Lag had to be fixed first, it’s a no-brainer and I accept that completely.
However, I fear that’s ALL the highly anticipated 1st big patch is going to address and the Bot AI is a shambles. Mostly offline players like myself may have to deal with moronic team-mates for a while yet, I suspect. I respect the devs decision to nerf our team-mate bots, in order to make us ‘the MVP’ on the team, but they’ve really taken the nerfing too far. I had a team of compadres last night that shouldn’t have been issued a spork, never mind an AR or SMG - seriously. As for the enemy, well…holy *. Headshots, uber-melee skills, psychic powers and the ability to 2-shot you from across the fking map. Imbalance is too weak a word, honestly.
I won’t list the blatant differences between the two sides’ AI-bots again, you all see them everyday and it would just produce ensuing TL;DR replies. Imo, the imbalance can be fixed in one of two ways:
- Nerf the baddies and buff our lads, making them ‘meet in the middle’. This way, our input remains critical to success, as the devs wanted to ensure, but we’re not saddled with the keen, brave but essentially brain-dead buddies we have presently.
Objective focus
Accuracy
Self-preservation (Medics are mainly suicidal, whereas Engr’s and Op’s will abandon their task the second the area goes loud, and seem to forget that they have a job to finish and back-up nearby)
Weapon effect
Route-finding
Co-ordination (Must they stream in to die singly, or could they be convinced to mob-up and co-ord their pushes or re-spawn runs?)
Defensive instinct (human players will find good spots with cover and LOS, bots will go all TDM, often leaving the human Op or Engr alone to die at the objective whilst they race around the map, seemingly at random, to find firefights that they then lose)
…all need to be looked at.
- Leave the baddies as terminator-ninja-rock-hard as they are now, but include sliders to allow us to scale the level of bot assistance we receive from our lads - newbies can crank it up for all the help they can get, more experienced Brinkers could adjust to taste as their skills improved.
It’s possible that the patch will be the end of our bot-related (ooer!) troubles, but it’s highly likely that they’ll remain an inherent feature to some extent. Accordingly, I believe that the AI needs attention as a matter of some urgency. Timely, useful and co-ordinated help from your team appears to be entirely coincidental when it occurs. This means that sometimes you can first-time a series of objectives, whilst at other times you can barely leave your spawn areas, let alone hack/cut into an objective w/o being abandoned to die by bots that appear to defend you just long enough to tempt you into starting the hack/cut/repair, before inexplicably abandoning you. It happens to me so often, I want to puke blood.
Flaws and all, Brink is currently great - with the lag fixed and the nerfing fixed, I hope it’ll be awesome.
Lastly, a request - I’ve read posts claiming that you can somehow influence the priorites and behaviour of your team bots, though I’VE SEEN NO EVIDENCE OF THIS. EVER - if it can be done, could anyone tell me how?