Unreal Tournament '99 - A Feature I Personally Miss

[Malicexi]

In the first Unreal Tournament, you could customize the bots. You could customize the ones one your team and the opposing team. Most people likely only played online, but I thought this was tons of fun.

You could name them, use a specific model for them, use a specific voice pack for them, and then customize how the AI behaves. I had one really cool bot named Tormax that I fought against. He was extremely aggressive and his favorite weapon was a rocket launcher. He was the kind of bot that would jump in front of you out of nowhere and blow you both up. He also had great accuracy and his voice pack went really well with his model. He was a force and fun to fight against. And there were others too, I customized the entire team of AI I fought against, as well as the entire team I played with.

I would spend a lot of time looking for models, voice packs, and balancing the settings to create a certain kind of character to fight. I remember wishing I could set up multiple teams with team captains, so I could mix things up more. And with all of the resources in the huge community, you could create so many different unique allies and foes. The AI settings weren't super intricate, but there was enough to create different fighting styles/personalities to go with the rest.

[Wail]

This was a nice writeup, thanks for sharing. It's cool thinking about how a tool like being able to customize the bots in this way allows people to create their own characters, rivalries, their own stories in a game/genre that's not typically known for that kind of thing.

I never did much customization with the bots but I definitely did have rivalries with Loque and Tamerlane in Instagib, the two perfect accuracy bots. Going into a match with one of those guys was always a rush because you were really under pressure to be aggressive but you couldn't slip up either.
I'm hoping with Open Tournament, once we are in a more robust state, we can remember to support this kind of feature to allow people to personalize the game in this way.