In Face Off, PC Gamer writers go head to head over an issue affecting PC gaming. Today, Tom and Wes argue about boss fights, which have been around nearly as long as video games themselves, and whether they re an outdated concept.

Wes: YES. I ve played many great boss fights in my day, but far too many big games shoehorn in boss fights when they don t need them. Boss fights once made perfect video game sense in linear, side-scrolling levels. Get to the end of the stage, fight the big bad in charge, and move on to the next. And that s still fun! But as games have evolved with open worlds and non-linear levels and forms of gameplay more nuanced than shoot slash punch bad guy, boss fights don t fit as well. Bioshock and the more recent Deus Ex: Human Revolution are two modern examples of boss fights gone really wrong. Bioshock needed an emotional climax, not one that involved shooting a roided-up bad guy. And Human Revolution betrayed the core of its gameplay by making you shoot it out with its bosses, which is something the new Deus Ex is thankfully addressing. Boss fights can still be done well, of course, but they re most definitely antiquated.

Tom M.: NO. Boss fights aren t always fun, but used correctly they can be vital to the pacing of a game. Boss fights don t just represent the end of a level, they are a change of pace after a long stretch of similar gameplay. You ve been running around shooting and beating up bad guys for a while, but how are you going to deal with this new enemy? That s when the concept of a boss fight really shines; when it s not just a bigger harder enemy, but instead challenges you in some interesting and different way. I completely agree that AAA games have recently misused the boss fight trope, treating it more like an expected practice than a place to shake up the game s design, but that doesn t mean boss fights as a whole are an outdated concept.

Wes: Sure—I d look like a big dumb idiot if I said all boss fights today are lame and crappy. There are still good ones! But I think there are two big problems with how boss fights are implemented. In big-budget games, they re often used to facilitate some dramatic cutscene or story moment, which means taking control away from the player or forcing you to play in a specific way. That sucks. And in general, I think too many games use boss fights because they re expected. Boss fights are part of the language of video games, but they re a very old word. And I d like to see more games creating new words instead of falling back on the Middle English that is the boss fight.

Tom: I actually don t mind boss fights being more rigid or scripted than the rest of a game. Making open world experiences where the player has lots of choice is a very difficult thing to do, and too much freedom can sometimes make for a crummy story. Boss fights are the perfect moment for a developer to bring the story back under their control a little bit to let them reliably tell the story they want to. Of course, the boss fight shouldn t take certain options or playstyles away from the player that the rest of a game has made them accustomed to, like in Deus Ex for example. Those fights should be climactic and should represent a shift in the story. Even if they re expected, they can play a vital role in the rhythm of a game.

Wes: Ah, so idealistic! Time and again, boss fights in big-budget games do change up the play style you ve been taught just to show you something cool. Even the Batman games, which have fantastic combat, lose their lustre when they put you in an arena to slug it out with a boss. Think of the end of Asylum, when the Joker gets all beefy and slugs it out with Batman. It s a great game, but that s a cookie cutter boss fight that relies on antiquated video game language. How do we make a big, climactic battle? Hm, how about lots of punching? But the Joker would never do that! He d do something clever. A smart, modern take on the boss fight there wouldn t end with a punching match. I d like to see more games have confidence in what they do best. To use a pretty traditional 2D game as an example: I don t even remember the final boss of Rayman Origins, but I do remember the incredibly challenging and rewarding final platforming sequence leads up to it. Surviving that level is the true boss of the game.

Tom: Lots of games have also tried doing boss sequences or boss levels instead of a straight up fight, and I love that. I think it s great when games don t adhere to the formula, but that s not the solution for every game. Assassin s Creed doesn t really have many boss fights, instead a particularly special baddy will get a mission all to himself. That s cool and different and doesn t shoehorn a stupid arena fight into an assassination game, but I also don t remember a single one of those missions. You know what I do remember? Every single boss I fought in Dark Souls 2. I still agree that developers will put cookie cutter boss fights unnecessarily into games that don t need them, but it s by no means a concept that s lost it s value. It s just more valuable in certain types of games.

Wes: I may not remember the characters of many Assassin s Creed targets, but I do remember some of my more epic assassinations—and I loved that those characters could be killed silently and instantly, if you planned the perfect stealth kill. That s a smart modern twist on the classic boss fight, too me--it elevates what s best about Assassin s Creed, instead of suddenly changing how you play the game. And hell, I love Dark Souls bosses too—I don t hate the traditional boss fight, I just think many games today could do something more interesting with them. It seems like we re mostly on the same page. So...what games are really doing creative boss fights right these days?

