[fearsomepirate]

No, there is no split-screen for the bot mode in KZ3. GG said it was too demanding to have the 2nd player (they are pushing the PS3 way too hard in multi IMO). For some reason, they give you no ability to customize your bot matches. Apparently if I was able to take Assassination out of the Warzone cycle, I would become sad and depressed and lose my will to live. Thanks, GG. Thanks for saving me.

[Shifty Geezer]

Originally Posted by tuna

Well, BF3 is not a cannon fodder game. If that is what you want, is it not better to play COD?

Horses for courses. Devs shouldn't refuse local coop just because they can't match the online experience with their bots. On offline training programme with bots is always a good addition to let players familiarise themselves with maps and weapons and controls, so please devs add that and tweak also it into a local coop experience.

[tuna]

Originally Posted by Shifty Geezer

Horses for courses. Devs shouldn't refuse local coop just because they can't match the online experience with their bots. On offline training programme with bots is always a good addition to let players familiarise themselves with maps and weapons and controls, so please devs add that and tweak also it into a local coop experience.

A bot in COD has to know about running around the environment and shooting. A bot in BF3 has to know about running around a much larger environment and shooting. The BF3 bot also has to know about driving vehicles. It also has to be able to drive vehicles with different bots/players in the same vehicle. The bots also have to decide when to enter/exit vehicles and what kind of loadout to choose based on the map.

I think that a training range would be nice in BF3, but BF3 bots would be way to complex to implement.

[Shifty Geezer]

That's overcomplicating it. Starhawk's bots aren't anything like human players - they are dumb grunts that spawn with a set weapon and simple tactics. The gameplay comes from them attacking in overwhelming numbers and the players having to outsmart them. I think that's a key component to good coop games - the team has to use their brains and coordination.

When I played CON again last Tuesday, we tried a 2nd difficulty game recommended for level 24+ characters starting with level 1 chars, and got mullered. But now I am scheming how four mages could possibly survive, rotating one blocker with the team casting ice spells, the blocking player being replaced when his mana has regenerated to fire off spells. In a BF3 local coop game, it could play with set enemy positions and weaopns and tactics and the players needing to learn the layout through repeated playthroughs. Or it could spawn various random elements and the players must react. There are lots of ways to play it out that don't need to emulate the online, human-competitor experience. Successful local coop has the players winning and feeling good at their teamwork, and only needs provide enough of a challenge to pull that off.

There's also the option of local team versus local team online - 4v4 BF3 maps with both sides playing local coop.

[nightshade]

Originally Posted by tuna

Well, BF3 is not a cannon fodder game. If that is what you want, is it not better to play COD?

Why not ?
BF2 and BF2142 had bots, it worked.
Team Fortress 2 a game which is heavily based around using loadout and special abilities has bots.

[fearsomepirate]

Here's the thing...bots don't have to do everything. They just have to be functional, and you just have to give the user some flexibility in setting up the bot parameters. And a lot of stuff tuna said bots can't do are things AI already does in many games, both in single-player games and multiplayer bots.

The AI of COD bots is actually pretty terrible. But you can make a fun game by doing a match of 3 vs 8. Or you can set the time limit pretty long and see who gets to the most kills. Or you can just mess around and do silly things, like go 1 vs 9 with you just dual-wielding pistols, or make a rule that you have to pick up the weapon of whatever bot you just killed. Give me the flexibility, and I can entertain myself for hours.

GG made the mistake of thinking bots are "training" for online, so they give you zero flexibility in bot mode, like you're playing a random match online, but with bots. You can't even choose what side you're on.

[fearsomepirate]

I should add that another advantage of bots is I can play games that people aren't playing online any more. It's really hard to get into a game of Medal of Honor or COD:WaW these days. And then there are lots games where the online mode was a complete bust right away.

[Acert93]

Originally Posted by Shifty Geezer

Bits don't have to be realistic though, mimcking online players. They need only be cannon-fodder. Like Borderlands, or Uncharted. Or Starhawk. All games I've played with friends; only one of which I could play local coop with a mate.

In fact BF1942 had bots and they were dumb as rocks--but playing on a 4 player LAN with 4 players and 4 bots versus 56 AI was a BLAST. Some of the best gaming I have ever had. They were sheer cannon fodder but it was a blast, especially Desert Combat. It seems ironic with 1080p on 42+ inch displays being a target a lot of console gamers could hit that consoles may cheap out + designers shy away from split screen when the hardware could finally do it justice.

[tuna]

Originally Posted by Shifty Geezer

That's overcomplicating it. Starhawk's bots aren't anything like human players - they are dumb grunts that spawn with a set weapon and simple tactics. The gameplay comes from them attacking in overwhelming numbers and the players having to outsmart them. I think that's a key component to good coop games - the team has to use their brains and coordination.

