onotob

Wired has an article about video game bosses, and why they are so satisfying to defeat. This is a subject very close to my heart, as many of you know (all too well). Boss fights in single-player games are fun and challenging, but for me they do not compare to the feeling I get when I defeat a boss for the first time in World of Warcraft. As I’ve said before, these bosses require 40 people working together to kill, and you must defeat an entire dungeon of other bosses just for the privilige of attempting to kill the final boss. The cost of failure is relatively high (in-game monetary costs for repairing equipment and buy materials, and real-life time). The so-called “hardcore” raiding guilds will come back night after night to work on the encounter until they beat it, which is why they are the ones to kill bosses first. My guild is more casual, so if we cannot defeat a boss in about 5 tries, it means another week and another run through the entire dungeon before we can try again (all of the big dungeons in WoW reset every seven days).

My guild first set foot in Blackwing Lair (BWL) December 1, 2005. We had been running the previous dungeon, Molten Core (MC), for the past 6 months and felt we were ready for the next challenge. We did not defeat the first boss in BWL until January 11, 2006. It took us over a month and in the range of 30 attempts to defeat this boss, and we still had to face six bosses before we could even attempt to kill Nefarian, the final boss of the dungeon. It would be another three months before we beat that encounter.

Finally defeating these bosses can be very emotional. If you skip to the last 5 minutes of my Nefarian kill video you can hear the excitement and down-right joy of my raidmates at the moment of victory. All the struggle and frustration gives way to a strong feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment as four months of effort finally pays off.

And then, of course, there’s the loot.

Posted at 2:45 pm.