How could the final boss fight, Nightmare, work differently?

[DoomMunky]

A buddy and I flailed against Nightmare for an hour or more the other night, and ID'd several issues with this fight.

First is the poor feedback throughout.

Feedback issue: It's hard to tell why things are happening. We missed the counter that ticks up as you kill guys in the Shadow Zone, which means they didn't show it to us well. It is a damage multiplier, and appears in the same place as other status effects and buffs, but I was never trained to LOOK there for information other than for whether my Trait has fired an effect, or my gun has. During a boss fight? Never.

Feedback issue: You don't know how much damage is enough to 'stagger' Nightmare and open the cage up to do massive damage: hell, you don't even know you need to stagger him, or that massive damage is possible. There's no indication that your buffed weapon damage is pushing him toward a new state. He just keeps doing the same attack animation, throwing those meatballs, until the stagger threshold is passed.

Feedback issue: There's no indication that and that mods do more dmg than weapons. Mods have never done more damage that weapons, as a class, have they? The design of the bosses damage model doesn't encourage you to experiment once you know how it works. My weapons aren't working, so I'm going to stop firing until something changes. (If it IS supposed to encourage you to experiment, I missed it. It's like 'you're doing super low damage' and my response is not 'okay, I'll try every tool in my inventory to see what will work' my response is 'WAT IS TEH SEKRIT I AM TIRED')

Broken expectations are the other big problem.

The damage model / trick doesn't conform to any other in the game, that I saw. Other boss fights were premised around resistances and weaknesses to damage TYPES (Rot, Corrosion, Electrical, etc), not damage 'classes' like weapon vs. mod. Is there any other fight where you are trained that mod damage is different than weapon damage?

Misc.
It also insists you're using 'visible dmg values' toggled ON. Can you imagine doing this with no dmg # feedback?

Then there's the issue that coop scaling makes the fight last forever, and the fact that you very rarely get to coordinate and assist each other when in coop. You don't get to split up tasks in ways like the Ixillis fight had you face opposite directions, call out damage, take on the cloud adds, benefit from each other's mods, etc. No coordination or *benefit from coordination* makes for a "you go, now I go" structure that kills the pacing and pits you against your partner if they don't perform perfectly ("Now we have to keep playing this stupid fight, dummy!").

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So we were really frustrated. I've played a lot of Dark Souls and Bloodborne, and I'm wondering how FROM software would communicate the various elements of this fight

I'm imagining the same kind of setup - man embedded in tree-like prison in boss chest, but very readably Fully Protected by the cage of branches. Attacking the cage would do nothing, you'd get weapon-bounce-back ricochet-type feedback. But then a few enemies would trickle out, and killing them would obviously 'open' the cage a bit. And for each enemy you kill, the cage would physically open a bit more.

You'd structure the 'Add Wave' phase in such a way that you could see or notice the effect your killing had on the cage; maybe an image of the boss floats 'behind' the shadow world, egging on his minions or talking trash to you, or there's no separate Shadow Zone, but he just removes himself above/nearby while you take on minions. Or maybe he's right down there with the minions, and with every minion kill, the cage opens a bit.

And as the cage opens, your damage reduction-on-hit is reduced until it's fully open, and you're doing full damage. This should be hard to achieve. (and it's FROM, so of course it would be) But within some time after the cage opens, it starts to grate shut again, closing your window in which to do damage.

If the boss is down in the arena the whole time, available during the minion phase, the risk/reward of the fight becomes how many minions you can kill, prying the cage open, before it starts to close back up. Do you try for another couple minions, or do you get your hits in now, even though the damage isn't optimal?

Then the fight is about many of the things we've already seen: A boss with Adds, managing minions while trying for damage on the boss, your usual weapons working the way they usually do. There's a different kind of pressure/structure to the fight, but not different *rules*.

(I dunno if this would work in Remnant in the same way - Dark Souls bosses tend to be much more in-your-face, making players much more focused on the details of the boss itself, its moves, its model, and so on. Communicating the fact that "the cage is opening!" would need to be different in a ranged shooter than in a Souls game, but it's still doable)

[william_es]

Or simply transport ALL players into the murky realm, so they can all stack up damage boosts.

When only one person gets transported, there's pretty much nothing for the other players to do. You can't damage the boss. It's boring and tedious. Man, those are two words you don't want to used to describe your game. Boring and tedious.

Maybe work it so it's better if one player makes most of the kills (you wound, he executes). Players greedily killing everything they see means that all players exit with low level buffs, and can't get past the threshold to open the chest area.

or all kills in the murky zone earn a groupwide buff.

I've completely given up on that boss fight in multiplayer. I exit as soon as I see someone's fruitlessly trying to kill it. Me joining their game just makes it harder for them. According to some posts here, a player simply spectating their fight instantly ramps up the number of adds that appear, even though they're not actually in game yet.

[LucasKane]

Pls, need help with last boss

[JackieTheDemon]

Originally posted by william_es:

Or simply transport ALL players into the murky realm, so they can all stack up damage boosts.

When only one person gets transported, there's pretty much nothing for the other players to do. You can't damage the boss. It's boring and tedious. Man, those are two words you don't want to used to describe your game. Boring and tedious.

Maybe work it so it's better if one player makes most of the kills (you wound, he executes). Players greedily killing everything they see means that all players exit with low level buffs, and can't get past the threshold to open the chest area.

or all kills in the murky zone earn a groupwide buff.

I've completely given up on that boss fight in multiplayer. I exit as soon as I see someone's fruitlessly trying to kill it. Me joining their game just makes it harder for them. According to some posts here, a player simply spectating their fight instantly ramps up the number of adds that appear, even though they're not actually in game yet.

Or you could just take Breath of the Desert and clap the final boss yourself to save them the trouble.

[william_es]

I'd LOVE to do that! except, I don't have that mod yet. Been through there endlessly, that guy has never appeared, in my game, or anyone else's I've joined. Shrug.

I just have to sullenly envy other people's breath of the desert for now.

And a bossfight that's only winnable with one RNG mod is badly designed bossfight. I think pretty much everyone agrees, that boss is boring and broken.

[Phosphorescence]

I literally had no idea what to do until i looked it up and saw
"Damage stacks in the other realm"

[Deus]

Yeah, the first time I did this boss with my friend we thought the other realm was just a distraction and the goal was to find the (really) hard to see exit before your life runs out...

[Sir Cook]

It actually an easy fix and everyone is looking at it the wrong way. Instead of giving the stacks to the one player killing them, reverse everything. When someone gets sent down, each kill grants a debuff to the boss instead. You wouldn't have to change anything in the fight, the one sent downstairs can stay until their hearts content, the ones left above can stop twiddling their fingers and start firing when the debuff is triggered. Boss cleanses itself of the debuff as it would a player in the original scenario. ez

[Deus]

Putting the debuff on the boss instead of the player is a good solution for multiplayer, but it does not really fix the whole battle.

If the debuff appears as soon as a player kills an add in the void, it would be now completely unbalanced the other way around because a player could stay in the void indefinitely, even though the boss could potentially be killed before the player in the void has finished taking out all the adds...