Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General Bosses and cinematic events - Can it be improved?

Hello everyone, as I haven't seen much discussion on this subject I thought I would create a thread dedicated to "Boss" encounters and/or cinematic events in general.
One of my biggest gripes with DOS was the lack of cinematic combat sequences. Real climactic fights with cleverly (cinematically) scripted mechanics that would leave you truly impressed.
In DOS I saw the very basics of this here and there, we had a crab in a cavern that had some scripting going on where it channeled something from the water and spawned bubbles. We had the giant robot. We had the giant statues that walked slowly but crushed you in close combat...but is that really all that can be done? To be honest the final boss didnt feel cinematic or engaging at all.

*So, what exactly constitutes a boss battle?
*How can epic encounters be crafted for the Divinity's turn based combat?
*What are the main challenges and why did we not see much of this in DOS, or did we and Im just in the minority here?


For me personally I like scripted encounters with clear and UNIQUE mechanics for that specific encounter and hopefully several stages in the combat. Dramatic voice acting if it makes sense (this does a lot) and preferably unique music for encounters labelled "bosses".

Hopefully this can turn into a thread that provides the devs with some inspiration for DOS:2

By cinematic events did you mean cut-scenes? Because i personally really like cut-scenes.

Could be, but I was thinking in very general terms.
Events that in the way they are presented, carry a "cinematic feel" with them. This could be in-game cinematics/cut scenes as introductions to boss battles with a camera fly-over and a fitting voice line, but it could also be embedded in the gameplay during these events and/or bosses.

Maybe the easiest way is to give these events more reactive Components to them (such as voiced or obvious gameplay reactions to OUR spells and abilities during these events). Thats basically what I mean when I say Scripted bosses. Scripted to give a cinematic and organic impression.

I'm going to be pretty controversial here... but what I would like is...

No boss fights.

Yes, I went there. Arbitrary boss fights have always been a weak point in RPG's, and I dare you to find a fight that isn't complained about. Having to stick all challenge into one foe also really harms the possibilities of what you could do. Most then compensate that with "adds" but that's generally just a done-to-death miserable sollution that usually doesn't solve the issue.

So yeah, no bosses, just... encounters. Some of them stronger than others, but not specifically set up as bulle... ehm... sword-sponges.

For example the battle on the Graveyard with the Skeleton King and his follower was much more fun that the end-battle of Ceseal (did I remember it correct?) with just this large HP-bloated guy who send in his adds which could actually not join the combat.

Overall I can't say big boss-battles have been D:OS strongpoint, just look at the complains at the final battle, or the "season king" section etc.
So rather than spicing them up with cutscenes (which wont solve the underlying issue) I would be more for removing them and keep the cutscenes for other impressive moments. A fly-over of a bay you look at. An earthquake happening. A dragon fly-over. Anything.

Just my 2 cents.

The most interesting thing with boss fight is not the boss fight in itself - it's the fact it's a cheap but nonetheless working way of telling the player "ok, you have completed this section as far as the main story is involved, so now go back and try the road that just opened".
Sure, the mechanic is a bit obvious, but it's a real way to just let the players know they have reached a milestone. A big boss fight in a closed room.

Now, I tend to agree I don't remember the boss fights to be that epic nor that interesting. Actually, I remember Cyseal last fight as I was playing a stealth ranger and had to cheap-shot him while my pal was getting wrecked in melee. I had to lure the adds while at the same time being sure they couldn't attack me or I was dead, and... It wasn't very fun.
But, we knew we were done with Cyseal. A few loose ends to tie, but now we were actually, really done. Milestone.

I'm pretty sure they fixed that a long long long time ago.

Bosses are actually very memorable and fun if done right, but you have to take some things in consideration:

1. They are a final exam of sorts. They should challenge you on the things you have learned up to now. I remember all the bosses around Cyseal and some after that, but they weren't all that challenging, maybe except the blob monster at the Lighthouse. I remember dying a few times only to him (and to the big bad in the church, but he was cheap, I will get to him later) legitimately and that was great. They should be challenging in general.

