offline mode?

[Mr.Valentine]

offline mode where you can command bots with you into raid or defend a place against bots and maybe make maps little bit bigger for this mode and have difficulty options would be nice and the game will live longer especially with the randomly generated levels

[th_pion]

While this would be amazing, this is widely out of scope and will not be a thing in the foreseeable future.

[Calypso]

Originally posted by th_pion:

While this would be amazing, this is widely out of scope and will not be a thing in the foreseeable future.

damn. Would love to play this in offline with bots. The fact that nobody in asia would play it kinda sadden me :(

[John27]

dynamic bots were never out of scope. Developer might just need a staff that can code it. Like any Valve games since like CS 1.6 you can type a command that wrote pvp waypoint. It was slow, but not nowadays. Besides a point-and-click with simplistic "fire at attacker" like in so many FPS would be easy to code. Looking forward not only for botmatches, but also 1v1 "Commander vs Commander" mode.

[The Vman]

Originally posted by Meyers07:

Developer might just need a staff that can code it

That's your problem right there. It's a small studio, all of the coding staff are busy with bugfixes, performance, and adding new features. There's also the secondary issue of programming AI that works on randomly generated maps, which is a lot harder than if you're working with static maps.

[Roronoa Pronouns]

The thing is, bots aren't gonna be as simple as "go to waypoint, shoot attacker" in Due Process. The games where that worked easily were games that had one set of maps that were completed by the time the game was released, with known chokepoints and no destructible terrain (aside from maybe a vent cover or window in CS1.6).

Due Process has new maps every single week. They accomplish this by using procgen to skip the early steps of the process, and I bet you dollars to donuts part of the reason they can do a new map every week is that they don't have to lay out waypoints for AIs to follow. More than that, simply laying out waypoints is not enough, because the paths between those waypoints can change drastically mid-fight--someone blows open a wall, or shoots out a previously locked door, and now a path which was previously blocked is wide open--and the bots have to account for both the new path they can take *and* the sudden lack of cover.

Then there's the question of how to integrate it into the planning mode, because half the point of the game is that planning mode, and if you can't issue bots orders in planning mode, why are you even using bots? Oh, and how does a bot decide when to keep following the plan and when to break from it? What happens if a bot is following a plan that calls for a wall to be breached, and the wall never gets breached because the bot carrying the explosives got killed? Hell, how do you represent "Wait here for a few seconds" using the drawing tools in Planning Mode? If you can't, then how do you set up the new tool that you'll inevitably have to create for interacting with bots, and how do you teach players how to use it?

Oh, and then there's the question of issuing orders to the bots during the match, or deciding which bot should carry what equipment.

TLDR: There's a reason that games can take years to finish. This ♥♥♥♥ is not cut and dry; there are many factors to consider, pieces which need polishing, mechanisms that must be made to interact cleanly and correctly. It is not as simple as "just add AI", especially not for games that aren't as simple as "just shoot them".

[Engicop]

Originally posted by KinoTrench:

Originally posted by th_pion:

While this would be amazing, this is widely out of scope and will not be a thing in the foreseeable future.

damn. Would love to play this in offline with bots.

Same here :(

[ProVegaGamer]

same here, oh well.