Do We Need Colossal Enemies?

[ScorpDK]

We could do with some larger (mini-)bosses that appear either in set missions or have a chance to randomly pop in at random.

Now, only infested can really bring scaled-up mobs into play (as Ancients are capable/supposed to be quite a bit larger than they currently are), while Grineer and Corpus would have to bring mechanized units such as walkers, drones and what not into action. Corpus Tech could have always been a dude in an exoskeleton armed with twi cannons, for example.

But yes, having a few more large-scale boss battles that are more than just a humanoid that you hit over the head with your weapon of choice for 2-5 minutes, could be fun.

[ScorpDK]

Now let's all imagine a squad of Archwing Tenno circling a massive Infested growth, tentacles flailing and poisonous globs flying everywhere.

 

If you've played Dead Space, think this:

*narrows eyes* Spacebutt...we meet again.

[RoboDoge]

Do colossal enemies need us?

[MechaTails]

I'd support this as long as we can climb onto the giant boss a la Shadow of the Colossus.

 

Haha, DE would have to give us sticky gloves and shoes for that.

 

The only way this would work is if it was a ship or huge mobile weapon of some sort(not a gundam type). This kind of enemy alone would make all abilities useless.

 

Good point, although I like the idea of giving the Tenno a feeling of helplessness, making their powers mostly useless. Some abilities would still be good, like Ember's Fireball, Nekros for distracting the minions, etc. Guns would be used to pop the gas sacks, melee can be used on the feet to conserve ammo.

 

Do colossal enemies need us?

 

As food, yeah lol

 

And yeah, giant Corpus/Grineer versions of this could be ships you fight while jetpacking around. Maybe a Corpus factory with a murderous AI so the whole stage is lethal xD Minibosses can be big robots, exo-skeletons, and tanks maybe.

Edited September 2, 2014 by DarkTails

[Vastaren]

Giant multi-stage bosses where the fight is prolonged by telegraphed weakspots and spawn determined by RNG in specific tilesets?

I'm not against it entirely, but the idea sounds like Lech Kril, the Stalker and Lephantis rolled into one. I just don't know.

 

Giant bosses are certainly awesome and could be fun and rewarding to bring down for the first few weeks people get hyped about it, but I certainly don't imagine they'll last long as a filler for content - just like people farm Lech Kril, the Stalker, or Lephantis. I don't imagine it'll change how much players engage with the game all that much as a random fight, leaving out possible rewards. Are giant bosses cool? For sure. But do we need giant bosses? Maybe not...

 

I would think that working on enemy design in other ways to augment the 'trash' mobs we currently have would be more of a priority and no less rewarding to combat than one huge juggernaut. As stated before, it's not a bad idea, but it would be a random novelty whereas changing up existing mobs would tackle many issues with overreliance on scaling and stuff like that, which I would rather they focus on. This could be the change-up in combat that we're all looking for - reintroducing a measure of adaptation to general gameplay which is regular and consistent rather than a random encounter.

 

Combat in Warframe is so heavily reliant on damage output rather than tactics that weakspots and multi-stage fights seem a bit contrived. With Lech Kril, the only thing stopping the fight from being a two-second beatdown for players with a Soma is the fact that he's invulnerable to damage on everything but a small weakspot on his back. While it's a fairly decent way to mitigate balancing issues with player damage output, it's also a very clumsy and illogical mechanic imo when you pair it with the second half of the fight, which is entirely DPS-reliant. I would have much preferred to be able to kill Lech Kril by either having percentage-based damage mitigation, or continuing to counter telegraphed attacks, but even these aren't particularly fulfilling to me, since it is the only option available. Weakspots are fine if they're an option, but encouraging players to repeat the same tactic over and over stagnates after a while. For example, with the shield lancer, they have near-complete damage mitigation through their shields, only exposing a part of their body when firing. The difference between this guy and Lech Kril is that the player has options if they don't want to wait for them to expose themselves - aim, manoeuvre behind them to get a shot, or use powers are just three, and doubtless there are specifics which widen those options - anything to take away the focus on DPS, and allowing more than just a single, 'right' way to go about taking him on.

 

By allowing the defeat of such a boss through something other than damage output or repetitive tactics, it would both be beneficial to players who don't have the equipment, but annoy those who do. This is why I would suggest other changes to existing enemies rather than implementing a new one before the paradigm of combat in Warframe is able to comfortably support such an inclusion. I feel that we don't necessarily need more bosses with weakspots yet, just more enemies which engage the player and present options on how to defeat them first.

