Have Bots been getting somehow even worse?
This is like the third room. I turned around for like four seconds.
even the scab on the right is like ‘This is embarrassing.’
My assumption is that comprehensive AI improvements to make bots less incredibly stupid would take a lot of time and effort to implement.
The following are suggestions that I suspect would be much quicker and easier, but which would hopefully still mitigate a lot of the current problems that bots have, so that while they might still be pretty awful, they won’t be detrimental. In addition to making bots themselves less terrible, this would also make leaving in the middle of a game less of a handicap (which would hopefully destigmatize leavers), and joining in the middle of a game less hobbling (rare is the day when I join a mission in progress and aren’t already missing more than half my health). My goal is not to make bots as good as players, just to make having bots not be such a massive liability.
First, slap some simple cheat codes on them.
- Bots regenerate health rapidly at all times, cannot use med stations, and are unaffected by med kits or med stims, so that they can only be incapacitated by sustained super heavy damage or by multiple super high damage hits in rapid succession.
- Bots have super high corruption resistance, like 75% or higher. They just love to stand around in pox gas. Almost as much as they love standing in fire.
- Bots have infinite ammo (though still need to reload). I’ve never seen a bot run out of ammo, since they will never bring out their guns if there are any melee enemies in earshot, no matter how many specialists are currently bullying me. But, if they had infinite ammo they would at least never complain about other people taking ammo pickups. Bots telling people how to play when they’re THIS terrible is some serious rage bait.
- Bots have infinite stamina. Their guard is never broken, and they can continually push enemies without ever running out.
- Bots have increased non-sprinting movement speed. I’m not sure how much, maybe somewhere in the realm of +25%. I often see them lagging quite a ways behind even if they aren’t wasting their time on single poxwalkers.
Second, make them more interesting and more useful than blank slate guardsmen.
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Bots are not randomly generated, but instead pick from a pool of premade loadouts. Each loadout has preselected appearance, personality, cosmetics, weapons, and skill tree with all points allocated. This includes some skills that passively help the team, especially Auras that aren’t Scavenger.
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Each premade loadout uses a different Premium Cosmetic bundle, which has the fringe benefit of also acting as advertising. Basically, take all these guys
etc
and turn them into bots. At minimum I think there should be nineteen: One for each personality on each class, including Arbitrator and Hive Scum (though there’s currently only one set of premium cosmetics for either of them. Maybe you should make some more, hint hint.) Though, for the sake of variety, I would personally want twelve Veterans and twelve Zealots, two for each combination of personality and sex, then six each of Psykers, Ogryn, Arbitrators, and Hive Scum. Veterans and Zealots being twice as common as the other classes makes sense to me, so that bots can sort of represent the rabble. Like I don’t know the population distributions of Tertium but it would feel weird if there were exactly as many Psykers as there are normal guys with guns.
This comes to a pool of forty eight loadouts for Bots to choose from. That sounds like a lot, but we’re just talking about loadouts. Sets of character data. It’s not like every single one of them has their own special perks or unique dialogue. They would all be made from the same character creator everybody else is.
As I’ve said about bots before, near invincibility and infinite ammo would in no way make bots overpowered, and neither would giving them decent weapons, because they would still:
- be substantially less effective at killing than the majority of players
- be substantially less effective at assisting and reviving teammates than the majority of players
- have poor judgement about target prioritization, positioning, and when to use their abilities, if they use their abilities at all
- never use their blitz attacks
- often lag behind
- never take cover from enemy ranged fire
- be bad at staying away from exploding things or staying out of fire or toxic gas
- be vulnerable to being disabled or tossed off cliffs
- never complete objectives like hacking or heavy lifting
- never carry ammo crates, med kits, or stimms
Side note, Vermintide’s bots can pick up bombs, potions, and health items, and will give them to players who don’t have any, can we get some of that over here?
To reiterate, my goal is to make bots at least actually useful despite all these harder to solve AI behavior problems. If they could just be relied upon to not immediately crumble and not eat all the med station charges, then just having them be around would be a significant help because of their ability to draw some attention the way any teammate does.
I speak from experience, by the way. In Payday 2, bots work this way, and I much preferred their company to other players. My gaggle of freaky plague doctor mask ladies with machine guns didn’t get a quarter of the kills I did, and I always had to haul all the bags myself, but they would usually only ever go down if they got shot by a sniper or by the minigun turrets mounted on those armored cars. Even though they couldn’t carry equipment or do objectives, they were still very worthwhile to have just because enemies would shoot them instead of me. Darktide bots do not currently rise to this level of usefulness, because Darktide bots are about as sturdy as burning tissue paper.
Though of course I mean if you DID want to take the time to improve their AI so that they just sucked less that would be JUST FINE BY ME
Be happy they are not allowed to use infiltrate on drop their Aggro to you.