Boss battles have such historic and nostalgic context for so many gamers. Just think back to the games you grew up with. Whether it was taking down Bowser in the last castle, or fighting some floating hands in 80% of the games in the early 90’s, that final battle was always an epic achievement and something that you could brag to your friends about upon completing. However, that was back when the goal of beating a game was to simply beat the game. It was a challenge back then, with little story to be told. The boss fight represented the hardest of those challenges, and made sense in that context.

Moving to modern games, boss battles don’t seem to fit in nearly as well with the stories of a lot of newer games. It would be strange to go through an entire game, fighting through a war-torn country, only to end the game fighting a giant robot, or some sort of mutated terrorist. And yes, there are still a ton of games out there with alien enemies or something supernatural, but even with those games, it doesn’t always make sense. If you’ve been chasing a fairly normal, albeit slightly larger, alien for an entire game, and in the end he transforms into a three-story beast, you’re going to call bullshit on the game and be annoyed. Even a game such as Arkham Asylum elicited more than a few complaints when it had you fighting a larger-than-life joker at the end…and that’s a comic book universe.

The other aspect where boss battles just don’t fit is oftentimes in the gameplay style. If you’ve been going through corridors, taking cover, and shooting with strategy in mind, then unloading onto a boss as you run around an open space feels out of place. There are two examples that come to mind to illustrate this. Uncharted 2 was a game that had you platforming, taking cover, and going through epic set pieces. The boss battle pits you against one old guy who runs around a giant room dropping grenades at you. It offers none of the gameplay styles that were featured in the rest of the game. The second title that is guilty of this is the first BioShock. While I didn’t hate this boss fight as much as everybody else seemed to, I can understand why people disliked it. Through the entire game, you are exploring Rapture, conserving ammo, and using your plasmids to their maximum potential. The boss battle is a souped up version of the man that has been controlling you the entire game that constantly bull rushes you while you dodge and shoot. It just felt different than everything else you had done previously, and didn’t make any sense.

So, where do we go from here? There are a couple of games that have paved the way to a new type of boss battle, which is more in the form of a final sequence that is capped off with one last action. Both Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and Modern Warfare 2 did just that. I won’t talk about each one because they do similar things, but here is an overview of how they work. At the last level of the game, you have finally caught up to the antagonist that you’ve been chasing the entire time. You go through the level just like any other, by shooting your way through enemies in pursuit of your objective. In each game, something happens to your character and you find yourself on the ground. With your last ounce of energy, you grab a weapon, in slow motion, and take down the enemy with one final shot. Game over.

It works for a couple of reasons. The first is that it is something that fits into the gameplay style of the rest of the game. You’re not doing anything that came out of left field, they just build the importance of it by having you chasing down the main antagonist. The other element that helps it, and this may seem cheesy but I swear it works, is the slow motion. It indicates that this is truly important and gives you that time to savor the moment.  Now, I don’t want to see every game end with a chase and slow motion kill-shot, but this is just one possibility.

The other game that comes to mind is BioShock 2. I figured I would use a game in the same series to show how they improved the ending encounter. The final sequence of the game is actually a series of larger battles. The first has you chasing down another Big Daddy, which I won’t spoil exactly who you are chasing, but it makes sense. This particular type of Big Daddy isn’t any more powerful than the ones you have fought previously, and it feels like an encounter that would exist in this world. After that, you fight your way to your escape and run into another group of enemies. Now, you’re not exactly there to fight them, they are just in the way of your objective. But, again, these aren’t enemies that you haven’t seen before. They all exist in the universe and make sense. Once you have completed your objective, which is quite simple, the game is over. Instead of throwing a giant boss at you, the developers created an escalated situation to heighten the tension and build to the climax.

In both of the examples I gave, the developer gave credit to the intelligence of the audience. They understand that they don’t have to throw a monster the size of a building at you to indicate the ending of a game. Gamers will understand the importance of a sequence if it seems like the logical ending to the story. That’s what more developers need to do.

Now, I will agree that boss battles do have their place in certain games. These are often games that are built more to be a challenge rather than to tell a story. Platinum Games is a company that has built itself upon games just like this, and their boss battles are ones that get people talking. It’s fine to create a game with that old-school design style, developers just shouldn’t feel like they have to shoehorn it into a game driven by narrative.

