‘Halo Infinite’ developer says teabagging bots are a glitch


343 Industries has explained that the bots in Halo Infinite have not been programmed to teabag players.

During Halo Infinite‘s recent technical preview, where players were only playing against bots, some had reported and shared instances where it looked like AI-controlled Spartans were performing the infamous taunt, repeatedly crouching over a dead player’s body.

Responding to Kotaku via email, a 343 Industries representative said that there isn’t any “explicit programming that tells the bots to teabag or taunt you in any way”.

“We never want to punish learning, especially not by having bots engage in behaviours that a player could feel is exclusionary,” they added. “The bots are meant to be welcoming and fun for players of all skill levels, and a feature designed to taunt a player would oppose that goal.”

The reason why some players have seen bots seeming to perform that action then is apparently down to a bug affecting the way bots navigate the environment.

If bots have trouble jumping, climbing, clambering, or scaling edges, including stairs (as is the case in the above clip), they would leave the ground briefly and then play a “landing” animation – such as a crouch – which then loops for a few seconds until the bot corrects itself.

Halo Infinite Credit: Microsoft

“If that happened to be observed shortly after a kill, or near a player’s body, it can definitely feel like an intentional behaviour,” the 343 spokesperson continued. “In reality, the bot was just struggling to go up the stairs.”

Teabagging had its origins as a sex act, which became more widely known in the 1998 film Pecker from cult director John Waters. However, it became widely used as a taunt by players in first-person shooter games to humiliate and provoke others, and has even permeated into other genres such as fighting games.

As another example of programming that has caused unintentional behaviour, Back 4 Blood‘s zombies had a sound effect that seemed to resemble a racial slur, which the developer has said will be fixed ahead of launch.