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.)
Bots Keep Old Games Playable
All good multiplayer games come to an end. No matter how good they are, player numbers will gradually dwindle. These numbers can surge occasionally, but the overall trend over a long enough period will be towards zero. Eventually, the servers will be shut down. This is the inevitable fate of every multiplayer game.
But multiplayer games don’t have to become unplayable when this happens. Playing on unofficial servers with fans who refuse to let the game die is one solution. Another solution that relies on something other than the existence of 3rd party servers is bots.
Star Wars Battlefront 1 and 2 (the original PS2 versions) are multiplayer-centric games. Barely anyone plays them anymore, with only the PC version having a few active servers. And yet even if the servers shut down today, they’d still be fully playable, whether on console or PC, because the Star Wars Battlefront games have bots.
Bots keep multiplayer games alive. If we reach the age of eighty, we might feel a pang of nostalgia for the primitive games we used to play. We might have a PC or still-functional console from back in the day, a working disc or digital copy of the game, or else we could buy it from an online store or pirate it if it can no longer be officially bought. We could then load up the game and, although the servers will have been offline for decades, we could still play it thanks to bots.
The experience of playing with bots won’t match the experience of playing with real people back in the day. But at least it will keep our favourite multiplayer games playable. The chaos of a match full of bots would be better than an empty match or no match at all.
Bots Are Good For Practice
While some online games are too casual to need a practice mode, others are so challenging that a practice mode is essential if you don’t want to suffer through hours of harsh lessons online and frustrate your teammates with your constant mistakes.
Many multiplayer games offer practice modes where you shoot at targets and learn basic controls – but without bots, these modes can’t prepare you for your first multiplayer match. Sometimes this doesn’t matter. Some games are so easy a practice mode is totally unnecessary. But in games like Apex Legends, a team-based game where combat encounters are spaced widly apart, heavily skill-based, and where victory depends on map knowledge and lucky loot discovery, newcomers find it uniquely hard to learn how to play. The only way to learn is to play with other humans. This means a lot of dying and letting your teammates down.
AI is insanely hard to program. AI is also extremely resource-intensive in large numbers, so bots in most games are as dumb as digital bricks. But even if a game’s bots aren’t particularly intelligent, a practice mode with bots would undoubtedly help new players learn the game. By helping new players overcome the initial learning curve, fewer players will give up, thus reducing the early drop-off rate of games you may want more people to enjoy alongside you. A practice mode is good for everyone, whether they use it or not.
Bots Are Fun
Some people prefer playing with bots over real humans. Bots are dumb (usually), but sometimes you want to fight dumb opponents. Sometimes you may want to avoid a challenge and instead experience what it’s like to dominate a multiplayer match in a way you can’t when your opponents are real people, some of whom live and breathe the game you’re trying to do well in.
Some people actively dislike the social aspect of multiplayer games – the stress of supporting your teammates and the vitriol of toxic rage-typers. But bots will never judge you for throwing the game (if somehow you’re bad enough to throw against bots). Bots will never get mad at you for killing them. Bots will never use cheap tricks or mods to spoil the game.
And best of all, bots will always be there to play with you because they have literally no life outside the game.