Boss Story unrelated bosses

Discussion in 'NPCs and Creatures' started by LeMinotier, Jun 19, 2016.

  1. LeMinotier

    LeMinotier Poptop Tamer

    Fighting big badass monsters is something a lot of people seem to enjoy.

    I think the story-related quests and bosses are fun but kind of disjunct from the actual world you can manipulate and effect yourself.

    I would love to discover bosses on planets and see a revival of "boss building" mechanics like we had in previous versions.

    Super rare bosses that are tied to rare dungeons or minidungeons would add a lot to the exploration. I know something like this has been started with the mother poptop for example but you could take this a step further and make bosses harder to beat while requiring more strategies. I'm not talking about just big mobs but actual bosses you can find or summon on specific places using a specific item. Think Terraria here.

    Aside from discovering huge bosses you have to prepare for, I liked the "boss building"/summoning mechanic in the previous versions. It lets you implement a strategy using prebuilt terrain and lets you be prepared in the best fashion. This would push the creative/building aspect of the game further and would be an idea for endgame-progression or an end-game goal. Being clever about fighting clearly overpowered bosses is one of the core mechanics and strenghts of Terraria and you could easily implement this here again as well.

    This has been suggested before but I would like to bring this topic up once again as we approach 1.0. I am suggesting both, progression-unrelated and super-endgame-progression-related bosses that would exist solely to please players who like a challenge and like to access end game progression after or aside from finishing the main story line. When I mean challenging I think about bosses as well that seem really overpowered. Bosses you would have to be super clever to defeat.

    This could be part of an end-game related update past 1.0 but I would be more than pleased to see some bosses like that implemented already in 1.0 to give some players some endgame goal to strife for. Discovering and sharing strategies is fun for many people. Beating a boss that is really hard to kill and requires lots of planning and perfect execution is something players could enjoy. They seem to enjoy it in Dark Souls and Terraria.
     
    Last edited: Jun 19, 2016
    Jareix Cryvix likes this.
  2. Jareix Cryvix

    Jareix Cryvix The Waste of Time

    I'm all for it, but I think we'll have to wait for post 1.0 for that. Once they've got their engine totally finished, then they could focus on more on content and features. But once 1.0 is finished and they can start working more on content, I think more endgame bosses would definitely be a worthwhile investment. I mean, the game has nine bosses as it is, and they are great. Like, really great... Especially the story bosses... (I don't know which one to say is my favorite... I'm torn between the Kluex avatar, the cultist leader, and the big ape hologram...)
     
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  3. LeMinotier

    LeMinotier Poptop Tamer

    I do think that would be a post 1.0 update thing but maybe putting in like one secret boss already would be feasible.
    And you might want to put a spoiler alert in front of the listing of the already existing bosses.
     
  4. Ludovic

    Ludovic Giant Laser Beams

    Actually 1.0 already answers has non-story essentials with the move of the penguin bosses being turned from "essential" bosses to side-quests ones. Also stuff like Nuru's arena quests once she's in the outposts could qualify as a different and more restrained take on "bossfights" by pitting you against NPCs.

    Having fought mother poptop many times in the nightly when creating new characters though, I would be very much for "exploration-discovered" bosses within specialized pregenerated dungeon rooms found on exploration planets. It might also tie into a special type challenge doors too, possibly a variant that could be renamed "sealed doors" and might need to be powered with special items like the ancient gates which required 20 core fragments. And behind such doors might be a boss of one kind or another... maybe even an excuse to bring back procedural giant monsters as a concept and idea. Unlike challenge doors, those might even remain until the boss is defeated... or even actually remain there forever; so that if we go with the route of procedural giant monsters again, you could always fight again a favored monster if you want. On the other hand this might defeat the purpose of a "challenge" door if it becomes something one can "farm" repeatedly.

    As for summoned bosses... ehhhh.
    To be honest they originally amazed me when I first played Terraria.... until they very much stopped to. And a big part of that was the ability to purposedly summon them into an environment generally of your own choosing. I recall clearly the lenghts of platforms and scaffolds created purely to cheese out any mobility advantages we might have had against bosses to degrees that just removed the challenge and fun of fighting these bosses. There are reasons "boss farming" became such a term in Terraria and it ties a lot into the reasons I've very much grown to prefer Starbound's missions instances or "shielded" dungeons(as can even now be found during exploration as well).
     
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  5. LeMinotier

    LeMinotier Poptop Tamer

    This is what I originally thought of and I do think it would spice up exploration a lot. I do however think it would not be too great for the game if you would meet bosses you could not defeat while being equipped with gear of the current planet tier. You could argue that you would have to return at a later stage of pregression to defeat the boss but I don't think that suits the game well. So these kind of bosses would not be end-game-types of bosses.

    This is why I thought of summoned bosses, either summoned with certain items at a certain place or summoned with a special rare item.

