The design of boss fights in many games tends to fall into one of two gameplay patterns:
1. Prescriptive Formula
Interactions with the boss are limited; a narrow sequence of moves are required to defeat it. For example the boss may only takes damage at specific times or on specific parts of it or when hit by specific moves.
Typically, a prescriptive boss will have multiple phases. Each phase changes the required approach or just ramps up the difficulty of executing the required steps, giving the fight some variety.
e.g. In many Zelda games, the boss won't take damage until you exploit its weakness, causing it to go into a vulnerable state, where it can take a maximum amount of damage before becoming invulnerable again. The boss's weaknesses can change throughout the fight, usually in a specific sequence.
Usually the solution to prescriptive fights is made plainly obvious. The Zelda series regularly uses big eyes as weak points. It does it often enough the games can rely on players knowing to attack them.
Sometimes the required moves are less obvious, making the fight act more like a puzzle, requiring the player to think logically on their feet about what may damage the boss.
When the weakness is too obtuse, the encounter can become frustrating. For example 'King MacFrights' in Luigi's Mansion 3: He becomes vulnerable after you flash your torch at him during a specific attack, blinding him. What's confusing is that his face is always visible, but so long as he is holding up his shield, the flash doesn't affect him, despite the fact that it's not totally obscuring his face, and it doesn't matter what angle you shine it at him. If you flash while the shield is up, the shield will briefly turn white, which could be a red herring because it seems to do something, while other actions do nothing, encouraging the player to trigger this behaviour again.
Puzzles in games usually give the player time and space to think out a solution. If the player is being intruded upon by threats, it's harder to focus on the problem.
The Bed of Chaos in Dark Souls is another example of a prescriptive puzzle boss gone wrong. Few people are going to look down into a death pit just in case it helps; there is barely even time to stand still without getting hit. What's worse is that it's the only prescriptive boss in the game, so the player has not learned to expect a non-combat solution.
2. Free-Form Formula
The player has lots of options in how they approach the fight. The boss can be damaged by any attack at any time anywhere on it. The player is able to progress towards the goal of beating the boss by using any of the tools at their disposal and taking advantage of any opportunity they can find. It's not that any strategy ought to work but that there should be no one required method. Because of the variety in how a free-form boss can be approached, there tends to be a greater variance in the outcome in terms of how quickly the fight is won or how much damage the player takes, corresponding to how skilful or strategic the player is.
Free-Form boss fights may still progress through multiple phases, and their attacks may only be avoided by doing certain things, and there may be certain immunities that a boss has, but these are exceptions not the rule.
The greater variety in how the fight plays out tends to make them more interesting and gives them a higher skill ceiling, which can make them more interesting to play, watch, and replay, and it means there's a chance to gain a feeling of mastery over the fight.
In Shovel Knight and its sequels — games full of free-form bosses — I tended to have the experience of dying to the boss several times, having barely damaged it, and all of a sudden being very close to winning. Because in most free-form fights, the boss switches randomly between many different movements and attacks; if there's even one pattern you can't handle, you will eventually lose, so you have to get a hang of all of them in a natural unscripted way.
If a boss moves unpredictably, the fight feels frantic because you don't know what's going to happen next, even after many attempts. Whereas in a prescriptive fight, even on the first attempt, you might find yourself waiting for the boss to give you the same opportunity to damage it that it has given you before.
Prescriptive fights tend to only have a few patterns that come in a specific order, meaning that after you lose, you have to cake-walk through the steps you beat earlier to get to the difficult bit, which can be tedious. Often a prescriptive boss will try the same tactic several times, even after it proves unsuccessful, before it decides to switch to a different strategy; this makes the boss feel stupid or like the game is letting you win.
So typically I prefer the free-form formula.
Between Extremes
Furi
Furi is an action boss-rush game where you fight through several multi-phase boss fights, using a small handful of abilities such as shooting, slashing, dashing, and parrying.
Each fight is split into around 5 phases. In each phase the boss has different attacks, movements, and rules for how it behaves. Some boss phases have moves chosen randomly and sometimes they come in a pre-defined order. The gameplay looks very free-form, but in reality the boss spends a lot of time invulnerable to certain sources of damage, such as while it moves into a set position or during certain animations. Some of the boss's moves only have one valid response, but most of the time you have more than one choice about how to deal or avoid damage. Therefore Furi has both free-form and prescriptive elements.
This might seem at odds with the kind of gameplay that I like, but Furi doesn't fall into the problems that prescriptive fights often have. The fights are challenging, with no obtuse elements. It's easy to learn what moves will damage the boss and when just by trying them. Each phase tends to have the feeling of a free-form fight by requiring mastery against a set of moves, except Furi forces you to switch up your moves and not rely on a single strategy.
What Furi manages to achieve by being somewhat prescriptive is the creators have more control over the feel conveyed by a fight. They can have very varying set-pieces. They can move the boss away from you or keep them close, change camera perspectives, switch focus between offence and defence when they want, requiring you to play reactively as well as actively, and thanks to having phases they can give a boss tons of moves without giving you too many to learn at once.
It also allows bosses to feel more different, with some leaning more heavily towards one kind of offence/defence. e.g. "The Line", an old monk-like man, spends most of the time unable to be damaged, but only requires a few hits for a phase to end, whereas "The Hand" who is dressed in armour, wielding a sword and shield, requires a lot of parrying.
