Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Sure. John developed Fritz Bots for Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, and id Software were really impressed by his work. Well, we were really impressed by his work, but they were impressed enough to actually go and hire him! The design goal was to have bots that played like real human players.

Because we're in beta at the moment, there are still some bugs. Occasionally you'll see a tank spinning round in circles or a Strogg and GDF guy running along side by side completely unaware of each other because their view frustums aren't intersecting with one another, but, setting aside those couple of small things, I think these are probably the most advanced implementation of AI yet in a multiplayer combat game.

They're not just target practice. They understand how to use almost every weapon, item, tool, deployable in the game. They understand how to use them tactically as well. A medic will make a decision about whether to revive a team-mate versus whether to heal someone to cover him while he's reviving the other player. A Covert Ops will jump into an Anansi, fly to the enemy objective, bail from the helicopter, select a camping spot, wait for the objective-completing character class from the enemy to turn up, stab him in the back, steal his uniform, and then stand around knowing that the enemy team is less likely to shoot him if he's the guy who's supposed to complete the objective, and then carry on going round and getting back-stabs. And there's no preset pathfinding, so we actually discovered routes that bots find between objectives that I didn't even know existed.

With the real game, if the bots did everything they were absolutely supposed to but humans didn't, it would suck when you played against humans because they would all just run around selfishly motivated by their own personal objectives. So what we do is we reward heroic behaviour in the game with experience points that lead to unlockables, attribute-modifiers and that kind of thing - rewarding you for making the other gamers' game more fun.

It will try to give them the best thing they could be doing at that given time. At one level it works a bit like a tutorial system - a new player will come to the game as an engineer and it will recommend you deploy a turret. Then it will give you missions for things like repairing deployables. Some of those are pre-scripted by our designers, but they're not particularly innovative. But as a second method of generating missions, some are based on intelligence your team gathers, and this works equally well for the bots as it does for the players. If you put down radar, and it determines the location of artillery, that generates a whole bunch of destruction or hack missions for the soldiers or Covert Ops on your team.

The third tier of this is that they can be generated by players on your team clicking on things. The context-sensitive menu allows you to point-and-click at something and it generates the most important order right away, so if your vehicle's damaged you can point-and-click and it generates a repair mission for an engineer. If he points at a plasma mortar and you're playing Covert Ops it will generate a mission for you to go and hack into the plasma mortar and disable it.

Another cool aspect of the bot implementation is that, ordinarily, even if you do play with bots offline, you might only do it for the first week or two. Here you can separate their tactical skill, their aiming skill and whether or not they complete objectives. So if you want to practice your sniping, you can sit up on top of a hill and just snipe, but if you want to go through all of the maps learning where all of the objectives are, you can set the bots not to complete objectives and you can be the guy who does all of the objectives playing through the game continuously.

I don't know. There's no definitive plans on what will happen or what won't. Ultimately betas depend on whether we can make the fixes that we need to in patches as opposed to full releases. With Beta 2, so much had changed that we couldn't really deal with it in a single patch, so that's what generated Beta 2.

We hope so! At the moment our focus is exclusively on getting the PC done, and as soon as that's done we'll be focused on whatever additional content and things we can make, to make people continue to have a really good experience. id Software are really committed to the ongoing support of the game, and so whatever work we do I would hope that Splash Damage continues its role as leading on the development on the PC sku.

But as for the next game and stuff, I have tons of ideas flying around my head, and I've been discussing a bunch of ideas with Kevin Cloud over at id Software, but to do anything more than just continue to have ideas flying around would be a distraction from the PC Enemy Territory, and everyone would hate me!