In a series first, the upcoming Halo Infinite has bots. And not just any bots – as I reported, Halo Infinite’s bots aren’t messing about.
Developer 343 used the recent Halo Infinite technical preview to gather feedback on bot behaviour and online performance. To that end, the technical preview debuted with the Bot Arena playlist, which put four players against four bots on arena maps.
As 343 pushed the bot difficulty lever over the course of the technical preview weekend, the AI became more deadly. These bots were accurate, aggressive and ruthless. They would come in for a well-timed melee hit after dropping your shield. They would dodge grenades. They used grenades well and often. They picked up power weapons and they were not afraid to use them.
Once, a bot used the grappleshot to fly towards me before smacking me in the face with the gravity hammer. I even had a bot outsmart me as I danced around cover.
Don’t get me wrong – you can tell Halo Infinite’s bots are bots. But they’re perhaps the most lifelike bots I’ve ever faced in a first-person shooter. They’re pretty impressive.
If you had told me that Halo would add bots that could style on me like this, I would have called you a liar from r/halo
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In an email interview with Eurogamer, senior lead gameplay engineer Brie Chin-Deyerle and multiplayer designer Sara Stern explained how 343 went about creating Halo Infinite’s bots.
At a base level, Halo Infinite’s bots are designed to be good training partners for players, whether they’re new to the game, fancy a quick warmup before competitive matchmaking, or just want a relaxing experience.
To achieve this, 343 tried to make the bots mimic actual player behaviour as best it could, and this led the developers to create a new set of behaviours and tuning parameters for the game’s AI systems.
Halo Infinite | Multiplayer Overview Watch on YouTube
But how do you model player behaviour? 343 used internal playtests to watch players at different skill levels on the team, to see how they moved, what they focused on, and how accurate they were with different weapons. “As an example, highly skilled players strafe very differently than players who are just getting started,” Chin-Deyerle and Stern said.