Valve didn’t just release Shattered Web’s challenges on December 21, they implemented the ability for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s bots to throw perfect executes.
In week seven of CSGO’s Shattered Web operation, players got a bit of a surprise when playing through the Guardian mission “Coordinated Attack.” What starts off as a slaughter that favors the human CTs quickly becomes complicated as perfect jungle, CT, and stairs smokes land on the site and a pop flash is thrown from palace.
In the December 17 update for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, most players were distracted by the datamined challenges that revealed through the operation’s week eight missions. The focus makes sense, especially since players have to wrack up 40 Dual Berretta kills starting Tuesday.
But there was something else in the update that few noticed. The updated included decisions trees for the AI in regard to last week’s mission, and inside them were instructions that allowed the bots to pick where they wanted to go depending on what was happening around them.
CSGO bot AI is becoming harder and smarter
The update is a continuation of CSGO’s September update which provided the framework for these decision trees. Players may have noticed that deathmatch bots are scary accurate sometimes. They’ve probably run into one of CSGO’s “Elite” bots.
Each bot is given a base rating that determines things like the angle at which they’ll aim at a target and their reaction time. The stats above are the for the elites and show that their reaction time is an insane .12. Other stats in the documents are in seconds, so if elite bot’s reaction speeds are .12 seconds, then that’s better than any other professional athlete in esports or otherwise.
An ELEAGUE graph shows that the top teir of professional sports cannot compare to the elite bots. The improved difficulty and decision logic of Counter-Strike’s bots means that CSGO might decide to include more cooperative content in the near future. At this point, true bot AI is still a ways off.
CSGO developers have uploaded specific bot logic code for each Guardian mission in Shattered Web, so the bots themselves aren’t deciding to throw the executes in “Coordinated Attack.” But the framework sets them on a path that might see them deciding to fake a B execute or run other more complex tactics one day.
Any improvement to a Counter-Strike system is a good thing, and these small, incremental updates to bot AI are trending towards a more well-rounded game of CSGO than the community has ever seen before.
