The state of the default bots on Darktide doesn’t seem to be that great, and it seems like everyone who weighs in on this subject is in agreement on that.
Now, the bots are a minor part of the game, they’re meant to simply be filler entities that get replaced when real players join a game.
However, it still seems like there’s been enough negative experiences with players that they’ve begun to notice the ‘lack’ that the bots have, that when players leave, or don’t join and fill a game at all, that negative experiences can often happen as a result.
Why is this?
Well, simply put, the bots are incredibly weak.
While they’re not perfect in their behaviour, and it would be far too much effort to program bots that play super effectively, and may even be detrimental to the play experience if they start outperforming players, that’s not really what I see as the crux of the issue.
The real problem is that they sit on level 1 basic equipment, and have no talent tree skills, and do not use their combat ability, which all combines to render them almost ineffective as allies to players even on Malice difficulty, let alone Heresy and above where they can barely survive more than a single encounter.
As a comparison, think about the bots in a similar game, Left 4 Dead 2. They’re not perfect in their behaviour, far from it, but they’re adequate in what they’re meant to do. They follow the players, they pick up stronger weapons, they heal when they need to and they know to shoot at the enemies, particularly the stronger ones.
The bots in Darktide are similar enough, but differ greatly in the weapons department, as they only have the basic level 1 equipment.
Imagine if in Left 4 Dead 2, the bots only ever ran around with a single basic pistol, and never picked up any other weapons or health items. Sure, you might be able to beat a campaign on the easiest difficulty, but playing with bots on anything higher than Easy would be a deeply frustrating experience of them ineffectively shooting strong enemies with the weakest weapon, then dying and draining resources constantly.
This is what the Darktide bots do currently.
In some ways it’s worse in Darktide, as the various different armour types like Carapace and Unyielding cause the bots’ level 1 grey-tier equipment to do no damage whatsoever to these enemies, being useless at best.
As an example, take this video released by Reginald on youtube, who recently did an official patch introduction for Fatshark:
This is him playing with and talking about the Power Falchion in the beta for the most recent major update.
Notice, especially around the 4:30 mark that I timestamped, he is playing with one Human ally, and two bots.
However, the bots are dead, and both players make no attempt to revive them.
Because… Why would they?
The bots are in no way a help, especially on a higher difficulty, and wouldn’t be worth the time to revive.
Not only did they die super early in the mission, but have been left dead for the entire map, and apparently had little to no impact from their absence.
Now, Reginald is a seasoned player who can overcome the lack of these teammates, but most players who play this game cannot, and therein lies the problem.
An additional problem is that, due to the bots having no talent choices and no Curios, they have a baseline Health and Toughness score, rendering them quite frail.
While they do seem to get two extra Wounds as a result of being a bot, which I approve of, their baseline Health and Toughness makes them not only very easily downed, but also creates the situation that when a player joins on this bots’ slot, the health percentage lost, and Corruption gained from being downed, is inherited, which can cause a freshly-joined player to immediately be at risk of permanent death, which many players have reported has happened to them more than a few times, at no fault of their own.
This of course wouldn’t be much of a major issue, the bots are expected to be replaced by human players after all, but the problem lies in when that doesn’t happen.
Situations like not being able to find a full squad due to your regions’ off-hours, or just not that many people happen to be searching for that difficulty or map at this particular time, or a player disconnects partially through a mission and the mission has left the mission board so no new players are queuing into it, these can all cause headaches as your squad’s effectiveness significantly drops, especially the higher the difficulty, which is what I think is a major part of people’s frustrations and complaints about the bots in Darktide.
So, what is my solution?
My suggested solution is to update the bot profiles so that they actually have proper equipment, curios, and assigned skill perks.
I have been testing and playing for a while with modified bots using the ‘Solo Play’ and ‘Tertium 4 or 5’ mods.
Yes, these are mods, but they don’t drastically change anything, they simply let you play the game solo offline (without rewards or exp) while using your other characters as replacements for the default bots, equipment, skills and all.
And my findings from playing like this, is that the bots perform VASTLY better when actually equipped with proper weapons and skills, without needing to have their actual behaviour changed at all.
I have done testing in particular with three upgraded Veteran bots, as similar to how the base game only has Veteran bots, and this is how I have their skills assigned:
Now, before I explain why I have these skills assigned to my bots, I will first say what is is bots can and cannot do:
When no enemies are nearby, bots will use their Ranged weapon’s primary fire from the hip. They will NOT aim down sights, or use any special weapon activations.
When enemies are nearby, bots will use their Melee weapon’s Light Attacks. They will NOT use Heavy Attacks, or special weapon activations, however they can Block, Shove, and Dodge, though they do these things rarely.
Bots will not (currently) use their combat ability, or throw grenades, and can make no practical use of the Keystones, which is why my image cuts off at that point, I don’t assign anything down there at all.
With that in mind, I have chosen talents that the bots can use as passively as possible. Some I’ve had to choose because the talent tree path has to go through them, such as Demolition Stockpile for grenades, but I do this as sparingly as possible.
While most of these choices are relatively useful passive buffs to bots that only hipfire and Light Attack, there are some in particular I want to point out, as I think they are the most useful:
Serrated Blade makes it so that bots, no matter what type of melee weapon they have, and no matter what armour type they’re facing, are able to do consistent Damage-Over-Time to any enemy, and not simply whack away uselessly at something they can’t damage.
Rending Strikes similarly upgrades the bots’ effectiveness against all armour types, and the same can be said for Onslaught, though that one is particularly useful as it causes Brittleness, which not only helps them but the entire team as well against tough armour types.
