Boss monsters are an important component of gameplay in MMORPGs and present a significant challenge for players. We spoke with developers of the online role-playing game Neverwinter about this topic.
A boss fight in an MMORPG is always something special. It should challenge players and provide an experience that heroes won’t soon forget. Not only the gameplay mechanics play a role in how a boss can be defeated, but also its design is important.
MeinMMO author Andreas Bertits spoke with Jared Sears, Lead Systems Designer for the MMORPG Neverwinter, and Robert Hrouda, Systems Designer, about the creation of boss enemies.
What is Neverwinter anyway? The MMORPG Neverwinter transports you to the fantasy world of the Forgotten Realms. It brings the D&D experience of the pen-and-paper games to the computer.
In the role of a hero, you first need to protect the city of Neverwinter from numerous threats and then travel to places like Icewind Dale, the jungles of Chult, or into the dark realm of Ravenloft or the Nine Hells.
There you and your companions will encounter numerous adventures. Neverwinter places great importance on storytelling, which is why PvE and quests take center stage. PvP also plays a role, but it takes place in separate zones.
MeinMMO: Neverwinter is based on the D&D rules and is set in the Forgotten Realms. Does this restrict you in terms of design and creating new bosses?
Jared Sears, Lead Systems Designer for Neverwinter: The Forgotten Realms has provided tons of great content, including the adventures surrounding Drizzt Do’Urden, which were among the first game content of Neverwinter. Another great aspect of D&D is the ability to travel to distant places and other planes.
That’s why we’ve seen the Feywild, the frosty lands of Icewind Dale, the hellish Avernus, the dinosaur-inhabited Chult, and Castle Ravenloft in Barovia. We’ve never run out of places we could visit. For us, the challenge is more about choosing from countless options.
When we have a theme for an update, there are usually several options for the boss, and then our brainstorming and planning begin. This has led us to interesting bosses like Valindra, Tiamat, Demogorgon, and Strahd von Zarovich, as well as creatures like bone devils, hellfire machines, angels, a burrowing worm, and the mechanical golem filled with Trobian’s spirit. We fight against omniscient beings like the mad wizard Halaster Blackcloak and even against a grotesque undead Atropal.
D&D has created a vast universe that offers numerous interesting stories. It provides a lot of flexibility when it comes to creating new areas or bosses in Neverwinter.
D&D offers many possibilities for cool monster designs
MeinMMO: I grew up in the late 80s/early 90s with (A)D&D when fantasy settings were still very simple and contained common monsters like dragons, vampires, orcs, etc. D&D has evolved over time and offers more diverse and unusual creatures. How has the design of bosses for Neverwinter changed as a result?
Jared Sears: I think I’ve already said some of this in the previous answer, but it definitely allows for a wide range of boss designs. We can take a classic and well-developed character from the D&D universe as a boss. Then we have to create a story and a battle that do justice to this character, whom players are usually very familiar with and might have even encountered in their own campaigns.
An example of this is the mad wizard Halaster Blackcloak. He is so powerful that he has created an entire world in the Underdark. It would have been ridiculous if he just stood there tossing fireballs while players circled around and beat him down. Instead, he hovers and throws furniture around the room before growing larger and wanting to smash the combat area with his bare hands. He then transforms the battle space into an entirely new environment with fire traps, threatening ice, and lightning strikes. He revels in his madness while trying to kill the players. Of course, such a fight requires a lot of work on our part, but the great new experience is absolutely worth the effort.
Even with our 20 expansions and our upcoming 8th anniversary, we’ve only covered a fraction of the unique bosses of the D&D universe.
We also occasionally create a new boss specifically for Neverwinter when the story requires it. The challenge here is to create a character that feels new but fits into the D&D universe. When you create a boss named Hellfire Devil, how do you distinguish him from other Hellfire Devils? What special attacks and themes feel new? Another example is your first fight against a giant T-Rex, which represents a novel player experience. But what do you do to make your next fight against a giant dinosaur feel like a completely new encounter so that both fights are clearly different from each other.
MeinMMO: Is there a monster or a being in the Forgotten Realms or the entire D&D universe that you would like to bring to Neverwinter?
Jared Sears: We’ve started planning a boss fight against a froghemoth several times. That would be exciting because it’s so different from other monsters in our game. It would also be quite a challenge since we would have to create a new model with tentacles. However, we decided to go a different route and instead brought in the Grungs, which were also a lot of fun.
Flumphs are also quite popular. The problem here is that we have limited resources. Therefore, we tend to create new monsters that we can use multiple times in the game or that can become new bosses with which players can interact a lot. Since flumphs are peaceful, players wouldn’t fight them and they would just be really cool to look at.
Tarrasques are also always a topic of discussion. It’s clear that such a huge and terrifying creature always raises the question of what it would look like in the game. But it is their sheer size that makes realization difficult.
Personally, I would prefer a giant ordinary alligator that I would turn into a mount. Wouldn’t it be awesome to ride a giant alligator!
“Feedback is especially important”
MeinMMO: What is the most important aspect when designing a new boss?