OK, so, these are actually the last examples I left to think up; and me and a friend of mine have been banging our heads against a wall for half an hour trying to think up any truly challenging bosses in an RPG. Turns out it's hard to find examples. We went through Baldur's Gate 2, DA:O, the FF games, NWN, MotB, Dark Souls and many other RPGs and we had a counter to any bosses we thought up. The main problem is that all bosses boil down to the simple mechanics it uses and working around that. You might say "But Dark Souls was really challenging!" and I'd say that it wasn't. It was mostly trial and error and keeping concentration for half an hour when you found out what kind of actions you should repeat. Kangaxx in Baldur's Gate 2 came up often and I don't know whether he belongs here or in the cheap section. His imprisonment was the problem and you didn't have access to freedom spells at that time. He also had access to the same overpowered spells you had, but that was fine. That leads me to this conclusion - the hardest bosses in games are other players. It doesn't necessarily mean PvP, dungeon master mode is an example. That is the only way for truly reactive bosses who can challenge you without feeling any artificiality and triviality. You can create the illusion of challenge like many RPGs and, without a truly spectacular AI rivaling human intelligence, that is your only option. I'm sorry that I can't provide anything more concrete than this, but that is how it is. That's not necessarily a bad thing mind you, ALL games against an AI are like this and there is nothing wrong with that. There are a plethora of good examples of this type of challenge in Baldur's Gate 2 alone.

2. They aren't random mooks with 10x the hp bar. They should be set up properly in the lore, background and/or foreground information. Having them randomly appear out of nowhere and being important just because they have a name is really contrived and jarring. Working them into the narrative is a difficult, but rewarding task. A great example are the bosses in the first Deus Ex, you knew *exactly* who they are and why they want to kill you. Not going to spoil them.

3. They shouldn't cheat. I.e. They shouldn't be able to break the game's rules or be completely different than anything else to the point of thinking whether it's a programming error *cough* Adra Dragon in PoE *cough*. They may have unique abilities and spells, but those should be within the game's context. They shouldn't have instant death spells if nothing else in the game has them. Examples include bosses who can cast more spells per round than is allowed, bosses who have unlimited movement points etc.

4. They shouldn't be cheap. This is where I talk about the big bad beneath the church in Cyseal. He had an aoe meteor strike kind of spell that he randomly cast at the start of the combat which wiped the whole party. There is no way to counter this if he casts it in the first round because he ALWAYS had first initiative. If he didn't cast it then you simply scattered your party and it wasn't that big of a problem. They also shouldn't have a bajillion hp which takes 1 hour to chip away. JRPG bosses are notorious for this. The Weapons in FF7 for example.

5. They should be rewarding. This is the most nebulous and hard to define point. It partains to the context of the boss and is a combination of the other 4. You get a sense of accomplishment when you overcome them. Either in a lore sense or purely mechanical or even a great unique item. Dragons in Baldur's Gate 2 are a good example. Though any challenging or important boss can fit.

That's basically it. It isn't easy, but nothing good in this life is. I forgot to talk about adds, but that's mainly because I don't have a problem with them. As long as they aren't annoying and gratuitous it adds a layer of complexity which is a welcome addition.

Mostly agree with Lacrymas, but I think you're missing a key component. They should be fun! And ultimately, that's the best thing to keep in mind in turn-based fights in general. It is insanely hard to design legitimately challenging fights in a turn-based RPG, with how difficult AIs are too design, so it's probably just best to focus on making bosses unique, interesting, and exciting. Sure, they should be harder than the average fight, but entertainment is the ultimate goal in these sort of things anyway. I think boss fights should vaguely feel like a puzzle with three or four viable solutions. Not like some ridiculously obscure solution, but it should make the player feel clever for defeating the boss.

I think King Boreas in D:OS was a pretty good boss fight. I found him reasonably challenging, and the elements rotating around the room were cool, and the elemental adds felt pertinent. Maybe he was slightly cheap with his resists, but you could get rid of them by destroying the totems. There was some build up to him, though maybe there could've been a bit more. His castle was neat and the rewards were relatively decent.

