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  1. #1

    Opinion Batari boss fight puzzlingly illogical, annoying and not fun.

    Second play through and just finished killing Batari, which gave me no sense of achievement whatsoever after dying several times. Found this fight even more infuriating than I previously recalled. Hitting her to zero effect in expert difficulty maddening whilst taking masses of damage when she hits you.. this not my idea of a good, balanced or sensible game mechanic even at an increased difficulty level. What expert seems to show is just how much of a messed up weapon sponge Batari is.

    What went wrong here compared to the rest of the combat in the game?

    To me the entire boss setup needs looked at again. The way the weapon damage is messed around here is continuity damaging compared to the established logic from normal battles. I am sorry but to me it just makes little sense that she is so cursed invulnerable to damage early on even when squarely hit and then suddenly keels over from one shot. It just feels wrong and ridiculously random making for an infuriating segment.

    Belatedly assuming it is linked to the position of the moon or the death of her flunkies or something. However if that is true and I did not look it up online it seems daft too. As I have argued bedfore she is supposed to be a human being not some goddess or mutated monster. Why would spears and arrows be bouncing off her one moment and then not the next?

    Before Primal mostly keeps the magical stuff rightly to drugged up sequences were it belongs. Is it wrong to expect weapons to behave as they do elsewhere in the reality of the game world outside of visions? Even hitting her with bee bombs just keep her preoccupied for a while again doing no damage to me all of this just seems from a logical point of view broken.

    I can understand elevating her towards myth but there has to be a better way to incorporate that sort of thing without such a heavyhanded logic defying approach. I believe games need persistant internal logic or it all starts to breaks down. The entire process a delicate fiction that has to be constantly sold to the player. I find with the Batari fight my suspension of disbelief is lost and my game world expectations damaged. Takkar is not in a dream sequence during the battle. Does this stuff not bother anyone else?

    Would it not have been better if you simply had to get through an especially fanatical tribal protection squad to reach her. People more than willing to die to save their priestess coming at you with unusual vigour perhaps hyped up on drugs, that sort of thing would have served the mythology well without breaking the overall illusion of the established world: the rules of cause and effect. Getting hit with weapons being a cause that really ought to have an assured effect in a combat orientated game. I would have nothing against her being agile enough to openly dodge some attacks or being especially well armoured so that she takes reduced damage (within reason), but just making her almost invulnerable at certain points in the fight seems cheap and lame to me.

    Sorry if this comes along as a bit of a rant but I do not understand why so many games break some of there own established rules especially when sending out the bosses.


    PS Was this fight changed by the patch? My recollection is rubbish but I do not remember hitting her before and her health just flashing but her bar not getting any shorter? It almost felt as if my game glitched. Had a look online belatedly at others fights - since I was playing on expert - and it seems the difficulty setting probably made an absurd difference [edit] actually an expert fight I just watched showed hits inflicting some damage so now I am confused [edit]. If this is due to a patch change the fight is now verging on broken at expert level. My opinion remaining that the amount of damage she is soaking up in general is just silly and if this is not looked at it wll make a mockery of the Survivor mode Permadeath thing at least on expert difficulty.
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  2. #2
    It must be some kind of glitch, because I had a similar problem with Ull. His bar was flashing, couldn't see any white, but he kept coming at me. he wouldn't die. Spears arrows. I was about to give up when I threw a shard and he dropped. Was weird. Something happened where he clearly wasn't taking damage anymore.

    For Batari, were you using the fire resistant recipe, and speed boost recipe? I found they both helped a bit. But yeah that can be a brutal fight.
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  3. #3
    Hi jimmycliff I did make use of the fire resist recipe a few times. The more I think about it now the more my fight with Batari did seem glitchy. I am even wondering if she was taking damage but it simply wasn't registering on screen via the bar.

    Sad thing is that due to the single save slot allocation (I am playing on PS4) I have no simple option to easily revisit the fight to see if it would play differently. After watching another player battling Batari also on expert on utube I was going to delete my post since my experience seemed non-standard making my complaints possibly redundant. Her health bar flashing red but not reducing at all from its full length. Then after one of the times I was killed and respawned, I hit her once and she dropped as if previously reduced to half health. I will admit by that point being very annoyed and frustrated and due to this dying very quickly a few times taking excessive risks just to see if my hits were connecting at all.

