hear me out.
maybe not literally invincible, but like give them really fast regenerating health and 100% corruption resistance. let me explain.
So bots are bad. Nobody likes them, but a lot of us still REALLY want a solo play mode. I’m sure it’s difficult to get them up and running in a game with as many moving parts as this, so to the end of getting bots into a state where they’re functional and useful enough for a solo mode, and so a player leaving unexpectedly on higher difficulty doesn’t spell doom for the rest of the team, I have an idea: Fudging It.
The core concept I’m kicking around here is that a hypothetical Basically Competent Allied Player fills a variety of roles (kill enemies for you, draw enemy attention, complete objectives for you, cover you while you complete objectives, save you from incapacitators, etc,) and trying to make a bot fill ALL of these roles is a crazy tall order. But, I think it wouldn’t take that much to make them be highly reliable at filling at least SOME of these roles. Namely, soaking damage, drawing fire, and thinning hordes.
Consider: what if Darktide bots were just, like, unkillable? They could still be pounced or trapped, or tossed off a roof, but they just never (or almost never) got downed by enemy damage. Would that honestly make the game too easy? Their ability to kill things would still be awful, they still wouldn’t use any useful abilities or grenades, and they wouldn’t be able to infinitely revive the player because Wounds are still be a thing. My goal with this concept isn’t to make bots as useful as players; just to make bots at least useful enough that playing solo would be workable.
Players would never have to try to get the bot back up in the middle of a fight, unless an incapacitation specialist got them, and enemies like snipers and poxbursters would no longer be an arbitrary reduction of your team’s health because there’s no way to stop the bots from blithely running straight into them. And on higher difficulties, the bots wouldn’t just be Always Dead.
They would reliably distract hordes and draw attention away from you if you’re in one place doing the interrogator or scanning something. If you’re alone with three bots, they would all always be staying close to you. If there’s only one or two bots filling in for player vacancies, you still have enough of a team of real people to do the important tasks, and the bots would still at least be able to soak up about as much enemy attention as a player or two would. They wouldn’t kill enemies as fast as a player, but that wouldn’t negatively impact the team, because the bots will always be drawing at least SOME attention, because they can draw attention indefinitely.
Since bots still can’t carry the heavy things and they aren’t smart enough to kill monsters or specials or elite groups for you, most of the actually engaging parts of the game would still be left to the player or players, and no rebalancing of bot ranged damage output would be needed, especially since they’d still tend to switch to melee if any enemies approach them. You COULD cheese some tougher fights by getting the immortal bots to handle it, but they wouldn’t handle it very fast, and while they’re handling it they won’t be doing a great job watching your back for the specials who are the real threat, so there’s still not really a way for a player to get lazy. And of course, the bots would still only follow, not lead.
At the very least if bots regenerated health they’d stop using up the dang healing stations and medkit juice.
Another couple of random thoughts:
If they’re all going to be Veterans, they could have Voice of Command instead of Volley Fire, and at least occasionally crack off a big area disrupt when they get surrounded by melee dudes. Wouldn’t hurt to also give all of them that assist skill, the one that makes you revive people faster and move faster when going towards an incapacitated ally. Could also potentially just be like 30% faster than players and have 100% sprint efficiency.