Why not just beef up the bots? I thought the problem was that they were brain dead? At this point I'd rather play against veteran quality bots with a full progression system than crappy players with a connection advantage.
Also, is this published by EA? Why couldn't they let Respawn use the Frosbite engine? Will be interesting to see how long from BF5 this will be released.
I think that bots of any sort mixed with human opponents just doesn't work all that well. Maybe as a one off mode, but definitely not as the basis for the whole game. It just makes for a weird dynamic in terms of competing. Titanfall had like separate stats for vs bots and vs Pilots IIRC, so they obviously see that there is a difference and they don't really go together or shouldn't be taken at the same face value, so why even integrate them?
And I know that they introduced Pilot only modes after it was already too late, but I digress, but even then it was the same low player count which just made it feel even more empty, although more satisfying when you did get to engaging.
I don't know. They want to do a Zombie type horde mode or something, then bots are fine, even though I never play those modes, but mixing them as the foundation of the game I felt was a huge misstep.
As for them using Frostbite, I can only surmise that since this is the CoD team, and they are intimately familiar with the mod Quake engine that they have been cutting their teeth with all this time, and that Titanfall was a pseudo launch title for X1, that there wasn't a lot of time for them to get up to speed enough to not only design a new IP from the ground up, but also use wholly unfamiliar tools to do it.
