There are bad bots, who ruin matches of Team Fortress 2 and extend the queues in MMOs like Lost Ark, but I'm here to celebrate the other kind—the kind who've been helping to fill up l
Q&A
Find all previous editions of the PCG Q&A here. Some highlights:
— What’s a weird quirk your PC has?
— What should boomer shooters be called?
— Have you learned a real-world skill from a game?
There are bad bots, who ruin matches of Team Fortress 2 and extend the queues in MMOs like Lost Ark, but I’m here to celebrate the other kind—the kind who’ve been helping to fill up lobbies in the quiet times when there aren’t enough humans on your server since Quake’s Reaper Bot, or who round out your squad in a co-op game when you don’t have quite enough friends to make up the numbers. When bots are bad they’re annoying, but when they’re good they can be preferable to people. Well, some people. You know who I mean.
Which multiplayer shooter had the best bots?
Here are our answers, plus some from our forum (opens in new tab).
Ted Litchfield, Associate Editor: They weren’t «good» bots in the sense that they played the game well or made up for a missing teammate, but I really loved the bots in Counter-Strike: Source. They were literally the only entities in the game that would use its prepackaged radio callouts («tango down», «enemy spotted») and they all went by cute little first names like «Toby» or «Bert.» My favorite gag people would pull was to set their username to impersonate one of the bots, actually use those in-game callouts to trick their teammates, then absolutely pub stomp their unsuspecting opponents.
Jody Macgregor, Weekend/AU Editor: The bots in the classic Star Wars Battlefront games, made by Pandemic Studios in 2004 and 2005, may not have been geniuses, but they didn’t need to be. You don’t expect a Stormtrooper to have great aim or one of those battle droids from the prequels to do anything other than say «roger roger» and immediately die (but in a funny way). What they need to do is run around like wild making the appropriate noises while flinging enough laserfire that it’s sure to spank off nearby objects dramatically while you take cover to let your weapon cool down.
My housemate and I played both those games to death, refighting the Battle of Hoth for hours, murdering ewoks on the moon of Endor, and playing this one Mos Eisley hero assault mode where everyone spawned as named characters from both then-current eras of Star Wars. Which was absolute chaos. Those games were designed for two teams of 16 players and there were only two of us, but throw in 30 bots and they became glorious mayhem.
