Bots and You!

[Spirultima]

Remember back in the day when internet play wasn't readily available, so for a multiplayer game to be successful, you wanted... you guessed it, Bots!

Now some of you will remember Timesplitters, how much fun was that game back in the day? Even really bad games such as Medal of Honour weren't fun without bots.

(Still on the good ol' days)

Another thing, remember having a friend round and then going against bots? How much fun was it, a few years ago, me and a friend played for about 10 hours or more, on a single game, and it never got dull once.

Recently i've been playing on Killzone 2 and i remembered how fun it was (though i got a bit irritated with the god AIs who can see you even if your 100% camoed) and i got to wondering, if new game devs. would make games with bots again, preferably 2-4 player WITH bots.

Now to you, do you miss bots as much? And what do you think of them now?

 

[Emphraim]

Do you mean games with multiplayer modes but in which it would be bots against humans rather than humans vs humans.? If you mean AI to take the place of humans, then don't most games already provide this? Any RTS game and TBS game does.

 

[Lukeje]

How can there be an OP about bots with no mention of Unreal Tournament?

...I think a major problem with bots (in FPS's) nowadays is that the AI has to be very complex to deal with the various physics engines, thus meaning that they're likely to be very buggy...

 

[Nincompoop]

I miss it a lot!

I have always loved to join a friend on LAN playing, say, vs. 16 counter-terrorist bots only equipped with knives.

Seriously, I really really miss it. And I say miss it, because even though it is around these days, it was a MUST in a game back in the day.

Nice of you to bring this up =).

 

[Pandalisk]

Not really, i prefer a live player to the AI

 

[Nincompoop]

How can there be an OP about bots with no mention of Unreal Tournament?

...I think a major problem with bots (in FPS's) nowadays is that the AI has to be very complex to deal with the various physics engines, thus meaning that they're likely to be very buggy...

I agree. That, and the internet being so reliable and fast, may make a game dev think twice before adding bots, which is a shame =/.

 

[walls of cetepedes]

Me and my Dad used to go on a team against all bots on RF2. It was always fun.

 

[.Duck149.]

MoH had good bots, Killzone2's bots are really good but a bit predictable, definitely Unreal Tournament (UTGOTY2005 expansion pack especially) were insanely good, and Unreal also had very good online play =)

 

[plastic_window]

Used to do it all the time on Red Faction and Quake 3. Although, I still play with bots - regularly - on Gears 2 and occassionally on UT3.

Unreal Tournament is just way too fast for me to play with real people. I tried it once and it went horribly. I kept dancing around people wasting all my ammo and then either getting killed or surviving long enough to see my opponent get killed by a member of my own team. Apparently, though, that's not even as fast as the older UT games were... I wouldn't have lasted in the Quake-era of online gaming.

 

[soren7550]

I remember the original Perfect Dark bots, and how you could determine their color and difficulty. Me and my brothers would always have Meathead Bots (or "sims" as the game called them.) We were able to name the color teams, so we named each one:
Red- Commies
Blue- Smurfs
Yellow- Go0ks
Orange- Carrot Top
Pink- Pansies
Light Blue- Faries
(pretty sure there was more, but I can't remember them all.)

When I got the prequel, Perfect Dark Zero, I was greatly disappointed by the game's bots and all the other multiplayer options. You can't customize your character, you can't have all the different characters from the game in the mulitplayer at once (you can only have a set of four different skins from a set.), there's only about 4 different bot classes (vanilla, agent, perfect agent and dark agent if I remember right.) and you can't really change the color of the characters. (you only get to choose from green, blue or red.)

I can only hope that the remake of the original keeps with the original's multiplayer.

 

[Omikron009]

I used to play James Bond: Nightfire with bots all the time. I was shocked that not all games had AI bots.

 

[L3m0n_L1m3]

I loved bots. No matter how many times I killed them they would never ragequit or sent me hate mail.

 

[Left4Meds]

Left 4 Dead Bots,
The good, the bad, and the epic phail.

 

[SebZero]

Alas, nowadays bots are so rare..

It's a shame, since shooting a bunch of bot was fun, since they never spoke, didn't have the voice of a 10 year old, and didn't make homophobic remarks towards me.

Plus they were fun to kill.

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

I remember Unreal as the first game I've played that came with bots. They were actually pretty good for their time.

Later on I used Foxbot to fill up the teams whenever I hosted a TFC game. I also liked using them for practice when my usual training servers weren't available. Me vastly outnumbered by bots trying to reach a certain goal like getting less than N deaths or no enemy flag captures.

I remember them fondly.

 

[APPCRASH]

I miss it a lot!

I have always loved to join a friend on LAN playing, say, vs. 16 counter-terrorist bots only equipped with knives.

Seriously, I really really miss it. And I say miss it, because even though it is around these days, it was a MUST in a game back in the day.

Nice of you to bring this up =).

I dare someone to say they never fought off 16 bots with only their knives, yelling "Freedom!" the entire time...until someone whips out the Para.

 

[Snotnarok]

Bots make games fun, when you don't feel like hearing the trash talk of idiots online or getting a quit early because you want to play for a few minutes.

In Red Faction 2 my friends and I made a bot called Nugget which was a "processed" model who had max health and only used a pistol and had no skill. It was funny in a lot of ways but he'd make the game challenging believe it or not, he'd take ALL the guns laying around and HP and never use them making getting a more solid weapon more difficult.

Timesplitters? Hearing another human er....seeing the text of another human mentioning this game is amazing, that game is one of my favorite shooters of all time, nothing did what it did as well. By that I mean not taking itself seriously and allowing dinosaurs, gingerbread men, cavewomen, gangsters, robots into a frag fest.