For me it's the opposite. I played Q4 first, easily played it 5 times since then. I played Q1 later and have have had multiple replays.
Q2 is the only one where I don't get the hype. Sure, it's an interesting window into what games can become when the narrative guides the player rather than "find the exist button and kill everything in your path". But by Q2 too many important faces of id have left and I feel it way too much. No Sandy, no Romero... it just feels stale and generic.
I like Q1 the most. I played Q1 the first time around 2010 or so, after playing Q4. So it is not rose tinted glasses. Just Q1 is a lot of fun! Quake 4 is good, but I think I never finished it. While Q1 is something I now install on all my PCs just for a little fun when I want.
The enemy and level design is simply good. And there is tons of content online.
Yeah agreed - I played Quake 4 in... I don't even remember 2007 or 2008 maybe. It was fine but don't feel the need to revisit it. I've played Quake 2 a couple of times though and would happily go again.
I remember pirating Quake, got it in August before the Nov launch (gotta love early 0-day releases) and playing the hell out of it. Played so many mods and the early machinima mods. By the time Quake 2 came out I had money to buy the game and did so, great game. I setup my first Ethernet network between two machines and the first thing I did was call a few friends over for 1v1 Quake 2 matches. I can still remember my friend Jose killing me in that lava room trap and the laughs had. I wasnt a big twitch gamer but my brother and I did a little bit of Q3A DM but it wasn't my thing; I prefer a story and casual game play.
I remember buying Quake 4 but I don't remember playing it. Tells you a lot right there.
> I actually love Q4 as it packs so much into the game. I guess it’s a love or hate game.
I guess it is, and if we're being honest I'm a certified hater.
I played all of the Quake games online, a lot, at their corresponding time of initial release. First on software, then accelerated on 3dfx Voodoo cards, then later on NVIDIA RIVA TNT and the original GeForce cards (to tie this into some of today's other big news).
I played untold hours of multiplayer online netQuake, Quake II and Quake III Arena and have my own semi-controversial opinion that Quake II was actually the best of them all (most people tend to either prefer the original, or III). But you may be the first person I've ever encountered online or IRL who has professed love for Quake 4. (I'm sure there are others out there, I just haven't run into them).
I barely played any of them in single player, to be fair, so that could very well be a factor in the difference of opinion(?).
For single-player, Quake 4 felt more related to Doom 3 and the later Doom remakes. A more modern, atmospheric, FPS dungeon crawler.
For me, Quake 3 was the end of my appreciation for Id games, since I am only interested in single-player and it didn't even try to offer that. I am drawn to the immersive FPS environment, but I have no competitive urge nor enjoyment from having random participants disrupting the experience.
Online games are too fast to let the atmosphere sink in. Playing the new Quake anniversary levels and they are a real treat. I hope to do the brutalist game jam levels next.
Yeah I get that. I also came from the Quake I era but I rarely played multiplayer games. I get why many Quake players dislike Q4 because it has little to do with the original Quake games gameplay-wise. Quake 2 is of the same universe but the style is different.
I tend to treat Q4 as a good FPS and that’s it. It is a polished game with a lot of contents so I love it. Quake I is still my fav FPS but Quake 4 is a good game as well.
I also love DOOM 3 for a similar reason —- completely different from the other DOOMs including DOOM 4 but still a fun game. I guess I prefer slower pace when I grow into my 40s…
That said, I still haven’t played my dream game —- a first person RPG —- something similar to Hexen/Skyrim but with richer contexts. Something like a first person D&D game.
I remember really enjoying the single-player campaign for Quake 4 at the time, but I don't know how well it holds up. I still have the discs in the original retail packaging, tucked away in a closet somewhere.
"finished" is a bit misleading, I'll try and explain.
Long time Quaker. I was quite involved in Q4 Multiplayer (in fact, I adapted and rebuilt a Quakeworld map for Q4MP a year ago "for fun", and got to see what the idtech4 modders have been up to).
Every now and then, I replay the SP campaign and every time, I am reminded of why I forget so much of it. The expansion, despite some interesting twists, was shaping up to be very much the same, and you can see why it was canned.
Some of its completed parts were rolled into Q4MP when id Software had taken over maintenance from Raven
I played the Ritual expansion as-is when it was leaked a few months ago. Impressions:
- First couple levels had gone through enough art passes to be about as good-looking, if not better in places, than Raven's. As an aside, from the levels and the new creatures/weapons, you can definitely tell Ritual had the chops to pull it off.
There were some awkward sections to navigate (cramped corridors where the marines would just block you), probably little playtesting had occurred - makes you wonder when they consider a level works well enough that you can art it up, because building levels in this engine for hardware of that era is somewhat tricky.
- Level quality then progressively degrades to what you expect from alpha. Not necessarily wholesale, but maybe a quite fleshed-out section is poorly connected to the next set piece, encounters are weird all over, etc.
- You acquire powerful weapons and upgrades way too quickly, including the new ones - I assume this was made to be able to get a feel for the whole thing quicker, before playtesting and balancing passes.
You even get the new guns, one of which (I can't remember) was essentially a different look of a gun you already have, with different ammo (no wonder I forgot what it was).
This is something I also remember from Q1/Q2 expansions: you could totally do without some of the new guns. You're just happy you get a "spare" of something else for bullet-sponge enemies.
- In this game, you remain a regular marine. You don't get the base HP, stamina and running speed enhancements from being stroggified (they couldn't have pulled this twice, understandably). So to veteran Quakers, this would have felt even more Call-of-Duty-Quake than retail Q4 already did.
- Retail Q4 had some quite tedious vehicle sections. There is still some of that in the expansion (good and bad), but Ritual tried some interesting twists, and some of these sections actually could have been an improvement over Q4's.
