262: Stop Killing the Foozle!

Narcogen

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Jul 26, 2006
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DannibalG36 said:
Apparently, Kaiser missed the Halo train. I would like to posit that Halo: Combat Evolved, one of the most significant shooters ever made (if not THE most significant) did not have a final boss. Yet, the ending is still thrilling as all get out.

[snip]
I'd argue that two of the three Halo games do not have a foozle. Halo 1 ends with you destroying the engines of your own ship and then racing against time to escape it. The ship itself is certainly not a boss or an archvillain of any kind, and the combat challenges you face in this section are no different than elsewhere in the game; it lacks the arbitrary nature of most real boss fights-- where enemies are only vulnerable to certain weapons, in certain spots, at certain times, or under certain conditions, and exhibit a resistance to damage on a scale completely out of whack with ordinary units.

Of Halo 2's dual plot threads, the Arbiter's showdown with Tartarus is a boss fight. He's arbitrarily only vulnerable under certain conditions, and has been the primary antagonist throughout most of the game's plot. There's also the fight against the Prophet of Regret that is an arbitrary boss fight, although Regret doesn't really qualify as an archvillain.

Halo 3 perhaps deserves an asterisk. While the final level does include a showdown with an old friend before repeating the race-to-escape sequence, and that combat sequence is arbitrary (target only vulnerable to one weapon) the difficulty of the encounter is so low that in nearly qualifies as an interactive cutscene rather than true combat. In addition, the conflict between that character and the player, while it stretches back to the first game, is not that of hero and archvillain, but more an organic situation that evolves between characters with different agendas. Gravemind and the Prophet of Truth both qualify as better foozles, and although your actions do lead to the death of both, one is killed as a result of your final action (a button press) and the other is killed by a friendly NPC during a cutscene.
 

Mutos4

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Aug 10, 2006
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I like this article, especially the paragraphs about open-ended games, where the author describes well the sense of "constraint from the storyline and from the player trying to follow that storyline" that I feel with most non-open-ended games and the "emphasis on finding your own way through the game" where I personnally find my interest in games : exploring universes instead of grinding my way to the next level...
 

Slackenerny

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Oct 26, 2008
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I grew up in this era and Ultima III and Wizardy were my first RPGs. I remember at 11 when I began to play Ultima IV it blew my mind. An internal conflict for a computer game? It posed complex moral questions that played out in our actions rather than just a crappy dialogue tree. Sometimes it was hard to be valourous yet humble, or valourous yet compassionate (e.g. not chasing down fleeing enemies). It was astounding. I still have an old Ultima box coin (from Ultima V I think) and a cloth map.

While not exactly foozle-less, the other game that came to mind reading this article was Thief. To engage in combat was actually a failure in this game, and there are a whole group of people who still play the game with the zen-like goal of playing without even touching anyone. A perfect thief.
 

bimbley

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Jan 31, 2009
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Good article. Of course you can't possibly mention every example, but I did half expect the Legacy of Kain games to crop up in that section discussing complications of the foozle role. The glory of those games was an epic narrative arch in which the player brings Kain to power, only for him to become the foozle for the main character Raziel in the later follow up game, (Soul Reaver). As the series progresses the shifting relationships between the various characters creates foozles from allies and allies from foozles, culminating in a grand finale which has completely switched up the roles originally established. One superb section that sticks in my mind is in, (I think, it's been a while) the final game in which Raziel and Kain face off. You play half the fight as one character and then switch midway through, so the game toys with the players sense of empathy for their main character... who exactly do I want to win this fight? The game complicates and undermines the simple hero/villain binary by doing something very realistic- basing ethics in indivdual perceptions.

To link this in with another of this week's articles, (Colin Rowsell's What Hulk Hogan Taught Videogames): by toying with it the Legacy of Kain games demonstrate that the good guy and bad guy, player and foozle, are completely inter-reliant. That's why so many games have a foozle, because they are a tool by which to define through opposition the identity of the hero. And if there's one thing a game really does need, it's a hero.

-Bimbley
 

Dom Camus

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Sep 8, 2006
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This article confused me for a while until I realised what was going on. The author doesn't want to kill Foozles because they are a lazy and unnecessary storytelling device... Whereas I play games for their mechanics. So if my game is full of fights I want a hard fight at the end. For me, a game full of fights literally cannot end with a peace treaty, because the treaty is not part of the game. The game ended at the end of the last battle I fought, no matter how anticlimactic.

People play games for different reasons. I don't dislike story, but to me it's just like a game's music or graphics: I prefer it to be good, but that's not why I'm playing.
 

Kadamon

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Feb 8, 2009
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If it's an RPG, most people are just constantly building up for some fuck-all battle that'll wreck their team. If most developers didn't make a "foozle", then it'd end up being a disappointment for them.

