'm a major fan and love all the Halo related games. One thing I’ve noticed is that there are not allot of boss battles in the previous games.
Fighting the scarab, and shooting Phantoms with the rail gun were fun, but (IMO) somewhat anti-climatic. (No offence) Facing off against 20 Elite generals, or a squad of Brute Chieftains can be hard if you charge in and try to go toe to toe, but if you use cover and take them out one-by-one, you can get past the hardest levels quite easily. (it takes a long time but whatever)
Halo ODST had a pretty sweet last level, Keep up with the Elephant and the asset, all the while getting shot and rammed by Covenant forces. I actually helped a few people get the achievement (and RECON) for this level because I had ALLOT of fun…but it still lacked something… Same thing with Halo 3’s last level racing on the crumbling ARK to the Pillar of Autumn was very exciting, but it got easier and easier the more times I did it.
Halo 2’s last level was AWESOME! fighting Tantaurus is exactly what I like to see! That fight was EPIC and (for me at least) almost unbeatable on Legendary. (Thanks Sgt. Johnson) Fighting the sentinels was also very fun and is the kind of thing I’m looking for. YEAH!
I don’t know what the plot or enemy will be in HALO 4, but I’m writing to ask (politely) that you include more boss characters and EPIC fights. Give us a battle against another Spartan, maybe a HUGE monstrosity that wants to peel John’s armor off and bite his head off, an indestructible machine that isn’t vulnerable to bullets and takes “thinking outside the box” to destroy or stop.
343 thank you for continuing this story… and thanks for reading.
The Heretic, Regret, Tartarus and Guilty 343 are ways to not do a Halo boss. The Engine Room and final door on the Library are good examples of how to handle one.
As for Scarabs being a boss in H3 or ODST, they need more than what they were. They were mini-bosses more so than bosses. They were missing that certain difficulty to make them BOSSes. Tartarus on the other hand… It’s that I can’t headshot him when his shields are down that I have a problem with. If it’s going to be a boss like Tartarus was, it shouldn’t be a character like Tartarus is. Same for the Heretic. It’s not that he did what he did, it’s that he was immune to headshots… WTF? Oh and the frail Prophet not dying from a pinky-flick from the Chief, least alone taking more than 1 punch to kill… eff gameplay reason for those 3. And for guilty… how the hell was that not a waste of a moment? The Sentinels in CE were much more enjoyable to face off against (leave his head, dispose of the rest…)
How an encounter is handled is how I view it as a boss or mini-boss encounter. I 'd like to see more aggression out of the encounters, both in AI response and in numbers (but not always in mixing ratios), that build to a crescendo of music and frantic gun-fire. Encounters have felt too clean since CE (as a whole) and the uniqueness of each seems to lessen. In CE, the playing field may have repeated itself on the way back, but the encounters always seem to have a uniqueness to them. Reach and ODST both captured that feeling more, don’t get me wrong, but it still felt as the music world would say “over produced.” Nah, it’s just 2 and 3 that are missing that uniqueness in diversity I desire in my campaigns. Reach could have used a bit more, but it left me wanting more, so it can’t be that bad.
What I don’t like about most boss battles (not only in Halo but video games in general) is that they very often defy well-established game mechanics. Example:
Rule #1: Any humanoid being in Halo that doesn’t have some form of shields, power armor, or protective headgear anymore or didn’t have it in the first place can be killed with a headshot. Rule #2: Rule #1 does not apply to Tartarus.
Something like that just sucks because it instantly tells you two not-so-flattering things about the developers:
They had no idea how to make this particular boss creature tougher than the rest except by (more or less blatantly) cheating.
They had no idea how to design the boss battle in a slightly more elaborate way and to provide other strategies for the player except “pump full of lead, stay alive in the meantime.”
And because of this, I prefer not to have bosses in a game at all.
Jesus… This would be the worst thing to possibly do with Halo 4.
Ever played Lost Planet? The boss battles in that game got extremely repetative. It’s like, “lets reuse the same mechanic on all the 20 or so ‘epic’ boss battles in the game, just shoot the legs.” I’d honestly be fine with Lost Planet if it only had 3 boss battles if they were all executed properly and were unique.
