Maybe you’ve seen the clips: A Halo multiplayer avatar crouching, then standing, then crouching, then standing again, either directly over or somewhere adjacent to a defeated enemy. You might think there’s a human behind the Spartan. There’s not. It’s a Halo Infinite bot, seemingly performing one of the most ignominious actions in a competitive game: the teabag.
But, as developer 343 Industries told Kotaku, the bots aren’t programmed to stoop to such base behaviour, no matter how human they otherwise seem.
“We don’t have explicit programming that tells the bots to teabag or taunt you in any way,” a 343 representative told Kotaku in an email. “We never want to punish learning, especially not by having bots engage in behaviours that a player could feel is exclusionary. […] The bots are meant to be welcoming and fun for players of all skill levels, and a feature designed to taunt a player would oppose that goal.”
Read More: Halo Infinite’s Bots Are Impressive (And Making Me Nervous)
So, how do you explain the cold, hard video evidence? Indeed, videos appear to offer a clear-cut case that Halo Infinite’s bots have evolved — or devolved, depending on your perspective — to a truly base level of human indecency.
According to 343, it’s a technical issue, a hiccup with the bot’s traversal programming.
Essentially, in Halo Infinite’s preview build, there was a bug with how the bots navigated the environment. In some cases, bots could have trouble jumping, climbing, clambering, or otherwise scaling edges, including stairs. The bot would leave the ground for an imperceptibly brief moment, then play the “landing” animation — in this case, a brief crouch. That animation loop could then go on for a few seconds until the bot corrected itself.
“If that happened to be observed shortly after a kill, or near a player’s body, it can definitely feel like an intentional behaviour,” the 343 rep said. “In reality, the bot was just struggling to go up the stairs.”
Suuure, guys. Whatever you say. But we all know the truth: You’re training an unstoppable army of artificially intelligent soldiers. No surprise there, the AI takeover is all but written in the stars. I just doubt anyone thought the first step on the path would be a (very rude) crouch.
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