Week in Gaming: Ask a Dev: Why do we have a love / hate relationship with boss battles?

By Kate Gray

The ABCs of boss battles

I’m going to preface this with a confession: I really, really hate boss battles. They’re stressful and difficult and they make my thumbs hurt. Also, I’m not very good at them.

In games that give me the option to be aggressive or friendly, I’ll almost always go with the friendly option, because then I don’t have to worry about whether I can parry well (spoilers: I don’t think I’ve ever pulled off a successful parry in my life).

But there are dozens of developers out there (hundreds, even) who love boss battles enough to create entire games that focus almost exclusively on taking down oversized and overpowered bad guys.

Cuphead, Titan Souls, Shadow of the Colossus, Evolve – these all distill a game down into taking on a handful of really difficult dudes with very little princess-rescuing, chicken-herding and magical-triangle-collecting to keep you going in-between.

So why do people enjoy boss battles so much? Perhaps it’s that feeling of beating the odds, of taking on something much bigger than you and winning. Games usually position us as the someone at the centre of the universe with enough power to save it, but there’s a small moment of …read more

Source:: techradar.com – Gaming