Tom: The first example that jumps to my mind is Titan Souls, a game made up of nothing but boss fights. It takes the kill the big monster in an arena concept to its extreme and cuts the fat off everywhere else. If you need to be convinced that compelling and exciting boss fights are still possible in modern games, Titan Souls will do that and then some. Terraria is another good example; each boss is difficult and unique, but also represents a tier of progression. The game has an open world with no fake constraints, but you can mostly only reach bosses in a certain order, each one giving you the means to fight the next. These games embrace the boss fight as the effective tool it is; a change of pace, a milestone in your progression, and a generator of wow moments.

Wes: I ve played my fair share of Terraria, but I ll be checking up on Titan Souls. If killing each boss doesn t make me feel a deep and intense sorrow in true Shadow of the Colossus fashion, though, I m going to hold you responsible for my irrational expectations.

Tom: Titan Souls was the first game that made me physically jump out of my chair when I killed a boss, and I did so for every single one. Consider your expectations rationally high. 

Ubisoft last week announced the Assassin's Creed: The Americas Collection, a bundle including Assassin's Creed 3, Assassin's Creed: Liberation and Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (sick of the words 'Assassin's Creed' yet? I'm sorry). That's all well and good, but it appears PC owners in North America will not be able to buy the bundle. While a PC edition of The Americas Collection has been confirmed for Europe and Australia, the same won't be true for the US.

It's especially strange since the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 editions will be available in North America. Nonetheless, Ubisoft confirmed with Gamespot that there are no plans to release the PC edition in that region. No doubt there's some arcane corporate logic to this, and given how easy it is to get these games at a discount digitally I'm sure few people mind. Nevertheless, Ubisoft did admit in August that it needs to work harder to do right by PC gamers, and this seems to clash with those sentiments.

Assassin's Creed: The Americas Collection releases October 3 in Europe and Australia and October 28 in North America.

I know a lot of people are sick of them, but I really love killing zombies. Shooting zombies offers this highly distilled sense of guilt-free violence that I can easily deal with. Another bonus: zombies arrive pre-killed. Putting them back down is really just a public service. I m sure one day I ll get tired of shooting/stabbing/blowing up the animated dead; on that day, I ll no longer be intrigued by Dead Cry, an upcoming total conversion mod for Far Cry 3.



Built using the Far Cry 3 engine and map editor, Dead Cry is a single-player campaign very much inspired by games like Left 4 Dead, according to the mod s moddb page.

Character and enemy animations will look very familiar to anyone who played Far Cry 3, but the environment, plot, and character models are all brand new. DEAD CRY will not merely be a bunch of maps or a mod alone, the mod page says, It's as close to a completely new game as you can get. The campaign will include an immersive soundtrack, cinematic cutscenes, custom sound effects and voice over work.

Dead Cry just entered open beta release a few days ago, so you can download and play it here. They re also inviting players to fill out a beta survey form to help them make changes; you can find that survey here.

Expected sequels to popular games often begin their public lives as tiny echoes awash in the din of our media age. Far Cry 4 seems to be following this familiar pattern, with an Ubisoft Shanghai game designer listing and then removing a reference to the sequel from his LinkedIn resume, according to a report at Joystiq.

The designer, Xavier Plagnal, reportedly listed his work in recent months as a Content Director on "the next Far Cry" at Ubisoft Shanghai. That line on his resume now lacks any specific information regarding exactly which "content" he's directing, but Plagnal isn't the first person to let slip a connection to a new entry in the series. Ubisoft executive Tony Key made a direct reference to a sequel to the 2012 Far Cry 3 last July when he said the following: It s a great brand, and now it s got the recognition it deserves, so we re clearly going to make another one: more on that soon."

Additionally, composer Cliff Martinez revealed in October his involvement with a "video game called Far Cry 4." We liked Far Cry 3 for its sneaking, its hunting, and for its hugely detailed open world. And the DLC followup Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon had its own part to play for its use of '80s icon Michael Biehn and its tongue-in-cheek approach to action-movie heroics. In any case, absent an official studio announcement to the contrary, it's looking more and more likely that a new Far Cry is on its way.

 

Technically, I'm aware that the employees of Valve have regular jobs, doing regular things on irregularly mobile desks. Even so, when picturing Clint Hocking's year and half stint with the company, I can't help but imagine him strapped into a central development node, where tendrilled mind probes extract creative ideas to be fed into the Almighty Feedback Formula. I'm not saying that's definitely what happened, but if it is, it's perhaps understandable why he'd leave. Which he has.

News of Hocking's departure comes via his LinkedIn account and personal blog, where his biography states: "From 2012 until the end of 2013, Clint worked as a designer and level designer at Valve in Seattle."

Hocking is probably best known for his work at Ubisoft, where he was creative director for Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory - a game that, to this day, remains the highpoint of that series. He was also the creative director for Far Cry 2, which is either the best of the worst Far Cry game, depending on your fondness for emergent situations, jamming weapons and malaria.

