I’ll be the noob.
I don’t mind.
I confess that I want bots in games.
I want to feel powerful, I want to play with and against mindless opponents, and I want
to still be able to play a full game long after everybody else has moved on.
I think you could get away with this opinion 10, 15 years ago, back when internet support
was worse.
The multiplayer fanatics minded their own business and the offline noobs happily played
bot matches on Face 2 in peace.
But times are changing.
Call of Duty and Battlefield are regularly releasing new titles, encouraging the fanbase
to jump to the new ones and to leave the old ones as ghost-towns where only the hardcore
remain.
Whether you jump or remain, you likely do so for the like-minded, human-led community.
But I don’t like multiplayer.
Counter Strike is enough for me.
I can dedicate enough time to remain good enough to enjoy playing against real people.
But with other games I’m a noob and don’t enjoy being there simply as cannon-fodder.
That’s where bots come in!
Battlefield 1942 was a fantastic game with great bot support.
I mean, they were buggy at best.
But they did the job!
You could mow them down and they’d continue playing.
You carried out heroic stunts that would turn the tide of the whole game.
My imagination could do the rest and I spent many happy hours playing that game on my own.
Battlefield 2 was a disappointment to me.
They scaled down the bot support.
16v16’s at best, on a cut-down version of every map.
I longed for the sprawling epics of the original game but still lapped up what bot support
it had.
This got phased out further in future Battlefield titles until eventually it was gone entirely.
And with it, so was my interest in the series.
Clearly, they didn’t want me as part of its fanbase.
Bots were cut to encourage pure man-on-man action.
Which is why I loved Red Orchestra and Rising Storm!
By the time I discovered the series, bot support had been added to the game.
It felt like I had returned to Battlefield 1942 and it brought back the same thrill of
holding onto control points for as long as possible, and in performing daring raids deep
behind enemy lines.
This didn’t hurt the game- there were still full 64-man servers for those who wanted hot,
pure man-on-man action.
But there were also a helloololot of servers with just a handful of players, with the bots
making up the numbers.
And I always had the most fun on these sorts of servers.
Sure, I’d still get obliterated by these players whenever I encountered them, but as
long as I spent most of my time rekking bots I didn’t mind so much!
Sadly, they’re not officially supported in the new Rising Storm 2.
I searched Reddit posts for a reason and even discovered an official statement from one
of the devs.
How about that!
Devs that respond!
They say the feedback they got from players was that they weren’t good enough.
Others would rather only play with humans and bots would interfere with that.
I mean, the things people say aren’t unreasonable.
But I think it’s missing the bigger picture.
AnselmBlackheart gets it.
I don’t doubt that bots aren’t up to human intelligence.
They’re not by a long-shot.
It’s part of why I like them.
And I’m sure that plenty of people would rather play against other humans… which
they can do already!
Who are they to have a say on whether bots are added for the rest of us?!
And for those of you who think I prefer bots because I’m bad…
maybe!
But do you really think I’ll enjoy the game more if I switch to player-only servers?
Do you think that me being better has any bearing on how much fun I could get from the
game?
I know where being competitive leads.
And it would take away what I love so much about games like Rising Storm.
You stop enjoying it for what it is, and it all becomes about being better.
I did this with Counter Strike, and in the process lost what I loved most about it in
the first place.
I used to enjoy hopping into a zombie mod server, or in exploring a weird map constructed
by a zany individual.
It’s hard to describe the appeal, but there was one.
A new server was like stumbling across a new civilisation, you’d have an hour or so to
get acquainted with their own close-knit community and quirky rules.
At the end you’d disconnect, sad you’d probably never see them again but also excited
to see where the next server would take you!
Now all that new experience stuff feels like time wasted when it could be put towards the
next competitive match where I may get a tiny bit better at the core game as a result!
What I’d give to not care about that stuff anymore.
To return to when it was myself and friends, exploring a game where being good didn’t
matter.
Last Christmas I made a control point map for CS:GO and ensured that it had bot support.
It was IMPERATIVE that it had bot support.
I thought back to how little Philip from 15 years ago would have appreciated it had he
stumbled across this gamemode.
I’ll never see the people that it benefits, but I know that they’d appreciate it.
