If a boss requires you to look up whilst avoiding holes in the floor then your boss is bad and you should feel bad

Just have to get this off my chest but it seems like more and more boss encounters are doing this. The worst offender by far is Control and the battle against The Former. It's a complete nightmare as you need to aim your view upward to target the weak spot and avoid the incoming projectiles, meaning it is very difficult to keep an eye on a rapidly disappearing floor. It makes for a very frustrating experience as deaths feel cheap and more a result of fighting the camera than anything else. I know you can levitate but it is not an endless power and still requires you to simultaneously be looking for death from above and below.

I thought a section of Ghost Runner had the same issue, requiring a challenging climb up a tower with rotating laser beams which move around a head and foot height requiring ducking or jumping accordingly, whilst also looking upwards to find the next grapple point to ascend.

Perhaps it's just me and I'm becoming an old man who yells at clouds, but I do wonder how these sort of frustrating experiences get through play testing sometimes. Some games manage it well, Titanfall 2 comes to mind, with a fight with an aerial boss managing to allow you to keep an eye on both the target and the floor by having the boss at a greater distance.

* Just to clarify, I thought both Control and Ghost Runner were great overall

If you find yourself in this situation in the United States, I would recommend contacting OSHA, as this sounds like a definite safety violation.

How about "bosses with insta-fail states who have long, unskippable death animations where you can still FULLY instantly die if you take one wrong step."

Ahem...not that the boss in Control was annoying for a few reasons...

And that game really does rule, it's a testament to how good the rest of it is that such fouled up bosses can't diminish it.

I believe the way that these frustrating things get through playtesting is that the playtesters play the game so much that they sort of lose track of what's frustrating for people who aren't going to play it a gajillion times. This happens a lot in game design.

So does game testers playing games as a job so not realizing that a lot of important quality of life features for people who are going to play games in a normal recreational situation are missing.

Like Destruction AllStars automatically turning on chat coming through your controller with no in-game way to mute it because it was tested with a bunch of colleagues who weren't just going to scream the N-word or play terrible music or play with the controller held up to a crying baby or whatever.

Also games tend to be made by people who love games and play them a lot, and often love hard games so they have a bad read on what's good hard and what's bad hard much of the time.

I imagine that the issue boils down to the same two things that most development comes down to which is time and money. They built out the stage, the programmed the behaviors, they put time and effort into the boss fight. Testing averages are lower on the enjoyment scale than usual but it's do-able and they already built it and they don't have time to create an entire new thing so it stays in. This is the only explanation I can understand because I refuse to accept that devs have the ability to change something that is clearly a nuisance but actively choose not to do it.

This was probably the least legible of the Control boss fights, but truthfully they were all mediocre at best other than the esseJ fight which I thought was a ton of fun. Granted, I beat it on my first try unlike the others, and did see plenty of complaints about that one as well afterward.

But this was definitely a special kind of hell because it takes multiple deaths to even get a handle on why you're dying, let alone what you can do to stop it.

Also consider unionizing.

The Control boss fights aren't very good in general.

For me the real killer was the plant in the basement. God. That thing is so frustrating, just, poison on the ground floor, constant explosives raining from above, not to mention the actual, y'know, boss. Plus a very long time to get back to it each time. H a t e

It really speaks to how bad the boss fights in Control were because, having not played it since launch, I read this thread title and immediately thought "yeah that sucks, just like that bullshit boss in Control."

it's a huge bummer because the bosses are all visually fascinating and extremely interesting from a lore perspective, but the combat in that game is tuned so tightly to the mad-dash run-and-gun chaos with humanoid enemies and they did not do a good job of utilizing those mechanics for hulking monsters.

Loved reading this thread because I clicked assuming this was about Control. Generally agree with everyone; this game is at it's best when you're taking on large numbers of enemies and managing the map with your different powers. It's strengths never translated to good boss fights.

@lapsariangiraff: Remedy obviously knew they'd made a mistake on the plant fight as the ultimate edition added a checkpoint just outside the arena. Still a horrendous fight though.

As others have said it really shows what a hell of a game control was that it is beloved by so many despite having three of the worst bosses of all time...(that optional flying prick being the third).

@bemusingname: Better late than never I suppose but I remember the run-back to that boss being a huge pain in the butt and I had to try it like 3 times unlike most other bosses in the game. I'm generally against run-backs anywhere, even Souls games where it just basically wastes your time, but in Control especially it made no sense to have it that far back.

@humanity: omg YES