A Skip Button for Boss Fights

[Dalsyne]

That's not a great example considering the Souls series has a variation on the skip button already: summons. Sure, how effective they are depends on the fight and the summons themselves, but generally they range between making the fight dramatically easier or outright breaking it.

And that's the kind of "skip" option I'd suggest, one that doesn't outright skip the section, but more or less(or even literally) plays it for you. It gives the player a way to continue if they hit a wall they can't get past, but it technically doesn't skip the section, so any context given by it is preserved. I don't see myself ever using that option, but I don't see it ruining anyone's experience either.

It's not a button. Summoning requires effort, risk and resources. It's not the best designed feature since your experience can vary so wildly, going as far as making the fight trivial, but it's definitely better than a simple button. I even mentioned it in another post.

 

[CritialGaming]

It's excuses and that is all it is. Skip buttons can fuck right off. Although I fully support skippable cutscenes that I have seen 100 times already. I'm dying to a boss over and over, let me skip his fucking intro please.

Sorry, but that's how the game is meant to be played.

Adapt and overcome.

EDIT: Kinda set yourself up for that one, mate.

Touche sir. Although the comment doesn't make sense even in mocking my original "moto", as if you make a game meant to be skipped, then what did you actually make?

 

[maninahat]

That's an odd assumption to make. I happily skip things that are frustrating, repetitive, or just plain rubbish so that I can get back to the good parts. Enduring through a tough or unpleasant thing is rewarding, but in the balance of things there are times were I would be happier skipping it (and that possible of a sense of achievement) so that I can get on with the rest of the thing I like. I'm sorry that you find this to be weird, unacceptable behaviour that you have never exhibited in gaming or the rest of your life.

The point was there's no satisfaction in skipping, just relief that you won't be needing to do that anymore. You may even feel some guilt.

Apply this to challenging boss fights and it becomes really easy to just press the button. One thing I like about the Souls series is how many people come from it with stories of "I nearly threw my controller on that one boss, fought him like 30 times, but in the end I was victorious! This game is amazing!". What would you think would happen if all these people could just press a button and move on? I'll tell you: "Man this game is full of shitty fights, I'm happy I could press this here button and just not do them heh".

You may not like it, but this is what would happen. People do not generally seek adversity, as a group. Those who wouldn't use such actions do not constitute a majority of the playerbase. Those who would, probably don't know they can do it and thus choose to rid themselves of the uncertainty. In any case, the game would suffer for it.

Which also reminds me: how do you think developers themselves would design their games if this becomes common practice?

"Hey this boss has a bullshit attack that kills you half the time and there's no way to stop it"

"Who cares, we put a skip button on it, didn't we? If they don't want the challenge they can move to the next level anyway"

Yes, I'm saying developers are affected by their own design choices. It happens - it happened with Diablo 3's real money auction house as a primary example, and I'm sure it happens all the time, the effects are just not as visible due to us not knowing the circumstances behind development. Hell, it already happens in some games with many difficulty modes - I was bored of Devil May Cry on easy mode but had problems with it on normal mode due to the devs expecting you to play it on easy first, then normal, then hard etc since the upgrades carried over. So I had to endure through a boring game to get to the good one in a manageable way.

I don't care if that is what would happen.

From a dev perspective, I imagine the most likely outcome would be them thinking "more people seem to be skipping this boss fight than we'd like. Perhaps we should better balance this fight to make them a more reasonable challenge, and people would be less tempted to skip it." Perhaps there already is a similar perspective when it comes to designing game cutscenes, where the dev's mentality is "let's try to make this cutscene as quality and unobtrusive as possible, that way less people will want to skip it". These days, if a dev includes unskippable cut scenes, they get a hammering for it from fans. Devs can either get precious about making people see every last bit of their hard work, or they can accept that players would rather have the option and adapt to it.

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

Touche sir. Although the comment doesn't make sense even in mocking my original "moto", as if you make a game meant to be skipped, then what did you actually make?

There's those videos on Youtube of just a game's cutscenes, stitched together sans gameplay.

So ... a poorly written, badly acted and disjointed movie?

 

[CritialGaming]

Touche sir. Although the comment doesn't make sense even in mocking my original "moto", as if you make a game meant to be skipped, then what did you actually make?

There's those videos on Youtube of just a game's cutscenes, stitched together sans gameplay.

So ... a poorly written, badly acted and disjointed movie?

So not a game then? Which is exactly the point of this whole thread.

