NetEase has been slaying the FPS arena recently, and with Bad Guitar Studio, a subsidiary developer of the group, launching Fragpunk with an impressive 113k concurrent players and thousands of Twitch streamers enjoying the whacky, card-cracking team shooter, we had a blissful few days of runnin’ and gunnin’. But just like Marvel Rivals before it, Fragpunk is already plagued with bots not even a week after its release.
Most of the best FPS games have bots. It’s a scourge and, unfortunately, a standard practice, but it was a realisation that came disappointingly quickly to Fragpunk players. We’ve all come to expect the odd bot on our team, especially when we’re playing in the early hours of the morning and the rest of our server is mostly asleep. Player numbers take a dip, and so it’s a standard practice in almost all live-service, competitive games to come across an AI buddy there to helpfully fill out the numbers.
But for a game only in its fourth day of life, the number of players voicing their frustrations is surely cause for concern. Despite its almost immediate popularity, Fragpunk received mixed reviews in the first few days after launch, and this was mostly due to players growing increasingly frustrated with the thinly-veiled inclusion of bots. Granted, the game is now sitting pretty with a ‘Mostly Positive’ tag on Steam, thanks to a push from the subreddit, but the issue still remains.
MORE FROM POCKET TACTICS: Play Fragpunk for free, Best Steam Deck games, Best FPS games
