For Honor's bastard bots will taunt you

For Honor's bots are bastards.

When I first started playing Ubisoft's medieval hack 'em up, which I reckon is more of a fighting game than anything else, the bots would often tear me a new one. For Honor's combat is initially tricky to get to grips with, and the AI doesn't hold back.

For Honor is a game where the bots play dirtier than the players. I've been in a number of 2v2 duels where human-controlled opponents have waited for my fight to end before trying to stab me in the face. Bots have no such honour.

In 4v4, the bots are even dirtier. I've gone up against a bot who's run away from the confrontation to grab a shield boost, then turned around to kick my ass. In short, always execute the bots, otherwise they'll come back to haunt you.

The best thing about the bots, though, is that they'll taunt you after they kill you. Someone at Ubisoft's clearly had a lot of fun programming human-like emote behaviour into For Honor's AI, and it is already producing some pretty funny results.

I've often been the butt of a taunt from a bot in a player versus AI duel, so have witnessed this disrespect first hand. I've even seen bots taunt multiple times in quick succession, in the way players do in competitive multiplayer. One bot spammed the collapse emote over my cold, dead corpse. It spammed it, interrupting the previous animation to do another over and over again. This is For Honor's version of teabagging - from the computer.

The fledgling For Honor community has already picked up on this. My favourite so far: a mic drop from an Orochi bot, which happened to Redditor NinjaHawkins.

I also like this:

These emotes don't appear to be available for players to buy in-game yet (apparently they're set to be added and cost 7k steel), but the bots can already use them. Bastards.

Also, some of the bots have great names, such as WhyNotJay, Grey2Scale, DroolTroll, YourNameOnMySword, DroidParty, MashdButtr and LeftShark. Again, Ubisoft's having a bit of fun here.

You may wonder why bots are worth discussing at all. Well, For Honor has an Orders system that sets daily and weekly challenges, and these often require you play against the AI in the various multiplayer modes. So if you're looking to score some steel, fighting bots is a relatively easy win.

Now, of course the bots get easier to deal with as you get better at the game (they seem to struggle to deal with being chucked off a cliff, for example), but one of the more impressive things about the AI is they rarely feel like cannon fodder. In fact they often put up a decent fight.

So, we have bots who play dirtier than players, bots who spam emotes to annoy the crap out of you, and bots who have names that sound like real players.

They're going to rise up, aren't they?