Last week I talked about gimmicks and what makes a gimmick, and
sure I didn’t come to a perfectly good definition, I came close in my humble opinion. For review:
gim·mick [gim-ik]noun4. In the context of a video game boss, anything that changes the default rules of the game, either by granting a new contextual ability (or abilities), redefining what it means for a boss or player to be defeated, or defining a player-induced trigger that alters the currently established rules of combat.
So are gimmicks bad, good, or just a thing?
Often times I hear folks talk about gimmicks, there’s an
implied derision involved, as if they’re slightly distasteful. Why add extra
hoops to jump through during a fight when you should be able to defeat it with
just your class abilities?
Let’s go back to the list of “acceptable” non-gimmick
mechanics: damage, adds, floor trying to kill you, tank swaps, interrupts. For
the sake of argument I’ll leave splitting the raid off the list.
That’s an extremely small list. Now, they don’t really tell
you everything. A tank swap could be required because of a stacking debuff on
the tank (Halfus with less healing received, or a debuff that increases damage
taken from a specific ability like on Norushen, or a stacking DoT link Feng),
or the floor could be trying to kill you in any number of ways: circles,
squares, strips, concentric circles, different damage types, applying debuffs
or just plain killing you. Damage could be coming from debuffs to be dispelled,
or a stacking AoE, or just melee damage. Overall, there’s some play within
these mechanics.
But if that’s all the developers had to play with, raiding
would get very dull, very quick. Just look at LFR, for example. Most of the
mechanics, gimmick and non-gimmick alike, can be completely ignored. Which
doesn’t make for a very satisfying fight in my personal opinion. Sure, I enjoy
the occasional tank and spank to race the clock, but at the end of the day I’m
fighting bosses because I want to defeat those challenges set up.
Looking at Siege of Orgrimmar, the following fights don’t
have “gimmicks” in them: Dark Shaman (and that’s actually arguable because they
share a health pool). Big list, eh? And most people introduce a “gimmick” on
the fight by purposefully splitting the raid because it makes the mechanics
easier to deal with.
Why is it that there are so few fights without gimmicks? Because all of the fights without gimmicks have been fought already. Take a look at bosses in Vanilla and TBC. They’re extremely simple (excepting fights like Netherspite, or a few in Naxx 40 which do have gimmicks to them). In a world of Deadly Boss Mods, Recount, and logging, where you’ve had players who’ve been raiding for nearly 10 years, how do you challenge them, but also not make the challenge so far above and beyond folks new to raiding?
Why is it that there are so few fights without gimmicks? Because all of the fights without gimmicks have been fought already. Take a look at bosses in Vanilla and TBC. They’re extremely simple (excepting fights like Netherspite, or a few in Naxx 40 which do have gimmicks to them). In a world of Deadly Boss Mods, Recount, and logging, where you’ve had players who’ve been raiding for nearly 10 years, how do you challenge them, but also not make the challenge so far above and beyond folks new to raiding?
Well, that would be to introduce new rules or mechanics. If
everyone knows the basics of the game (how to play your class, and frankly, if
you’re raiding at Normal and above, you should know your class or you’re doing
your raid a disservice), then you trip people up by showing them something new.
But WoW is by far and away not the first game series to do that. How many folks
have played Mega Man?
The Mega Man series is considered one of the best
platformer-shooters around for the time period, and even today. And how did they keep things fresh
without making them impossible for new players? By changing the rules. What
killed Cutman in Mega Man was a lot different from what would kill Quick Man in
Mega Man 2. Fights were puzzles to be solved, but if you were particularly good
at the game, you could ignore the puzzle and brute-force many bosses. Sound
familiar? Basically, changing things up is a tried and true design tool for
boss encounters.
The other half of the story is movement and the like. At
this point, folks are pretty used to at least getting out of the bad, but if
the only thing you really want to do is use your class’ abilities and nothing else,
perhaps you should go play a JRPG instead, where everything you do is
menu-driven. There’s no movement, no space, nothing. WoW has characters who can
move in 3D space. They can jump, they backpedal, they can turn around and face
in another direction. So the game space has all of these concepts, why is it
bad to utilize those concepts when designing a boss?
A fantastic example for this are the Twin Consorts in Throne
of Thunder. Drawing the symbols (which was very Okami) on the ground to
activate certain effects? I think that was the most fun I’ve had in a boss
fight ever. Sure those effects could be mostly ignored on Normal and you would
still win (heck, my raid one shot that fight the first time we saw it), but it
was still a blast.
Thaddius, a Vanilla then Wrath boss, was a fun one too with
the jump in it, despite a large number of folks who had issues making those
jumps. Or when you can avoid abilities like Quake in Stonecore by jumping at
the right time. Sure, the healers could heal through it, but it was a fun bonus
if you could make it and avoid the damage entirely.
So in my opinion, gimmicks are a good thing. They keep the
game fresh, they compress the learning curve (veterans can still use a lot of
their acquired skills, but they still need to learn new mechanics like everyone
else), and they give us interesting boss fights. I’m not interested in fighting
Patchwerk and Onyxia 1.0 over and over again. But I am interested to see what
new encounters the designers come up with.
Netherspite from Karazhan is still one of the memorable encounters for me just because it introduced new concepts of positioning to a boss fight rather than just don't stand in the bad circle.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree, taking the same old "deeps till it's dead" and switching it up time keeps things fresh and engaging, and gimmick or not is better than rehashing the same old boss mechanics