    Whilst done is done, it has really put me off this fight big time. So I am hoping it was a weird buggish fluke perhaps caused by some other factor. For example I even wondered if only having done one great beast hunt this time around might have made a difference as belatedly I seem to recall a character mentioning something like, 'you need the power of the great beasts to take on Batari'.

    Otherwise my latest experience just confirmed my general hate of boss fights in most games. Been playing the Uncharted Collection recently too and it also has some stupidly bullet spongy bosses and creatures at times. I find that really annoying in products that are otherwise in many areas excellent then they just throw it away via these OTT tanks that can take hit after hit yet often kill you far too easily so that you end up doing the same sequence over and over again. I do not mind dying in a game when it seems due to tactical stupidity but when the amount of damage an enemy can takes seems absurdly outrageous I find it a serious game turn off.

    Another dodgy mechanic being making characters temporarily invulnerable because they are story assets that is just immersion breaking. Any coders out there if you want to ensure a npc lives to a certain point then please provide them with cover or some other logical means to avoid taking hits, please do not just make it that at certain points bullets or whatever simply bounce off them.

    More than enough ranting from me. To end on a positive note just watched a recording of the live feed demonstrating the survivor mode and it looks an amazing job. I just hope they have not forgotten about the boss fights and made some alterations with those to match the new mode making them a bit more realistic too notably via reducing the damage sponge situation. Even if my last experience was a glitch or due to not doing many Great Beast Hunts I still think in general that giving bosses loads of hit points is a terrible mechanic from a realism perspective. Got to be lots of other ways to make an opponent challenging without resorting to what seems like the game cheating.
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  4. #4
    Sadly enough, every strong human enemy in Primal has his/their difficulty defined by how much damage they dish out and how much damage they can take before they fall.
    There is literally not a single exception to this.

    Although I realize my opinion on this matter is unpopular, I found the quicktime-fashion bossfights in Far Cry 3 extremely satisfying. The cutscenes were well done and it felt really good diving your blade through your enemy's chest at the end of such fights.

    In Primal, every single bossfights is just some kind of tribe leader that soaks up damage like there's no tomorrow. I thought the Forsworn from Skyrim were unrealistic, seeing as they were half naked barbarians who required 5 to 10 greatsword slashes depending on the difficulty to kill.
    Primal takes this a step further. You got Batari and Ull, both of which don't seem particularly well-armored, while both of which require an insane amount of spears or arrows to the head before they succumb. It's a little silly.

    ---

    Would've been so much better if Batari and Ull only had 25% of their current health but were good at dodging arrows, forcing you to rely on your beast as a distraction or extremely risky up-close club beatings and/or bee bombs.
    But alas, dodging would require some serious AI coding and it doesn't seem like Ubisoft was very willing to do so.
    I would've settled for a quicktime bossfight but I didn't even get that...

    I got a half naked tribe lady who got her tits hanging out and didn't wear a helmet, yet somehow still able to stand strong after 50 arrows to the head.
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  5. #5
    I think part of my failure with Batari may ultimately have been that I did not do what I was meant to do but in an open world game...

    Truly it is preposterous that she takes so many hits on her bare skin.

    To stay alive she could have just retreated into cover until you kill all her guards including perhaps a couple who acted as close protection even after you say break down the gate and try to rush her. That would be a more balanced and tactical fight. It would have been cool if she was made suitably fast and agile rather than outrageously constitutionally tankish. She seemed the type to slash at you then skip back out of range circling and flanking you for openings and opportunities such as a backstab, dodging too direct throws - keeping her distance - perhaps unless skilfully forced to back up into a corner or hit and wounded if wounds were scripted to slow her down. So many ways such a fight could progress without breaking the games sense of fairness and logic and with no risk to your suspension of disbelief.

    PS Sorry but I hate quicktime events even more than silly weapon spongy boss fights. The problem here imo is they replaced one tired old overly gamish mechanic with another tired old overly gamish mechanic rather than do something newer and better.
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