The Difficulty Paradox | Semi-Ramblomatic 

This isn't just an Ubisoft problems and instead it's a gaming problem, and one more common in corporate development. I tend to give the example of Legacy of Kain 2 as a great example of how to do this right (Metroid is another one, but they dont' do it quite as right because they present the problem before the solution), it shows how you can pose a a challenge by giving new powers needed to then progress the game and it does it with the blocks puzzles and soul reaver door keys. As you progress you learn skills that then are compounded upon as a new puzzle requires all the previous skills you learned to be utilized to overcome it and creates a new challenge in the process. I mention this because this is mostly a problem with Video Game RPGs, and not TTRPGs, because in a TTRPG there is a lot more room for the GM to create new problems and solutions (I'm a TTRPG designer) and it's more problematic in games that focus more on looking good (graphics and marketing) than they do on focusing on satisfying game loops. I recently played a game called Rift Breaker. By all accounts I should have hated this game because the narrative, script and VA at it's heights reaches mediocre levels and is mostly piss poor, but I found myself playing more because of the fun aspects of the game, I wanted to unlock more tools to have more ways to solve problems and move forward and do more various kinds of building and tower defense style things... and that was fun enough where the fact that the game narrative was shit didn't even bother me, even though it was noticeably bad to mediocre. Ubisoft obviously is a chief aggitator here, but so is Starfield, and CoD, and all the other big investment experiences because their goal is never to create a good game, their goal is to make money and it's more efficient to just market something that looks pretty and passably functional-ish than it is to create new and exciting types of games, instead they let the indie devs do that and then steal their ideas and call it innovation, without ever really understanding why it worked to begin with. This is why when you hand wave and stealth kill everyone in AC it's power fantasy yes, but you just deleted the game, where as in Mario 3, using the warp whistle, in that period of time was a very different matter than it is today. Today you can just google where the warp whistles are and skip the game and be done in under an hour without even using glitches and exploits, but at the time no such information was available unless you shelled out for the game guides that were printed on paper. Back then, finding the warp whistle with no information that it even existed WAS a skill challenge, but with the internet that's no longer true. The problem started when games didn't adapt to include that new information and the trend just continued. The correct answer to satisfying game play is indeed that both the challenge goes up AND the player gets new tools (becomes stronger) to deal with new kinds of challenges, but that's a lot harder to do as a designer, and costs a lot more money, and requires artistic vision and understanding of what fun and proportional challenge is rather than prioritizing quick turn over cash grabs like yearly releases laden with microtransactions. The two philosophies are fundamentally at odds. This is why you're seeing a trend now that is just starting in the indie space now of making everything customizable for the game experience and including native mod support, which you see in stuff like V Rising, and Settlement Survival so that players can decide how the game should feel for them and modify the experience with mods to make it their own game for endless engagement, and that's a brilliant new tactic... well maybe not new, but it's new as a trend. This has been around for a while, but we see stuff like Fallout and Skyrim and other games like stellaris surviving on mod support alone, and that is where video games are heading, so that players can customize their preferred experience and if they don't like it, at that point they have nobody but themselves to blame. Want to reduce the grind? Go for it! Want to increase the grind and make enemies 10x spongier? Go for it! This is the future of gaming now.

Yahtzee, if you are reading this, I have a rather silly idea: when the week of St. Patrick's Day comes around in March, you should do that particular week's Fully Ramblomatic episode in a Ridiculous Irish Accent, complete with Cartoon Yahtzee & Cartoon Dog dressed as Bearded Leprechauns!

It should be a fluctuating line of similar difficulty throughout the game with little spikes for mini-bosses/bosses as the best way to keep a player engaged. That's why the skill based games are the best kind of raw gameplay. But almost every game in the best genre, RPG, is stat level building nonsense instead. Imagine Bethesda Fallout games playing like Rainbow Six, or the Far Cry 3 realism mod that made that game so fun with high damage to yourself and enemies.

Glad you guys have kept rocking and rolling

❤

💀

Euro truck driver reference

I-- You-- *angrily likes comment*

Indeed 👀

I believe the sniper was a bolt action not semi-auto. 🤓

Not to mention your soldiers can’t hit their targets at first but as they level up it gets easier. It last trying to balance those two opposing forces of player strength and player difficulty.

