Battlefield 2042's reveal around E3 was one of the online expo's big highlights, its first trailer and then gameplay glimpses doing a heck of a lot to whet the appetite of the series' diehard fans and newcomers alike.
Since then we've had trickles of new information from EA and developer Dice, as they continue to discuss the game before doing a larger showcase in more depth at EA Play Live in July. The latest tidbit concerns the game's large server sizes and previous mentions of bots.
Now, speaking to The Verge, EA has confirmed some more of how bots will work in its matchmaking. It will effectively fill underpopulated servers with AI enemies to keep things flowing nicely, but will do so with restraint, so that at busy points players are unlikely to run into any.
With up to 128 players on many of its servers, after all, a game with only a couple of dozen human players could feel a bit pointless if you didn't have bots to help out. This is actually pretty reminiscent of another big Dice shooter series of recent years, the Battlefront games, which used bots to make sure that games looked and felt as epic as the battles they were showing were supposed to be.
Whether the bots are tuned to the point where they're both useful teammates and proper adversaries, of course, is another question that will become clearer when BF2042 releases in October.