I also liked the Braccus fight. It was like, "Oh what! I have to fight all these other bosses again?!" Pretty easy to abuse the door chokepoint, and you could teleport the other bosses into the fire boss's lava death spill, but if those were fixed, I think it'd be a pretty good fight. Maybe could've been better loot though. His axe was good I guess, but I think there should've been an item that anyone could use.

Yeah, Boreas was a pretty good boss.

My biggest complaint with Boreas was that he was pretty much a "No attack magic allowed" boss unless you took out the totems, but doing so took a very long time, and after all that, it only removed three of his resistances, and did nothing for his offensive or summoning capabilities, which felt vaguely unsatisfying.

My first sentence was that they can be memorable and fun :p I mostly concentrated on the mechanical aspects and neglected the aesthetic and creative ones. Of course they should be fun and creative, with interesting mechanics and cool visuals and all that jazz :p There is another type of boss battle that I neglected as well, because of being too focused on the mechanics. Dialogue fights. Think Planescape Torment. There was a way to fail conversations in that game if you didn't pay attention and there was a way to talk yourself out of some bosses. Even the final boss. This is the hardest thing to do because it relies very heavily on good writing and all concepts that entails.

That's quite right, yes.
Ironically, it's in MMOs like World of Warcraft or Wildstar that I found bosses matching that description, to some extent.
I say to some extent, because due to the nature of MMOs, you can find strategies to beat bosses on the internet and sometime completely miss that the game tried to prepare you all along. And sometimes, instead of thinking "hey the game prepared me to fight this boss, I saw those mechanics before!", you'd instead think "hey this quest is a training for boss X".
Anyway, thanks to quest lines, dungeons theme, or overall knowledge of the lore or ingame mechanics, you can enter a boss room and immediately get that he will do this, probably will do that, may enter a second phase where X happens, etc.
And when you're right, it's kind of very satisfying.

About bosses, I want to say that it can be frustrating if they give you a reward that you would need before the boss fight.

example:
- The ultimate super hard boss drops the ultimate weapon. You do not need it any more because you already beat the hardest enemy with what you have. ( I talk about single player games, not MMO where you do the same boss every week to farm equipment)
- The only dragon in the game drops the dragonslayer, a sword that is good against dragons.

In those cases it would be better to do it like monkey island. The boss drops a shirt that says: "I have beaten the hardest boss in the world and all I got was this lousy shirt."

In case of the dragon, it would be better if you find the sword by a dragon cult. The cultists kill dragon hunters and hide their equipment to protect the dragon. Those cultists have their lair far away from the dragon. If a dragon hunter finds and defeats the cultists, he could use the sword against the dragon next door otherwise.

Funny you should mention MMOs. Me and the aforementioned friend of mine had a lot of MMO bosses in our minds when we were thinking challenging bosses. I didn't mention them because I don't know how well that can translate into a single player experience. MMO bosses not only challenge you mechanically, but also individually and as a group. That is a hard dynamic to transpose into a single player game. They have mechanics that are actually challenging to overcome and don't feel contrived (especially some bosses in WoW). It still is a predetermined script you work around but it has enough of a bite to not matter so much and it feels great to kill a boss. Though D:OS 1 has and D:OS 2 will have a co-op experience, so I say go nuts. Make optional bosses as hard as you possibly can (given my points of consideration of course).

Lots of good thoughts around here.
I personally go with Hassat Hunter here. I would myself like to not have any boss at all. There are other ways to do difficulty peak.
On the other hand, I'm also with Dr Koin saying that bosses are pretty often the end of a part/zone/chapter. Which is great. You know as a player, when killing a boss that you achieved something in the game, progression, or something like this.
The bosses I like in game usually is, like Lacrymas said, the ones who test the stuff you learned in the zone.
For me that was not the case in D:OS, it was mostly big bad dude/dudette who where here to punch you in the face, sometimes cool, sometimes cheap. It's ok to some extend with the game because there's no way to exactly know how the player will spec their characters. In D:OS you can know, to some extend, which skill the player might have but that's still a lot variables.
It's not like Super Mario Bros or The Legend of Zelda where this is the most simple form of Rational Game Design. In this particular level you give this power to the player, he learn all the way through the level how to use it and then the boss is there to challenge him.
Designing boss is a great challenge. Especially designing FUN bosses. Because designing nasty annoying boss is pretty easy. But in the end, they are not just fun. We could go to Darksoul on that matter, bosses destroying you, that are fun. I guess that's another subject, haha.