 

[Kerg3927]

Oh, there's something wrong with it all right. It's garden variety snobbery and it's rather pathetic.

You're talking about video games. The great accomplishment you're taking so much hilariously unjustified pride in and looking down your nose at others over is the ability to put the correct inputs into a digital toy.

Yes, because other forms of sports and entertainment aren't the same in this regard....

You're gonna have to elaborate on that if you want any kind of response.

You don't think Tom Brady was motivated by recognition and rewards as he worked to become the best QB in world? He now has 5 Super Bowl rings, multiple MVP awards, hundreds of millions of dollars and is married to a super model. That was his reward.

Are you saying Tom Brady is "pathetic?"

That's obviously an extreme example, but that theme exists in all levels of sports and yes, games, including video games. People are driven to excel and overcome obstacles because of self-pride, recognition, and rewards. That's not "wrong." What's "wrong" is jealous people crying that it's unfair that better players get better rewards. Like it's discrimination or something.

 

[Req]

It's not a button. Summoning requires effort, risk and resources. It's not the best designed feature since your experience can vary so wildly, going as far as making the fight trivial, but it's definitely better than a simple button. I even mentioned it in another post.

It effectively is a button. What effort is there in pressing "Accept"? True, there's some risk due to the higher likelihood of being invaded, but the summons themselves mitigate that risk, not to mention most summons are found right outside a boss door, past which you can't be invaded. As for resources, those have always been laughably common, you could even earn them by being summoned yourself. The pros of summoning have always vastly outweighed the negligible cons.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

You don't think Tom Brady was motivated by recognition and rewards as he worked to become the best QB in world? He now has 5 Super Bowl rings, multiple MVP awards, hundreds of millions of dollars and is married to a super model. That was his reward.

Are you saying Tom Brady is "pathetic?"

That's obviously an extreme example, but that theme exists in all levels of sports and yes, games, including video games. People are driven to excel and overcome obstacles because of self-pride, recognition, and rewards. That's not "wrong." What's "wrong" is jealous people crying that it's unfair that better players get better rewards. Like it's discrimination or something.

Oh don't be so pretentious, gaming is entertainment and only in specific circumstances considered a 'sport' which is highly regulated as it is.

 

[Zhukov]

You don't think Tom Brady was motivated by recognition and rewards as he worked to become the best QB in world? He now has 5 Super Bowl rings, multiple MVP awards, hundreds of millions of dollars and is married to a super model. That was his reward.

Are you saying Tom Brady is "pathetic?"

That's obviously an extreme example, but that theme exists in all levels of sports and yes, games, including video games. People are driven to excel and overcome obstacles because of self-pride, recognition, and rewards. That's not "wrong." What's "wrong" is jealous people crying that it's unfair that better players get better rewards. Like it's discrimination or something.

Whoooooo, boy. That analogy is woefully off target.

You're comparing a competition between professional competitors to people playing with a toy for their own enjoyment. We're not even talking about competitive multiplayer games here.

I haven't seen anybody suggest that people who aren't much good at games should be awarded a share of the prize pool of the pro-Starcraft league.

I was actually trying to come up with analogy of my own for my initial post, but I was struggling to find something that encapsulated the sheer pettiness and pathetically low stakes of it all.

Best I can do is that it's like if someone learned how to solve a Rubik's Cube then he hears that someone else just peeled the coloured stickers off and rearranged them to "solve" it. So he gets all snooty and says they shouldn't be allowed to put it on their mantelpiece until they do it "properly" and demands that Rubik's Cubes be made with indelible paint to prevent the common folk from possessing completed cubes. Because apparently he can't take pride in his own amusing but ultimately useless skill unless he thinks it's giving him something that someone else can't get.

Oh, and if Tom Brady, whoever that is, went about trying to rub his accomplishments in the faces of people who aren't interested in playing professional sports but just want to kick a ball around the park with their kids for fun then yes, that would be utterly fucking pathetic.

 

[Kerg3927]

You don't think Tom Brady was motivated by recognition and rewards as he worked to become the best QB in world? He now has 5 Super Bowl rings, multiple MVP awards, hundreds of millions of dollars and is married to a super model. That was his reward.

Are you saying Tom Brady is "pathetic?"

That's obviously an extreme example, but that theme exists in all levels of sports and yes, games, including video games. People are driven to excel and overcome obstacles because of self-pride, recognition, and rewards. That's not "wrong." What's "wrong" is jealous people crying that it's unfair that better players get better rewards. Like it's discrimination or something.

