Riot’s League of Legends is one of the biggest games in the eSports scene, with incredibly competitive gameplay rivaled only by games such as Starcraft 2, Dota 2 or CS: Go. That doesn’t mean that League of Legends can’t be enjoyed by less-skilled players or casual gamers who just want to unwind. This was the mentality that created the AI controlled opponents in League of Legends. Unfortunately, the Coop vs AI mode suffered from limited and predictable AI opponents that weren’t too challenging to defeat. The community has been asking for more human-like bots in League of Legends, and Riot has answered their pleas.
The 4.25 update to LoL will be focused on improving the experience of playing against bots, through a significant boost to the AI’s capabilities, reactions, item builds and teamplay. The most obvious flaw of bots was the fact that they always retreated under a certain HP threshold. This was easy to exploit, and once you managed to take weaken a bot enough, you could simply give chase and finish it off without any fear of retaliation. This is where the biggest change will take place, and bots will now be able to analyse a scenario and adjust tactics accordingly. If the bot sees an opportunity to fight back, it will keep on fighting no matter how low its HP bar is. Bots will also take into account what spells and skills you have available, and will monitor your cooldowns when deciding a course of action. Of course, bots will still be limited due to the fact that they are not human, but we should be seeing a huge increase in their competence as opponents anyway.
League of Legends bots will now also dodge skillshots more. The formula is complicated, but rest assured, you’ll be seeing bots dodge and strafe a lot more. However, Riot has explained that bots will still not be able to flash over walls in the jungle, and this is not something that can be fixed in the future either. That being said, bots will now synergize effectively, combining skill-chains and ultimates, providing a larger level of threat. Expect an Amumu-bot to stun-lock an unprepared team, while allowing Orianna-bot to land that perfect ultimate. Granted, this won’t be at the level of highly-skilled teams such as Fnatic, TSM or Taipei Assassin’s, but it should provide a big enough challenge for new League of Legends players. And after all, that’s the entire point of the Coop vs AI mode. Bots are not designed to be the ultimate opponent, but are rather there to allow new players to test out champions or get a grasp at the mechanics of a complex and hard-to-master game.
Riot promises to keep working on developing a more complex and useful Coop vs. AI mode for League of Legends, but with the changes to bots in the upcoming patch, they are definitely up to a great start. For a more detailed analysis of how exactly bots in League of Legends work, feel free to read Riot’s official post on the matter.