PUBG Corporation has announced that the console versions of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds will be getting bots for public matches to ease new players into the game.
In a dev letter, the studio said that the skill gap between veterans and newcomers has significantly widened over the years, with an increasing amount of new players visibly struggling to get kills. PUBG Corp noticed that a lot of players were dying without even dealing any damage, let alone get an elimination or two.
The introduction of bots with update 7.1 aims to address this issue. However, the developer has warned that bots can impact matches positively and negatively, both. That said, update 7.1 will bring the first iteration of bots and there will be continuous improvements and fine-tuning.
The letter reads:
While there were many other factors that went into programming PUBG’s bots, these were the three we felt carried the most potential impact on a match. We hope that introducing bots will help players get more shooting practice and kills, a higher average survival time, and maybe even that first exciting chicken dinner. Basically, the full battle royale experience. As for our more experienced players, you are less likely to engage bots the higher your MMR is. In addition to that, there will also be the next evolution of competitive PUBG in our new Ranked system due out next month, which will not have any bots.
One last note, this is just the first iteration of bots. In the coming months, we’ll be implementing machine-learning techniques to continue monitoring how humans play, so we can apply improvements to make our bots behave more and more realistically. Of course, no amount of machine learning beats direct community feedback, so please let us know your experiences with the bots and how else we can improve.
PUBG Season 7 is due to begin on April 29 for consoles. For more on PUBG, read our review.
[Source: PUBG Corp]