In MMOs and a few others games, what's interesting is when encounters start involving elements of decor in the actual strategy of the boss. Like forcing them to bullcharge in the wall, attacking totems in the right order, having a wall or the ceiling or the floor collapse unto/under him, forcing him into an electrified pool, etc. A multifloor fight may even be possible in DoS despite the top view, just fall with the boss and maybe suffer some light crushing damage.
In God of War 2, we fight two of the three sisters of fate : the fight essentially ends when we trap them into the mirror around the room by smashing them. They use those mirror to send us back in time where we have to ensure what happened then still happens.

The second kind of tactics not revolving around abilities or gear is targeting : you have to destruct parts of the boss ( whose appearance can change, ie armor crumbling, new parts emerging, etc ), or adds first/in order, or ( and this one is a dungeon boss from WoW, Jandice Barov, that they redesign some time ago ) attacking the right clone. In the WoW example, she splits into like a dozen or more clones that are clothed slightly differently from the original - that's how you can find her. Of course you can brute force and kill everyone.

Another example involving both room mechanics and targeting mechanics is Yogg Saron ( and C'thun too ) from WoW - simply put they "ate" the players who are then sent to another room where they have to fight to get out AND hurt the boss. The Lich King encounter also sucks players into his sword, and they have to fight the trapped souls in there to break free.
With 4 characters available, multi-planes battles may be a reality

Of course these are very basic examples. Games with the best boss fights I can remember are God of War(s), Darksiders wasn't bad either, Castlevania:Lords of Shadow/Shadow of the colossus ( since well, it's all about climbing giant monsters in both )... I'd tend to think it's harder for cRPG bosses to leave an impression as they often lack the theatricals from TPS or modern Beat'em'all, but there may be a little revolution at hand here...

That's the thing though, Action RPGs and Action games in general can get overly theatrical with the bosses. That's one of the main draws of the genre after all. Giant bosses and over-the-top fights can easily mask the script, kind of like orchestral music can mask a bad composer with its reliance on timbres and effects. If you take a step back you will see the artificiality of them. There is no strategy involved in ARPGs (not top-down Diablo style ARPGs, but Dark Souls style) and Action games, not really. Bosses there are puppets with the same attack patterns repeated over and over again. Some bosses can get fancy with 2 or 3 stages, but it's pretty much the same. RPG bosses can at least vary a little even with basic AI changing the boss' behavior in tandem with the player's actions. They can because the players have a lot of tools at their disposal and is feasible to expect players to use them. I tend to remember these bosses a lot more than in Action RPGs. The only ones from the top of my head are the sewer dragon (forgot the name), spider lady (same) and Capra Demon (cheap) from Dark Souls. From RPGs there are a lot. From BG2 - Firkraag, Yaga-Shura, Kangaxx, Demogorgon, Balthazar, all the dragons, Melissan, I can go on. I actually remember all the bosses around Cyseal, but I can't recall their names. Blob monster, giant crab, failed robot, evil sorceress, big bad under church, skeletal family etc. Diablo 2 - Blood Raven, Countess, THE Smith, Andariel, Radament, Summoner, Duriel, act 3 gets a bit fuzzy, but the Council and Mephisto, Izual, Diablo, act 5 no idea except Baal.

