[...A]n important factor to good boss design is the understanding that the player is always going to be the most powerful thing in the game. If you design a "Devourer of Gods", then the implication is that
Player > DoG > God
Or in other words, the player is essentially two steps above a god by the time he fights DoG.
Well, you
have beaten the Slime "God" pre-Hardmode, Astrum "Deus" pre-Moon Lord, and most recently Providence, the Profaned "Goddess". I think it just means that being a "god" in this setting isn't a very big title.
The point isn't to make DoG feel powerful, the point is to make the player feel powerful. If the boss is a decent challenge, then the fulfillment of having overcome that challenge makes the player feel good at the game and more "powerful" in a real world sense. The big problem [...] is that it feels like Fabsol is focused primarily on trying to make the bosses feel stronger than the player even though, by design, they're intended to be defeated.
Amen! For me, knowing that beating the boss
has to be possible kind of makes it feel like the game is pointlessly gloating, but for some people, making the big-bad-evil-guy seem impossible to beat builds excitement because it's like a personal challenge, like, "Oh, he's been holding back this whole time? I can't
wait to see his
real form!"
In my opinion, the fact that Yharon talks down to you for defeating him and forces you to fight him twice is just a disgusting misunderstanding of the relationship between the player and the game.
I guess the idea is that he was just
toying with you before, and got bored and left after you hit him enough times. Only after beating a buffed Mothron (why Mothron? no idea) does he think maybe he should
actually try to stop you. And, you know, some people are into that, like, "now I've shown you that I'm a real threat, haha!"
Calamitas also talks down to you if you beat it, acting as though the player had to cheat to win but still trying to represent Calamitas as this ancient evil worthy of respecting.
I guess the idea is that... well, she's just a crazy
...
Based on the other post-Moonlord bosses, I suspect that Fabsol is going to proceed with the same mentality and make his other super bosses be condescending and spongy.
Yeah, I'm getting kinda tired of the "
nuthin personell, KID" stuff, too. It would be refreshing to have one of the bosses give dialogue that's less cocky and overconfident, since, again,
we all know you're beatable, Mr/s. Big-Bad!
In a relative sense, I dislike post-Moonlord progression in Calamity because I think the player gets weaker instead of stronger. He finds himself with fewer tools, and the boss fights are longer without really becoming mechanically more engaging in the context of Terraria's normal gameplay.
That might be an inevitable problem of extending a game's play-time so far past where it was originally meant to be over, you kinda run out of stuff to work with. New ore spawns, biomes, or events would help with that, but Calamity's main emphasis is and will probably always be on the chain of bosses, meaning that that's the only post-ML stuff that's likely to get added. I think it would be pretty cool if, for example, the Abyss didn't generate until after beating a post-ML boss. Or maybe if you had to beat SCal to make a new ore generate in hell. Things along the lines of Uelibloom and Exodium, though Exodium doesn't have anything but a single weapon and a few accessories to its credit yet.