>>719077817
I believe that Dark Souls single handily saved the concept of boss fights in AAA games. Around ~2010 to 2014 it was becoming extremly common for games to just not have boss fights, and for “boss fights are outdated concept” opinion preices to be given massive spotlight by media outlets. Pretentious journalists liked the idea because they only cared about realistic cinematic storytelling as metric for video game’s improving as a medium. And game devs loved it because boss fights are one of hardest things to make, and by far the least efficient use of dev time/resources. A boss fight will take 50x the dev resources as designing a new trash mob, and only appear once per playthrough, wheras trash mob can appear 1000’s of times. Games with boss fights were considered outdated and “video-gamey” compared to modern games which ended with a stylish QTE or maybe just a room full of mobs.
Dark Souls changed that. It felt fresh and experimental, but was extremely “video-gamey” by those metrics. And gaming media sites realised they could make easy money pumping out “top 10 best boss fights” and “top 10 hardest boss fights” lists. It took a little while, but by mid 2010’s boss fights were coming back in genres that absolutely would’ve skipped them completely in 2010. And the “boss fights are outdated” narrative disappeared entirely.