XCOM 2 at least can also kinda swing both ways though where it tends to kind of spiral in either direction - If you're winning consistently, then your soldiers generally outpace the enemy growth, and the game gets easier and you win more and repeat. If you start losing, you fall behind the curve, and it gets harder and harder to recover and start winning again - you get stuck in a failure spiral

@@DreamblitzX That's why you want to take a rookie or two along on missions. At least the less critical missions. Make sure you're spreading out the XP in order to minimize the odds of getting caught in that spiral you mentioned.

@@DreamblitzX I think the key is that in Xcom 2 you need to learn how to handle mistakes, but at some point you get good enough that you rarely make them... and once your soldiers get good enough they also rarely make them, then you've kinda lost the core theme. But that's probably why mods that add 10 times more enemies are so popular in Xcom games. Gotta increase the tension to the point where no matter how good you are there will still be mistakes because of how difficult the challenge is.

@@DBZHGWgamer its the same in most games. You do less mistakes and you know mechaincs and so you have DS no hit runs at the end :)

This made me wonder- they have been discussing the whole affair up until now in detail. Suddenly we get this- which could be a joke or they are tired of talking about it - plus this weeks FR pushed back (again, could be respect for the last ZP's dropping) I hope for their sake it's that and not real legal issues that could threaten the future of Second Wind

@@gavinchoules8165 It's probably more about avoiding litigation in the future.

@@gavinchoules8165 generally speaking, in situations revolving around business and questionable employer/employee relations, any lawyer will basically tell you that your only comment is "no comment" until potential litigation has run it's course. So this is a cheeky way of saying, "Hey, we have new jobs now but can't really talk about it."

⁠​⁠@@gavinchoules8165 When they left The Escapist, part of the severance package was an NDA, which some of them like Nick and Yahtzee didn’t accept, so they didn’t get severance. On the other hand, they can legally talk all they want about the ordeal I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the less public members took the deal and thus can’t talk as freely about it.

Could be part of legal discussions to get rights back to some of their old shows.

Spot on - the game gets more complex, you get proportionally more abilities to deal with the complexity. That way, you _are_ getting stronger but the game's still more challenging because you have to remember how to do more things and under what circumstances. I'll grant that's a hard balance to pull off - even more so if you have a plethora of different builds to choose from because making them all capable of dealing with the increased complexities while making them different enough to bother putting in there in the first place is tricky.

That's why I never play Sorceries in souls games.

So then you ask yourself why is it that the activity is not worth being done in a more engaging fashion. If sitting in a bush sniping everything is the best strat, then it's a failure to the level design because there should be a lot of other tools that can be used to get through it. Or it bypasses what should normally be a stat check. And at the same time if it feels like it's cheesing it, this means that they aren't adaquately testing your stealth skills to make the methodical approach of sneaking through and clearing each enemy individually satisfying.

best example I know of of that phrase was, if I'm not mistaken, the game that spawned it... Ultima online. Originally, Ultima online was going to have a whole, truly organic functioning ecosystem, where there was actual population numbers for the random mobs, and food chains, and migrations if conditions were favorable. During playtests, they discovered that players were content to just farm easy to kill stuff instead of moving on because it was easier and "more optimized", so they had to abandon that model.

I believe it may well have been TotalBiscuit (John Bain) who said that quote. He lamented years ago about how games of the time would allow you to optimise to the level of circumventing the very idea of the gameplay in question, just like Yahtzee does with Assassin's Creed here. He was one of the those players that would optimise as hard as possible for the best outcome, and would often complain that games would unbalance unlocks and abilities away from an appropriately fair challenge.

I'm pretty sure that it was Sid Meier who said "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game."

I'd like to call up Final Fantasy V, as that game is special in that many fights don't actually award EXP. Skills are gained instead through BP, which can be earned by a few methods. Thus, people have been able to beat the secret super-bosses with insanely complicated solutions at the lowest possible levels. It turns every fight into a big puzzle instead of the usual RPG raw-numbers slugfest. I always consider the RPGs where low level runs are possible to be some of the best, because they typically have varied battle systems with a ton of options to work with.

Yeah, shouldn't have to be necassily frustrating. Just make you think more

Well said!

Yeah, nothing is worse than getting the "I win" button but having no reason to use it other than boredom. I shouldn't be required to handicap myself in order to get a thrill near the end of the game. I should feel like "there's no way I would have made it without that upgrade".

