What ever happened to bots?

[LWS666]

i'm playing L4D2 now, BOTS!

 

[Jonny49]

Despite it's flaws, HAZE 1 vs 15 with bot's is a laugh. Rather scary too. Worth the £8 I paid for it alone.

 

[Prometherion]

Anyone remember XIII(13)?

Multiplayer with bots was awesome, i love multiplayer offline. Spilt screen is so crap.

 

[fix-the-spade]

Anyone else have any opinions on this?

Online multiplayer happened, that's what.

Most PC shooters still have bots, either fan made or coded in.

But from a developer's point of view bots no longer make much sense. For your multiplayer mode you can spend hundreds of thousands programming, bug testing and playtesting an set of extremely complciated AI programs that will still be vastly inferior to human players, especially as their entire set of actions will be procedural rather than scripted. Or you can not bother, bang together fifteen or so maps for 16 people and call it multiplayer.

Humans are a thousand times more unpredictable and adaptable than any bot, to most developer's there's just little point adding them.

 

[Hobo Joe]

Most of the time they have incredibly poor AI; plus this new multi player craze has killed them off rather effectively. I miss them though. Timesplitters 2 *Hugs*

 

[HandfulofWolf]

maybe all the developers gave up on bots because they knew that they couldn't make an FPS with bots, as epic as Timesplitters

This.

 

[Luke5515]

You have to add them in your server. Mind you, this is PC only.

 

[muffincakes]

Perfect Dark (N64) had really good bots for the time. I used to play 2 player and fill in the rest with several Dark bots and some easier ones just for fun. The Dark bots were very tough. At least I think that's what they were called, it's been so long...

DarkSims, baby! Yeah!!

[sub]sorry. I get excited sometimes.[/sub]

And PD bots are still great, especially since there have been relatively few games since that include bots. Also, I love bots. Why did they have to go?! Why??!!

 

[Squilookle]

Just the other day I had an absolute blast playing XIII with my gf's brother, doing CTF loaded up with bots. There really is no excuse not to have them in a multiplayer shooter.

An FPS without bots better have a fucking good singleplayer.

Yeah, this too. It's already at a massive disadvantage in my books. In fact when I hear about a new game, finding out if it's multiplayer has bots is usually the first thing I look up.

 

[rt052192]

online is accepted as something everyone should have, but i feel your pain. i personally miss destroying the bots that came along with Medal of Honor:Rising Sun(most notably rickshaw) but Gears of War 2 has bots that are remotely challenging and fun to play offline

 

[Singularly Datarific]

I don't know, especially since Terminator said they'd've taken over now...

 

[Kae]

maybe all the developers gave up on bots because they knew that they couldn't make an FPS with bots, as epic as Timesplitters

probably that but they were still awesome to have while you were playing offline to make everything more chaotic and awesome specailly in Time Splitters my favorite FPS , also Perfect Dark was great fun with it's bots I especially remember KazeSim and CowardSim they were so awesome

 

[Quiet Stranger]

I hope no one has mentioned Red Faction 2 yet, I loved that game, I actually gave my bots names and they leveled up (Im pretty sure the more you played with them the better they got) and I treated them like people

 

[Joshdemon]

Anyone else have any opinions on this?

Online multiplayer happened, that's what.

Most PC shooters still have bots, either fan made or coded in.

But from a developer's point of view bots no longer make much sense. For your multiplayer mode you can spend hundreds of thousands programming, bug testing and playtesting an set of extremely complciated AI programs that will still be vastly inferior to human players, especially as their entire set of actions will be procedural rather than scripted. Or you can not bother, bang together fifteen or so maps for 16 people and call it multiplayer.

Humans are a thousand times more unpredictable and adaptable than any bot, to most developer's there's just little point adding them.

A fair comment, but if Turok: Rage Wars on the N64 has the processing power to handle bots and lots of maps, then surely a latest generation game, e.g. Modern Warfare 2 can!

 

[VGCATZ]

Timesplitters series was one of the finest for bots.

I recently found a game (which I got for free, don't ask me how) called Perfect Dark Zero o Xbox 360 that does Bots quite well, in fact, I thinks its a lot like Timeplitters with the bots and multiplayer.

I too loved the Timesplitter bots. They made for the most interesting games when you could out animals versus zombies. I do regret finding out that Mr. Giggles was a clown though. I loved using him until that point. I hate clowns but that's off-topic.

 

[FoiL]

Bots usually enhance the multi-player, even if by only adding sillyness. But they are considered too expensive to be well pulled of, so they were kind of abandoned.

 

[MR.Spartacus]

Perfect Dark is getting rereleased. How could it NOT have bots?

 

[JeanLuc761]

They're a lot of effort to code well and never come anywhere close to the real thing or train you for anything.

You'd be surprised. Put the bots in Unreal Tournament 2004 on anything above "masterful" and see how well you fare.

 

[Darquenaut]

...why must everything remind me of Perfect Dark these days... *sighs* one more week, one more week...

Back to the OT, *ahem* I really think it is simply a case of both demand and ease of programming. As for demand, since the time where people could more easily play each other online as opposed to split-screen matches, people have been more inclined to want to play with each other rather than a bot. Further, there has been a steady unspoken race between companies to constantly straddle the line between FPS and MMO. As for programming, although this is coming from an amateur (read- never did any programming anything farther than Javascript), I would surmise it is much easier for programmers to create essentially avatars of the characters and have them all have roughly the same attributes (give or take depending on variables such as armor, etc.) and have the player dictate how they themselves act than to create separate identities and quirks for each individual bot. Further, which loops back to the first point, bots, as the name implies, are simply AI running a course and interacting to outside variables. Otherwise they are always able to be predicted once you play with them enough. Actual people however can adapt and change strategies according to the situations that arises. Hell, just play a decent match in TF2 on the Goldrush map to that idea in action.

Just my thoughts. That, and Darksims are the spawn of Hell itself.
That is all.

 

[fix-the-spade]

A fair comment, but if Turok: Rage Wars on the N64 has the processing power to handle bots and lots of maps, then surely a latest generation game, e.g. Modern Warfare 2 can!

Of course they can, but the cost of making bots has gone up along with everything else in game since then, it's just not economically expedient to make them anymore.