In typical Valve style, we don't officially know what Hocking was working on. But based on leaked information taken from their internal database, he was suspected to be part of the team developing the yet to be announced Left 4 Dead 3. As yet, there's no information about his next project, but hopefully it'll evoke the same manic clash of systems that defined FC2's best moments.

Thanks, ValveTime.

More and more new games every year are sequels, so I guess the next logical step is enormous collections of previously released games. Bethesda announced at QuakeCon that every Elder Scrolls game would be available, and now Ubisoft is following suit with the Assassin’s Creed Heritage Collection. Available on November 8, the Heritage Collection will include Assassin’s Creed, Assassin’s Creed 2, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, and Assassin’s Creed 3.

The official price has not been announced, but some listings are starting to pop up in the neighborhood of $70/£40, which isn’t outrageous for five games plus DLC. Still, at that price you’re paying a premium for the packaging and whatever extras they throw in there, and we have no idea what those extras might be.

Of course, Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag lands on November 19. Technically speaking, I suppose gamers brand-new to the series could pound through the first five games in time for the launch of Black Flag, but only if they’re willing to give up showering and eating. Still, die-hard fans might appreciate having the games and their individual DLCs all in one tidy package.

As worthy a goal as liberation may be, most of us aren't going bother if it means dealing with those ugly "low" definitions. Not only that, but playing Assassin's Creed 3 spin-off Liberations would have meant buying a PS Vita, which, according to sales figures, is not something a lot of people have done. Perhaps because of this fact, Ubisoft have announced Assassin's Creed: Liberation HD; appending the near-meaningless suffix to an upgraded version of the game that's due for release on PC and the less portable consoles.

Liberation was set in 1765 New Orleans, starring a new protagonist, Aveline de Grandpré, and continuing the series' penchant for batshit fisticuffs between Assassins and Templars. For the HD version, new missions are planned, as well as an upgrade to the shiny graphics department.

Assassin's Creed: Liberation HD is, according to the trailer, "coming soon". Meanwhile, Ubisoft are also pretty hot for pirates, and will release Pirate's Creed 4: Hooray, It's Got Pirates! in November.

 



Ubisoft Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales Tony Key has told Gamespot that Far Cry 3’s success has already greenlit a sequel (though this one will probably have fewer laser dragons in it).

"We’re totally psyched from ,” Key said. “It’s a great brand, and now it’s got the recognition it deserves, so we’re clearly going to make another one: more on that soon."

Key went on to talk about how Ubisoft’s investing most of its time and resources into open world games, though you don’t need to be a financial analyst to figure that one out. Both of Ubisoft’s big new IPs, Watch_Dogs and The Division are open world. Add Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed into the mix and it’s enough to make you wonder when Splinter Cell or Prince of Persia will hit the open world.

Of course, Key didn’t actually say when we’d actually hear more about Far Cry 4, so we’ll just continue fighting our losing battle with the unstoppable beast known as the cassowary until that day arrives.

Susan O’Connor, who helped pen the stories in BioShock, Far Cry 2, and the latest Tomb Raider along with Rhianna Pratchett, isn't happy with the state of game storytelling. She doesn't condemn video game stories themselves, but rather the overall process through which those stories are written. She sees storytelling in games being as dominated by teams that care more about compiling code—and she's tired of it.

In an interview with The Gameological Society, O’Connor pointed out how the creative process for video games is different from other forms of media.

“For me, I always want to focus on the entertainment side of it,” O’ Connor said. “This is supposed to make people feel something. It’s supposed to be fun, or be scary. But when I look at conversations that creatives are having, like in television or film or theater or freaking mimes, everyone else, the conversations they’re having are totally different.

“If you were to say, ‘Books are a great way to go inside a character’s mind for pages and pages, and movies are a great place to see larger-than-life movie stars and phenomenal explosions that are 40-feet tall,’ games are a really kinetic medium. The story is what the player does.”



She has a point. Books and movies rely on well-developed plots because that’s all they have. Movies might add amazing special effects to distract you from a poor script, but games are interactive. Whether you’re taking out an enemy base, scavenging an abandoned cave, or opening inter-dimensional portals, you are busy doing something. Sometimes, there’s not enough time or priority to inject enough plot to tell you why you’re doing said thing.

O’Connor went on to admit that she was tired of writing stories for video games and wanted to move on to other areas of entertainment.

“I don’t want to put up with this s$*& anymore,” she said. “I’m grateful for the success I’ve had, but I’m never going to be able to do work that can come anywhere close to the kind of emotional impact that stories in other media have, at least not in the next five to 10 years. I love stories, and I just happened to fall into games. I’ve learned who I am as a writer, and I think my talents and skills are much better used in other places."