Halo Infinite Bots Aren’t Actually Taunting Players After All

Once Halo players finally got to go hands-on with the first Halo Infinite test, they made two surprising discoveries. The first was that the bots present in the Halo Infinite technical preview were tougher than expected, and the second was that these bots were apparently able to taunt players with age-old teabagging tactics. It appears, however, that the latter discovery wasn’t what players thought it was after all with 343 Industries explaining now that this was a bug and not an intended animation.

Teabagging is something Halo players should be all too familiar with by now and consists solely of a player crouching and standing repeatedly next to someone, typically someone they just eliminated. It’s been a taunt exclusive to players, not bots, but that apparently had changed based on what people saw in clips like the one below from the Halo Infinite test.

But according to 343 Industries (via Eurogamer), this supposed teabagging was a result of the bots being unable to figure out what to do next. It was a “bug with bot traversal” which prevented bots from climbing vertically and caused them to get stuck in a jumping loop which looked a whole lot like crouching and standing repeatedly.

“It caused bots to fail to successfully jump and clamber on the edge of stairs or ramps,” 343 Industries told Eurogamer. “A bot’s feet would leave the ground very briefly, then play a landing animation when they failed the jump, and they’d get stuck in an animation loop that could look like crouching rapidly. If that happened to be observed shortly after a kill, or near a player’s body, it can definitely feel like an intentional behaviour. In reality, the bot was just struggling to go up the stairs.”

While some may have viewed the bug as a very Halo-esque feature and hoped it was a feature that would stick around, it doesn’t look like 343 Industries has any intentions of adding that sort of animation as a bot feature. The developer said it wants bots to help players learn and progress through multiplayer experiences and that it’s important for players to feel comfortable doing so which means no bots will be teabagging you.

“We never want to punish learning, especially not by having bots engage in behaviours that a player could feel is exclusionary,” 343 Industries said. “For that reason, we don’t have explicit programming that tells the bots to teabag or taunt you in any way.”