 

As for the abilities suggested, I think forcing movement is standard fare for most bosses in the game. Jumping, sliding and moving to avoid damage are all fine by me, I guess, even if they sound a lot like what Lephantis already does. The danger in having too few of these moves is that it forces players not necessarily to adapt to telegraphed attacks, but to memorise repetitive motions to stay alive just as we memorise repetitive motions to take Lech Kril down. I don't see this as a particularly big issue, though, the four abilities sound fairly broad enough to escape further criticism.

 

RNG-determined spawning in specific tilesets is also a contentious point. RNG-determined spawns are a hard thing to get right - the difficulty is in the impossible task (due to the definition of 'random') of trying to balance the rate such that people don't get burnt out from being let down, but nor are they able to reliable 'farm' for them. As we saw with the Stalker, either players were simply annoyed at dying on an RNG-determined basis when levelling new frames, or just trivialising the encounter using weapons with high damage output as an added bonus to what they were doing anyway. It's just not reliable to use RNG content to set goals for that most people play Warframe to achieve.

 

If we are to go with the RNG route, I would certainly hope this encounter is skill-based rather than damage-based so that everyone has an equal opportunity to defeat the boss. The Stalker encounters are more a random gear check than anything else, really. We shouldn't need more of these.

 

So overall, I'm definitely not rejecting this idea, I think it's cool and neat, but I don't think it should be an absolute necessity until we have a few more changes to enemy design and RNG reliance to ease the inclusion of this boss into the game first. Right now, the standard of gameplay in Warframe heavily limits how I think the idea would pan out to be as fun and accessible as possible.

[RoboDoge]

Haha, DE would have to give us sticky gloves and shoes for that.

 

 

Good point, although I like the idea of giving the Tenno a feeling of helplessness, making their powers mostly useless. Some abilities would still be good, like Ember's Fireball, Nekros for distracting the minions, etc. Guns would be used to pop the gas sacks, melee can be used on the feet to conserve ammo.

 

 

As food, yeah lol

 

And yeah, giant Corpus/Grineer versions of this could be ships you fight while jetpacking around. Maybe a Corpus factory with a murderous AI so the whole stage is lethal xD Minibosses can be big robots, exo-skeletons, and tanks maybe.

What about Giant Teddy bear?

[AlphaHorseman]

Would be awesome if these things spawned at every 10 waves of defense. It would help break the monotony of defense missions. Or even 10 minutes of every survival.

 

As you increase the number of waves, the mechanics of these massive enemies would increase. 

 

Say, the gas sacks become retractable into the body, or the enemies spawned can help heal the boss, or their abilities receive a buff one way or the other.

 

The one for the void could be a Tower Guardian or something like that. Grineer and Corpus could have an Officer of the Boss of that planet. In other words, a Lieutenant of Captain Vor on Mercury, an AI similar but smaller to the Jackal on Venus, Alad V could send a prototype Zanuka on Jupiter, and so on.

 

Or is that too much?

[angelsplight]

I'm up for it, as long as it isn't something taking 30+ minutes to kill and has a limited amount of runs per daily like a certain game I used to play x.X

[Beas7ie]

If we can climb them and actually melee them then Im all for it, but if its just shoot the little spots like Lephantis, then forget it.

[Xievie]

Raid bosses. Maybe 6-10 man boss raids, much like WoW, Vindictus, etc. Of course these bosses would have stats extremely high, accessible to players who have sufficient skill and equipment, and to possibly require voice coordination though raidcall and ventrillo.

 

Something like this being added could bring us a great form of progression and endgame.

 

For this map in particular, the giant Infested could have these kind of attacks:

Sweep Attack

Uses an arm to sweep an entire floor. The way to avoid it is by either sliding under it or by being above or below the floor it's sweeping.

 

Stomp

Getting close to it will cause it to stomp the ground, causing a damaging earthquake that knocks down all the Tenno.

 

Gas

It can pollute a large section of the platforms with gas, forcing the Tenno to keep moving.

 

Minions

Can release infested to harass the Tenno on the platforms.

 

Strategy for defeating it is:

•There are gas sacks on its torso that must all be ruptured. Destroying them all releases all the gas and it forms a giant cloud in one section of the level, it will slowly dissipate. The Giant can no longer use gas attacks.

