I love how two people can take a bite of the same cake and have totally different reactions.
See, I mostly felt that boss fights on B&BB were spot on. Quick, brutal, and decisive. (As opposed to endless, boring button-mashing or full of sucker-punches and cheap deaths requiring reload after reload, breaking the pacing of the drama.) I tried DM once and got as far as fighting the gargoyle with Kiera...and I was like, "Nope."If there were anything about the boss fights in TW3 I would do differently, it would be to tighten up the monsters' attacks to be more situational and less predictable. And also, the reason I mentioned the The Shrieker and Jenny are because I felt they were intrinsically flawed rather than unfair.
- The Shrieker's dash-attack both strikes early and its range is way, waaay, waaaaaay beyond where it's actual character model is displayed. Plus, it does a ridiculous amount of damage if played at-level. Even if the quest is green, that attack can be a one-shot kill on Geralt. All of that combined made me do frown face.
- Jenny's ability to basically full-heal if even one of her mirror images touches you was just annoying. This was definitely getting into the realm of frustratingly repetitive and trifling. My first time beating her, the single fight took about 45 minutes of real time from beginning to end (not counting all the countless times I had to reload and retry). I think they eventually did something to balance that a bit, but it was crazy at release. (Or bugged...who knows?) Either way, she still does that insta-heal thing if she lands one nick on Geralt.
As for Cyberpunk, I was a little disappointed by the boss-fight against the mech-suit at the end of the original gameplay demo, but I felt the Sasquatch fight looked much tighter.
Getting combat "right" is hard. As we're exemplifying, there are a lot of different tastes out there. Hard to develop something that meets in the middle.
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Point in case, and just to get this squarely back on topic, I'm presently playing Breath of the Wild, and I must say:
Combat in the game is the only thing I find to be a negative. I find it lack-luster, gimmicky, poorly executed in a few places (namely the way timed blocks and dodges work), am not loving how quickly weapons break (though, I must say I like that idea...even despite its flaws...as it means I'm constantly excited to find weapons and shields.) In short though, I feel it falls a bit flat compared to pretty much every other aspect of the game.
And, to be fair, it's not "bad" per say. I still have fun with it, but it just leaves me feeling disappointed or frustrated a large portion of the time. I usually enjoy situations when I can use the environment to take enemies out. It's when I need to draw a weapon and fight face-to-face with an enemy that I'm like:
To this day, I think Dark Souls and Kingdoms of Amalur have the all-round best combat systems (for swords and sorcery stuff), and Dragon's Dogma takes the cake for best boss fights ever. (The above focused on real-time, action-based combat.)
