Greetings! Some of you may remember me from the Steam forums. I signed up here with the explicit intent of posting one thing. Isn't that nice? So, I had another one of my random dreams/visions last night. Every once in a while, I get this idea from my dreams for one game or other. This time, I was blessed with an idea for Monday Night Combat. And what is that idea? "Guests". Essentially, what "Guests" are are computer-controlled Pros -- what one would call "bots" in most other games. They'd run, jump, play, fire, kill, maim, and eat bacon like normal players, but of course, they wouldn't keep stats or anything like that. They'd just be there for a good, quick bit of fun and practice. The Guest Pros would also have the normal bunch of settings: Difficulty ("Intensity"?), Allow Skills, Class Limiters, Enable/Disable Class Change, etc. etc. It would take some extra work to get them to be able to build turrets and upgrade their skills, not to mention use said skills, but if that could be implemented as well, it would really be awesome stuff. This idea, combined with the semi-recent "Minimum Players" setting on Crossfire being reduced to one, could be very beneficial for those of us who are either afraid to instantly try their luck at online play, or simply lack the connection to do so. (That'd be the category in which I fall.) Achievements/Highlights could be disabled for "bot matches", which I'm sure would irritate some of the more lazy of us out there, but for those of us who just want to experience the game like it was meant to be experienced? This would be a pretty darn good thing. "Why call them Guests?" Simple. The game already has "bots". Those are the things that run around and attack the other bots. "Guests" was the name that came to mind to differentiate between players, bots, and computer-controlled Pros. They could even have special robotic skins to further differentiate them from player-controlled Pros, a'la Tribes 2. While I suppose you could call them any number of other things -- "Automatons", "Cannon Fodder", "Robo-Pros" -- "Guests" was what stuck in my head. So, aside from sounding like a lot of work and headaches for the programmers and staff, what do you folks think? Thanks for reading!
the reason companies don't make bots anymore is because its a whole lot of work, and the bots are never very good. it sucks you dont have the connection to play but i doubt you'll ever see AI players in MNC.
Time? Yes. Much time. Money? Not necessarily. Look at the people who work on Omni-Bot and RCBot. They've been at it for years, and while they do accept donations for their work, I can't honestly think they've invested a great deal of money into their projects, aside from webhosting costs and the like. To get somewhat off-topic for a moment, how many of you have played Unreal Tournament? The original Unreal Tournament. If memory serves me right, those bots were darn near flawless. They would stomp on your throat, steal your wallet, hang you from the rafters, and pants you without mercy or remorse, but they were also extremely talented at capturing the flag, running Assault, and other things. And they never did idiotic things like run into walls or jump off cliffs without a darn good reason. Why? Because they were programmed beautifully. I personally feel that as far as games like this go, the Unreal Tournament '98 bots are a pinnacle of programming. How long did it actually take to engineer such bots? I can't imagine it took five minutes, but I also can't imagine it took the entire development process time of Unreal and/or Unreal Tournament to do. Good bots... Truly good bots... They're hard to come by, but clearly not impossible to program. But I digress. I'm not asking Uber Entertainment for player bots in the next patch, or even the one after that. I'm not asking for player bots ten patches from now! I'm just saying...take it into consideration some time down the road. They're good for practice, even better for players on crap connections. "Good things come to those who wait."
In the game industry time IS money. All costs are time. From a business sense you have to say, will working on bots bring in money or will adding more game modes/customization options?
I think Uber mentioned this a long time ago in one of their blog posts, but AI is superior to humans in games. It has pin point accuracy, and can counter your moves before you even do them. But that's not much fun. Making a fun AI to play against is hard. And that was just for the bots. You have to remember, this is not a AAA title being released by some major studio. Uber said there would be 1 free DLC and 2 pay DLCs. They would support the game for a bit after that, then they're going to move on... hopefully to make MNC 2 :mrgreen: Not much money in making AI players, it's not something that will make people buy the game/DLC, since it doesn't really add variety, and could very likely just be switched off on some servers. Especially since I hated playing with/against bots in TF2. :roll:
Uber is not Epic (nor Id for that matter). Without bots neither Q3 nor UT would have had single-player modes. And the bots in either game werent as impressive as you think (though I agree, still the best Ive seen) they became rather predictable fairly quickly. I dont disagree that bots would be an improvement (assuming the bots didnt suck) but MNC is such a team-based game that I suspect creating bots that could do more than just kill you would require more resources than you think.
As an aside, I'm looking forward to Brink's bots. Our AI players are very, VERY good. In fact, several times weve had people not realize that they are playing the AI players, and these are quite hardened journalists. They become very angry, its very funny So we can guarantee good teammates.
Hm... I almost hate to admit it, but you guys are right. While it might be nice to have player bots in a future release, it's ultimately not very profitable, so it's probably not going to happen. I wasn't personally aware of how the company saw Monday Night Combat, and you're right, Uber Entertainment isn't Epic, Id, or the sort. They probably don't have the time to keep at this one game for more than its projected life span and still turn a profit. Player bots might add to the Single Player experience (as per Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and the aforementioned Unreal Tournament and Quake series), but ultimately? It's an online game for the masses, not a single player experience. *nods* Thanks for your feedback, folks. It's quite enlightening.
Bots in games like Quake and Unreal Tournament are relatively simple AI wise. They run around picking up items and shoot people when they see them while randomly dodging if the AI thinks it should know a player is around. Difficulty is mainly tuned by how accurate they are at aiming and some pre-programmed tactics for more advanced weapons. For game types where defending is important there are hand placed hints for bots to know where they should stay near. The key thing about these AIs is they don't really ever try to do much in tactics, they're all about path finding, 3d traversal, and aiming. RTS AI the playing field tend to be 2D and are pre-programmed with specific tactics. A 2D space is much easier to program complex tactics, but for RTS games they don't need to look or play like humans to be fun to play against. We're a hybrid game with rts, tower defense, and shooter mechanics. It's a much harder problem to solve for AI to be human like in their tactics and human like in their gun play and skill usage. With out some considerable time and resources our AI would be very formulaic and not very fun to play against. All the games that you guys have mentioned spent considerable time and resources working on what is a very, very hard problem.