 

•There are tendons on the feet that must all be severed to knock down the Giant. Once it's knocked down, it exposes glowing weakspots where it takes lots of damage. After a while it heals the legs and gets back up. Repeat until it's dead

 

So yeah, how can we, and should we, introduce giant enemies into Warframe?

 

Now first reading your post, I got a bit worried (and still am to a degree). Your ideas of moves were extremely simple, and I'd hate for these to be the only attacks on a boss.

 

If we got bosses as cool as this, it would be horribly ruined for me if they ended up being tank and spank.

 

The strategy part, while still extremely simple, got me to worry less because they are some alright ideas.

 

 

 

 

I think it would be totally radical if there were like a 5% chance that a giant enemy would spawn in certain wide open tilesets. Or maybe if you kill enough Infested, they send one of these big baddies after you.

 

NO. Such a great update would be ruined if a boss was RNG based, and I don't entirely agree with the kill count idea either.

 

I believe that it should be it's own game mode, as being in an already-existing mode would greatly devalue them and would force others to deal with something they probably didn't want to deal with at the time. Whether or not a boss could be encountered should be up to the players.

[JohnProdman]

I suppose you posted this already knowing that the Infested Juggernaut is already an official thing, right?

 

It's not that diseased ancient concept, though.

[LeoAtKnight]

We absolutely need colossal bosses! Just as long as the don't make the boss immune to everything and only have certain times you can damage them. Rather, they should have weak points you can constantly nail at all times, and after enough damage has been dealt something happens (severing an arm for example). We shouldn't have to destroy EVERY part to kill these bosses.

 

But you know what I think we need more? REAL bosses on OUR scale. But then again, the kind of stuff I'm thinking of way out this game's league (at the moment). Giant bosses will work for now.

[smithf]

For really colossal ones, maybe it will cater for 4x4 squads instead of just one squad :) (idea from another game starting with D and ends with y)

 

But it will probably require dedicated server/host rather than one host+client serving 3 other clients, which is unreliable (both in hardware and network).

 

EDIT: just to clarify:

squads of 4 starts the approach mission individually which does not contain the boss yet, when they reach a prepare/gather point, just before boss fight, the squads join up into one boss mission (so only the boss fight part has > 4 players, which MAY be able to limit the amount of resources required, since the previously traveled part will not be needed and can be unloaded, or the boss fight part be a newly loaded, independent segment?)

Edited September 2, 2014 by smithf

[Ririknight]

This sounds awesome, just think one giant corpus proxy * o*, or a giant grineer chicken ( Vay hek pun).

Totally would want this to happen

[AandOE]

Going through my first play through of Dark Souls, and that above picture reminds me of Ceaseless Discharge. :D Though the Shadow of the Colossus giants were really great, meaning that random hackings or shots wouldn't down them before my loading screen ends. I've seen other large, open spaces that'd be great for monster huge boss battles, usually at the beginnings and ends of outdoor levels.

[MechaTails]

I've seen other large, open spaces that'd be great for monster huge boss battles, usually at the beginnings and ends of outdoor levels.

 

There's a wide open Corpus hangar with like 3 or 4 parked ships that seems like a good place to put a flying miniboss, the Tenno can take cover under stairs, under the ship's wings, containers, etc., plus it's a nice setting with the open hangar doors taking up an entire side of the room showcasing outer space

Edited September 2, 2014 by DarkTails

[AandOE]

Oh yeah! The first time I encountered it, the hangar really gave off the 'boss battle' vibe. I'm surprised that some of the outdoor parts don't also have heavy bombers flying overhead, when the alert is triggered.

[VKhaun]

I like it, just because # of targets means you can't Boltor Primify it. Make the targets shift colors or shapes and be very dangerous to shoot at (various reactive attacks) unless shot at the right time. Give it big scary attacks that will mess up max geared characters if they don't interrupt it by doing X.

[jennibear]

There's a wide open Corpus hangar with like 3 or 4 parked ships that seems like a good place to put a flying miniboss, the Tenno can take cover under stairs, under the ship's wings, containers, etc., plus it's a nice setting with the open hangar doors taking up an entire side of the room showcasing outer space

omg i always think that when i pass those, that there should be a random boss in those locations!! even if it's just a land boss it would still be awesome. But how cool would that be to be flying?? When you walk up the ship takes off in a cutscene and you have to chase it through the planet in the air. it would be epic

[Chub_N_Tuck]

Man, after reading op, I started to wonder how many large-spaced tilesets we have in game.