While I’m sure that boss battles will still pop up from time to time in games where they shouldn’t, I do feel like developers are starting to realize that it has become an antiquated design. Hopefully, as time goes on and stories evolve in complexity, boss encounters in narratives will become a thing of the past. When that day comes, I don’t need to see that body to be able to move on because I will have already accepted it.

via Joystiq

For those of you who still haven’t played developer Quantic Dream’s Indigo Prophecy, Lucas Kane is one the main characters of the game. What I have just described to you is a scene that takes place very early in the game. However, what makes this scene so special is the fact that I made him do all of that. After receiving only the smallest of cues – the quick inner-monologue line that Lucas just wanted to go about his day – I made him go to the bathroom. I made him take a shower. I made him stop and look in the mirror. My question is simply, why? I could have just as easily gone straight to the closet, put on some clothes and been done with it. Why was I so willing to dwell in the mundane tasks of everyday life in a medium that, for the most part, is meant to take us out of all this banality? But at that moment, I was living the life of this man. I made him shower because he was going to work. I made him go the bathroom because when you wake up you have to pee. Lucas was real, the immersion was real and I was swimming in it…the immersion, not the pee. This is the magic of Indigo Prophecy.

Ewwww, yeah…I’m gonna need to wash my hands after this.

In order to uncover some answers as to how Quantic Dream is able to accomplish this feat, let’s look at some other games that have also attempted to achieve greater immersion through “real life” tasks with less than favorable results.

The first game that sprang to mind when I was trying to figure out why I was completely fine with making sure Lucas took the time to wash his hands and blow dry them after using the bathroom was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Here is a game that goes out of its way to include things like working out, eating, and getting a hair cut into the gameplay in order to create some sort of connection between the player and the character, and yet it fails so hard. The problem here is that it tries too hard. GTA:SA makes some of these acts an important part of the overall gameplay mechanics and, in doing so, makes them feel like a chore. If your character eats and doesn’t work out, he gets fat and slow. Don’t eat enough, and he gets skinny. It becomes something you feel like you have to do because it helps build the character’s stamina and expands his move set rather than something you choose to do because of honest immersion.

The other, and more important, reason I feel it doesn’t work is because the system doesn’t behave realistically relative to the time elapsed. You can make your character fat, ripped or skinny in such a small amount of time relative to any sense of real time passage in the game. Again, this just serves to highlight these things as game mechanics rather than something that psychologically or emotionally connects the player to the character. The eating and the exercising are about reaching the end goal of having a character with the player’s desired stats. It’s not about being in the moment of eating or exercising. And that is what Indigo Prophecy is about, sharing the moment with these characters and existing in the same reality of time that they do.

Another way that other games try to add bits of immersion is through available interactions with random objects throughout the game’s world. The game that did this most recently was BioShock 2. As I lumbered around Rapture as Subject Delta, I noticed that I had the ability to turn on water faucets. Why? Why did the developers find it necessary to make the sinks work? There wasn’t much else in the world that I could play with. We’ve seen this in plenty of games. Doors open. Toilets flush. Phones ring. But for what? These do not help immerse the player in the world because they are exactly the way I described them, random. They have no meaning or reason to exist in the narrative of the game. They serve no purpose. Through the use of a meter that displays your character’s mood, Indigo Prophecy gives purpose to having them use the restroom, turn on some music or get a glass of water. Even the actions that don’t have a direct impact on the character’s mood still seem to make sense due to the simple narrative implications of their everyday life. Making a character wash their hands after using the bathroom doesn’t elevate their mood, but it makes sense in the situation because it’s what I would do in the real world.

Indigo Prophecy’s greatest trick is to blanket the player with a feeling of connectedness to all of the main characters. The presentation of the narrative plays the biggest role in this feeling and helps foster the player’s participation in these mundane tasks. Here’s what I mean. Lucas wakes up in a trance and finds himself in a bathroom stall. He murders a man, has some visions and blacks out. He had no control over his actions. As a player, I was the mercy of the director’s whims had no control since this was all presented in the form of a cut-scene. Emotionally, the player is instantly on a level playing field with Lucas due to the shared helplessness of that experience. While playing as Carla or Tyler, the two cops charged with finding Lucas, you also share the emotional gravity of the situation because just as they were thrust into the case, you are thrust into the situation of solving the murder you just saw yourself commit. You don’t have the choice to not play these parts; it’s what the director wants.

You’ve probably caught on by now that one of the biggest factors at work here is the manipulation of control for both the characters and player. Control is constantly being taken away from the characters and then given back bits at a time. Events are going to play out one way or another. As a player, you feel this lack of control just as the characters do, and it will effectively alter your mood and make you want to participate in as many actions as you have control over as possible. Enter the mundane.

It seems to me that it’s no coincidence that the game’s mood meter uses words like stressed, anxious and depressed to describe the character’s mental state throughout the game. Anyone who has chronically suffered from anxiety or depression can tell you that sometimes when the weight of their depression is at a paralyzing apex, it’s the most menial of tasks that can feel like the largest victories. Getting out of bed, brushing your teeth, doing some laundry; all these are minor things that a person has control over and can participate in when everything else seems out of control. Indigo Prophecy’s narrative reflects that by putting these characters in an extraordinary situation that they have little control over and telling them to continue to live their lives. You as the player have to live it with them, and when you get those fleeting moments of control, that few seconds to go to the bathroom or to dry your hands, you will take them. And what’s more incredible, you will enjoy taking them. Indigo Prophecy proves that you don’t need to force the player into some gimmicky gameplay mechanics or create the illusion of a real world with running faucets and flushing toilets. You just have to set the mood.

