Id Software Is Adding Bots to Quake Champions
Recently id Software studio director Tim Willits sat down to talk about the future of Quake Champions, announcing the plans to add an updated gore system to the game. Now however, the developer has revealed their plans to add bots to the popular arena shooter to fill empty spots during matches.
Community manager Joshua Boyle and technical director John Dean discussed this new feature for Quake Champions in a recent video. Dean mentioned that the addition of bots to the game has been long requested and will be beneficial to the game for a bunch of reasons. “They’re really fun to play with. It’s nice to be able to play more low-key games, a little less stress with friends and stuff like that.”
John Dean also talked about the “training aspect” that will now be useful thanks to the bots. Instead of regular AI that don’t quite behave like other players, these bots will be able to use game mechanics like trick jumps and strafing in a variety of game modes. Of course this will differ based on player skill. Dean stated that there will be a skill slider to accommodate these different levels of play. “If you go down to like the easy level, they’re not going to be jumping around. They’re going to be more just kind of running around, staying on the ground.”
For those who have the slider set on easy, the bots won’t be able to take away any high-powered items or weapons from lower-level players who aren’t quite familiar with the game’s mechanics. Instead, these bots will let the players interact with them. Likewise if a bot and a player are going for a powerup at the same time, the bot will allow the player to get the pickup instead. You can check out the full explanation in the video discussion below.
These bots will be added to basic game modes, like TDM and Institute, first. When they are first added to Quake Champions they will play all of the champions and use all the weapons, however they won’t use any abilities. The next phase will include support for champions’ abilities and will add the bots to the rest of the game modes. At this point however, the offline bots mode is nothing more than speculation, and neither Boyle or Dean would comment on a player’s question about it. With that said, they both said id Software does have more plans for bots moving forward.
Is this good news for all you Quake Champions? Would you like to see id Software take the bots further, adding offline game modes to play against and practice your skill? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below and keep it locked for updates!