Multiplayer Bot Arena

I must be a minority here but the one thing that I miss from gaming, even as little as 5 years ago, is the multiplayer bots that you could use for offline play. I’m not expecting revolutionary AI or easy difficulties but just the option to pull in a few bots and feel like king of the world for a little while.

I know Black Ops I & II have bots, which can be made frustratingly difficult to play against, but the vast majority have dropped these from their multiplayer modes in favour of wave based gaming.

Perfect Dark is, ironically, the perfect example of multiplayer being successful offline. You could fill a game with bots and route around killing them for hours on end or play 8 vs. 1 and see how long you could last.

Sure it’s not the same thing but the option to play with bots is something I always expected in games. It’s nice to play without the frustration of camping, cheats or massive ‘rank’ differences. It also stops, in the rare cases that still have it, people from fighting over split-screen location checks.

I have actually purchased lower rated titles solely for the reason that they have bots. Brink instantly comes to mind, sure it wasn’t an amazing game, but I enjoyed running through the bot filled levels.

The addition of bot systems could do a lot for online multiplayer too. Losing a few team members is always a frustrating situation, especially in games like Halo where people are so fond of playing the same maps over and over. The smallest advantage for a team can really make a difference and the ability to drop in a bot when someone leaves your game may not make a whole world of different but it would add to the experience. I love the Gears of War implement this strategy to their online gaming and their small team based combat would really suffer should a team lose even one of their allies.

It’s sad that some shooters don’t have bot modes, and as I’ve mentioned before, the one that really stands out for me is Halo. The closest we get is Firefight and now Spartan Ops which are pretty fun to play but they just don’t have the longevity of a solely bot based experience.

I have always felt that the most natural progression for learning a games multiplayer was through a bot mode. You can play multiplayer without having Xbox Live Gold, you could test play all of your forge maps and cool down after some frustrating online play.

Ok so rant over. I’m just disappointed that developers don’t think about plugging their bots/AI enemies into their multiplayer maps. I love a good death match where I thrash some bots and it give me a chance to learn where things are before I jump straight into a multiplayer horded by a single weapon locations or perk load out.