Often in games, when a boss can change their moveset part way through, you end up learning a completely new fight from scratch and if you fail, it can be tedious to go through the earlier phases. However Furi is more forgiving than this and gives you more opportunity to learn each phase. You have 3 lives per fight. If your healthbar hits zero, you lose a life and the current phase restarts, putting you and the boss back to full health. If the boss's healthbar hits zero, you both fully heal and move to the next phase, and you gain a life. The time between failing at a challenge in any game and being able to retry it, when shorter, allows players to more effectively approach the challenge and more effectively adjust their strategy.
When you inevitably lose all your lives and have to start again from phase 1, the earlier phases are still meaningful because they determine how many chances you will have at the later more difficult phases. Plus, because all damage is avoidable and almost always feels fair, it's enjoyable to breeze through earlier phases that were once causing you trouble and feel that sense of improvement and accomplishment.
Furi has very consistent indicators and visuals for attacks across all of its bosses and their phases, meaning no time is wasted learning what is safe and what isn't or re-learning parry timings. There isn't a feeling of unfairness or an obtuse surprise about what will work.
Doom Eternal and The Marauder
Doom Eternal has very free-form combat with lots of weapons and enemy types. You have a lot of movement options, allowing you to choose which enemy to approach, at what angle, and when. Any weapon will damage any enemy. It uses weapon weakness and enemy weakpoints to encourage weapon switching and fighting different enemies in different ways. Doom Eternal leans into this design much more-so than Doom 2016 likely as a response to the fact that some players relied too much on the Super Shot Gun in the previous instalment. Arguably some weaknesses such as the Cacodemon's propensity to swallow sticky bombs take this too far by prompting the same response from the player every time.
The most controversial enemy in Doom Eternal is also its most prescriptive. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear and absolutely will not stop ever. It can't be directly damaged because it will instantly shield incoming fire except when it is swinging its axe or is staggered/frozen; you will even be punished for attacking it because hitting the shield can summon his fire dog who chases you down.
The Marauder being inconsistent with the other enemies can give the player faulty expectations and that can be frustrating. Doom Eternal will sometimes pause the game to pop-up a dialog box when you first encounter an enemy type in order to explain its weakness. Reading this is essential for progression in the case of the Doom Hunter, who you meet earlier in the game. I skipped the dialog box, not wanting to be told how to play, only to find that my shooting the Doom Hunter's chest was completely ineffective.
This is the dialog box for the Marauder, paired with an animation of Doom Guy shooting the Marauder with a Super Shot Gun when his eyes flash green.
"The Marauder is a defensive powerhouse. Stand too close, he uses his Shotgun. Stand too far away, he throws projectiles. Keep him at mid-range, counter his attack when his eyes flash green, otherwise, he blocks your shots. The Marauder is resistant to Super Weapons."
The instructions here are very specific. This is clearly a prescriptive encounter and it goes the same way every time you meet him, except as the game goes on there are more other enemies in the arena with you. Unlike other enemies, he chases you down (not the other way around) and there's barely any other enemies in the room in order to compensate for how dangerous he is. He's antithetical to the way the rest of the enemies are designed. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but he gets old fast, while other enemies don't, because each encounter is the same.Many players find it difficult to stand in the sweet spot that triggers his counterable attack. Some defenders of the Marauder discovered that you can trigger this attack just by continually moving away from him, prompting him to close the distance and use the attack. It's also true that there are more creative methods for defeating him including stunlocking him with grenades and doing some fast weapon switching. You can make him turn around and hold the shield away from you by firing the BFG past him. You can infinitely stagger him by repeatedly shooting him in the back. He used to turn to face any ice-bomb you shot behind him, but this has been patched out and possibly other methods have been too.
So it turns out there are multiple approaches to this fight, which is in-line with the rest of the game design, but most players never notice this. I suspect this is because the game tells you what strategy it thinks you should use.
Without the dialog box explaining the Marauder, I think players would still be confused by him. I don't think the Marauder gives players enough room to experiment with how to fight him because of how dangerous he is and how much you are punished for fighting him wrongly. Further confusion is caused by the fact that other demons hitting his shield also causes the dog to appear even when you're not looking, leading players to think the dog appearing is not triggered by shooting the shield.
Here's a video from one fan of The Marauder that responds to a number of complaints about it. Most of his defence I've already addressed.
The worst line of the video is: "it wasn't until my second playthough that I really started to get it"
That's simply not a well-designed experience therefore.I'm not saying that there's no fun to be had fighting him; it just wears off quickly.
I don't want to say that there is no way to have a good prescriptive elements in Nu-Doom. The blue shields of Possessed Soldiers render most weapons not very effective, but you have a choice between using an explosive to the side of them, or using the Plasma Rifle at the shield directly, or try to get behind them, or just brute forcing the shield.
Conclusion
I feel obliged to write a conclusion.
Game developers are much more successful at making engaging, enjoyable, and memorable free-form combat than prescriptive combat.
Prescriptive combat can be good when it takes the form of puzzle solving, so long as the puzzle is not obtuse and the fight isn't repetitive.
It's possible to make combat less free-form and still make it enjoyable, and it can even have advantages, by tailoring the fight to have an interesting theme or flow. However, designers have to be very careful not to over-do it.
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