LoL devs outline plans to make AI bot practice ‘feel more like real games’

If you’ve ever played against bots in League of Legends, you know that the game’s AI can feel lightyears behind actual players. In a future update coming soon to the game’s PBE, the LoL dev team plans to change that. 

Earlier this year, Riot gave an update on their plans to reignite the game’s bot AI, and how players can actually use bot games as a practice tool instead of a glorified day-one tutorial. Today, League’s executive producer Jeremy “Brightmoon” Lee and Riot’s head of League Andrei “Meddler” van Roon further expanded upon those plans in a dev update. 

New, updated bots will be available for testing sometime in September, and all LoL players who have a PBE account are invited to come test them out. While they likely won’t go live until later this year at the earliest, the PBE still gives players a chance to try out new things coming to the game before they’re widely available. 

“We’re currently focusing our bot work on helping new players learn the game,” Lee said.
“So these bots are deliberately intro level at the moment. We expect most of you to crush them easily, but we’d still love your feedback on how they look and feel.” 

Related: Riot confirms LoL’s bot AI system is getting some much-needed dev attention soon

Expansive details for the bot AI updates were written out in a dev blog by Darcy “DashiJador” Ludington and Emmett “Sentanel” Coakley, who have been leading the project to revitalize the game’s bots since April. Today, the duo laid out plans to make League’s bots more intelligent and responsive to players. 

The updated version of League’s bot system is revolving around the way these bots interact with players on Summoner’s Rift. While the current AI bots mostly just farm lanes and occasionally skirmish, the new bots will be able to do things like gank, jungle, tank objectives, and even coordinate their roles in champion select. 

In other words, they’ll actually be playing League of Legends.

For new League players, jumping from the current version of the intro bot experience into a real game is like going from tee-ball to pro baseball in the span of a week. Riot hopes to soften that learning curve by making bot games “feel more like a real game,” according to van Roon. 

The new-and-improved League bots will be available on the PBE in September for a two-week testing period. Riot intends to start this public testing project with intro-level bots before moving onto a testing period for beginner and intermediate-level bots.