Why can't western devs into final boss design especially the big developers?

My biggest complain about the game. Considering the disaster that was TR 2013, Rise of the Tomb Raider was a good surprise and actually pretty good and faithful to the old TR games, it even had decent boss fights, I was satisfied with the game up until that Konstantin fight.

because single player is a casual experience now and they let multiplayer leaderboards and ranked games filled with shrieking teenagers and beyond the point of hope NEETs add difficulty to games for them now.

It's because the gameplay mechanics don't really lend themselves to a "boss" style 1v1 encounter.

A boss fight should, ideally, test the player's mastery of all the game mechanics up to the point of the fight, or at least the ones you're expected to master at that point. (e.g. how in MGR wolf is where you need to know how to dodge and parry slowly, Monsoon is where you need to be able to rapidly parry and Sundowner is where you're expected to be able to make a precision cut mid-fight.)

TLOU's gameplay is mostly about how you work your way through an area filled with multiple enemies that require different strategies to get around, mostly sneaking about. That doesn't really lend itself to a boss fight and the one boss they did have was basically "sneak up 3 times to do pre-animated takedowns"

That depends on your standards for a "good" boss.

I'd say the Witcher 2 had some decent bosses. The draug in chapter 2 stands out because it had the buildup necessary to make it seem like an imposing boss when you finally did get to fight it, and the gameplay in the fights was decent enough by my standards.

I hear shovel knight was pretty good too.

Consider the Metal Gear Solid series, especially pre MGS4. The core gameplay is about sneaking around. It obviously doesn't lend itself to a "boss" style 1v1 encounter yet the series has ones of the best, memorable boss fights of all time. You know why? Because instead of being lazy and saying fuck it, Kojima and his team put actual effort into designing them.

I'm sure if you were creative and put enough effort into programming a level dedicated to it, with the mechanics of TLoU, you could have at least a decent boss fight.

Driver SF got nice final boss and pretty orignal for non-combat driving game.

Different design philsophies. Japan doesn't seem to mind their games feeling "game-y" and most devs there understand the importance of a good final boss; it's the climax to the story, and should be the hardest and most eventful encounter.

Most western devs, especially AAA, are focused on realism and their combat systems often lack depth. There's also cases like the Batman games, where it's not even geared towards intricate 1v1 combat. You also have "cinematic" QTE shit, this is because, beyond gameplay limitations, I feel game devs want the boss to go how they think it should go, instead of letting the player achieve that.

Bad battle systems and games get focus tested so that even 80 years olds who have never played a game can beat them

I agree that it can be done with effort. But the MGS boss fights work because there are enough supplementary mechanics and weapons and gadgets in place beyond the core sneaking gameplay to be able to make a good boss encounter.

TLOU in comparison had very little scope for making a boss interesting because it went for the "realistic" route. Enemies that doe in 1-2 bullets don't make for good bosses.

>enemies that die in 1-2 hits don't make good bosses

They can be if they're designed cleverly enough.

The End from MGS3 is an example of a boss that completely throws typical boss conventions out the window, and it still works.

If you design bosses as tests of a player's understanding of certain mechanics, rather than designing them as damage sponges, you can't go wrong.

Because for good boss fights you need good gameplay mechanics. Something you'll rarely find in western AAA trash.

>Shadow of Mordor
> intricate combat systems
It was just the batman combat, but even more automated, what are you talking about?

wow, a mid tier nes game in the 2016!

What? The David fight was great, faggot. It's a tense, stealth-based fight that gets nerve-racking as fuck in the third phase when you're slinking around, trying to get the drop on each other, and all you hear is ragged breathing. It's a nice change of pace in playing as a weak and vulnerable Ellie who has to rely on wits to survive instead of playing as Joel who relies more on guns and brute strength. Would you have preferred some generic, retarded bullet sponge enemy bullshit instead? The game mechanics are still there: cat and mouse-style gameplay loop, distractions, open level design with different routes and shortcuts running through it, baiting the enemy, listening to the environment, improvising when shit hits the fan--it's all there, you just don't have a gun in that part. It's as good a traditional boss battle as it gets.

That's kind of what I said in my first post. Bosses should test a players understanding and mastery of the game mechanics. If the mechanics are pretty shallow for 1v1 combat though then it leads to underwhelming bosses.

To be fair, Shadow of Mordor had no good bosses from Batman to copy.
Mr Freeze is good but Shadow of Mordor did away with stealth and gadgets.

It's pretty sad that the only recent FPS games I can think of that had proper final bosses are Black Ops 3 and Doom 4

It was the Bioware employee who said final bosses were too "video gamey".
Jesus christ what business do they think they're in.

I'll give kudos to Uncharted 4 though, I enjoyed the last boss in that.

To be fair, Arkham City's fight against Mr. Freeze was amaszing because it was a fight that explored all the possible methods you had for taking out enemies in a stealth scenario.

>game has a great combat system
>bosses mostly take advantage of that system and work well
>final boss completely throws it out the window and goes into a completely different genre entirely

It was still kind of fun but it just totally threw me off

>Shadow of Mordor
>intricate combat system

Are you shitting me right now.

Because they don't want the boss fight to go against this crafted experience that they've envisioned.

Bioware's never made a single good video game, so it makes sense they think they're above the whole business.

Yeah Uncharted 4's final boss was pretty dope apart from the pop ups that kept inexplicably flashing up on screen, as if I'd suddenly forgotten what the controls were in the space of 10 seconds.

When Nate and Sam are in the old lady's museum there should've been a part where they find some antique swords on the wall or something and play fencing with them, that way they could've expected the player to know what the controls were.

Furi was a western game with great bosses

>villain is flinging cars at the hero
>guy realizes he's in a coma
>starts throwing cars back at the dream villain
>uses his dream(containing info from real life news on tv/radio) to stop the real life villain
That was a great game.