The two games that really caught my attention on this subject are high profile sequels: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and Bioshock 2: Sea of Dreams. The original installments were single-player games driven by wonderfully developed narratives. Bioshock hit the mark in its attempt to drop players into the middle of Rapture and the mysteries within it while Uncharted delivered the experience of living through an Indiana Jones-esque adventure flick. Both games triumphed in championing the notion that games could be taken seriously as a legitimate narrative medium. Then the sequels were announced, followed by the announcement that each would feature an online versus component. This lead to the simple question: why? What is the purpose of shoehorning a versus mode into a franchise that was founded on story? Furthermore, who is the addition of these modes catering to?

Looking at the question of why these modes were added to the sequels, the most obvious conclusion is that they exist to give the player more value and to keep them interested in the game. Not to mention, when Bioshock was released, one of the major, albeit unfair, criticisms hurled in its direction was a lack of multiplayer. The critics leveling those complaints are the ones that, I attest, are doing nothing but holding the medium back as a true narrative art form. What would be the point of having a versus mode in Bioshock? Just to show that gamers are a juvenile lot that salivate at every chance to shoot at one another? How can we say that we are more than childish, no-attention-span-having, hyper-barbaric fantasy seekers when games that finally start to push at the “games as art” barrier are deducted points for not including shoot-everything-that-moves-mode? Oh, but this time we get to do it in an underwater city. Seriously, grow the fuck up. A game’s existence as a shooter does not mandate a versus mode any more than my existence as a male mandates that I grow a beard, no matter how manly beards may be. The games are meant to tell a story. Including a versus mode in Bioshock makes as much sense as including a versus mode in a game like Assassin’s Creed, but I don’t recall the community outcry for “Altair-online-super-stabby-slayer-mode.”

Speaking briefly on the idea of perceived value, who is really getting value from creating these new modes? Last week we saw that only about a third of all Xbox Live users even have a Gold membership. That is only a third of the 31 million Xbox 360 owners who even have the ability to utilize these features. Why is there such a rush to accommodate an overwhelming minority in the gaming community? It was also stated that even in a franchise like Halo, who popularized console-based online multiplayer, the number of unique online players is fairly small when compared to the number of units sold. Gamers need to break free from the perception of getting more bang for their buck, especially when the added bang doesn’t get used. Additionally, developers’ willingness to alter a game’s purpose in order to meet the needs of the I-have-to-shoot-everything lowest common denominator only serves to further cement video games at the bottom of the artistic medium list.

Now that I’m done ranting, I have to admit that the public’s perception of gamers who love a good deathmatch is actually not even my main concern here. The aforementioned fear I have of including these modes into these games is the potential cost of including them. Of course, dollars and cents is not the cost to which I am referring. The real potential cost here is the risk of compromising portions of the narrative mode in order to accommodate the inclusion of the multiplayer portion.

We’ve all played our share of mediocre games that attempt to win players over with quantity rather than quality. Games like the newly released Wolfenstein or even John Woo’s Stranglehold. These are games that both attempted to include a compelling single player campaign as well as deliver a solid multiplayer experience. Sadly, they didn’t achieve either one, and both games faded into the bargain bin ether rather quickly. It would be a shame if Bioshock’s or Uncharted’s single-player campaigns took any sort of noticeable hits due to the development team having to worry about catering to the multiplayer minority, especially if the new modes only manage to generate as much excitement as the multiplayer portions in games like Wolfenstein or Stranglehold.  All of that extra work will have been for nothing, and in the end, the gamer is the one who loses the most.

As I said at the outset, this is mostly a “what if” sort of concern. After all, the pre-release reviews of Uncharted 2 seem to be glowing. For Bioshock, gamers still have a fairly lengthy wait to see how the new additions pan out. However, even if both games manage to blow away expectations in the campaign department, I can’t help but feel that unless the multiplayer modes really add something to the overall experience, I will be cursing them with every slight frame drop, control hiccup or texture pop-in I come across.  Finally, keep in mind that I love multiplayer as much as the next guy. I’ve spent many a night glued to Call of Duty and Gears of War. I’m also not saying that multiplayer is somehow inferior to single-player or that those who enjoy it are in any way beneath players who prefer a good story mode. Instead, just be aware of a game’s intent or purpose. There are certainly games out there whose foundations exemplify all things multiplayer, I’m just not sure a game based around the philosophy of Objectivism and the idea of control vs. free will is necessarily one of those games.