 

Think about the Orokin Derelict. There is a huuuuuuge room where infested roots(?) are placed, the room is rather large but the entire room has an uneven foothold. So, not just some bosses that stand around, a large boss - not as large as lephantis but maybe half the size - that flies/leaps to a one wall to another and keeps players at threat of falling and when they fall, take guaranteed damage or even death.

 

That would be one hell of a challenge but still fun.

[W4RH3AD]

Not only big bosses, I think we need more dynamic environments and tilesets.. like moving platforms and floors that the boss can jump to and use, and will actually make us use the wallrunning/parkour system that we have.

 

It will be soo cool if we had to jump, dodge and shoot at numerous enemies while the boss throws in heavy damage from the side all at the same time!! Maybe we can even have one person to be in charge of activating like life support of some sort/platforms so we can jump to the boss/disable his shields kind of thing while the rest cover him and at the same time try to take out the lesser mobs..

[UnknownBlademaster]

I'd rather preffer DE first creates a STEALTH enemy. Like, FULL STEALTH. And it can execute you like you do to enemies when they can't see you and the alarm hasn't been triggered.

 

That or rollers with Brakks and Moa's with Detrons.

 

P.S. J-3 Golem is coming back very soon and will be almost as big as the map or THE MAP ITSELF. Also, Balor Fomorians will be a pretty massive boss battle when archwing comes out, seeing that the Fomorian is A F*CKING SPACESHIP BIGGER THAN THE NORMAL GALLIONS, AND THAT THE ARENA IS SPACE. OPEN SPACE WITH SOME ASTEROIDS TO TAKE COVER.

 

So yeah, just wait abit. Probably until 15.2 or so.

[Lakitel]

 I think if parkour ever gets updated a shadow of the colossus style boss would be brilliant.

 

 I also like the idea of a multi-stage boss but preferably one where multi-stage doesn't mean "He runs away after X damage".

 

 How about this for an idea:

 

First stage its a normal boss that you have to infect with the technocyte virus. Essentially you would have to beat down the boss until he has a low level of health, or maybe have some kind of stamina meter where he can't fight back if you try and infect him.

 

Second stage: Something goes wrong with the infection and the boss doubles/triples in size. This could be like a "hit this spot" type of fight with waves of enemies.

 

Third stage: Boss mutates and changes into a third much smaller shape. This stage the boss would be very mobile and would run/jump around a lot, so we'd have to use teamwork and accuracy to take him down.

[CnadyChaos]

+1 Love the idea

[Taranis49]

Man, after reading op, I started to wonder how many large-spaced tilesets we have in game.

 

Think about the Orokin Derelict. There is a huuuuuuge room where infested roots(?) are placed, the room is rather large but the entire room has an uneven foothold. So, not just some bosses that stand around, a large boss - not as large as lephantis but maybe half the size - that flies/leaps to a one wall to another and keeps players at threat of falling and when they fall, take guaranteed damage or even death.

 

That would be one hell of a challenge but still fun.

 

Actually, it'd probably be more frustrating than fun without Parkour 2.0, due to the fact that parkour and linked actions don't work properly on uneven surfaces, e.g. even simple front-flipping has a huge delay on anything resembling a slope... if it works at all. The room in question in particular suffers from this and the roots might as well be made of teflon for how little traction there is on them, :-P

 

 I think if parkour ever gets updated a shadow of the colossus style boss would be brilliant.

 

 I also like the idea of a multi-stage boss but preferably one where multi-stage doesn't mean "He runs away after X damage".

 

 How about this for an idea:

 

First stage its a normal boss that you have to infect with the technocyte virus. Essentially you would have to beat down the boss until he has a low level of health, or maybe have some kind of stamina meter where he can't fight back if you try and infect him.

 

Second stage: Something goes wrong with the infection and the boss doubles/triples in size. This could be like a "hit this spot" type of fight with waves of enemies.

 

Third stage: Boss mutates and changes into a third much smaller shape. This stage the boss would be very mobile and would run/jump around a lot, so we'd have to use teamwork and accuracy to take him down.

 

Sounds too much like you want to play Resident Evil. ;-)

Edited October 6, 2014 by Taranis49