With Halo Infinite approaching, there’s a lot of excitement over the new features that have been teased for the game. One of those features will be the inclusion of bots, which will be a helpful way for new players to learn the Halo multiplayer experience. They’re designed to mimic how actual players would play Halo, but a lot of the players who got to experience the recent tech demo for Infinite said the bots could be pretty brutal at times.
These same players also saw the bots doing something else that caught everyone a little off guard. Anyone that’s played Halo knows that when someone defeats you in combat, they have two choices: run past you and move on with their day, or proceed to walk on top of your body and crouch constantly. Since this is Halo, the majority of players choose the latter. Well, because the bots are supposed to mimic humans, there were apparently reports from players of the bots doing exactly this, with a few videos confirming it.
Did the bot just…? pic.twitter.com/PYkaANHD3l
— whisper (formerly snipe.) (aka Improv) (@reqsihw) July 31, 2021
However, the developers at 343 Industries have already confirmed this is a bug and not a feature. The bots are meant to teach players how to play the game, not humiliate them for the times they aren’t good enough, and these clips are actually from a bug where the A.I. gets confused after a jump. A dev explained more about this bug to EuroGamer:
“We never want to punish learning, especially not by having bots engage in behaviours that a player could feel is exclusionary. For that reason, we don’t have explicit programming that tells the bots to teabag or taunt you in any way.”
…
“[The bug] caused bots to fail to successfully jump and clamber on the edge of stairs or ramps. A bot’s feet would leave the ground very briefly, then play a landing animation when they failed the jump, and they’d get stuck in an animation loop that could look like crouching rapidly. If that happened to be observed shortly after a kill, or near a player’s body, it can definitely feel like an intentional behaviour. In reality, the bot was just struggling to go up the stairs.
Video games should be enjoyable to everyone and bots are a learning tool. For someone who has never played Halo before, the idea of getting taunted the entire time isn’t very fun, and the only thing it would do is make them want to turn the game off and never jump into actual multiplayer.