Do you know why I remember these bosses? Because of the context. Either they were so masterfully presented (lore, build up, set up, atmosphere, aesthetics etc.) or just fighting them ingrains them in my memory. Using all the tools at my disposal to overcome them. Do you know what I don't remember? Random mooks with no names. That's actually a jab at the people who suggested D:OS 2 not have any bosses. But it's also true. You can have a council-like fight instead of a single boss sometimes, and that would be great, but not having any bosses would remove the climactic points. Bosses don't only serve a gameplay function, but also an artistic one. If set up right they serve as focal points and add local climaxes which help with the pace of the game. You've all studied literature at one point and I'm sure your teachers have said something about narrative pacing and the wave-like tension it creates with downward and upward motion. That is how you keep the reader/watcher/player's attention and is a sign of good writing. That's the other main reason bosses exist in the first place apart from being a final exam.

I don't remember the names in D:OS because they were neither set up properly nor were they challenging. I remember their concepts because they were actually quite creative and fun with great memorable twists in them. That's not enough though, at least for me. MMO bosses are a completely different beast because the whole situation is different, the inclusion of other people is a critical element. You CAN draw inspiration from them, but you have to be able to extract the meaningful parts that can be used in a single player game and filter the garbage. Using the environment can add a different twist to a boss, sure, but with moderation.

I think D:OS can learn some things from Shadowrun returns. Both games have a similar combat system. I have read that they implemented a cover system in D:OS2 as well.


I have not played SSR Hong Kong yet. SSR is even more tactical than D:OS1 because you have more limited resources (only up to 3 weapons, 6 spells and 6 items per char, summons require an item or a weapon slot (drones), hacking requires a weapon slot, you have to reload weapons, improving your char with implants lowers magic power, . . . ). However, D:OS had its wondefull elemental system and world interaction as advantage.

I have played WoW for some time (and I am happy that I stopped playing). WoW had many interesting bosses. But I do not know how well you can transfer something from real time MMO to a turn based single player game. But I guess some things might give you an inspiration. I quit playing when the second raid tier of Mist of Pandaria came out and my favourite dungeon was Ulduar.

Yes, Ulduar was something to remember. I don't understand why a LOT of people hated it

While I'm aware that it's hard to translate beat'em'all or mmos mechanics to a tactical cRPG, I'm merely throwing things that I felt helped shape a fight into a fight to remember. The Jandice Barov fight seems reasonnably adaptable to something like DOS combat system, and try to get the player to really pay attention to what is happening.
Maybe throughout the chapter you could be chasing hints and clues on how the boss actually looks, trying to sort out what is myth and what is truth, so that you'd know what you're looking for when you step in the fight, as long as you were willing to play the game. Or else, the fight may be something really , really hard.

I dunno, it's just random things that may help tie the ongoing story to a boss fight, as well as make it more spectacular.

For me, the most critical thing about a plot-related boss fight IS whether the devs tie it back to the writing, characterisation, character relations, etc. Though they could mix that into the cinematic showdown. :p

I liked Ulduar because you selected the difficulty by your actions in the game world and not with the game options. This felt more immersive.

Here is an example of how this could be done in a single player RPG:
You have to kill a general in an army base. If you charge through the front door you will face the general and 4 groups of soldiers at once. This is very difficult but it can be done. If you do not want to fight the whole base at once you can do some things:
- Sneak into the base without being seen.
- Give fake orders to one group. They will leave the base. (You need to find some items to craft the fake orders.)
- Poison the food in the kitchen. One group will fall asleep. (You need poison and you have to enter the kitchen without being seen. They will not eat when they see an intruder messing with their food.)
- Deactivate the alarm. It will take longer until enemies find out whats going on. (you need to find the alarm and a deactivator without activating the alarm)
- The third group has their room behind the room of the general. If you attack him they will come at once. You can get to their room from the back door and start fighting them. The general and his group will will enter the room and join combat after 3 turns (1 turn if you did not deactivate the alarm).
When you do all these things, you have to fight only 2 groups and one of them will be weakened (or even dead if you are good) when the second one ( plus boss) arrive.

This means, if you want to have an easy fight you have to do lots of things. These things can go wrong if you are not careful. If you make a mistake you have to fight in a position where the enemy has an advantage.