- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Heyyo,
Posted by: stealthlogic
As many of you know, a staple of any PC Game is bots for offline play. Now beside it just being a defining charactersistic, sometimes you just want to get some quick action without having to search for a server that meets your expectations of that day.. Also, many poeple want some practice before being humiliated.
Besides, Bungie aready has teh killer AI. They use vehicles just fine. Some minor modifications may be required, but that's a smal price for all that it will add to the game.
Bots will also make it easier for long time PC Gamers to accept H2 Vista.
Now, I was very tempted to vote for beer... but what kind of beer is it? if it's budweiser, then I made the right choice voting yes for bots.
Most likely though, they won't include bots. I just hope they include fakeclient support for H2V so someone could design a bot for H2V. Yes, the singleplayer AI for H2 was pretty good with the vehicles, and even the basic AI with tweaking makes pretty good multiplayer (as noted above for hang em high with AI).
As for dumb multiplayer AI? yes, lots of game's don't have the best. The official CS bot is a pretty intelligent bot though. They usually travel in packs (you can even disable bots going "rogue" so they always travel in groups) and they emultate online play pretty well I say (minus the proper grenade useage I guess). The third party bots for CS1.6 & CZ are pretty good too, and they just constantly get better. I for one, hope someone continues where PMB left off with RACCBot (uses navmesh to nativate the level, and actually "sees" the geometry of the level, so it figures out itself where to go.. so cool).
Who here remembers the great AI that was in UT1, and UT2k3/4? same with Quake3Arena? great bots that were damn good for MP (Sadly, Quake4 lacked MP bots... but the game I find ain't as good as Q3A anywho). I for one can't wait for UT2k7 to come out... the AI will even be programmed to respond to VOIP commands... I mean, actually yelling at the bots to get the flag or defend and they obey??? monumental. Epic software will create a monster of AI that will definately define "next-gen gaming" when it comes to AI. :D
Anywho, from the above, pretty obvious that I can't wait for more games with multiplayer AI, cause they expand a game's lifecycle I say. Many of you know, that it's hard to keep a good server going with players when there's no one innit. Using bots to keep at least 4 players or so in a server helps quite a bit.. so not only do I say bots good offline, but can be very useful for dedicated server purposes.