The twist is, it’s probably not in the way you’d expect.
The mobile counterpart to PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds released to some wide fanfare on Monday, March 19th, with gamers praising the game’s smoothly optimized transition onto the mobile platform. The game’s free to play mobile launch isn’t without its hiccups, however, as more and more gamers are reporting that PUBG Mobile is absolutely riddled with bots.
Bots are commonly known among the gaming sphere as third-party programs utilized to make a task easier, or to automate it entirely. Many veterans of PUBG are more familiar with aimbot, a program that allows players to score consistent headshots without aiming their weapon.
The bots in PUBG Mobile, however, are more akin to bots from MMORPGs - masquerading as players and carrying out very particular tasks. In this case, it’s making other players feel like they’re better at the game than they are.
According to an article by Kotaku, these bots seem to be designed to appear more frequently at earlier levels of play, and are designed to ease people into the game. Simply put, they’re low-difficulty AI enemies meant to be cannon fodder for new players.
And they all seem to be clad in red shirts.
Both Tencent and PUBG Corporation have yet to comment officially on their hand in creating these bots for the mobile version of PUBG. It’s easy to see why they would implement a feature like this, however. Most games become more unwieldy during their transition to mobile from other platforms. It stands to reason that a first game with a high kill count (unknowingly propelled by bots) would make players feel a bit better about sticking with the mobile version of the game, especially given the high learning curve of its PC and console counterpart.
But an argument can also be made that the addition of bots invalidates why people play games in the battle royale genre to begin with - a no-holds-barred brawl between 100 real players, and the satisfaction that comes with coming out on top. Finding out that the round you just won was actually made up of 50 AI controlled NPCs and 50 actual players would absolutely put a damper on that sense of accomplishment.
