Earlier in the week, a modding Discord uncovered an "ADD_BOT.png" file in the Season 5 update for the Halo: The Master Chief Collection. Of course, it led to a lot of speculation on social media that bots might be on the way, but it's now been officially confirmed nothing is on the horizon - at least in the immediate future.
343's community support and engagement coordinator "Postums" clarified this over on the Halo subreddit, explaining how the team had heard requests but had "no plans" for bots to be added to the MCC at this point in time.
"Thanks for the great coffee reading this morning around this topic and all of the wants and desires around bots. This is definitely a feature we have heard that players want in MCC for quite some time, but there are no plans for Bots to be added to MCC at this time.
"We will speak to it a bit more on Friday on bots, but to be brief, they are used with Custom Game Browser testing. We will go more in detail Friday though!"
In a follow-up post on Halo Waypoint, Postums went into a bit more detail - acknowledging bots as useful tools when it comes to testing out new features, but reinforcing how 343 was "not ready" to talk about any future plans for them yet.
"Bots can be a useful tool for testing some of our features such as CGB (Custom Game Browser) and they have a ton of potential, but we are not ready to talk about any future plans for them yet. We are encouraged by the discussions online from the community and taking that into consideration when discussing them internally. I can personally confirm that in their current form you do NOT want to play against them in SWAT."
Would you like to see bots one day added to the Master Chief Collection? Leave a comment down below.
[source reddit.com]
Comments 7
After learning some interesting info from people at 343, I know that adding bots to MCC, would be either good, or bad. And I mean bad for the games stability. And lately fans are complaining about the newer added stuff but I don't see much of an issue with that.
You know what ruins campaigns?, when you start adding PvP aspects to it. And you know what ruins competitive MP modes?, when you start adding PvE aspects to it.
If it means I don't have to have a gold subscription to play multiplayer against bots I hope they add them
I genuinely don't know why bots fell out of favor. They were such an important part of legendary multiplayer-focused FPS titles like Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, Turok and Perfect Dark and then devs kinda got lazy there. Programmers took pride in making really good, really competitive, really smart and customizable opponents to play against, and it absolutely helped the longevity of any multiplayer game. As well as the communities. Every online-only game now suffers from having a continually shrinking playerbase over time, and it's no wonder why; no new player will show up because the only way to "practice" is to go up against people who have been playing for years and they'll just get slaughtered and learn nothing. When you have bots, you can actually get practice and familiarized with maps, etc. and feel good about jumping into the multiplayer properly. When you don't have bots, new players simply won't jump in. They'll wait for a sequel or some other jumping-in point that may or may not (in the cases of titles like Lawbreakers) ever come.
I know game productions are huge & complex now, but at the same time, we also know that 343 wrangles external developers SPECIFICALLY to handle MP work on Halo titles (like Certain Affinity or Sabre Interactive, who also does Quake Champions, ANOTHER game that should have bots). Someone should be working on this. Hell, at this point, there should be a middleware studios can nab for their FPS games - like how fighting games can just nab GGPO to start building good netcode from? It's genuinely mind-boggling that there are so few (if any) FPS games now that have bots. You can STILL fire up Unreal Tournament and have a great, very engaging time against bots. The AI on those bots put so many modern games' single player enemy AI to shame... I am not a fan of the attitude of, "We don't have to worry about it because it's so easy to connect to live players now." There's a lot of worth to good bots.
Honestly though, I can understand it being low-or-no priority for MCC though, since it's been out for so long and it's something where at least the infrastructure should be established when you're prototyping (rather than glopped on to a codebase when the game is done; the tools for navigation alone should be something map-makers have access when creating them instead of trying to jam that information into maps after they've been made), but I would like to see 343 give a sh** about this feature for future Halo games, that's all. It would be great of them to take the lead here for the industry. If a major series like Halo validates the worthiness of MP bots, maybe there'd be a renaissance there with other studios investing in good bot AI too.
I checked Unreal Tournament 3 on Xbox 360 and was lucky to find match in Team Deathmatch with 1 player and bots, lol.
Bots are very important for any MP game regarding its longevity. There are plenty of games that I buy years after release and it can be very frustrating when the established user base is just way, way ahead of you in abilities, map familiarity (that's a big one), items and weapons access, etc.. That certainly doesn't hold me back from jumping in, but I have two close (and still fairly noobish) friends that just aren't as confident or good out of the gate when it comes to MP gaming. I try to show them the ropes of MP gaming with bots. If I consider buying a MP game I have to consider whether it has bots or not because my friends will refuse to play unless they have a way to learn the game without getting completely frustrated and discouraged. I don't blame them. Bots were a regular thing in games of the past. Now devs are just too lazy or release date constraints influenced by investors or publishers make it not possible to add to the mix. I still love the games but I really hate the industry and how it works now days.
There's a game on Steam called Day of War that reminded me a lot of MOH:AA multiplayer from back in the day so I was excited to see it re-released with new maps and gameplay. It died a quick death for some reason and now you see no one playing it. If they had added bots to the mix the game could have stood on those legs until marketing or word of mouth pulled people in. Bots or not, if people see 'players' in servers they are going to jump in. I feel like anytime a MP game releases without bots it's potentially a huge, huge mistake. If I ever develop an indie game with MP it will never get released until I find a way to have bots in there on day one.
I don't see any reason to not add bots, makes perfect sense for local multiplayer games. Sometimes I just want to play the game with a buddy and it would be nice to have a few bots running around, heck I would even love just playing the bots for practice.
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