The thing I’m trying to say is they’re not needed. No game needs bosses. Sure, mini-bosses can help add variety, but when you go full out and have completely unrealistic rules for the boss engagement or overuse bosses it can make the gameplay tedious and not satisfying at all to the player. That said I’m SO glad that the Giant Chieftains from the Halo Reach PAX conference never made it into the game.
Halo is not meant to have bosses. It doesn’t really fit the feeling of the game. I mean, in Halo 2 you fight brutes along the way. They’re tough, but they can be dealt with with a core mechanic of the game like headshots. Then we get to fight Tartarus. For some limited reason he suddenly gains a super overshield that he never has in any of the cutscenes, not even when he tries to protect the Prophets from the Flood. It’s just BS. Then when you take out those shields he is somehow headshot-resistant. Before he was portrayed as a fairly regular Brute with high status, but then for some unknown reason he turns into a god for the last 10 minutes of the game.
That said I think Bungie did a great job with the Heretic Leader. It was at least a reasonable “boss” encounter, unlike Tartarus. Hopefully 343 takes heed of these things if they consider implementing bosses into Halo 4.
Another problem with boss battles is that they hardly make any sense. You slaughter your way through hordes of wimpy opponents and then you encounter a creature that’s more powerful than everything you fought in that level combined?
Boss monsters are an unfortunately still-not-forgotten remnant from the earlier days of video games. They’re a relic from the past, and there they should stay - in the past. They have no place in modern video games.
Please, no boss fights. I hate fighting Tartarus, no matter how much I shoot him, he just won’t die. It’s also (even canonically) unrealistic that Tartarus won’t die from multiple Needler explosions. I personally would much more like another Warthog run. Fighting Tartarus was boring because you were trapped into the control room and just had to shoot a big, invincible monkey. No offense, but boss fights in FPS suck.
> Please, no boss fights. I hate fighting Tartarus, no matter how much I shoot him, he just won’t die. It’s also (even canonically) unrealistic that Tartarus won’t die from multiple Needler explosions. I personally would much more like another Warthog run. Fighting Tartarus was boring because you were trapped into the control room and just had to shoot a big, invincible monkey. No offense, but boss fights in FPS suck.
I agree boss fights are bad for all the reasons stated , but done correctly can add to a story, a multi-tierd , multi-level boss fight vs Grave mind would be epic. It just has to be done against enemies where the “normal” rules don’t apply , chasing Tarterus up the engine core while pumping lead into him to drop his shields and then getting to deliver the head shot at the top would have been great, repeatedly getting your head pounded by an invincible monkey , not so much.
I prefer boss fights that mesh with the gameplay. To be doing the standard FPS style and suddenly deal with the “grab Bowser by the tail and swing him around to throw him into a bomb three times” mode of gameplay is not enjoyable. It just doesn’t work, the way that it has been done in Halo so far.
The best way to do it, with Halo, is through big machines. Scarabs, for example, make for a good boss fight (conceptually; I’ll grant that they were okay in Halo 3 but could’ve been great with some tweaks). I’d like to see huggarok-manned war machines; rare huggaroks that have learned to willingly take up arms. And occasionally new formations of lekgolo. We’ve only seen the maeglekgolo, for whatever reason; I’d like to see variations of that, or entirely new shapes. For example, wouldn’t it be cool if there was a kind of Hunter that had spikes instead of hands or cannons or shields, and booster jets on its feet to allow it to hop and dash forward quickly? A boss fight could be made out of that.
But I do not want to see “this guy is a brute, but with an INVINCIBILITY SHIELD” ever again. Completely shatters immersion.
the only actual boss battles in halo has been in Halo 2 with donkey kong(4got real name) and halo 3 (again i cant remember my mind is blank) so most likely there will be possably 1 if that
I am on the fence with this one. One hand, it’s cool if the bosses felt challenging, natural, and organic to the experience. Not just shoot the orange spots x amount of times and you win the fight no. Strafing, memorization, tactics, and very good understanding of a games mechanics and challenging that skill set is what makes a good boss fight.
Of course, modern boss fights aren’t like the good ones in the older gen consoles (NES/SNES/Genesis etc). It’s about making the experience accesible and easy for the player (skilled or not) to succeed. Having incredibly challenging, but fair boss fights would often fustrate players who couldn’t get past them and with open accessiblity, gamers can enjoy the game without being stuck. However, doing this means dumbing down the game and removing the challenge byimplementing easy to exploit weakspots, low durablity, and predicitable AI.