Robert Hrouda, Systems Designer for Neverwinter: There are several important aspects to the design of a good boss. Feedback is particularly important. I start the boss design by first determining which core gameplay elements the player must tackle to defeat the boss, as I want them to demonstrate their skill in relation to these elements. Then I can design the ways in which these challenges are presented. It’s not easy to predict how players will behave in these situations. So I make assumptions about player behavior that I will either counteract with other aspects of boss design or that I will want to encourage.
As soon as the core concepts and mechanics are established, I have numerous conversations with different people to gather opinions and make improvements or changes, and based on that, create and test the boss fight! Feedback is an incredibly important aspect of a boss fight, and during the testing phase, there are often changes in direction.
MeinMMO: How difficult is it to design bosses that can still surprise players after you’ve already brought so many into the game?
Jared Sears: It’s not the design that is the problem, but the implementation into the game. New and crazy ideas come quickly, but it’s essential that the team can also implement them.
I already mentioned Halaster, who required entirely different elements than our previous boss fights. However, he also has a few elements that we’ve already had in other boss fights—and that’s actually an important part of creating a boss.
Players learn the mechanics over time, and when designed correctly, these mechanics have their own visual language. Each new boss should possess a mix of existing and brand new mechanics. Players can use their experience to recognize what to do in the fight and have a sense of achievement. And then they also have the new mechanics to learn and master.
This combination is key to new bosses in our game and is often achieved through dungeons with three bosses each. Another element is that we introduce a new mechanic during a dungeon and then increasingly use it in the boss fights, so players get a preview and already have a strategy when they encounter the mechanic again.
We have bosses, like the hellfire machine, where there are mechanics that destroy the combat area over time, forcing players to pay attention to their movements and defeat the boss before the combat area is completely destroyed. In another boss fight in the Tomb of the Nine Gods, players must separate from their group to avoid triggering deadly mechanics. For this, they must demonstrate constant attention and good group coordination. Another fight takes place on a platform that gradually tilts, and players must reposition themselves to avoid falling to their deaths.
Despite the many boss fights in Neverwinter, we still find new designs that provide variety and expand our engine to bring new mechanics into the game that were previously unfeasible.
“Everything should be thrown out there, even if it sounds a bit too crazy”
MeinMMO: Did you have ideas for creating bosses that you had to scrap because they were a bit “too extreme”?
Jared Sears: In brainstorming, you sometimes come up with ideas that are too extreme, which are essentially good. That’s what we hope for in brainstorming. Everything should be thrown out there, even if it sounds a bit too crazy. We then go through the ideas and see what could be fun, work in the game, and be feasible.
Sometimes, a somewhat tongue-in-cheek contribution becomes part of a design. We had a heroic encounter in Lost City of Omu where a giant dinosaur jumps into the fray at the end. During an early playtest, it was often jokingly mentioned that we should also have a giant gorilla (the expansion came when we first introduced gorillas into the game) charge into the fight, attacking the dino in homage to King Kong. And before we knew it, the heroic encounter ended with a giant gorilla scaring off the dinosaur.
The idea for the boss fight against the hellfire machine was originally a closed metal arena where devils would peek through windows to enjoy the chaos of the fight. It was meant to create a Mad Max atmosphere that would have fit perfectly with Avernus. One of the attacks of the hellfire machine was supposed to be revving its motor to fill the arena with dark exhaust smoke, suffocating and weakening players. During the course of the battle, the side walls were to move closer, and players had to defeat the boss to blast the back wall and escape before being crushed.
In the end, we opted for an outdoor arena. There are no closing walls, but we found a new way to shrink the arena by incorporating bombardments. We still had devils sitting on the walls, cheering on the boss and throwing things at the players. There are other exciting mechanics like the fire shot, where the hellfire machine spins around itself, the chain attack, where a player is pulled in and shot at point-blank range, and the little hellfire machines that appear and pursue players to blow them up with their self-destruct mode.
So if one of our ideas is a bit too crazy or complicated, we find ways to make the core idea into an exciting fight—even if it becomes less crazy than the original idea.
There was another idea for Avernus, but ultimately we went in a different direction. Not because it was too crazy, but because we had many ideas and had to cut something as we couldn’t implement everything.
Our first Avernus expansion included a floating fortress being pulled down to the surface of Avernus with chains attached to devil citadels. The idea was that players would be beneath the citadel at the end of the dungeon instance and would have to jump across floating boulders to reach the hellhound devil final boss defending the chains. While some party members would keep the boss occupied, two players would have to climb the chains and destroy them to free the fortress.
That would have been a new kind of boss arena, where we would have had many floating parts instead of a single combat area. Players would have had to be careful not to fall. Moreover, it would have added a 3rd dimension, as our boss fights usually don’t have a vertical aspect.
In the end, we decided against the idea and changed the order of bosses and the flow of the dungeon.
There are surely dozens, if not hundreds of ideas that haven’t made it into the game over the years. Sometimes we later have the chance to revisit an idea, but we also constantly have new ideas to choose from. We’ve already given a preview of what we plan to implement in the coming year, and players can expect new, exciting, and unique fights.
MeinMMO: Thank you for the interview.
What boss monsters would you like to see in Neverwinter? Let us know in the comments.
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