Oh don't be so pretentious, gaming is entertainment and only in specific circumstances considered a 'sport' which is highly regulated as it is.

I didn't say it was a sport. I said the motivations that drive people who play sports also drive people who play video games. When I come home from work and play video games, I see it as not much different than playing golf, going bowling or playing poker. Yes, it serves as entertainment, but it's not the same as watching a movie or reading a book. People are driven to be good at games, and it's not "wrong" if they are rewarded for success. It's a good thing.

 

[Zhukov]

That would be like if the movie industry went, "Well you guys can now skip the horror scenes in a scary movie" or if a book had a page with the title "Skip to page 132 to see the plot twist" written on it. What's the point of skipping something that was meant to be played? You might as well watch it free on a LP or something if you're that lazy / unmotivated to skip a boss fight lmao.

Ummmmmmm... you know you can in fact skip scenes in a movie or pages in a book, right?

Does your enjoyment of movies suffer because I prefer to skip the nighttime scenes in Mad Max Fury Road when I watch it?

 

[Kerg3927]

That analogy is woefully off target.

You're comparing a competition between professional competitors to people playing with a toy for their own enjoyment. We're not even talking about competitive multiplayer games here.

A(n American) football is a toy, too. And ultimately, what happens in professional sports is useless, too. It's not solving any pressing world problems.

Best I can do is that it's like if someone learned how to solve a Rubik's Cube then he hears that someone else just peeled the coloured stickers off and rearranged them to "solve" it. So he gets all snooty and says they shouldn't be allowed to put it on their mantelpiece until they do it "properly" and demands that Rubik's Cubes be made with indelible paint to prevent the common folk from possessing completed cubes. Because apparently he can't take pride in his own amusing but ultimately useless skill unless he thinks it's giving him something that someone else can't get.

No, you've got it backwards. In the current situation, the colors are already painted on to prevent people from cheating and rearranging them. But there are people crying that it's not fair, that they should switch the colors to stickers so that everyone can cheat and rearrange them and complete it.

Oh, and if Tom Brady, whoever that is, went about trying to rub his accomplishments in the faces of people who aren't interested in playing professional sports but just want to kick a ball around the park with their kids for fun then yes, that would be utterly fucking pathetic.

Who said anything about rubbing accomplishments in anyone's faces? I would certainly never do anything like that. But I do feel self-pride when I beat a difficult encounter in a game. And I am motivated by that self-pride. I am also motivated by the fact that beating a certain boss rewards me with being able to see the next part of the game. And there is nothing wrong with that.

 

[Dalsyne]

It effectively is a button. What effort is there in pressing "Accept"?

Recovering your humanity at a bonfire, using an item, finding summon signs, using them, and then pressing Accept. That, and you still have to do the fight, and you can still die on the boss if you're careless or if the summons aren't very good. It effectively is NOT a button, not even close. It's multiple buttons, and not to skip, but to roll the dice and make the boss fight easier.

I don't care if that is what would happen.

From a dev perspective, I imagine the most likely outcome would be them thinking "more people seem to be skipping this boss fight than we'd like. Perhaps we should better balance this fight to make them a more reasonable challenge, and people would be less tempted to skip it." Perhaps there already is a similar perspective when it comes to designing game cutscenes, where the dev's mentality is "let's try to make this cutscene as quality and unobtrusive as possible, that way less people will want to skip it". These days, if a dev includes unskippable cut scenes, they get a hammering for it from fans. Devs can either get precious about making people see every last bit of their hard work, or they can accept that players would rather have the option and adapt to it.

Balancing things for a single-player game after the game is launched is usually a bit too late, as the majority of sales happen shortly after and before launch. People will have already concluded something about the game by then. How many devs balance boss fights? How many games change mechanics post-launch? How many will they still want to if the option to skip it is already there? I find your thinking to be a bit dismissive.

I don't expect bosses to be super hard overnight. I expect this to happen very gradually, to the point where videogame bosses will just be "for the hardcore" and completely separate from the difficulty curve, because the casual audience is where most sales factor in.

 

[Zhukov]

A(n American) football is a toy, too. And ultimately, what happens in professional sports is useless, too. It's not solving any pressing world problems.

Not the point.

You're comparing professional competition with solo amusement. Two very different things.

