Bots could never replace actual players.
There’s something about the co-mingled intelligence and stupidity of human players, their skill and lack of skill, their unpredictability, and the awareness that they are real makes them the best multiplayer allies and enemies.
But while bots can never truly replace humans, that doesn’t mean they don’t have a lot to offer multiplayer games.
(I’m focusing mainly on the FPS genre here.)
People calling for From Software games to have an easy mode are missing the point: Fromsoft games (which I’ll just call Souls games for convenience from now on) already offer the means to make playing them easier.
Souls games let you summon players and NPCs. If a boss is too hard, you don’t have to fight them alone. Beating a boss this way isn’t as satisfying as beating them yourself, but neither would be beating a boss on easy mode, so it’s a wash.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’ map is roughly a third of the size of GTA 5’s Los Santos, yet it somehow feels much bigger.
How big a map feels is obviously subjective. Nevertheless, many people have expressed this view since the post-release hype surrounding GTA 5 began to wear off. Google comparisons between the maps of both games and the sentiment is everywhere.
It’s an interesting quirk of perception. How can a map that is significantly smaller feel larger than a map which is, in fact, nearly three times the size? Is it just nostalgia? Or is there some fundamental and learnable difference between the design of both maps?
Quantity has a quality of its own, but, in the context of player caps in multiplayer first-person shooters, there are limits.
The announcement that Battlefield 2042 would have 128 player servers was met with excitement by many, but almost immediately after release, opinions soured.
This is not to say no one liked the vast increase in player count, nor that it couldn’t have been implemented better. But there are fundamental issues with player counts beyond 64 (the standard cap for ‘large’ multiplayer games) that are not easy for developers to mitigate.
Every FPS falls somewhere on a spectrum. At one end of this spectrum are ‘movement shooters’, and at the other end are ‘positional shooters’. Most shooters fall somewhere between these extremes though they tend to lean in one of either direction. It is helpful to both players and developers of shooters to know the difference.