When I played CON again last Tuesday, we tried a 2nd difficulty game recommended for level 24+ characters starting with level 1 chars, and got mullered. But now I am scheming how four mages could possibly survive, rotating one blocker with the team casting ice spells, the blocking player being replaced when his mana has regenerated to fire off spells. In a BF3 local coop game, it could play with set enemy positions and weaopns and tactics and the players needing to learn the layout through repeated playthroughs. Or it could spawn various random elements and the players must react. There are lots of ways to play it out that don't need to emulate the online, human-competitor experience. Successful local coop has the players winning and feeling good at their teamwork, and only needs provide enough of a challenge to pull that off.

There's also the option of local team versus local team online - 4v4 BF3 maps with both sides playing local coop.

There are BF3 coop stages, have you tried them?

[tuna]

Originally Posted by Acert93

In fact BF1942 had bots and they were dumb as rocks--but playing on a 4 player LAN with 4 players and 4 bots versus 56 AI was a BLAST. Some of the best gaming I have ever had. They were sheer cannon fodder but it was a blast, especially Desert Combat. It seems ironic with 1080p on 42+ inch displays being a target a lot of console gamers could hit that consoles may cheap out + designers shy away from split screen when the hardware could finally do it justice.

Could they enter/exit vehicles? Decide where to spawn? Change loadout?

[Shifty Geezer]

Originally Posted by tuna

There are BF3 coop stages, have you tried them?

I've played 10 minutes of BF3 when a friend showed it. I'm only using it as a reference here because others have raised it. The specifics are immaterial - local coop can be supported in lots of ways to cater for lots of tastes, and devs shouldn't avoid it if they feel they can't capture a particular style of experience.

[Davros]

In the Gaming Machine of the Gods space (aka: the pc) with eyefinity/nvsurround 2 screens can be presented to the games as a single screen so split screen actually means 2 players on 1 pc each with their own monitor

[Shifty Geezer]

Multiple monitor support from the same console would also be a good idea, although as I say above, I think tablets with HDMI in would be the best option as the easiest system to assemble instead of lugging monitors around. Is there an HDMI protocol for daisychaining displays so they count as separate devices? I'm guessing not.

[fearsomepirate]

I really think it's because developers are so focused on the kind of experience they want to create they forget that it doesn't mean other experiences are "bad." Like I'm pretty sure an 4 Humans + 4 Idiots vs 56 Idiots match isn't the Battlefield experience anyone at DICE imagined. So I'm guessing from the developer's point of view, they've got in their heads things going a certain way, so when they don't, they think, "Oh, this is really bad. Just awful. Leave this in, and people are going to be disappointed by such an incomplete, second-rate piece of garbage. Best to take it out." They forget that a lot of times, the way the gamer wants to play the game isn't the way the developer intended...and that's okay!

You can see this in interviews with Treyarch before Black Ops came out. They viewed people not playing online as a problem to be solved. The bot mode was intended to entice people to play online, but instead what a lot of people did was just play against the bots. Fortunately, they responded to the market and added the bots to the split-screen multiplayer via a patch.

[Davros]

Bots when done well can be awesome (see unreal tournament)
I prefer an UT botmatch to live
they dont cheat, they dont engage in ass clownery, one of them suddenly doesn't decide to constantly tell the rest of the bots how gay they are and they are always available.

[tuna]

Originally Posted by Shifty Geezer

I've played 10 minutes of BF3 when a friend showed it. I'm only using it as a reference here because others have raised it. The specifics are immaterial - local coop can be supported in lots of ways to cater for lots of tastes, and devs shouldn't avoid it if they feel they can't capture a particular style of experience.

I do not think the BF3 devs avoid local coop, it is just that those resources could be used to make the main game better. BF3 is a game that is very unsuited to local coop and bots and to implement those would take a lot of resources.

[tuna]

Originally Posted by fearsomepirate

I really think it's because developers are so focused on the kind of experience they want to create they forget that it doesn't mean other experiences are "bad." Like I'm pretty sure an 4 Humans + 4 Idiots vs 56 Idiots match isn't the Battlefield experience anyone at DICE imagined. So I'm guessing from the developer's point of view, they've got in their heads things going a certain way, so when they don't, they think, "Oh, this is really bad. Just awful. Leave this in, and people are going to be disappointed by such an incomplete, second-rate piece of garbage. Best to take it out." They forget that a lot of times, the way the gamer wants to play the game isn't the way the developer intended...and that's okay!

Do you actually think that DICE has implemented bots in BF3 (for all platforms) but just did not show that feature to the BF3 players?