Plus it’s not as though there are going to be enough people to fill up that kind of
custom gamemode in the first place.
Which takes me onto my second point: bots help to keep games alive.
PUBG and CS:GO are the lucky ones.
They are big enough not to need bots to inflate the numbers.
I still find it miraculous that I can click PLAY at any time of the day and immediately
be placed in a game with other people who had the same idea as me, at the same moment.
The world isn’t big enough for many games with this size of community.
For all those smaller or more niche games, bots are needed to help keep these games running.
Because let’s face it, even if you’d rather be playing with real people, bots are still
better than nothing.
They’ll help keep you playing until other players join a server- and that can make a
big difference.
They may be basic but they’ll help keep a gamemode functional until there are enough
real people to sustain it themselves.
Even for popular games, bots fill a roll when it’s first taking off or when it begins
to die down later on in its lifespan.
There’s no better example of this than with Air Buccaneers.
This was originally a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004.
For me, it was love at first sight.
Imagine pirates in airships and that’s pretty much what it is.
If any game were to struggle with implementing bot support, it would be this one!
And yet it managed it.
Surprisingly well, in fact!
They could man, pilot and shoot from the ships.
They were a little rough around the edges- but that was fine, it worked well enough!
Well enough for me to enjoy playing solely with bots, or with my friends at LAN parties
against these AI-driven foes.
We had so much enjoyment from this game, without another human player in sight.
And then they mucked up the sequel by not shipping with bot support.
I would have loved to have played this game with friends, but the online servers were
buggy and laggy and offline play was lonely without bots to boost the numbers.
That game was dead to me- and now it just seems dead, since its reliance on internet
access has stopped me from even loading it any more.
But the original mod lives on and I suspect will aide us in many LANs to come.
It seems we’re living in an era of planned obsolescence.
Where it’s not enough to be playing a game unless it’s the developer’s latest cashcow.
Unless we’re on servers full of real people, where our purchased cosmetics double as visible
adverts intended to line the dev’s bank balances.
How dare I enjoy mowing down bots when I should instead succumb to the endless grind to become
the best!
But it doesn’t feel right to me.
That’s not why I signed up to gaming in the first place, nor is it how I get my enjoyment
from it now!
And although from this video it sounds like I’m a noob gamer who doesn’t like losing
and would rather be hanging out with bots…
no!
No…
It’s not like that.
Sometimes.
It’s rather the human confrontation that I tire of.
I guess I grew up in an era of offline games, where I could imagine how good I was.
Multiplayer has only shown me that I’m not special and that there’s always someone,
somewhere, who’s ready to ruin my day.
In reality I’m a nice, calm individual, but competitive gaming exposes a side of me
that nothing else can.
After the things I’ve felt and the things I’ve said, I feel SHAME after I’ve disconnected
from a heated game.
And I realise that I simply didn’t enjoy it, even if I did end up winning.
You know what I do enjoy?
Human company.
I enjoy playing with friends!
But I’d rather be playing WITH them and against some faceless enemy.
An enemy I can be mean to without feeling bad.
An enemy that I can configure to win or to lose, depending on what’s more fun for me.
An opponent that I have control over, who will happily play the maps and gamemodes that
I choose and for as long as I want to.
A good LAN game pits real people against AI foes.
I’m an utter beast in Left 4 Dead, but rather than use that to sit on my friends until they
ragequit, I get more enjoyment from using my skills to help the team.
Bots give me an opponent I don’t mind thrashing, abusing or losing to, since they literally
cease to exist once I turn it off.
Plus, rather than the ever-moving goalposts of human competition, I feel progress with
bots.
When you suddenly find that hard difficulty is no longer hard, and you can then pit your
skills against very hard!
I find this far more rewarding, even if they don’t throw a childish tantrum when I upset
them with insults geared towards their Mum.
Bots let me stay nice.
Bots are the unsung heroes of multiplayer games.
So I urge you, devs, design your games with bots in mind.
See them as nurturers for when your game is taking off.
As stand-ins when your game is going well.
As carers, in your game’s waning years… and as ghostly companions, for when I make
a nostalgic video about it in 10 years’ time.