Bots are one of the greatest inventions in gaming, but alas in some circles they seem to be disappearing faster than the food on my plate. And that is pretty fast! You know, if you play Call of Duty 4, or even as I have been doing on an off the past few days, Medal of Honour Allied Assault, you won’t be able to just run around some maps and play with the bots.
My early gaming experiences were defined by the presence of bots in games, for a long time I was a big console gamer with the PSX and PS2 being my home from home. Games such as Red Faction and Timesplitters 2 were just two of my favourite games, and there is a simple reason for that. Bots. I would spend endless hours playing those games simply fighting the bots, I had great fun slaughtering them all.
When I saw the light and moved back onto the PC properly I was stuck on a measly 56K dial-up connection, my few times trying to play Red Alert 2 online ended up with the opponent having a fully constructed base by the time I was able to get into the game. Thus I would spend hours upon hours playing against the AI in Red Alert 2, I loved the special Christmas tree map, there were so many crates in that map that you could easily build up a base with both GDI and Soviet buildings and units, it was awesome!
I also have a guilty secret, I would use the Final Alert map editor to create a map so one sided that it was impossible for me to lose, I would have all the Ore with capturable bases for the different factions scattered around whilst the AI would be stuck on the other side of my very own Berlin Wall, three strips of wall to prevent my rivals sneaking into my domain. Good times.
Of course playing with bots didn’t end with Red Alert 2, Unreal Tournament 2004 was a big game for me, when I got it I finally had a fast internet connection, but the handful of times I would venture online ultimately left me looking like the noobiest noob from noobville. It is safe to say that I would spend all my time playing against the bots, great fun they were.
At that time you could also find me playing with the AI in Battlefield 1942 and Vietnam as well the amazing bots in Counter Strike: Condition Zero. Eventually I did venture online properly, initially with Counter Strike: Source then ultimately Battlefield 2.
Whilst I had played online and had some great times I still wanted to play with bots, thus my disappointment when Call of Duty 4 came around that there were no bots to have skirmish battles with. Yes the single-player campaign was great, but it was short. If you didn’t have a speedy internet connection and couldn’t play online then the lack of bots would have been a major pain. Even though I did play the game online a lot, I still missed being able to play with bots.
I was again disappointed when the time came to play Team Fortress 2, after the amazing skills of the bots in the Counter Strike games I found it barmy that there weren’t any in TF2. I love playing TF2 online, but sometimes you don’t want to deal with the pressures of it, or your connection is being a bitch and you still want the Team Fortress feel.
Of course I was exaggerating at the beginning of the article, bots aren’t really gone for good, just look at Unreal Tournament 3 and Left 4 Dead, bots still play a big role in these two games. I just wish more games would make use of bots and put in an offline skirmish mode in games, don’t let the bots die. Long live bots!
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In Timesplitters 2 I made a map with one big room, then a long corridor – the end of which was filled with massive guns and loads of ammo. All the bots against me, I suppose it was like a crap version of Killing Floor.
Also, I used to mess around with them loads on Perfect Dark. You could order them around so I got all of them to line up in a room on Facility with pistols, then get one to stand against a wall. I then switched the loners team. Lols.
Ahh, I remember the heady days of my youth, struggling to get the Eraser Bot working in Quake II without any idea what the hell I was doing and no internet to fall back on. And this was after I’d figured out what on earth a “Zip” file was.
Oh, such innocence…
Having played a bunch of games online like Battlefield 2 and Halo 2 when I was going to college a few years ago I totally agree. Now that I’m back to the country where we have broadband but its satellite broadband so online gaming is not ideal, I use bots all the time. That’s one of the reasons I still play Battlefield 2 with bots, Perfect Dark Zero with bots, Gears of War 2 with bots (thank you Epic!), the C&C games with AI, Unreal Tourne 3 with bots, or any strategy game for that matter. I bought COD4 even though I couldn’t participate in the online awesomeness and I have to agree the single player was great but I would have rented that game that is if I wasn’t wanting to help out the developers. I don’t think Bots will die but yea they are declining which is sad. I mean you play AI in RTS games to brush off your rusty skills before going online to a global competitor.
I played far too much Perfect Dark as a kid. I remember the hardest bot on there just being – obviously – inhumanly good. Multiple headshots with pistols from half the map away… Every know and then the four of us used to play against one of these bots and see who could survive the longest, occasionally we’d kill it. Rarely though. I do know now, though, that when the robots eventually rise up. We’re fucked.
Absolutely. The only reason why I bought Enemy Territory Quake Wars was because it was this huge, complex multiplayer game whose single player is the multiplayer but with bots. Well, that and Linux support. Perfect.
but i’m there with you on timesplitters 2. Man, those were the days.