Good post! I was thinking much the same thing, it should become more *challenging* so it makes the player learn and adapt. Giving that larger pool of resources and options trade-offs and costs makes a player think before doing or using Stronger Thing. Yes that shiner laser rifle is better than a rifle for example, but perhaps you have to charge it, which commits you to each use. Being able to out-wit and out-play a problem should feel good as it cost the least, through some planning and good timing, or just improvising and good luck.

I think it depends on the type of games, and to what kind of players they cater to. People find fun in different types of challenges, be it mechanical prowess, puzzle solving or spreadsheet optimization. Some game can give the player options, other it might be harder. Personally most of my favourite games don't even have enemies. I do prefer games that are more puzzle like, but I also know a lot of people that just want their mechanical skills challenged and not think too much about optimizing everything.

He's got some mad skills!

What's the other channel?

@@psycojosho it's a joke about The Escapist releasing the rest of the videos they had, including Yahtzee's

Someone finally found the RU-vid account's password. XD

I didn't know if it was one of his videos or not but I just clicked 'Do not recommend channel' just to be safe.

I like Hades's take on this: The player gets significantly stronger through the course of the game... but once you beat it for the first time, it unlocks a smorgasbord of difficulty options that you can play with, and rewards you for using them. Or you can keep playing the vanilla experience, that's valid too.

@@NYKevin100I find Hades a bit of a mixed bag for it's additional difficulty options. To put it simply, I don't like it when a game takes away player choices/chances to get stronger without giving the player anything to show for it, and some of the options do just that. Increasing the Time to Kill of enemies also makes the gameplay loop less satisfying. Peglin does this even worse, the Cruciball difficulty modes not only make the game harder (Stronger Enemies), but also make you weaker (Less rewards, worse starting loadout) all for the sake of meta-progression. Meta Progression just isn't a good enough reward to make the game itself less interesting to play. For comparison, I'm a fan of the difficulty in a game like The Binding of Isaac. As you progress the game, you unlock new optional areas and challenges that are more difficult, but offer better rewards or more choices. You unlock new enemies to create new challenges. You unlock the ability to progress further into the game with more difficult areas, but the increased duration of the run gives you time to develop your loadout further.

Exactly, you CAN have both. Keep some enemies from the early part of the game around to act as fodder in the later stages. That's where the sense of power can come in. More difficult enemies can and should exist, mixed in with the fodder so there is an immediate and noticeable distinction between them.

The Souls games are actually a great example of this. You can either take the hard way in fights, either deliberately or inadvertently, or you can cheese almost everything, especially in Elden Ring. But the latter usually requires a good amount of investment to get it running, so it helps you feel like you're not forced to.

That tug-of-war can get really irritating if implemented naively. I get extremely irritated with enemy scaling in particular, which in theory can be a perfect balance. In practice it feels like an exercise in futility and frustration. The most boring rollercoaster is a flat curve. Scaling can also be frustrating in two ways - either the early game choices you made come back 40 hours later to destroy your progress (leveling useless skills in Skyrim), or nothing you accomplish ever feels satisfying because there's no indication that there's a difference. If the numerator and denominator are increasing at the same rate, the ratio stays the same, no matter how big the numbera get.

I've been thinking about this myself. MGS gets away with it because it doesn't have RPG-like player upgrades, the enemies adapt to your tactics, which is cool as hell. But in a traditional RPG-like upgrade tree, it would be utter bullshit to see enemies suddenly countering cool abilities you just bought. What if it were inverted though, and your abilities came from overcoming your enemies? Like you don't earn the ability to do a stealth takedown on a heavy guy until you've killed 5+ of them in other ways. It'd be like an arms race against the enemy forces. They bring out bigger guns because you're a threat, and your skill trees reflect your character learning how to adapt to those bigger guns, making you a bigger threat. If the player is the first one in the arms race to accelerate, it feels shit. But if the enemies do it first, and overcoming those obstacles is a requisite to the player ramping themselves, it flows a little better.

