I typed it as ‘Destructoid AllStars gets bots’…twice
Destruction AllStars has been on a collision course for a while, and now…let there be bots!
Lucid Games is responding to some of the feedback though, as evidenced in this new developer blog this past weekend. The idea is that they’re adding global parties, playlists, and you guessed it…bots. The former two features are pretty easy to get down with, but the latter? Yeah, that’s going to have some pushback depending on how its done.
Without outright saying it, Lucid Games notes that the lack of players in Destructoid AllStars is to blame. Here’s their carefully-worded reasoning: “With a community the size of Destruction AllStars, spread out across the world we do have peak times and low times of player activity for online matchmaking.” That’s a good save, but I’m sure Sony putting it out as a PS5 exclusive when they’re extremely hard to find isn’t contributing to this….at all. The studio further explains, “We want to ensure that matches are filled to capacity with as many real players as possible, but when missing X amount of players when queuing for a match, AI bots will take the remaining places. The exception to this is Blitz, as a competitive mode, Blitz will never feature bots.”
Now that last part is extremely important, and seems to be going over well with the community. Having a competitive mode stuffed with random bots would probably kill the game, so it’s great that they aren’t going that route. With that said, as someone who used to love the idea of bots in single player games, you kind of don’t want to rely on them for online experiences like this. Small quality of life features (like changing the way slams and ghost hits work) are also on the table, but are they enough?
Also, did you catch the “Destructoid AllStars” above? Yeah, I left it. You know what Sony didn’t leave though? The free PlayStation Plus price tag. I totally forgot that they converted this to $20 after a few months. Which, uh, might hurt your playerbase if people couldn’t find a PS5 until then! Yeah, this probably should have come out on PS4 too, with cross-play.
