- Aug 3, 2006
- 10,246
- 207
- 106
I realize this is old news to many, but hoooooooooly shit they are stupid; Miss South Carolina has nothing on them! I realize this is a "cooperative survival horror" game and it is best played with other humans, but sometimes friends aren't around and Live sucks at matching me with people smarter than bricks. The friendly AI is so weak I just spent about two hours trying and retrying the fourth leg of Dark Carnival on normal difficulty in Realism mode. Granted, this probably is the nastiest leg of any campaign (the running panic event at the end is just insane), but I tried no less than a dozen times!
Examples:
- The bots are entirely incapable of freeing themselves from a mob of common, even if all four of us are right next to each other. They just stand there and alternate casually shooting and meleeing, getting torn to pieces. Sometimes they don't even do that though, they'll just stand there like dumbasses, not resisting at all as they go from green to incapped.
- They're too stupid to wait until their health is at least yellow, if not red, to use first aid or eat pills. The result is that we never have health when we need it and they pop pills like it's 1969.
- Whenever a witch is near their path they all walk toward her, slowly. If I run by, they creep towards her; if I hang back, they inevitably wander her way until somebody gets instakilled (because it's on realism).
- They are incredibly inconsistent alternating between horrific aimbots and blind as Ray Charles. The witch they were just creeping toward for a full fifteen seconds? Coach misses her every damn time. But sometimes you're walking along someplace, one of them fires into some bushes, and a boomer explodes on the other side. They do the same in Versus and God does it suck.
- Coach will not pick anything up but a shotgun, and Ellis won't pick anything up but a sniper, regardless of their ammo situation.
- They come in two modes: stand there and look stupid, and unload on everything like they're Rambo and standing on an ammo dump.
- They like to let you handle things, meaning they won't shoot at that mass of forty zombies running down the corridor until they're already on your head, then they basically do nothing because they suck at being mobbed.
- They like to be reminded they're alive, so they'll edge into fire and acid repeatedly if another survivor is on the other side. If you're on advanced difficulty one instance of that is enough to take all of them down from green to low yellow, if you're on normal it's just fricking irritating.
- They are slooooooow; if you ever need to get a move on, they WILL be left behind. This results in scenarios where you're trying to wade through endlessly spawning common and specials in order to turn off an alarm entirely alone. How am I supposed to play a cooperative survival horror game if the damn bots are too busy playing tag with untold legions of the undead to help me get from point A to point B without getting my face clawed off and smashed into the concrete?
The easiest answer is that I just suck, but I regularly played through L4D1 solo on advanced, and regularly play through L4D2 on on advanced standard (or normal realism) with a partner. The bots sucked hard in the original, but the game has gotten harder and the bots simply have not improved with it.
Valve is a studio that we love to put on a pedestal, but seriously, what the hell? Playing solo on advanced standard is just as impossible as normal realism, and it's not much better with only one other human. The game just isn't playable unless you're playing with a group or enjoy playing a game so easy that your grandmother could beat it. And as I said before, the people Live matches me with are generally just as bad as the damn bots. It really is a cold day in Hell when I'm matched with decent teammates AND the opposing team is a fair match (neither too stupid nor too 1337).
Cliffs:
L4D2 bots SUCK
XBL consistently matches me with retards
WTF is wrong with Valve that they release a game with such horribly broken friendly AI?
Examples:
- The bots are entirely incapable of freeing themselves from a mob of common, even if all four of us are right next to each other. They just stand there and alternate casually shooting and meleeing, getting torn to pieces. Sometimes they don't even do that though, they'll just stand there like dumbasses, not resisting at all as they go from green to incapped.
- They're too stupid to wait until their health is at least yellow, if not red, to use first aid or eat pills. The result is that we never have health when we need it and they pop pills like it's 1969.
- Whenever a witch is near their path they all walk toward her, slowly. If I run by, they creep towards her; if I hang back, they inevitably wander her way until somebody gets instakilled (because it's on realism).
- They are incredibly inconsistent alternating between horrific aimbots and blind as Ray Charles. The witch they were just creeping toward for a full fifteen seconds? Coach misses her every damn time. But sometimes you're walking along someplace, one of them fires into some bushes, and a boomer explodes on the other side. They do the same in Versus and God does it suck.
- Coach will not pick anything up but a shotgun, and Ellis won't pick anything up but a sniper, regardless of their ammo situation.
- They come in two modes: stand there and look stupid, and unload on everything like they're Rambo and standing on an ammo dump.
- They like to let you handle things, meaning they won't shoot at that mass of forty zombies running down the corridor until they're already on your head, then they basically do nothing because they suck at being mobbed.
- They like to be reminded they're alive, so they'll edge into fire and acid repeatedly if another survivor is on the other side. If you're on advanced difficulty one instance of that is enough to take all of them down from green to low yellow, if you're on normal it's just fricking irritating.
- They are slooooooow; if you ever need to get a move on, they WILL be left behind. This results in scenarios where you're trying to wade through endlessly spawning common and specials in order to turn off an alarm entirely alone. How am I supposed to play a cooperative survival horror game if the damn bots are too busy playing tag with untold legions of the undead to help me get from point A to point B without getting my face clawed off and smashed into the concrete?
The easiest answer is that I just suck, but I regularly played through L4D1 solo on advanced, and regularly play through L4D2 on on advanced standard (or normal realism) with a partner. The bots sucked hard in the original, but the game has gotten harder and the bots simply have not improved with it.
Valve is a studio that we love to put on a pedestal, but seriously, what the hell? Playing solo on advanced standard is just as impossible as normal realism, and it's not much better with only one other human. The game just isn't playable unless you're playing with a group or enjoy playing a game so easy that your grandmother could beat it. And as I said before, the people Live matches me with are generally just as bad as the damn bots. It really is a cold day in Hell when I'm matched with decent teammates AND the opposing team is a fair match (neither too stupid nor too 1337).
Cliffs:
L4D2 bots SUCK
XBL consistently matches me with retards
WTF is wrong with Valve that they release a game with such horribly broken friendly AI?
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