In most FPS games, the character has been BUILDING UP to an event, and it feels like a cop-out if it's just "a peace treaty".

Now something like Metro 2033, where you could basically choose to kill the final entity, or save the entire race, was definitely a change in pace we can all agree on. The thing is, we love killing things.
 

Rowan Kaiser

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@Dom
Dom Camus said:
This article confused me for a while until I realised what was going on. The author doesn't want to kill Foozles because they are a lazy and unnecessary storytelling device... Whereas I play games for their mechanics. So if my game is full of fights I want a hard fight at the end. For me, a game full of fights literally cannot end with a peace treaty, because the treaty is not part of the game. The game ended at the end of the last battle I fought, no matter how anticlimactic.

People play games for different reasons. I don't dislike story, but to me it's just like a game's music or graphics: I prefer it to be good, but that's not why I'm playing.
This is an interesting point, and I'm sure there's part of that aspect in theory when designers build their games and antagonists, but I'm not sure that, in practice, it really works that way. The main reason is that big final boss fights, which are supposed to exist to test the player, as you say, disappoint as often as they thrill. FF7 is known for its boss fights, but they aren't Sephiroth, they're Ruby and Emerald Weapon. But they aren't Foozles; they're barely even antagonists.

And games like Ultima IV and VI do have difficult combat end-game challenges. There are deep dungeons, filled with dragons and liches and demons. They're just not necessarily attached to the story (although they can be, if you do it in a certain way).

On the other hand, think of how many games have bosses who don't fulfill your criteria? They aren't difficult, or they don't test the player's skills. Alternately, they could be too hard, or too arbitrary. Given how many great games have boss fights that don't work as culminations of a difficulty in the way you describe, I have to say that it's not a necessary component of games or game storylines.
 

loui.emma

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Mar 11, 2009
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Does Myst count as Foozle-less? While there are bad guys they aren't actively trying to destroy the world. In fact you could say they they are already 'defeated' when you turned up, its a game set AFTER the big boss battle.

If you choose to do nothing in Myst, nothing happens, the game mechanics don't even allow for combat.

Great article, I am one to get bored with rubber-stamp videogames that are all the same bar the scenery.
 

SandroTheMaster

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Apr 2, 2009
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Rowan Kaiser said:
@SandroTheMaster You're right, those could be good further examples. However, I must plead that both Might and Magic and HOMM are series that I've never really been able to get into, in any of their incarnations. You're right that HOMM 2 (my favorite of any of them) does have a narrative similar to Warcraft 3, but I don't think the characterization is anywhere near as strong.
Well, then you're excused, or at least partially.

But it is in Heroes 3 that the narrative is similar to Warcraft 3. You're constantly switching sides and viewpoints, and while it is obvious the final campaign will be about the good guys against the bad guys, you do play in the bad guys point of view for a while, building up their heroes and their forces. The Armageddon Blade and Shadow of Death expansions also expand the notion further. In Armageddon Blade you're controlling a group of protagonists whose motives and goals are more personal and the TBS plays more like an RPG without a set foozle. In Shadow of Death you play as the villain trying to put in motion the conditions of the original Heroes 3 campaign, which is a very interesting twist in story-telling.

In Heroes 4 you have a complete redefinition of the Black-and-White mentality. The Nature's campaign doesn't have anything to do with the other factions and the roles of the protagonist and the antagonist are completely interchangeable. Gauldoth Half-Dead's campaign puts a completely different perspective on the foozle again, as you play with what could only be considered the villain by everyone else, but is the only to come off as justified for his actions.

Still, the Might and Magic series probably relates the best with everything said in the article. Shelten is the expected foozle for a big part of the series but he's never directly confrontational nor one of the main motivations of the plot. And from the 6th installment on you could say most of the conflict is a result of your own actions, even though the Kreegans are introduced they are just a backdrop for most of the time.
 

neispace

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Mar 2, 2009
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I think this highlights a problem. Without a foozle, those fights are optional and meaningless. The weapons were not the reason you beat the game-you beat it because that bastard Sephiroth killed Aeris. Negotiating a peace treaty between faceless armies is not going to drive the same response.

All those hard dungeons, and I'd argue a lot of the conflict at all will have no meaning. The article mentions MMOS, but any serious MMO player realizes because of the lack of a foozle, most of the content is meaningless storywise. A good foozle makes the plot into more than an abstraction and makes it personal. He unifies it from a collection of mechanical challenges into a real story: why are you dungeon running and levelling up to negotiate a peace treaty?
 
Nov 14, 2007
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So glad people mentioned STALKER already. No final boss. Just a final goal. I felt the 'boss' bit of STALKER: Clear Sky felt tacked on.

Deus Ex could go either way, there's a final antagonist, but you don't fight him, you complete one of a few tasks to defeat him. The sequel's the same way, isn't it? I can't recall.