Difficulty scaling and end of level bosses

by Mr Danger, Scotland, Monday, April 01, 2013, 03:06 (4042 days ago)

Hi DBO forums,

I was looking at the above GDC concept image that Staten kind of teased, and thought that the smoke coming from the ball/engine/weird alien artefact in the middle also looked like a giant hand reaching down to leech energy from it. Its got to be an End of Level boss!... Then I saw the lasers and thought probably not.

But it got me thinking about if anyone would want them or something like them. One of the things I loved about Halo was the lack of bosses It kept the universe consistent and more immersive(and hated it whenever it was broken with stuff like Tartarus's magic shield etc.) and ramped up the difficulty through enemy ranks/numbers and layout etc or just went and flipped the gameplay with a death race.

I can imagine end of level bosses being used to encourage co-op play, i.e they are doable solo, but not without alot of death and time compared to co-op which is where bungie are obviously aiming for the "funzone" to be.

But this brings up the issue of general difficulty and difficulty scaling. As anyone who has played through a game with 4 player co-op like the later Halo games or borderlands etc knows there is almost no difficulty to it without radically altering the game compared to single or even two player playthroughs.

So with 6 player co-op being always available if not required, how do we think Bungie will keep it from being either a cake walk or a instakill respawn grind? (and I am not sure if any game can be consistent challenge wise when it can go from single player to co-op with the press of an invite button).

Will it be a dip into dungeon bosses or something else like (I hope) a new high standard of enemy A.I. and tactics that has not been attempted before? Or possibly a "Skulls" style ramping up of difficulty the more players there are present or in your party. There is also the option of the borderlands approach where you can set you own difficulty level but and you do/take damage accordingly for greater or lesser reward.

P.S. I've been lurking around for about 10 years on HBO but i think this is my first post on a bungie.org forum so apologies if its not quite right but i hope the fact i've been pushed into posting tells how excited I am about destiny, haha.