One of my favourite memories from my teen years is teaming up with my siblings to play Perfect Dark deathmatch on the Nintendo 64. Not against each other, but a team of simulants, or bots—AI designed to mirror the playing tactics and styles of real players. This was a time before digital downloads, one click matchmaking and vast online communities became commonplace and the novelty factor of playing with or against AI bots was enormous. Without the Internet, multiplayer gaming was restricted wholly to local multiplayer, or to a LAN if you were lucky enough to have multiple PCs and the space. The idea of jumping online to play a few quick rounds of deathmatch was but a dream at that point, but the creation of AI bots meant that solo players could have a sweet taste of the action.

For a long time that was my favourite way to play games, especially shooters. Games like Counter-Strike—which retained the ability to play with bots in CS:GO—and Unreal Tournament 2004 were mainstays in my apartment purely on the strength of their bot play. They would seek out ammo and health, check their corners for opponents and leap around like jumpy idiots when fired at, generally behaving as you’d expect other players might. But that was not to last.

“ Games like Counter-Strike and Unreal Tournament 2004 were mainstays in my apartment purely on the strength of their bot play.

Games moved into the online space, and the importance of good multiplayer AI fell away once gamers the world over could connect to each other. Not only that, but when games went online, the level of competition shifted from ‘schoolyard’ to ‘world-class’, and with it, upped the performance anxiety of millions of gamers who were suddenly faced with the very real prospect of being tea-bagged by a faceless avatar from the other side of the world named “xXxHedshotZxXx”.

Bots faded away, then, but they never completely disappeared. In fact, if we cut to the present day, the advent of better tech, stronger CPUs and greater demands from players has meant bots are making a resurgence, just not as we knew them.

They're going to take over eventually. Might as well learn to fight them.

CS:GO, Rocket League, For Honor and Overwatch - as well as many others - are using bots in one form or another to help players sharpen their skills, and their comeback fills me with joy. I love the trappings of deathmatch, of domination and of capture the flag, but I can’t stand the stress of dealing with other people - of multiplayer being pure competition, as opposed to a form of relaxation. Simply put, the idea of digging into some modern, online-style fun without the need to connect is a beautiful thing. (Both Overwatch and For Honor require internet connections to play, mind you, but that’s a whole other conversation in itself.)

So, what are these modern takes on bots like? And how are they used? In Rocket League, bots are great for pick-up and play matches but won’t set your world on fire with their rocket jumping or goalkeeping skills. They’ll manage the basics, but if you can get a little bit tricky with your moves, even the best AI becomes a cakewalk. As well as this, once you gain a little experience you can read their plays from a mile away, and it never really changes. Rocket League’s bots are perfectly fine training wheels or for a quick match with mates, but that’s about it.

“ CS:GO, Rocket League, For Honor and Overwatch - as well as many others - are using bots in one form or another to help players sharpen their skills, and their comeback fills me with joy.

In Ubisoft’s fantasy mash-up For Honor, a game that focuses heavily on strategic combat and timing, bots are used in a number of ways to prepare the player for both the campaign and the online modes. As well as a couple of standard tutorials that teach the basics, there is a free play mode which acts like an endless King of the Hill, combining the standard AI fodder—who are easily brushed aside—with the tougher, more lifelike hero bots. Its endless nature allows the action to rinse and repeat—meaning coping with multiple engaging heroes in one-on-one battles, taking care of minions and generally grinding down the enemy—without any permanent ramifications. If you die, you respawn and the scene starts again, expertly stripping away any of the unneeded extra context that gets in the way of learning how to really nail those combos.

The limited-sandbox style experience reminds me a lot of sports games, in which the rules and playing area are small but well defined, allowing you and the AI to play things out in a natural, unscripted, yet organised manner. The very nature of a bot’s AI is what makes it so interesting to battle against. A duel battle against a level 1 bot is vastly different from duelling with a level 3 bot, who comes at you with the ferocity of The Mountain from Game of Thrones. It will attack repeatedly and aggressively, swinging hard with every blow to get you on your back. If you can learn how to defend from that, you’re gonna be more than alright when you take your skills online.

Overwatch’s use of bots doesn’t go quite as far as some of the other games I’ve mentioned. As it’s team-based, players need to team up online to take on an AI team of heroes. You can’t, however, team up with AI against AI, which leaves your PvE experience at the whim of other human players. If you’re on your own, chances are you’ll end up stuck in a skirmish against a very fallible, and not very fun pairing of Soldier 76 and Zenyatta.

By the same token, it’d be understandably difficult to build friendly team AI that didn’t just react to your actions, but also interact with other heroes like real players do. But I have to imagine that if there is anyone in the games industry with the technical nouse and the budget to make something like that work, it’s Blizzard.

The real question is - what’s the actual demand like for bots in the modern age? Is there a large enough audience of people that are intimidated by the competitiveness and - let’s face it - often quite aggressive nature of online gaming to bring about a broader bot renaissance? Or does that just sidestep the bigger problem, which is finding ways to make online play more welcoming and more all-encompassing? With the rise and rise of AI in general, should bots be standard issue for training players, giving them an environment in which they can make mistakes before pitting their skills against other real world gamers? I’d love to know what you all think, so please sound off in the comments!

James once teamed up with some AI to rob a bank in Payday 2, but instead of helping they meekly stood in a circle and got him arrested. You can jeer and tweet at him behind bars @j_swinbanks.