a save point just before the fight, and said save point fully heals the party, it's certainly reasonable to allow a boss to open the fight with an attack that does a large amount of damage to the party, provided that move had a rather large cooldown so it wasn't used too frequently.

Bosses predicated on obvious clues found previously fit better for that. Kari in the Volcano in FF1 is an obvious example. You go through an area full of fire enemies, a lot of them physically strong as well, boss is a fire enemy who is also physically strong, and takes ice damage. Even having NPCs be able to give hints as to enemies weaknesses, through legends and the like, actually build up hype for the fight ("The elder dragon Lao-tung is god of wind and lightning. Legends say he was slain by an archer who called up the power of the earth to strike him down" makes you more excited for a boss fight than "Oh, here's a random lightning dragon boss" and preps you as well), and give the players an ability to prepare, without having to redo. That's actually the big problem with the final boss in FFIV...you get no preparation for what he does, and what he does is kinda ridiculous. (Oh, that black mage/summoner you had to bring along? Yeah, she's on frigging healing duty because she gets counter-attacked all the time)

What about bosses without any real elemental affinity? How would you give context clues for that?

author=Craze
i think the biggest things here are a reliance on using cutscenes to tell a story and battle systems/boss designs that are too tough to deal with on a moment's notice. when your game relies on "ooh the boss hits for a lot of aoe damage once a turn!" then you should probably start making fun bosses instead of making the player rewatch a scene because you can't design fights or balance a game

Makes sense. It's a case-by-case basis.

author=Crystalgate
Generally, I would recommend against trying something like Final Fantasy IV Zeromus. The more games there are that have already tied this, the harder it is to hype the player. The problems will however remain even if you got no benefit from the cutscenes.

Well, Zeromus was just an example. FFIV already commits a cardinal sin by adding in a final boss that just made it's first appearance right at that moment after snuffing out a different villain just before, so quite a bit of hype was already lost.

Ideally, you want to build the hype prior to the fight. You have like the whole game minus the ending to do it. However, it is alright to build hype shortly before the last fight or during it if you can do so without wasting time.

Depends on the story. If you've played Silent Hill 2, the story does quite a bit more than present an evil in front of you and builds tension and expectation about that one, singular evil.

author=Rine
@Red_Nova: The problem with just starting the battle over is it might prevent you from prepping for it. Probably best to have two options on game over, retry and load from save.

If you do what the Tales games do and put players back into the main menu to reconfigure your party/equipment/strategy, then immediately put you back into the beginning of the fight, then a lot of time and tedium is skipped and keeps the hype high.

If it's bad enough that you have to leave the area to level up the party, then no solution would be adequate to keep the hype high, because it's gone.

For bosses without elemental affinities, you can still give clues on how to counteract certain abilities, or clue people in to weaknesses to certain status effects. "The demon doesn't like loud noises, it makes them stagger." IE, use sonic attacks to counter its charging attacks. Similar clues can be given to tell that an enemy is particularly weak to poison, or jump attacks, etc. You can even give it in battle, if a character knows them. An turns into an alternate form, and someone goes "Wait, don't attack!".

Yeah, that makes sense.