Sorta. MGS5 kinda muddies the waters a bit with the RPG style weapon research,. so whilst Venom never gets any better, the weapons and equipment he uses certainly does. @@seecreature8664

After 40 missions and tons of side content, a lot of them had riot suits on. Had to CQC them or use non-lethal nades, difficulty spiked at that point

What I really wish is that the gameplay mechanic that removes these things wasn't a 'send your guys off to do a real-time mission to fuck with supply lines' but was instead a MGS3 style 'blow up the food/ammo depot to starve them of the resources' thing. Though to be fair, I've been a huge sucker for that mechanic ever since I first saw it. The new system feels really uninteractive and being able to make intentional, player-made strikes against enemy supply lines in preparation for a mission would be much more fun IMO.

Yes but that works best when few games use it and the player isn't aware. If every game had enemies adapt to the player's play style, it'd come across as the game punishing the player for... well, playing as he liked.

There's nothing more satisfying than getting the Screw Attack in a metroid game and just annihilating your way through those backtracking moments. The Screw Attack is kind of ingenious because its the moment where the game goes "You've been running back and forth through these maps for ages. Here's an upgrade that trivializes both platforming and most enemies. It'll make backtracking and collecting those tricky upgrades really easy!" But at the same time, the new areas that require the Screw Attack introduce new enemies and challenges that take it into account, so it only trivializes places you've already explored.

@@lunarazure9969 You seem to be a little confused. The Screw Attack doesn't trivialise platforming or enable you to reach any new areas, except in the sense that it lets you kill enemies in mid-air that might knock you out of your jump. It's the Space Jump that allows Samus freedom of traversal by enabling her mid-air multi jump.

​@@ArcaneAzmadiWell, you usually have the space jump when you get the Screw Attack, and at that point the only thing that hinders your traversal are enemies, either one the ground or mid-air. In any case, the Screw Attack trivializes enemies and thus also platforming

@@ArcaneAzmadi People have been sequence breaking Super Metroid for so long that it is actually a shock to some people that the Space Jump even exists separately from the Screw Attack.

I think BOTW has is the worst of this "difficulty curve" issue, since the endgame is post-story and you keep getting stronger well after the enemies do. I think TOTK handles this a bit better, since Silver Lynels are no longer the only, or even hardest, enemy that feels remotely challenging in endgame. You may be overpowered at the end of TP, but there's a much lower limit than BOTW to how overpowered you can get.

@@samt3412 The recent ones especially have a problem with the hearty foods. In most other Zelda games you had 4 bottles max for everything, and then in the new ones you can have, like, 30 full health items.

@@samt3412 BOTW spawns enemies based on the gear that you have as part of some calculation to basically create meat sponges to force you to use up durability on your best weapons. BOTW and TOTK's real power mostly comes from ingenuity, using the systems available to you and infinite durability. I don't think the devs ever really considered balance outside of the simplistic "what's the strongest weapons available when this creature is attacking, how many of them are there and how many swings does that strongest weapon take to break"

@@Cyberspark939 The claim about weapon held determining enemy spawns is false. BotW (I don't know if TotK uses the same system) uses a hidden "leveling" system that determines average weapon strength and what enemy colors appear. If you infiltrate Hyrule Castle early and get top-tier weapons they have zero effect on enemy spawns. If you drop all your weapons in the end-game and equip a bunch of sticks, it will not make enemies magically weaker after a Blood Moon. Killing enemies raises your level a little, while killing bosses raises it a lot. The _final effect_ is similar to what you describe, but the actual mechanic is very different.

@@seantheimp This is correct as far as I understand, and lines up with my experience. That said, I just plain dislike the level/power/whatever scaling period no matter what it's based on. In any and all games for that matter. How tough Link currently is or what he's done so far, and how tough any given Moblin is, should have no connection. If the two newest Zeldas had some sort of fixed enemy strength and loot quality option, I'd gladly take it.

i think the best way to explain inmerisve sims would be "yknow those beating the game without x challenge videos? make sure every single one you can think of is beatable and engaging"

You are asking the player to design the game for you if you consider that that is enough, though.

@@untemperance Other way around. It's a game design so meticulous that a big range of players, not just the most hardcore, can do challenge runs and still have fun. That there are people that think there's only one way to play a game is my biggest gripe with these difficulty debates.

@@belldrop7365 If playing the game X way is less interesting, then yeah it might come off that way. You can try to deviate from the intended playstyle, but that might just brake the game or lead to you just not engaging in many mechanics that would normally keep things fresh. That's usually why people feel discouraged to play like that if it means playing in a more boring manner. Like yeah, you can try to beat a Souls game without rolling or a Batman Arkham game without using any gadgets, but is that more fun?

