This afternoon Riot unveiled the new bot AI for the upcoming cooperative mode during a live stream. Interestingly enough, the Riot team lost. I wasn’t paying close attention to the stream, but the few times I did watch, the bots definitely seemed much improved. They were tower diving, backdooring, ganking, baiting, the whole nine. It was actually pretty cool.

Granted, I don’t think this will be much of a challenge for high-tier players. The new AI seems good, but it can’t jungle and doesn’t take dragon, which is a huge gold/xp loss. Still, it will probably be a fun way to spend a low-key evening and it’s definitely an improvement over the old bots.

It was also interesting to see the internal build Riot was using. During the stream, Phreak pointed out the shield notification you can see in the screenshot at right. That white bar gets tacked on to any character with a shield as far as I can tell. In the livestream it was working on Karma, Malphite and I think Shen, including targets that Karma and Shen shielded. I would guess it also works on Sion. That’s a nice feature that’s long overdue.

It’s encouraging to see that the bots are so close to release ready, at least from what I could see tonight. Obviously the proof will be just how soon we see the feature go live. It was only announced a short while back, unlike Magma Chamber, which we’re still waiting to see.