Fully Loaded, Lock and Load and Shock Trooper are chosen to help with the bots’ ammo economy, as they tend to start firing their guns less when their ammo goes down, and also to ensure that if a player joins on this bots’ slot, they have a higher percentage of ammo retained.
Leave No One Behind is also a significant quality-of-life skill, as bots otherwise tend to have a nasty habit of being ‘interrupted’ trying to revive a fallen human player, only to immediately go back to trying to revive the player without addressing the problem, causing a repeating loop of not quite reviving a player constantly, often ending up being downed themselves by whatever is ‘interrupting’ them.
Pairing with these skills, these are the weapons and Curios I (generally) have them equipped with:
The most significant choice here is the Accatran Recon Lasgun.
For a combination of weapon power, fire rate, and ammo pool, without having to rely on special activations or particular distinguishing or targets (as in, bots just fire at anything infront of them no matter what it is), this has been the clear winner in my testing.
In my testing, the actual Mark of the gun doesn’t seem to matter much, the bots seem as effective with any Mark as any other, so that could be varied from bot to bot without issue.
A second-place finisher has been the Infantry Lasgun, however with the single-shot (semi-auto) weapons, the bots tend to have a very low fire rate with these, much lower than what is actually possible with the gun when being shot as fast as possible by a Human.
An Infantry Lasgun with the Efficiency Blessing is great for ammo economy, but they just don’t fire them enough to make them overall useful as allies.
Most other types of ranged weapons the bots either fire too recklessly, thus burning through limited ammo pools rapidly, or are unable to use them against the correct targets as they fire indiscriminately, or both.
In terms of the melee weapon, I have the Combat Axe there as an example, however with the combination of Serrated Blade, Rending Strikes, and Onslaught, the bots are easily effective with just about any melee weapon, so long as it is at a power level of 500, has perks that are level 4, and has level 4 blessings that work passively on Light Attacks, like in my example shown.
For the Curios, increasing the bots’ Health and Toughness is a must.
I’ve shown just one with the major Health blessing, but I run two Health and one Toughness on my bots. I’m not sure it makes a difference on the bots either way whether it’s two Health and one Toughness, or two Toughness and one Health, but some combination of these goes a long way to improving their survivability.
And with the addition of the Revive Speed (ally), this helps even more so avoid the situations where bots are trying and failing repeatedly to revive a Human player, or even each other.
As a demonstrative example of this in action, I’ve uploaded several videos showing my gameplay with three of these modified Veteran bot allies, using each of Darktide’s base classes on Damnation difficulty:
You can see that, although I am far from an expert player, I am able to complete Damnation missions with each class and these bots with relatively few spills, which I think should be a baseline for a co-op game like this where you could potentially be relying on bot allies. Doable, but not a cakewalk.
From testing the game’s various bots, it seems like the default bots are sorted into three different ‘groups’, those being internally named in the code ‘low_bot_1’ (going up to 6), ‘medium_bot_xxx’ and ‘high_bot_xxx’.
These appear to be used for different difficulty levels. The ‘low_bot_xxx’ bots are in the entry prison uniforms and appear to be used for Uprising difficulty, the ‘medium_bot_xxx’ are visually equipped like standard soldiers and seem to be used on Malice and Heresy from what I can tell, and the ‘high_bot_xxx’ ones have a bit more cosmetic equipment and seem to be used on every other difficulty.
As it stands though, they are all the same in their actual weapons and skills, that being just the basic default equipment.
I think it would be a mistake to change ALL the bots to my modified ones. Having the bots be such equipped on lower difficulties like Uprising and Malice would probably be detrimental for newer players, as they’d easily be taking down threats before the newer players were seeing them and learning to deal with them themselves, thus causing them to not really learn about the enemies for themselves.
However, on Heresy difficulty, which is a significant jump in the difficulty and strength of the enemies in this game, it’s safe to say that the default bots become significantly lacking at this point, and the higher the difficulty, the more stark this difference. Heresy is also a difficulty in which players should be expected to have SOME level of equipment, skill and knowledge about the enemies, so I think the bots should be able to match and not drag the team down.
So, my suggestion for the bots is this:
For Uprising, keep the ‘low_bot_xxx’ as they are.
For Malice, keep the ‘medium_bot_xxx’ as they are here too.
But for Heresy and above, use the ‘high_bot_xxx’ bots, given the upgraded weapons, curios and talent tree perks that I’ve been using, and I think there would be a significant improvement in the players’ experience when having bots on their teams, and the complaints about them would be significantly reduced.
This is all, of course, suggesting no significant changes to the bots, simply re-assigning their equipment and skills, which seems already possible in the code of the game, given that the aforementioned mods that let you play this way do without changing anything about the game itself.
If I could make one significant change to the way the bots actually function though, alongside my suggested changes to their profiles, it would be to bring back their ability to use their Combat Ability.
I say bring back, because the bots in Darktide used to be able to activate their combat ability, prior to the update which gave us the wider branching talent trees.
Back when we had just the single Executioner’s Stance ability for Veterans, the bots would use theirs, albeit semi-randomly.
Simply restoring this functionality for the bots, alongside my suggested loadouts, would go a way to make the bots even more effective as allies.
In that instance, I would replace Superiority Complex and Field Improvisation with Duty and Honor, and Only In Death Does Duty End, so that if the bots were using the Voice of Command ability, even semi-randomly, it would have the aiding benefits of granting the extra toughness and potentially reviving downed allies, which would be a significant boost to the usefulness of the bots as allies.
However, sparing that, I hope that at least the bots can have their profiles updated for the ‘high_bot_xxx’ profiles as I’ve suggested, which I think would go some ways to easing people’s frustrations about their performance in Heresy and higher difficulties.