@@belldrop7365 Honestly I think "only one way to play" sums up my problem with difficulty debates as well. I personally like pushing my limits when there's good gameplay to the hard mode (looking at you Alpha Protocol...), but not everyone does or can. So let those people have fun too! It doesn't hurt me at all. I can still thump my chest about beating Balteus before he was nerfed all I want, but y'know, other people should be able to enjoy big stompy robots too even if they don't want to spend 30 hours mastering the helicopter boss in the first level or whatever. It gets stickier when there are benefits beyond bragging rights attached to higher difficulty though that players who don't find that fun want. That's the harder tightrope to walk, and I think if there is any productive debate to be had, it's there.

I mean that's the kicker: You're starting a new game. Of course the difficulty curve is going to reset.

@@jedimasterpickle3 That's true, but I do think there's merit to the idea that this still makes the whole package work as a single "game." Even within a single Ace Attorney game, the main thing determining difficulty on a quantifiable level is "how much evidence do I have" because that's how many options you have to choose the right one from. So as you enter a new case and acquire evidence, it's easier than the end of the last one for a bit before it picks up, creating a bit of an ebb and flow. Outside of Ace Attorney, there's definitely arguments to be made for the difficulty curve not being a linear increase from start to finish. For the "Player get Stronger" side, having a mission that shows you how much stronger (or more adept as a player) you've become by throwing early game-level challenges at you can make things feel rewarding and offer a breather, for instance.

@@underFlorence I think discussing difficulty within individual Ace Attorney games is valid and has merit. That wasn't my point. I just disagree about treating the whole trilogy as one game for the purposes of discussing difficulty since...they're literally different games. It's a different discussion.

Ace Attorney trilogy is something of an oddball when it comes to the difficult in that while the first case is always easiest, they also get harder by the sequels. To people who never played it, in first game the culprit is hilariously inept at lying, with very obvious contradiction for you to point out. It's so onesided the prosecutor couldn't even get a dig at you and you don't have to press the witness (so that they either add more detail, probably contradicting something in the process). Then there's the second game, first case there's still obvious lies but now there's several more subtle one where you have to either press a witness or sift through your evidence and worked up a logic on how this'll work (ie: something you only do at later case in the first game). By the third game, you're in for a loop; the culprit while remain obvious, they already captured the heart of the court, really good at lying, and your client are *very* unhelpful.

Sakurai talked about difficulty on his RU-vid channel, and his ideal curves trends toward being harder while having spikes and valleys, where beating a hard boss rewards the player with more power and an easier next level.

Well, after 15 hours neither of those two Zero Punctuation episodes have over 100K views... so. Yea.

I think these guys win

I saw the Spider-Man review and thought that I might watch it. Then I saw they had released two at the same time and realized they were desperate

I'm going to wait because Yahtzee said he was going to review Spider-Man 2 as a Fully Ramblomatic eventually. Mostly because he liked it and wants to get Sony review codes again

They did that trick where you flash three middle fingers. They thought it was cool but nobody was watching.

All of Frost's stuff has been fantastic. Very worth a watch.

@@idlemindedmage6925 Absolutely!!! I got into his videos more recently and they are wonderful! It's a real shame that my favourite episode of Cold Take is the one immediately before all this nonsense happened -_-

We all are

@@sommeone Funny, I liked the Cold Take video about the "line go up" mentality that Second Wind put out.

As always, it's better to add more tools and ways to do things than scaling damage/health numbers. It applies to player progression too as nothing bores me faster than "+10% when crouching on tables on Thursday" but tell me I can "hold enemies as human shields and enemies actually react believably to the now hostage situation" and I'll climb a mountain to get that skill because that skill transforms and reinterprets how I play as well as add roleplaying/immersion opportunity. While the former skill is 50 shades of "you do more damage sometimes".

Shadow of War is quite good at this, enemy captains become immune to types of attacks if you repeat them too much, so even as you become more powerful, some fights are incredibly hard to cheese (Shadow of Mordor is not bad at this but only had enemies being immune, they didn't adapt) - I only ever had ONE really bad experience with the adapting where a major story boss adapted to every single attack except ranged attacks, and there were hardly any arrows and no other enemies to use (for combos or converting or anything) so I just spent 15 minutes running around shooting this guy until he EVENTUALLY died.