No, you've got it backwards. In the current situation, the colors are already painted on to prevent people from cheating and rearranging them. But there are people crying that it's not fair, that they should switch the colors to stickers so that everyone can cheat and rearrange them and complete it.

Same thing.

The point is that you're not satisfied with your own trivial accomplishments if someone else accomplished the same trivial thing in a way you don't like.

But I do feel self-pride when I beat a difficult encounter in a game. And I am motivated by that self-pride. I am also motivated by the fact that beating a certain boss rewards me with being able to see the next part of the game. And there is nothing wrong with that.

Nope, nothing wrong with that.

But if self-pride was all that was motivating you then you wouldn't be concerned with how other people go about playing their games. But apparently you really, really are.

The bit you quoted in your first post and agreed with summed it up pretty well:

"But someone other than me might press them, and then they'd get to see a bit of the game that was meant only for the Deserving Champions!" Because, the real nub of it is, it's about exclusivity. It's about keeping the Thems, the riff-raff, the outsider, out. THIS section of the game, this is special to me and only those as great as I am! I DESERVE this bit of the game! Those weaklings do not!"

That right there is not a description of self-pride.

...

Let me put it another way, with an example from an actual video game.

There's a door in Dishonored 2 that you need to get through to progress. It's locked by a logic puzzle. You can get the password by doing secondary missions. Or you can solve the puzzle, which is rather tough. (Or at least it was for me, maybe I'm just thick.)

I chose to solve the puzzle without finding the solution as a point of, well, self-pride I suppose. Doing this gives you an achievement. (Then I loaded my save and did the secondary missions anyway because I wanted to see all the game's content.)

I feel confident in saying that there are people out there who "cheated" for that achievement. They could have saved at the puzzle, done the secondary missions, written down the solution and then reloaded and "solved" it. Or of course they could have just googled the solution. There are people out there with that achievement who didn't "earn" it like I did.

Also, we all progressed to the next stage of the game, regardless of how we did it.

And I don't give a single flying fuck. Why the hell would I? How they play their games is their business and has no impact on how I chose to play mine and whatever enjoyment and satisfaction I got from it.

Just contemplating the idea of getting uppity over something so trivial makes me feel petty.

 

[Potjeslatinist]

all games, that is

See, this irks me. Maybe it shouldn't, but I'm an irkable person, easily irked, and this is as irking as irkishness comes.

You want to see *some* developers keeping your not-willing-to-put-in-the-practice-to-earn-your-ending-attitude in mind? That's fine I guess. It takes all sorts to make a world.

And I get that since you got toddlers your playing time vanished in a puff and your thumbs just plain fell off, but that's the way the cookie crumbles okay? Some games want you to eat the dirt, learn from your mistakes, and git gud all the way to victory, and that's the goddamn way it goddamn should be.

You git gud at changing diapers, but get your paws off our bragging rights.

(and with you I don't mean you, OP - just the advocates of this silliness in general)

Skip button for boss fights, I can't even *mumble grumble*

 

[Avnger]

You git gud at changing diapers, but get your paws off our bragging rights.

That's what this is all about? "Bragging rights" about a consumerist hobby? Do you really have nothing else in your life to base your self-esteem upon that excluding others from enjoying the same media as you becomes a necessity?

Regardless, you still would have your "bragging rights" that let you put others down over a meaningless toy. They would simply change from "you noobs couldn't even beat dark souls" to "you noobs couldn't even beat dark souls on hardcore difficulty" or "you noobs couldn't beat the Bed of Chaos without the skip button."

Why does it upset you so much that others might get to enjoy the game in a different manner than you? The person who beat dark souls using a plastic guitar for input is better than either of us, but I haven't seen them arguing that dark souls should mandate the use of plastic instruments as the only input devices; he can still "brag" about his accomplishment if he feels its necessary though.

 

[Kerg3927]

You're comparing professional competition with solo amusement. Two very different things.

Different to you. Not so different to me. When I played (American) football growing up, I put a lot into it. Lifting weights, etc. I wanted to become as good as I could be at that sport.

I treat video games the same way. When I was GM of a WoW raiding guild, I did every little thing possible to maximize my character and to prepare myself for raids. I tried to lead by example. If we failed to down a boss, I didn't want it to be because of me. I always wanted to be a part of the solution and not the problem. I tried to motivate others to do the same.

I don't play WoW or raid anymore. But my hobby is still video games. And I still approach it the same way in solo games. I study stats, game mechanics, etc. I min/max. Although fashion is important, too.

