Well, assuming that your character had not died fully, and had left, it would be the same in terms of him coming back in fully armed and healed -- if the situation looks hopeless, there's nothing to stop you from fleeing and saving your character and coming back with heavy munitions, is kind of what I'm saying. There's just too many ways to cheese a bosses-retain-damage system, including devaluing characters even more by just throwing them one at a time at the boss until the boss is finally whittled down by sheer attrition.
I'd rather have folks weigh their options and actually retreat if death looks likely, rather than just pressing on until the bitter end in every fight. But the decision to run is way too obvious if you're about to die and you know you can just come back anytime after healing and re-equiping and finish right where you were. There's no tension then, there's no "should I stay and press my advantage or should I cut and run."
Anyway, those were the general motivations, among others discussed in more depth elsewhere. But those were the most relevant ones to your comments.
Oh, I understand the reasons for making the change.
And I'm not entirely against the result. Certainly in Metroid if a boss kills you, you're dead and have to start over - and those fights were awesome.
I suppose, in fact, the resultant lack of tension to which you refer is precisely my problem. In Metroid, you're at a boss so that's it: you're stuck until you kill or are killed. First time around you're just cornered and there's not a whole lot you can do about it, but next time you recognise what going through
that type of door means - and prepare for what's on the other side mentally. It's gripping stuff.
But then if Samus dies, she doesn't die permanently. Clearly in Valley, locking the boss door behind you is a major no-no.
In Valley, with permadeath around the corner, my options, if I've spent time gathering potions and trecking across the land, then fighting a boss for fifteen, twenty minutes, are non existent. "Run like a coward and try again from scratch" or "die like a hero and try again with additional ghost to contend with." That's a pretty bleak outlook.
Especially when the boss in question is so very nearly dead (a few hp) and all I need to do to kill it is dodge a couple of bats, a few beams of energy and land one final blow - whilst I'm sitting on well over half hp but have just run dry of health potions.
Of course I'm going to go for it. Sure it's a gamble - if my character dies, his ghost is going to ramp up the difficulty - but if I don't, I've got another 30, 40 minutes gearing up for the same damn fight and ploughing on in there to try my hand again. And if I still don't do it then? I have to run away and try again!
Knowing that, the only sensible tactic in future is an extremely conservative approach to potion gathering and boss fights. Double or triple the time I spend hoarding pots and don't take any risks in boss battles at all - play it safe in an altogether different battle of attrition. (I'll just hide behind this wall and ice cross this thing to death. Even if it gets me, these fifty health potions should keep me covered!)
Now, that all sounds a bit ranty but I genuinely do understand why the changes were made, for the most part. Popping out of a chunk to gear up some more, popping back in to chip away at the boss is no more noble a tactic than hiding behind a full inventory of health potions. I'm also, as I mentioned, quite a big fan of having to tackle a boss in a single visit. That's definitely good for my hero complex.
But I'm actually (and it sounds odd even to me) advocating that if you die, the fact that a vengeful ghost appears should be punishment enough for the risk you took in just trying to finish the boss off. Valley's pretty unique for an action-exploration game, in that when you die you materially lose a lot more than just the time you spent on the boss. You lose the time you spent preparing for the boss
and a character you'd become attached to - and to boot, you've now got an evil ghost in the world!
The skinny? What if bosses
only retain the health you left them at (or even regenerated up to a certain level - a third health, or something) when you died fighting them? That is, when there is a vengeful ghost with them. You still gotta fight the ghosts so throwing characters into the meat grinder becomes massively counter-productive anyway. And if the ghosts aren't sufficient disincentive, buff 'em. That's what they're
for, after all - to add gameplay weight to your death.
Actually, it occurs to me that if you implemented some (admittedly rather more complex) logic such that death in boss battles left the boss at dimished health and also locked their room for portal scrolls - so you had to 'port in the next room down (or outside the building or chunk or whatever) - then spawned the ghosts in the room below and locked the door up until the ghost was dealt with... then that would solve the meat grinder problem; give players who wanted to risk dying like a hero some payoff; and create an interesting new gameplay scenario whilst you're at it.
Phew. Or you could just leave it like it is. No biggie!
