It is such a tragedy that a large percentage of modern multi-player games come with no options for bots. For example, it would be so lovely to be able to play the Master Chief Collection against customizable bots.
Pulsar: lost colony, which is a spaceship bridge simulator game has an amazing bot interface. It is nowhere near as good as playing with friends. but it lets you play alone or to fill the ranks if you can't find four other people to play with. You can tell they put a lot of work in the ui exposing what is a complex subject and I found it a lot of fun trying to tune the bots to my play style.
Completely agree. I actually think there's a huge opportunity for game companies to create bots that have been fine tuned on notable players, former tournament champions, etc. so then you have your base AI bots, and if players want they can essentially purchase virtualized opponents.
What Quake player didn't want to pit their skills against Dennis Fong back in the day?
Of course there would need to be someway to adjust the difficulty while retaining the famous players stratagems otherwise 99% of casual players will get crushed. :)
Has PC gaming fallen in any meaningful sense? And what is 'trad' PC gaming?
It seems stronger than ever to me, and I started in 1993. Consoles are becoming more PC like. PCs can now be more console like, if one so desires. In many ways we get the best of all worlds.
'trad' in this sense mostly being the era of dedicated servers and the countless mods and whatnot that these games are known for. Some of the better bots during these years were done by modders who had access to do these things - Q3 included.
And bot AI doesn't have to be super smart to be fun to play against. I recall the erudition of John Romero in saying highly intelligent, patient bots are less fun; usually big, dumb enemies are the most fun.
Duke Nukem 64 bots were fun to play against. All they did was walk in the direction of the nearest opponent (with some left/right randomness), while hitting 'activate' (to could get through some doors), while shooting if an opponent was in sight. They didn't even change weapon (except automatically when a new one was picked up), and didn't avoid traps (pipebombs and laser trip bombs). Primitive yet so much fun.
I preferred Eliminator and Frogbot to the Reaper bot because they were simply a little less perfect in how they played. Reaper had a habit of dominating routes and circle strafing with deadly precision, which just wasn't fun.
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