Now I don't expect other people to put that much effort into it. But it does bother me when people obviously don't want to put ANY effort into it. They want to just skip stuff - even when they have easy-mode - at the first sign of a challenge. It's makes me sad.

So maybe it's not so much the idea that a skip button might be implemented that bothers me. I'd never press it. What bothers me is that people are asking for it. It bothers me that easy-modes aren't enough for some people. Because I'm pretty sure that the percentage of gamers who literally CAN'T complete most games on easy-mode with just a little bit of effort is very, very small. It makes me sad that there are people in the world who are really that freakin' lazy. People who would demand a significant change to what, IMO, video games have always been about, overcoming obstacles to progress. Because they believe they are entitled to it. It's just disturbing to me.

So maybe that's a me problem. It probably is. Still makes me hope like hell that developers laugh off this ridiculous boss-skipping idea. Just stay the hell away from my Souls games.

 

[votemarvel]

That to me sounds self-defeatist and is basically you admitting to the game that you do indeed suck. Imagine if the people playing through Ending E on Nier:Automata had agreed with the ending and decided to quit after the 3 or 4th attempt. Shit like that is supposed to make you say "FUCK YOU GAME I'LL SHOW YOU", not crumple like used up kleenex tissue and give up.

Spoiler if you haven't played it and don't intend to:

Spoiler

Ending E of N:A puts you in a bullet hell twin-stick shooter sequence vs the end credits sequence. At a certain point it become nigh impossible to complete solo and each time you die it'll ask you a question like "Do you want to give up?" or "Are games silly little things?" and you get the choice to continue. Menawhile messages of encouragement to push on left from actual players all over the world that have also played through the sequence, their number increasing each time you die. Eventually after dying and continuing enough time it asks if you want help. If you say yes, more ships representing other people who've played the game and the sequence becomes basically impossible to fail, however only people who deleted their save data at the end of the sequence will be called to help and each time one of their ships blow up it tells you the name of the player who chose to sacrifice their save file to help you. At the end of the sequence you're asked if you want to delete your data to help another player as well. Obviously if you agree with the game at the start and give up you'd never know that this happens.

I've reached a point in my life where I don't find frustration to be fun. To me there is no enjoyment to playing a sequence again and again until you find the one trick to getting past it.

Like I said, I can understand why people do enjoy it. Beating the frustration is part of beating the sequence.

However I have enough frustration in my working life that I don't need to come back to my flat and get frustrated again in my entertainment time. I loved LA Noire, I didn't use the skip option before that bulldozer sequence or after it, but without it I never would have seen the rest of the game.

There was a game back in 2010 called 'Lords of Shadow' which I was greatly enjoying. There were parts of the game though where you have to climb up large golem like creatures and activate sigils in order to defeat them. I reached one though, and I forget the exact place in the seven years since, that I simply could not get past. I honestly don't know what it was, for some reason I kept messing this one golem up. After more tries than I care to remember I stopped the game, placed it back in its box, and I've never played it since.

For some that frustration I was feeling would be a drive to continue, to prove that they could do it. For me it was the sign that I was no longer having fun in the game and that it was time to move on to something else. It's a shame really as it is entirely possible that if Lords of Shadow had a skip option just like LA Noire that I would have gone on to see what else was in the game.

 

[Erttheking]

I have to say if people want to skip boss fights in games, why not? Let them do what they want to. No one is forcing you to use the skip button, the same way no one forces you to use cheat codes or super easy mode.

 

[CritialGaming]

What I don't understand is the whole "every game should be for everybody" argument. Right?

Like there are some games that are fucking hard by design. Cuphead, Souls games, bullet hells, etc. The suggestion that bosses have a skip button means that games don't have a right to be challenging, nor do they have a right to be unforgiving. Dark Souls has the policy of "get gud or get out" and it has every right to be that way.

I am so sick of this fucking mentality that everyone has to be include, everyone should get to participate. Fuck that noise, you don't want to put in the effort to defeat a challenge? Fine. But don't act like you should get a fucking special pass that lets you skip the challenge and get right to the reward.

If a game is too hard, go play something else. Simple. No developer is required to make their game accommodate you and your lack of trying. They are obligated to provide a fair and fun challenge for as many people as are willing to take up the controller. But that doesn't mean appealing to the absolute lowest possible denominator.

Let easy games be easy and let hard games be hard and deal with it.