-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
-
We have made minor adjustments to how the search bar works on ResetEra. You can read about the changes here.
Cory Barlog addresses the lack of boss fights in GOW
- Thread starter Jacob4815
- Start date
I didn't think their were too few, just that there was only one large scale fight that the series is known for. You can tell they are definitely saving some stuff for the sequel(s). They didn't want to blow their whole wad right away, and I'm cool with that.
Good to point this out because in God of War 2 he only kills one God and it wasn't a boss fight, it was by accident. So the idea the series is about killing Gods is just wrong.
I really enjoyed the Baldur fights and the Modi/Madni fight, they clearly know how to handle god fights and I have no doubt going forward they'll deliver awesome boss battles.
Hades, Hercules, and Chronos are three of my favorite boss battles of all time, and they're all in the same game. GoW III is my least favorite SSM GoW game but I'll be damned if it doesn't EASILY have the best boss fights in the series. Though I'd be lying if I said the giant scorpion fight wasn't terrible. I hope they can get back to that level with God of War 5.
The only time I felt even slightly disappointed was not fighting the huge thing lurking in the background in Hel.
If they somehow manage to keep the core combat system, up close camera etc the same and give me GoW3 bosses in the sequel that would be one way to easily outdo themselves and somehow make a game better than this version.
If they somehow manage to keep the core combat system, up close camera etc the same and give me GoW3 bosses in the sequel that would be one way to easily outdo themselves and somehow make a game better than this version.
The scorpion boss fight really did feel like filler. It was weird that they kept building up to it like it was going to be this awesome thing.
What does this mean though. Like do you know all about development pipelines and especially Santa Monica's pipeline and wondering why something would take so long? Or are you just genuinely curious on the process?
Games are really difficult to make, don't assume differently because everyone makes it look easy.
Sounds like bull shit. They had three bosses reskined multiple times during the game. Should definetly have been more variety.
The only way I would have wanted more boss fights would be in exchange for those rehashes of the same troll mid bosses. Other than that, I didn't need any more, game is long as is. And GOTY tier.
I kinda felt like i beat that boss already kinda in GOW Ancension. Ofcourse it was different still but it was really simular imo.
Edit: oops
Just... in general terms how could it possibly take one year at least for EVERY boss? I realize they are a ridiculously talented studio and they like to get things right, but 1-2 years per boss kinda blows my mind.
If they're designing bombastic boss fights like the ones with The Stranger then I imagine they take a long time to create. They are basically set pieces aren't they? Lots of iteration probably required to get them to look and play right.
Polyphony said it took 6 months to model a single car for GT5. It's not plausible that a huge boss could take a year when there are so many more systems involved in making a boss (eg: concept art, animation, gameplay mechanics)? SMS said just the axe recall mechanic took a long time to get perfected.
Ahh got ya.
It's a lot of work. Boss fights are generally self contained, so they have: their own unique cutscenes, generally a fully different AI system, an entirely new rigging settup, custom audio/sound direction, progression adjustments, most if not all is uniquely created (almost every moment). So a boss fight of this type can sometimes be every aspect of a game in one place, but all unique and independent from the rest of the game, while trying to balance it towards all player progress and the varying possibilities going into it. Plus being contained it can go through a ton of iterations and redesigns and scale is drastically changing so it requires those things to sync up as well.
This even goes for unique enemies, they can take a lot of work because of the amount of steps needed to integrate them into gameplay and balancing them/adjusting their AI. But they have the luxury of being reused, whereas bosses tend to be unique. And you are twisting your engine egregiously in ways it was never intended to be used like, especially when a character impacts an environment.
To put it simpler, a boss fight (mainly God of War style) has the potential to effect every single department, requiring each team to add something that is uniquely tied to only that fight, which then causes a lot of dependencies and waiting for other pieces to be put in place and balancing very specific parts across large teams.
This very rarely happens. Most teams are self-contained and generally try to have everything they need for what they're doing within the team. It'd be really inefficient if you had to go outside the team all the time.
It's less about it being a year per boss and more about him saying that for a big boss set piece, it requires 15-20 people to be working on it as a focus for about a year. Maybe it's an exaggeration, maybe not. It's not outlandish considering how much work goes into it and polishing it would take several iterations and various trial and error. So you have a team of artists, designers, and programmers working on developing and tuning just that one set piece, which means while they are doing that they can't work on anything else in the game. When you have a limited number of resources, you can only put so many people on so many things. With parallel development, five of such teams would be 100 people. That would just be for five boss setpieces. You still need hundreds working on the rest of the game. The hub world, the various quests, the main story areas, the optional areas, a combat team polishing and balancing the mechanics, etc.
My memory must have deceived me. He felt fo samey the last time we fought him. I was so disappointed when I found out that he was the final boss fight.
Was not expecting so many responses, lol. Thanks for bringing me up to speed. Still kinda blows my mind, but I understand what you're saying and why it can take so long. All the parts have to come together while the train is still moving per se, and every aspect of the game needs to be incorporated to make it work, implying a lot of people will have their hands on it.
Thanks for clarifying. It blows my mind how easy some people think game development is, specially on a AAA scale with a plethora of complex systems working all under the hood harmoniously to render something very simple even. And here we have people brushing off all the work that went into it as a mere 'reskin', implying the developers literally just used the same rigged animated body and just swapped the albedo colours and call it a different boss O-O
OP
OP
Reading this topic I have discovered that I'm not the only one thinking that the Helheim troll is the most disappointing thing of the game.
And it's more disappointing beacuse of that huge bird in the background. The expectations of a player in that moment went through the roof.
My real-world (software) product development experiences disagree with your statement. The amount of times my (actually, and proud of it!) efficient self-contained team needs to wait or switch to something else due to a specific change or feature having dependencies on external systems or competencies that we cannot influence cannot be understated. It's the nature of complex, interacting systems and teams.
I always remember this God of War 2 video around the 6:35 mark about Cory talking about how many people it took to make Kratos pull a column down, which is just a minute of gameplay.
Alrighty, I guess we've had different experiences then. I am not saying you would never go outside of a team for such things, but going outside frequently isn't something the teams I worked with found desirable, since it tended to slow down their work and hampered their autonomy. Normally if you needed some specialized knowledge and had to keep getting that from a member outside the team, it was typically the case that a specialist with that knowledge would become part of the team (maybe temporarily, maybe long term, depending) so that they could share and disseminate that knowledge, increasing team autonomy and allowing for smoother development day-to-day.
I've never said they go outside their team? I said they have to sync between departments; art, design, programming ect. for a specific unique task.
Who are you, where are you coming form with this information? You sound like you are coming from experience with business software or something.
Before I answer, can I get some confirmation that you won't continue to personally attack me? So far you've been nothing but accusatory and antagonistic.
I did not mean any of that negatively, you just keep taking an authoritarian stance on all these things which I find interesting. If you want to take it to PM though I'd respect that, don't mean to make you feel attacked.
That was not my intention, I was just stating my own experience. I apologize if it came off that way, and I did not mean to make you feel attacked either.
You are correct in that most of my personal experience is in business software (working for Dell), but I also know other Austin developers and product managers who have had similar experiences to my own, while working on games.
I'm tempted to say that I'd prefer if some of the resources spent making the campaign ~20 hours long should've been diverted into making more unique boss fights, but on the other hand I liked the vast majority of the content in the campaign. So I don't know. I'll just trust that, given the resources and time that they had, the current slate of bosses is the best they could realistically do. They certainly weren't a highlight of the game outside the Baldur fights, but those fights were two of the most spectacular bosses I've ever played - so if the cost of that was skimping on other bosses, then sure, I think they made the right choice.
