{"id":2286,"date":"2010-03-19T10:23:54","date_gmt":"2010-03-19T15:23:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/?p=2286"},"modified":"2010-03-19T11:27:27","modified_gmt":"2010-03-19T16:27:27","slug":"the-rts-bossbattle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2010\/03\/19\/the-rts-bossbattle\/","title":{"rendered":"The RTS Boss Battle"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his mostly glowing review of Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising<\/em><\/a>, Bill Abner hits on one of my personal annoyances with RTS campaigns – the boss battle.<\/p>\n

This annoyed me in the original game and it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t serve its purpose any better in the expansion. It just makes no sense to me at all thematically that the big boss guy would wait until the end of the map to basically fight the marines solo rather than lead his\/its troops on the field. Not only that but the boss fights are incredibly boring compared to the rest of the missions. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a rush to unleash hell on several squads of marines and a Chaos Dreadnought \u00e2\u20ac\u201c not so much fun to just target the big baddie at the end of a level with very little cause for strategic planning. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

DoW 2 is full of these. You lead your squad through hell to clear a map and then you find the big, bad general who probably has some special powers and take him\/her down. It’s four against one and can be stressful in that enjoyable way that a tight RTS fight can be. Sometimes these boss fights can get downright silly though.<\/p>\n

Supreme Commander 2<\/em> doesn’t have many boss fights, but in the second mission of the Illuminate campaign arc, a giant experimental unit comes out of nowhere. Oh no! Whatever will you do! You only have an army of three experimentals, ten bombers and 50 assorted other shiny metal weapons. Pardon me for not sharing the heroine’s fear and surprise.<\/p>\n

The boss fight is a holdover from martial arts and James Bond movies. Once the hero has cut through a forest of henchmen, he must face off against their leader. He’s not always the final leader, but somebody in the hierarchy. Fantasy RPGs follow this trope and in this character arc concept it makes sense. You the hero are getting closer to your enemy by taking down his entourage one villain (and a hundred expendable ensigns) at a time. Personally, I was pleasantly annoyed by Baldur’s Gate when one boss character escapes from a fight – you end up meeting him again at the side of the arch-foozle. Then you kill him.<\/p>\n

Real time strategy really doesn’t work like that, or it shouldn’t. Yes, the story campaigns generally follow the same heroic arc, but Abner is right to point that it makes for poor strategy to leave your strongest unit behind the rest of the army, standing on a platform and waiting for a squad of space marines to fight it. This is a war, and if your general is your strongest unit, you move it to the front line and support him\/her with whatever it takes to stay safe and deadly.<\/p>\n

This gets to the core of why so many RTS story campaigns are weak. They are written like movies, following one or two main characters through a war or struggle for something. But the gameplay is not designed to be character progression centered, so you end up with either a light combat RPG thing like Dawn of War 2<\/em> (which isn’t half bad) or a cliche monstrosity like almost every other one. <\/p>\n

But if you tell me I am fighting a war, and the bad guy knows where I am and I am still building farms or mines or energy plants, you need to give me that sense of urgency if you want to have a boss battle. Show me a timer with a countdown to when the big bad and his army arrive. Then I know that this is serious business for my team and that the enemy is taking me seriously, too. Don’t make me kill a planet of bad lieutenants just so I can face off against Superman at the end of a mission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his mostly glowing review of Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising, Bill Abner hits on one of my personal annoyances with RTS campaigns – the boss battle. This annoyed me in the original game and it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t serve its purpose any better in the expansion. It just makes no sense to me at all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[9,41],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-AS","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2286"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2286"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2288,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2286\/revisions\/2288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}