    I do however think this "cheesing" and "exploitation" of the bosses is a fun part of Terraria. Some bosses are really, really hard to defeat unless you get creative and use the games building aspect to your advantage. The bosses were made in a way, you had to get creative. I think this is a great aspect of game and fun for many people. Fighting is tied to the rest of the game. If you just look up the perfect solution for every boss on wikis, well yeah, then you could argue, it takes away the fun, but not everyone plays that way. Some people like to write guides and come up with strategies, others like to improve upon them and others don't like that aspect and just follow them.

    The boss farming in Terraria comes from the fact that there are certain items only rarely dropped by bosses. The end-game progression in Terraria is based on boss and event farming but this doesn't have to be that way in Starbound. It could be enough to just defeat a boss once.

    I'm certainly not asking for a progression system like in Terraria. I think the story missions in Starbound are way superior and amazing as is. I am just asking for an additional aspect for end-game stuff where creative people can tinker with strategies to defeat seemingly overpowered bosses and write guides about it.

    Exploration bosses like the mother poptop are amazing as well and I hope for them as well, but serve a different purpose.
     
  6. Ludovic

    Ludovic Giant Laser Beams


    Personally "events bosses" feels like it would be a better alternative to "summon bosses". I always felt the early days of those were just an artefact of not having a mission system yet and I fear that it negatively impacted the game in being another link too much in common with similarities to Terraria. "Why play starbound if it's the same as Terraria?" was often an early criticism of the game.

    It might be my personal preference but it ultimately felt like having.... too much control over a "threat" one should normally have no reasons to. It could certainly be an idea for end/late-game stuff but I'm just wondering if different variants different than "use item to summon boss" might not be better; not only because of similarities to Terraria but also because of the limitations such bosses might suffer from unlike those met in environments handcrafted by the devs; there is a reason why on average Terraria's bosses were designed to ignore the environment as they all did. Because this is a game where the player can control the environment and thus the only way to work around that was to make bosses entirely bypass it.You can see if in the great majority of bosses, from the Eye of Cthullu, Skeletron and even the Wall of Flesh and that later was one of the more "unique" bosses of Terraria. Ultimately a lot of them basically just run in the pattern of "bypass environment as they try to headbutt the enemy" while including the occasional(environment-ignoring) ranged attack. There's still a lot of variation, but this is something I noticed a lot of Terraria bosses had in common.

    Which I believes is why Chucklefish really want to avoid especially as they stated in interview that they wanted to pattern bosses around the "concept of the boss room, as seen in megaman and similar games".
    To a degree, we can see the effect of that philosophy in the variety of bosses fought; from the immobile erchius horror which is a bit of a platforming challenge boss. The Floran boss itself is dependent on it's web for movement and I'm not even getting into the bossroom of the hylotl library dungeon mission(though technically their teleportation ability MIGHT be a way an encounter event boss similar to them may be able to bypass walls that players could setup).

    If we see a "non-bossroom" boss later, I believe it might be something like an event version of Dreadwing showing up to assault a colony, with the ability to damages environments as we had once seen in the original version of him before he was given his own bossroom. Thus... they'd have to feel like bosses who -can- feel affected by the environment and thus not "ignore" it while still giving them ways of dealing with it(Like Dreadwing's downward block-smashing attack) so players can't just wall themselves inside. Enemies that can "ignore the land" should continue being the exception, like the various phasing "ghosts"-style enemies and the Erchius Ghosts, rather than the norm.

    Even if the "worm bosses" from Terraria were more "unique" than others due to the fact they -needed- environments of physical foreground block to move, the fact remain that they were specifically defined ultimately by their ability to "ignore" such "physical" obstacles in the long run.

    But ultimately, for "optional bosses' I believes another way should be devised than "summon items". It truly felt too much like a Terraria-ism in terms of encountering bosses when this was how they originally were fought and too many sandbox games uses this already only to be subject to the same comparisons with Terraria's way of doing things overall.
     
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  7. LeMinotier

    LeMinotier Poptop Tamer

    Fair point and you might be right. I do however think that events players can't control are a bit of a hassle. They were annoying in Terraria after a while I thought and if a block-destroying boss would just show up at my colony I would be upset. So our middle-ground are bosses you can discover in generated dungeons, I guess :D.
     
  8. Ludovic

    Ludovic Giant Laser Beams

    To be honest they possibly would work best only if there were "prerequisite" before some of these "events" bosses could happen.
    For example "Penguin Pirates attacks" might only happen if a colony is large enough to make an enticing prey at all. By them it might have already been bolstered with multiple guards or defense turrets.

    Smilarly, an humanoid "bounty hunter" boss might only start stalking you if you triggered the proper event to get an "hit" called on you(perhaps having stolen an object of value or something of the like.... for example a "super-rare" avian tomb treasures might trigger the possibility of being chased by vengeful "temple avengers" units in repercussion for your theft as a sort of miniboss like random NPC encounter).
     
  9. Crixalis

    Crixalis Master Chief

    i would actually want to see "Planet Raids". Pretty much invasions like in Terraria. Maybe they can be story-related too!
    For exsample, if your colony has 5+ apex rebels, Miniknog soldiers will raid your planet! You will have to fight back, ofc.
     
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