Last week I was: getting stuck into Battlefield 6, testing out weapons and all the new maps.
This week I've been: observing Battlefield 6's bots in the natural habitat, feeling a lot like David Attenborough.
During my many hours putting Battlefield 6 through its paces in early access, I had the chance to face off against and team up with content creators and other journalists. That's cool and all, but some of the most fun I had was against Battlefield 6's bots. Not because they're incredibly easy to farm for kills (though that's also true), but because they're so…interesting.
It's hard to truly grasp just how dumb BF6's AI-controlled bots really are, and that's a shame because you're unlikely to ever witness it for yourself outside of the campaign. These bots only ever joined in on the action whenever the server couldn't be fully populated by real players. During a limited review period, that's an inevitability. Once Battlefield 6 is in the wild, chances are we'll never see these bots in their natural habitat ever again (outside of Portal, I suppose).
As you'd expect from bots in any multiplayer game, they're essentially free kills. They barely fight back, and they don't exactly play around cover or even with self-preservation in mind; they don't care about their K/D ratio.
This resulted in many situations where I could dump a whole mag into a group of bots, stand out in the open while I reload, before continuing to mag dump their friends. But in one particular case, enemy bots nonchalantly strolled on by without a second thought, failing to even attempt to kill me while I was quite literally AFK texting:
But that's somehow only the tip of the iceberg. Observing these specimens in their natural habitat, I began to notice that bots tend to repeatedly crouch when under stress, whether that be my gunfire or their own apprehension about pulling the trigger after flanking me. Hell, some have even tea-bagged me, sending me into a daze and making me think I'm back playing Call of Duty or classic Halo.
Most scary of all, though, is that the bot's number one priority is always reviving their android allies, even if you're standing right there reloading your gun. Kill a bot, and you can bet that another bot is going to immediately run out into the open, no matter what dangers surround them, to bring their buddy back. Be it a rifle or a tank raining hell down on them, these bots are dedicated to their friends. Some even danced with their allies back at camp, making me feel a tad evil for all the ones that have fuelled my weapon progression thus far.
Funnily enough, friendly bots often did the opposite. Just like real players, I add many an ally Support ignore my pleas for ammo, or even stand right on top of my corpse as a call out for a revive. In that way, the AI are actually quite good at mimicking the behaviour of real players.
Travelling in tight-knit squads, always looking out for their own, and grasping at real player behaviours, I think this could be the early signs of an AI uprising—though their inability to aim makes me a little less worried about my capacity to defend myself. Unless they come with vehicles, as enemy attack helicopters and jets were surprisingly terrifying compared to their ground-based counterparts.
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