[tuna]

Originally Posted by Davros

Bots when done well can be awesome (see unreal tournament)
I prefer an UT botmatch to live
they dont cheat, they dont engage in ass clownery, one of them suddenly doesn't decide to constantly tell the rest of the bots how gay they are and they are always available.

Do you think bots would work as well in BF3?

[TEEDA]

original SSX was one of those games I spent many hours with splitscreen gaming when it was released on PS2. I really regreted the lack of the splitscreen option in the latest iteration this gen.

[fearsomepirate]

Bots were fun in Quake III, too. If it were really a matter of competitive multiplayer being the be-all, end-all of gaming, PezBot for COD4 and W@W wouldn't even exist. It actually seems like you're more likely to get bots in a PC game than a console game, despite likely far more PC gamers having Internet connections.

Originally Posted by tuna

Do you actually think that DICE has implemented bots in BF3 (for all platforms) but just did not show that feature to the BF3 players?

As said before, they were in BF2. No one said or implied they were part of a BF3 build at some point. Rather, Patrick Bach explicitly said they didn't make it into BF3 because they look at the bot experience as being crappy, sub-par version of a COD-style single player campaign:

Sebastian Stange: In former battlefield games you always had matches with bots for training. Do you intend to do that again for Battlefield 3?

Patrick Bach: No. We won't have bot-matches in the same way. We think that bot-matches were kind of a emergency solution for Battlefield 2. It wasn't the dream scenario even back then. Then again we were much smaller and we didn't have all the resources that we wanted to have. Now we have it and we want to create a great campaign, where we can create more drama and create more things as you saw on screen here [presentation at the GDC 2011]. If we weren't allowed to do this because of the Battlefield 2 heritage I think we would do something very wrong. I think this is the right way of moving forward with the Battlefield franchise and again … I want people to understand that we don't want to dump down the multiplayer and we don't want to create a worse multiplayer just because we make singleplayer. It's about creating the full experience.

http://www.pcgames.de/Battlefield-3-...Duty-814499/4/

The problem with your theory that no one would have fun with bots in BF3 is that bots were in BF2, and they were fun in that game.

[Acert93]

Originally Posted by tuna

Could they enter/exit vehicles? Decide where to spawn? Change loadout?

Yes, they use vehicles.

Yes, they spawned at the various capture points.

Yes, they used the various classes.

[Shifty Geezer]

Got to try my CON last night and it was excellent gaming. Lots of teamwork and talking through actions. Lots of silly moments of the camera getting stuck and someone going the wrong way leading to death, but a run back to the checkpoint brought everyone back. Where CON scores very highly in coop is being pretty open. We were allowed to play four mages, and not forced to play different characters, plus we were allowed to start level 1 characters at any difficulty level (after playing through once). In a more traditional play through with four different characters at normal difficulty, the ranger tends to kill everything before the melee fighters can get a look in, but sidestepping the official design for a custom variation made for a much better experience.

It's also worth looking at Snowblind's later games and where they went wrong. Justice League Heroes was only two player and forced the character selection in some levels in order to preserve the story. That's fine on a first playthrough, but everyone complained at the limitation and how they weren't allowed to play their favourite DC hero all the way through. LOTR:War in the North is similarly story bound, forcing a choice between one of three classes. And it was just a pretty weak game too.

I dare say the way to provide a stellar local coop experience is pretty easy, if you've got the split-screen or shared-screen mechanics working. Just open up parameters for players to select and let the play around finding the best fit for them. Don't worry about balancing it because the players will be able to balance it themselves.

[Arwin]

I just want to reiterate, for the hell of it, that the dynamic split screen in the lego games is outright fantastic.

Also, I think this is why Horde mode gameplay is so popular these days. Much more 'sandboxy' and forcing you to work together.

Also, your comments play to the too much story in modern games bit.

[tuna]

Originally Posted by Acert93

Yes, they use vehicles.

Yes, they spawned at the various capture points.

Yes, they used the various classes.

Do they enter/exit vehicles? Do they change loadout based on the map?

[fearsomepirate]

I'm not sure what you think "use vehicles" means, tuna.

You know, you can make an AI do almost anything. Telling it what loadouts to use on a given map is probably the easiest part, you just encode the variables in the map file. Or you just tell the bots to randomly choose kits and let things happen as they may.

I'm also not sure where you're getting this idea that programming an AI to have certain conditions where it uses or stops using a vehicle is an insurmountable task. They did it in BF2 and BF2142. The AI in Just Cause 2 can do it. There are user mods for Tribes 2 where the bots will use the vehicles.

Of course the AI isn't human. You'll always find something you can do that it hasn't been programmed to do. But it's not necessary for an AI to be humanly clever in order to be functional in a game.