Unreal had a (well deserved) reputation for poor multiplayer, thanks to hideously broken network code and under powered weapons. So it came as something of a surprise when Epic revealed they were working on a multiplayer-focused follow-up to the game…
Breaking from the traditional “find red key, use red key to open red door, repeat” formula of most first person shooters, Unreal Tournament instead puts you up against a series of AI bots, which are designed to mimic real human players.
And they do it pretty well. In fact, at a (somewhat premature) launch party back in September, UT’s bots passed the Turing Test by fooling me into thinking they were real players for almost half an hour!
Epic have done a great job of making the bots behave like humans, and in almost every situation they work perfectly. You can even give your AI team mates basic orders in team games using a straightforward drag and click interface.