You should have a personal connection to the boss. You need to hate them before you kill them. There must be a reason why they attack you.
Yup. That's why you can remember bosses from bioware games. They always follow the same pattern, which is kinda sad, of a random sod ( you ) who is friend / student / mentor / you name it of what will actually be either the bid bad guy or the second to last big bad guy.
Jade Empire was the best example.
Death Hand is quite easy to remember, you meet it a few times, but the real boss behind him was someone very close to you character.
Mass Effect had
Saren, in 1. 2 had The
Ellusive Man. 3 had every Reapers, which is a bit more generic but by that time you didn't really need a specific villain.
Kotor had
Darth Malak and the "ellusive" Revan.
Other cRPG examples include
BG1's Sarevok and
BG2's Irenicus.
FO:New Vegas had
Benny, and Caesar ( although I always felt the last "boss" was quite crappy ). FO2 had Frank Horrigan...
Other genre also have a few very specific final boss you ( or well the character ) have a personnal connection with.
Try the ending of
God of War 3 - after 2 games, if not 3!, pursuing
Zeus, that ultimate sequence where you're just prompted to hit him in the face is nothing short of exhilarating, and you can go and go and go even when the screen turned red. You just
want him to die.
Resident Evil 3's very own
nemesis. Who didn't choose that ultimate prompt to fight him ?
Far Cry 3 heavily used
Vaas as promotion material, and the guy was really cool. Too bad they didn't offer him a decent ending and he turned out to be a mere lieutenant.
Borderlands 2's Handsome Jack, mocking you throught the entire game. You want him to die.
Blizzard had a gallery of really cool villains they mostly manage to let go to waste. Illidan and The Lich King are complete failures in WoW. Kerrigan is a complete faillure in SC2.
FF6 Kefka, FF7 Sephiroth.
List could go on, and on, entirely made up of villains that mattered in various games, various genres, even if the ultimate fight was a letdown.
A good villain is one you love to hate. He isn't something that pops out in your game during the last 5 minutes. You create it, you build tension, you make them do terrible things you want to stop them for.
A good villain in the Divinity universe is now of course Damian. But by naming DOS2 villain right there in the KS campaign, Larian already took a step in a possibly good direction. Now we should just have to run into him a few times rather than just hear about what he is doing "somewhere else".
about MMOs: This was my biggest problems with MMOs. Other players expect you to have a program that tell you what to do. In WOW it was DBM. It tells you: The boss will use skill X in 5 sec. Gather in the blue circle and interrupt spell Y. You also need a program that shows you the aggro list. The devs know that people use such programms and so the bosses get more and more complex (= you have to look at 3 timers at the same time at least) so everybody must have this programm.
Yes. This is because players have been getting more and more stupid and incapable of analyzing what is happening and why, as well as getting lazy. MMOs have become a huge idiocraty, sadly.. But that's because of the players rather than the game, although the game went out of his way to adapt to the player base rather than force THEM to adapt. Again, Blizzard, looking at you. The leader show the way, and WoW clearly destroyed the genre in its complexity. More things now, more things easily, more, more, more, or else players are unhappy and leave. *shrug* I guess by now we know that I'm really bitter at Blizzard =)
