Games Thursday : Play Call of Duty 4 Multiplayer Offline with PeZBot

Thursday, October 9th, 2008, 12:00 amRoys

Finally bought the PC edition of Call of Duty 4 (COD4) after finding the unofficial mulitplayer bot PeZBot recently. PeZBot provides a way to play the various multiplayer modes of COD4 offline with AI entities aka “bots” and unlock weapons, attachments and perks as in playing multiplayer with real humans online. As a player who never plays online, I procrastinated on getting the game since the extremely intense (and short) singleplayer experience just doesn’t really justify the cost.

Installing and playing COD4 with PeZBot is really simple. Download PeZBot, unzip and dump into the Mods folder of your Call of Duty 4 installation (usually C:\Program Files\Activision\Call of Duty 4 - Modern Warfare)

Start Call of Duty 4 Multiplayer, select PezBot from the Mods menu and click Launch.

Click on Start New Server, set your game options (remember to turn off Punkbuster!) and click on Start. Once the map loads, press the tilde or ~ to bring down the console and type /set svr_pezbots X (replace X with the number of bots - 7 or 9 is nice) and get ready to kick some bot butt. Showdown is an murderous bloodbath when playing Domination!

Sorry, only two screenshots, but you already know what COD4 looks like

While PeZBot is currently in alpha, it does show a lot of promise - the opposing team will flank you and your team when in contact. They will also use frag grenades and are smart enough to run away from one. They also react to your stun and flash grenades although they currently don’t seem to use their special grenades. And yes, they do call in UAVs, airstrikes and helicopter gunships.

The unlocks work as advertised. You don’t get to bring these perks and unlocks to your online profile, of course

There’s a known bug in PeZBot where subsequent maps are filled by only one or two bots. Just press Esc, Leave The Game, recreate the server and start fragging (again ).