You have to outsmart and outmaneuver enemies with shields, so they are not a test of strength or patience, but of skill and cunning. Tests of skill and cunning are fun. Tests of strength and patience are not.

@@grzegorzbrzeczyszczykiewic563 Stealth games would disagree on the patience part but agree on the strength part.

Agre to disagree- I find sheild enemies and their variants tend to break my flow too much. It probably doesn’t help in most games there’s only 1, maybe 2 anti-shield moves so it’s always the same solution

I was thinking that too! Honestly, the thuggish splicers are a good example of that. You start off fighting them one at a time, then you get (well, if you search for it) a tonic that improves your melee damage, so they get easier. That you get another, they get easier, so on, so forth. When you get to Hephaestus, they become immune to electricity. So your usual attacks really don’t work on them. The game basically forces you to adopt a new strategy, or invest in different plasmids, etc. But I guess the only downside is, the balance isn’t quite right. You effectively get 2 inverse difficulty curves, instead of a steady increase in difficulty bolstered by the new mechanics. Still tons of fun though, and challenging enough.

Fromsoft in general encompasses the 'you are getting more powerful' while also ramping up the complexity of the bosses, which is one of the reasons I think it's so satisfying. You can cut down the mooks that were giving you issues before, but you have to put more thought into the heavy-hitters as you go on. But then steadily you can look back and really see yourself improving and that feels great.

So long as you do the “play gets stronger part” as theirs a great point after horse general boss where if you don’t upgrade your damage the copy paste mob you’ve fought before has noticeably way more hp for no reason. But if you do upgrade your damage then it’s hp is back to exactly what is was before. Soft always had this problem of holding the players hand and pulling them back telling them no you can’t no your not allowed to

@@SpottedHares Tbh I never played Sekiro and not terrible knowledgeable so I can't comment on that extensively. But a lot of your complaints seem to stem from Sekiro, where it does require you to do a fight a specific way? It's one of the reasons I'm not interested in playing it. Like you MUST parry or you MUST stealth for this boss. Otherwise, I know that sometimes there is scaling in Soulsborne. But it's usually specific mobs and not very often. As for pulling players back, I've always seen the opposite with any Soulsborne, where Fromsoft usually lets you make the game as hard or as easy as you want and lets you go f*ck around and find out. Elden Ring has been 100% this experience, even more refined than the previous installments. Even when you have to open up gates in Soulsborne, if you have the skill, you can usually get it done early game and go farm mobs somewhere else to obliterate early game mobs and bosses.

@@luvhair255 Parrying in Sekiro is the name of the game, but that doesn't mean there's not room for creativity, despite how many people try to boil the combat down to that. That's why the prosthetics exist. Look at Sekiro's most popular content creator, ONGBAL. He shows how there's much more to the game than just "parry --> attack".

Because it's rewarding. And actually gaming

Yeah, I've never understood the "this thing makes the game so easy it's not fun" argument because rarely (basically never) is that thing necessary and if the person wants more challenge they just don't have to use it. That autostart ability in Mirage I used maybe twice, once to see what it did and once to get an achievement.

@@Pallysilverstarthe reason behind the argument is that it means those upgrade points are now useless as all you can spend them on now is stuff that removes gameplay

@@joedav67 not a great argument since the skill points are there to allow you to customize your playstyle. Can you name a game where every single skill fits into every single playstyle. I don't know about you but in my experience about half the skill trees or more are basically useless for my preferred playstyles. There's always going to be skills that it would be pointless to put points into unless you just have nothing else to spend them on or they're a bridge to another skill you actually want.

I love it when a game has peaks and valleys. Challenge me, then give me a new power and let me be over powered for a short while before you introduce the next element that makes my last new toy useless. There's nothing more frustrating than a game that never lets you feel strong.

So you want lame boring easy final bosses? With no challenge to the skills you’ve been honing for hours?

@@FrankDux-uo7ig OP said "the very end," IE there can be a post-boss phase where you truly annihilate and be super cathartic. Example: Super Metroid.

​@@FrankDux-uo7igonly if the part before said final boss is balls difficult. And / or make the part after the final boss really easy.

Could also be a multiphase thing where the boss starts really hard but by the end is futilely throwing the kitchen sink at you.