What are the plans for AI bots in Star Marine [and PvE modes]? People don't always like to play against other people. Sometimes they like to get together with their friends and just practice against bots.
TL;DRThey want AI bots and wave-spawner survival modes in Star Marine, with the Good Doctor map built for that, but it waits on AI progress, which prioritizes Squadron and the PU first.
Yeah, we want to do the same thing. And actually, really interestingly, the internal AI teams, they kind of want the same thing. So this one takes a little bit of markup on the maps. We've got to get a wave spawner in. We've got some basics to this where we can preplace the characters. But what we want to do is have a little more, I hate to say it, but a systemic setup where it's much more procedural. And by procedural, it's more just generated, right? I want to put a spawner in. I want to say what kind of guy I want: whether I want a male or female, whether it's a rich guy, poor guy, whether you've got lots of guns, whether you've got a few guns, whether he's really got good abilities or not, and the designers would be able to set all this kind of stuff and ramp up over time. But actually, the whole existence of the Good Doctor map has a lot to do with wanting to do a swarm mode. So this was something that came down from Chris and Erin, that they wanted that within Star Marine, absolutely. And it's such an obvious thing, because we are actually doing that within Arena Commander. We've got two different survival modes already, and we don't have a single one within Star Marine. And a lot of that just comes down to the actual development of that given AI. Now, I don't want to go super into detail, because that's another pillar, another director, another set of people that are working on that. But of course, Squadron AI has to be the top priority, and then the PU next, and then everything within here. So just like I said at the start, as they progress on the Squadron AI, as they progress on the PU AI, we will take advantage of that kind of stuff. But right now, the best spot in the PU is this underground facility with this stuff. So for me, it wasn't yet enough to be able to make a really reasonable sort of swarm survival horde Star Marine mode, but very soon we will be there. And again, the Good Doctor map was actually built and incepted to do specifically that. Now, we didn't want to just hold on to that map...
And wait until the AI was done.
And wait until the AI was done. We had it, and making a deathmatch map is not too dramatically difficult in terms of sight lines and things like this. So we figured, why not release that while we wait for the AI to kind of be in a state that we want to do that.
And by releasing the map earlier, players get to beat on it a bit. You show us some of the shortcomings of it, and we can iterate.
Yeah. It's bad to say it this way, but yeah, we get some free QA, is kind of the thing. But it's good. I mean, it's a good deal, right? Because you guys get some new content. We get some new feedback. Everybody wins. That's how it's supposed to work.
And also, when we do actually work towards the PvE side of things, one thing that we will get is a different set of feedback. So when it's PvP, when it's player against player, and when we have that more focused experience in the Good Doctor or any other map that we eventually add AI to, I think that will give us some really good feedback. It will be different compared to the PvP feedback, potentially a different player base, in terms of people really focused on the PvE side or the PvP side. I think from a holistic point of view, getting all of that information would be something that would be really good going forward, and allow us to get that feedback to actually balance it for Squadron and for the PU.