AI hostage trading? Really?

When the clue about trading popped up in the Road to Crimefest, I was certain it would be item or mask trading, a feature many have wanted for a while and that mods like GoonMod enable. Instead, we got an "AI fix" which absolutely no one wanted or needed.



I made a mod called Better Bots. It's the most downloaded non-HUD BLT mod on LastBullet, and it makes offline play with bots (rather than braindead pubbies or, worse, F2Ps) a worthwhile experience. As such, I'm pretty keenly aware of what the bots are and are not capable of, and what they SHOULD be able to do. AI hostage trading is such a non-issue that, despite BB being out for MONTHS, the idea of giving the teammate AI that feature NEVER came up. I got more requests to give the bots the ability to pick up loot than I did for hostage trading (considering the requests for hostage trading was ZERO, that wasn't difficult to achieve). Here's a list of things BB changes that Overkill won't add into the game for no apparent reason (get cozy, this is a long one):



1. Three bots rather than two. PD:TH had this and the claims that using three bots would cause bugs or problems are demonstrably untrue; I don't know of anyone who has run into issues using three bots with BB or any other mod that achieves the same effect. The game is designed for four player co-op; if the resulting "players" in offline mode is actually three, then that designation of being "single-player" on the store page needs to be removed.



2. Targeting of Snipers. Overkill claimed some time ago that the bots would be optimized for attacking Snipers and that simply isn't the case. By default, the bots' weapons don't have HALF the range they need to take out Snipers, and if they did, they wouldn't be even remotely accurate enough for the task. More often than not, bots will mark the Snipers, point at them briefly, and then do nothing. If you are playing offline on, say, any Transport heist and you don't have weapons to deal with them, then there's no logical way to complete the heist. This is yet another problem that online players don't have to deal with, so the idea of PD2 being "single-player" is, once again, laughable.



3. Targeting of Shields facing away from you. One of the recent updates of BB included some code by TdlQ that gave bots the ability to target Shields as a priority IF the shield was facing away from them; otherwise, the bots would target pretty much everything else first. It was a pretty simple piece of LUA, only three lines long, and yet it increased the bots' efficiency by many magnitudes. So why hasn't Overkill, the developer, implemented anything close to that? Surely they know their own game, the code, and the language better than we do.



4. Reviving bug fix. This is, without a doubt, the biggest problem with the teammate AI. If you go down, they will stop and start reviving you ad nauseum, and their ability to treat the revival of you as a priority is pretty nonexistant. Above all other issues with the AI, this one makes offline play the most unenjoyable. You simply can't go down or the heist might as well be over, ESPECIALLY in front of a turret, which brings me to the next point:



5. Removal of "stunlocking." The teammate AI uses almost all of the same code for the cops; it would be accurate to describe them as Jokered cops with a lot of health. As a result, they have to deal with the same "hurt animations" that the cops do. However, they also don't have a "damage cooldown" like the players have. The result is that too much damage from too many sources at once (the most obvious one being the turrets) will "stunlock" them and they won't be able to do anything. This further compounds the problem with reviving you. If a bot goes down, it should be because they've taken too much damage and their health is gone, NOT because they were tossed around like a ragdoll. Once again, this is not a problem that the PD:TH bots had.



6. General improvements to their aim and damage overall. The vanilla bots will do 35 damage at close range and 5 longer than that. That's pathetic, that's barely excusable for Normal difficulty and not at all for higher than that. Their weapons will regularly be unable to break 15% accuracy; even point-blank targets can go as low as 70%, and because of their aiming and focus delays, it will take them a while to even reach that. They can't melee at all, so they won't be able to handle close-range targets particularly well, even though the cops can all melee for 150 damage regardless of difficulty. If you want the experience of playing with a crew who can take out cops and live to tell about it, offline mode simply doesn't qualify.



These are all features that are just in my mod. There are many other features that COULD be in the game if Overkill bothered to do something other than churn out more paid content, like the aforementioned bag carrying or perhaps fixing a drill or two. Another popular teammate AI mod, Keepers, allows you to tell the bots to hold a position until you call them again. Another, Bot Bullet Collision Fixer, keeps the bots from absorbing your bullets if you accidentally shoot them. These were all made by hobbyists in their spare time, many (like myself) who can't actually read LUA and just change a value here and there. ALL of this is made worse by the fact that they completely broke modding in the Crimefest update, and whether or not it was intentional is disputable. Overkill is staffed by people who once made the Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter games. There is, without a doubt, no excuse for how bad the teammate AI is in this game and the absolute gall on their part to claim giving the bots the ability to trade hostages fixes a damn thing is downright insulting.