Interesting Ideas for Boss Battles

Across the width of the sky, the valleys of the ocean, the ears of every man, woman and child on the earth - let it be known that most boss battles in video games are TERRIBLE.


The same template for a boss fight has existed for 25 years, and still exists today. You (usually) can't beat the boss in a straight-up fight, so you have to use cheap tactics and opportunistic strikes to take a boss down. This usually consists of either hiding or running around in circles until a weak point or something on the boss exposes itself and you can attack it.

For the most part, boss battles were accepted as an integral part of the game ever since gaming existed. People never complained about boss battles, they just thought "well, they're supposed to be the hardest part of the game!". While that's true, that doesn't mean it needs to be the same old crap regurgitated for every game out there. It seems like progressive design in boss battles really doesn't exist.

Ultimately, a boss battle is a story hinge. It says "This is the bad guy. The entire game you've spent your time fighting his lackeys up until you get a final showdown with him." There's many instances in which it's perfectly fine to have a boss battle, and if there is a boss battle at least make it interesting. Have that battle be a new dimension to the battle dynamics instead of the same old stuff with one powerful guy instead of a bunch of average/weak guys. Not to mention a lot of times it doesn't even make sense. Just because it's a boss doesn't mean it needs to have 10x the health of any other enemy in the game, especially when they all look the same. Even trying to explain why they have so much health is a waste of time.

I often wonder if a boss battle is even necessary. Take an example like Half-Life 2. There was no main antagonist, so I guess there's no reason for a boss? Their final battle was a ton of fun.. fight a bunch of striders that are wrecking buildings, and do it in a way that's never been done before up until that point in the game. Picture perfect way to end the game. In Halo:CE and Halo 3 the "final boss" is a driving stage, where you have to floor it amidst a crumbling environment and make it to the end without dying. That's plenty fun. No main antagonist means no final boss.

But why does the lack of an antagonist need to be a requirement to skip over a boss battle? Why can't the boss fight be a chase sequence, a series of strong waves to defend a point? Even if you need a boss for story's sake, make the boss fight an enjoyable one.


Here's a few ideas on how to improve some recent boss battles, for all of you interested:

Dragon Age: Origins - Final Boss

As it stands, their boss battle is to fight a huge dragon who knocks anybody next to it over whenever it attacks. This makes 2 of 3 classes virtually useless for this fight, and it makes most of your minions you can call into the fight also very worthless. The way you win is going over to a cannon and pressing A to load it, wait, press A to fire. You do that for about 3 minutes straight, occasionally stepping out of your spot to check it's health and make sure it's dying, and return. This is seriously one of the worst boss fights I've ever seen in my life.

The way you improve this fight is select your NPC army to send in there to fight the dragon while you stand off in the background at your cannons and fire away from a distance. In the meantime, you're being bombarded by regular-strength enemies and your remaining party members must protect you. But, instead of pressing A to fire and having it automatically hit the target, you should have to choose a plot where the shot should land in hopes that you hit the dragon but don't harm your army (and it can change so you'll need to predict where the dragon is moving in order to land shots). As time passes, the strength of the foes attacking you and your party will increase essentially setting a time limit on it. While the cannons reload, you can turn around and help your party fight off the enemies attacking you instead of just standing there.

To add even more strategy, have more than 1 cannon available so you can choose to assign a party member to a cannon in addition to yourself, to sacrifice defenses for more damage on the dragon. You could also experiment with different NPC armies and call in more than one at a time to optimize a stategy - for example your strong warriors would go attack the dragon while your archers would stand back and get shots on it while still being safe.


Prototype - Final Boss

As is, the boss battle in this game feels just like any other fight, except a few huge problems exist in this one. For one, there's one thing the boss can do that will instantly kill you if it hits you. The boss spreads these long tentacles in every direction and if they hit you, you're dead. Sometimes it's hard to tell if he's going to activate it because the entire battle you have to fight at a distance or you'll get wasted.

The first problem at all with this game is the utter chaos that takes over the game during any fight. You can run like 30 miles per hour and turn on a dime, so your character is hard to control sometimes, but any given fight will involve like 20-30 people, and they'll all shoot at you.

This might be a good game to have some sort of chase sequence or series of goals to accomplish to win the fight. Pull out your arsenal of different vehicles, weapons, abilities and whatever and make it a finale instead of a boss fight and a bunch of pukes around the place. The most fun thing in this game is using your abilities to tear through people, not chip away at a boss' health and frantically run around for 20 minutes only to die by something you can't control at all.

So, my proposed solution would be an arena fight where you're closed into a building.. you clear the building of guys, find the main antagonist hiding somewhere inside and chase him out of the building. He gets into a super-armored tank and goes rampaging through the city, so you need to disable his tank before he gets to a certain point. When you disable it (damage it enough) get out and chase him through the streets as he continues to head toward whatever objective it is that he needs to reach. When you get there, you have to protect the objective from a swarm of easy enemies that he calls in (basically, rampage for a good 5 or 6 minutes, slaughtering easy enemies because that's always a ton of fun), and then the final showdown where he shows up. You can have the option to fight him from a helicopter, tank, with guns or just with your abilities depending on what you prefer or what you find most effective. And instead of making him a lumbering, slow boss, make him a super fast boss with relatively low health (like 5 or 6 direct tank shots would kill him, but they'd be hard to land). And instead of making him have power moves, have him do something more fun like throw debris at you so you have a chance to dodge attacks, or even vary the attacks depending on what kind of method you're using to fight him.

There.. there's a great sequence of events to show the game off and give you both a fun and challenging battle to end the game on. The concept is much more fun than fighting him + 30 soldiers that are neutral and will fire at whatever they feel like, on a ship against a boss that can kill you in one hit.


Based on what I've seen over the years, I don't think people design a boss battle to be unique or achieve any sort of goal, other than "you vs him, small room.. fight each other". This has been going on for 25 years. Get off your butt and do something original.