AI: Artificial Incompetence

Tactics, or lack thereof

Anyone who can finish a campaign on expert on single player has my deepest condolences. The mental anguish required to achieve such feat must be terrible - because the bots like to do things their own way. No exceptions.
Tactics are essential to ensure that the final stage of any campaign is completed successfully. You can't tell bots what to do, well, not to any degree of success anyway. A common tactic is to stay in a single room, and fight from within. Each player covers a particular entrance. You try telling that to a bot, I dare you. Now try it with three. A rage quit ensures.

Irritating bots aren't restricted to this one game, not by far. Many games of all genres have annoyances - L4D just happened to be the last game I played with standout issues. For instance, what about those infamous ‘catch-up' algorithms in some car titles? They wait for you to crash, and then they spawn right behind you! How thoughtful.
Maybe, just maybe, these issues will phase out eventually. We can only hope, can't we?

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12 Comments

smadge1 Feb 23, 2009 2:16 PM	the L4D bots are a bit stupid, though, they do make great meatshields. What annoys me the most, is you can be a boomer in a Vs match, and you can be hiding in the trees, well out of sight of the survivors, but 9 times out of ten, a bot will shoot you.
nesquick Feb 23, 2009 2:25 PM	Can I just say that in the bots defense 90% of public players on L4d are worse then the bots, anyone who has played this game on VS will know what I am talking about. There is an army of deaf, illiterate and idiotic people that play VS through the day and always ruin whatever plan you have told them to do. The place that frustrates me the most is the crescendo event in the 3rd stage on No Mercy where you go up the lift "stop and kill the smoker" generally means kill the bastard not all jump in the window and let me get dragged off then boomed and eventually pounced. It also annoys the crap out of me that the classes are not shared around like it seems the retard on the team will always spawn as a boomer and when the do spawn they spawn like 100m in front of the survivors its like le sigh :/ the boomer is a suicide unit nothing else. So I actually prefer having 1-2 bots on my team in VS because you can count on them to stay with you and not so anything stupid. end of rant :P
Lord-Ezekiel Feb 23, 2009 4:25 PM	I can't believe the amount of people and reviewers that crap on about the AI Director in LFD and how "awesome" and "revolutionary" it is - what a load of crap. All it does is spawn monsters and items differently for certain situations - that's pretty basic AI people - it's been around for a looong time. And i disagree on the team mate AI in LFD - i thought it was actually fairly good - much better than most of the human players I've played with >_< What IS shocking is the standard Zombie AI - or rather how they programmed them to behave - i mean really, half of them just stand around seemingly brain dead until you start shooting at them, and the other half just fucking home in on you from anywhere at full pelt as though they've got inbuilt GPS - it's just stupid.
D12017K Feb 23, 2009 7:39 PM	This isnt a single player game, the option is really just there for you to learn the maps so you dont embarass yourself online. You can really play with bots at all in versus cause come your turn as infected you'd be a man or 2 down. If you wanna do achievements (the appeal of which i never understood myself) then get your self a decent team of human players and run through campaign mode on easy :P The bot AI are abit defective in battle but really all I ever wanted of them was to be autonomous enough so you dont need to baby sit them. They follow you well enough and know to combe back and rescue you if you are the rear guard and got smokered. The pills thing is more of a design issue auto selecting newly received weapons (I havent looked but you might be able to switch that off in options) i find it annoying even in multiplayer that others can change what i'm holding. Also messed up akimbo assassin once cause i popped some pills and it auto reselects your primary weapon for you rather than the one you were using. :( But yeah to the author if you dont intend to play this game with live buddies then maybe another FPS would be more suitable. Maybe Rainbow Six Vegas, you can order your bots around in that at least.
nesquick Feb 23, 2009 8:01 PM	seems like cyberglitch has stirred up the hive :P
Lord-Ezekiel Feb 23, 2009 10:27 PM	Saying "it's not a single player game" is not an excuse for doing a half-arsed job... If a game has a single player option, it should be made to work properly, patched quickly, or not included at all. The complaints about it are justified.
.:Cyb3rGlitch:. Feb 23, 2009 11:30 PM	Oh, I play with mates all the time D12017K. :) I like the game, no doubt about that. Just pointing out how irritating bots can be - whether it be single or multi player.
Sen Feb 24, 2009 10:43 AM	""It'd be fair enough if you could refuse the med kit, but you can't! Melee their head, shoot them kindly, nothing!"" Sorry M8 did you try to take your own Medkit or pills... Its works just fine... The pain is : try to go away without healing yourself and Bots will come back to heal you =(
dngfng Feb 26, 2009 2:09 AM	I know that the AI sucks virtual ASS, but have you ever tried playing CS with BOTS? - its just ass bad or even worse. Does that make CS as a bad game? I personaly don't think so, due to the fact that its really only fun when you play against real life oponents the same goes for L4D, its only really funny when you play it with friends. The CoOp really does kick ass, never enjoyed playing a game as much. Twice a week me and an old College friend of mine meet up online to kill some hordes. We couldn't give a rats ass about the BOTS AI -> most of the time they are 500% better than Human Players that just randomly drop in. At least you guys don't have to jump through hoops to get the uncensored game experience like me in Germany. -you can't see burning Zombies, they just run through the flames and drop after a while. -"dead" zombies disappear into thin air. -no exploding zombie heads -you can't shoot of body parts. -reduced Ragdoll effects. That trully sucks ass, thank god for good old imports and Steam support being nice enough to exchange the KEY.
hello0011 Mar 27, 2009 8:57 PM	lol the a.i in crysis http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNRvYqTKqFY
Fat_Bodybuilder Mar 31, 2009 1:27 PM	I just completed UT3 in Co op mode with a friend. Bots there, OMG, shocking.
radioBirdman May 30, 2009 7:27 AM	is it just me or do the bots NEVER EVER pick up (and ultimately use) grenades?

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