Unfortunately, this is particularly sensitive to pacing IMHO and the alpha suffers from pacing problems everywhere.
- Placeholder content everywhere, including in the more complete sections: barren cutscenes to try and get some time allocations here and there, temporary voiceover/animations or none at all (you wouldn't burn too much money on mocap at this point).
One of the vehicle sections, you're a gunner on a ship. Every now and then you have to get out of the turret and perform some task in the back. The task, in alpha state, is essentially click a GUI and go back to gunning down infinite enemies, and you're not sure how your ship is still going somehow.
- New monsters and bosses - except they're super buggy. Interestingly enough, some of the jank carries to enemies already existing in the Retail game: either they made it worse in code, or missed some supporting level design elements, or started working off an incomplete pre-release Q4, and this is prior to them merging in some of the fixes Raven would have made.
- You start getting some new enemies early, but since you also have access to too much firepower, you barely notice they're supposed to be tough. You can still get near one-shot by some basic troopers thanks to the wonders of Alpha Jank TM, though.
There's one miniboss encounter where the door opens right on him, and you can get insta-killed at range because you turned left instead of right trying to get cover in the maze of boxes facing his closet. If you turn the other way, you can just trivially cheese him behind a pillar (except when the collision is bad, and you get insta-killed anyway).
- Another thing from Retail this suffers from is, your cohorts seem invincible and their rifles are better. So, no need to bust your ass: you can just let them work (when they don't block you).
Except since this is alpha, sometimes they die in weird ways (maybe the game designers were trying to make them more important?), but the game doesn't care (yet), and you can continue with events that would depend on them being triggered :)
- Final level was so janky in all of the ways I just had to go through it with /noclip and /god to see the end.
Some of these problems can be addressed in code, and going by the moddb page, it seems this is what has happened in this fixup release of that vibe-coded Q4 source port, quoting:
> Where the alpha's own code or content stopped something working as designed, openQ4 fixes it.
Back in the day, people weren't afraid to use the SDK to modify game behaviour you couldn't alter by just changing interpreted scripts. It was the most accessible, you already knew how to program.
This somehow got lost, so recent "mods" largely remain at a basic "I changed this gun, altered a monster".
It is now possible to vibecode yourself out of this, and thus we get a more playable alpha. But it is by no means _finished_.
You could probably generate some better-than-placeholder voiceovers and music with AI now.
The big problem before you can call this anywhere _finished_ was, and remains everything else pertaining to content:
- You need to take editorial, game-design decisions and run balancing and pacing passes on the entire product.
- You will need to get some good animators to invent what is barely there in the alpha expansion.
- You will need to complete some of the new models, etc.
Textures and modeling were a generational upgrade in tech4, leading to the foundations of the current art pipeline (high-poly -> low-poly+normal maps, diffuse, specular).
You barely saw any of this at the amateur level, and when you did it often wasn't pretty.
Nowadays, hobbyists have caught up, and i.e. in the D3 modding scene, they endlessly remaster the existing models.
- You will need to run design and art-passes over most of the levels.
Levels were tricky due to the tools and increased difficulty of texture making from reasons above. They started using more static 3D models, so you needed to level-up there too.
Back then, it was comparably easier to make new levels, and you'd try to reuse stock assets as much as possible.
You probably didn't understand how the lighting model worked and suffered performance and/or visual issues, assuming the 60fps cap and hardware upgrades would sort you out. That part has not changed.
Nowadays, the level editing tools have changed the least. No Trenchbroom for you, and vomiting meshes out of Blender only takes you so far. It has remained the most tedious part IMHO.
Unsurprisingly, the tech4 diehards have output very, very few new levels, and at comparably low levels of quality.
This is unfortunately a very, very visible aspect of this alpha.
My fork of DarkRadiant focuses on experimental editing, including editing in the 3D view like in TrenchBroom, as well as mouse wheel extruding (Cube-like), procedural tools, wall/floor tooling, etc. It also fixes all issues with Q4 and Prey. You should check it out:
I've been maintaining and adding new features to DarkRadiant as well, which aims to be more stable than HF and less experimental. NetRadiant-custom (https://github.com/Garux/netradiant-custom) also supports id tech 4 to some extent, and WifeRadiant (https://github.com/erysdren/WifeRadiant) aims to improve that support soon.
The Quake 3 demo was one of my favorite games I wasn't allowed to play as a teenager. Loved blowing people up with a rocket launcher and laser beaming with a railgun. I have no qualms about whether AI finished this, just enjoying the fact that nostalgia can be invoked more easily and cheaply than ever before.
On a similar note World of Warcraft just launched "WoW Forever", a nostalgic throwback to vanilla WoW. Millions of people tried to play on the first day and for the first time ever during a major launch of WoW, everything went smoothly and players were able to log in and play without lagging out. Normally it took a few days after launch for servers to catch up to demand and allow people to actually play the game without lag or disconnections. I'm confident that AI played a major role in allowing Blizzard's team to navigate a WoW launch successfully for the first time.
It seems weird to attribute WoW's launch success to AI and not to the 20+ years of experience the industry has with modern online game architecture. When it launched in 2004 the state of MMO games was very different and a lot of those choices are hard to undo on an actively played game. I imagine AI was used but I doubt it had any great architectural insight that the experts at Blizzard didn't.
My belief that AI may have helped Blizzard plan, set up and smoothly launch WoW Forever is inferred and based on the poor quality of their other recent launches. WoW Classic released in 2019 and was a laggy mess for the first few days. Blizzard recently said WoW Forever is their biggest launch in history for peak concurrent players, bigger than Classic or any expansion they've released including Burning Crusade and WotLK.
Blizzard has long been derided for its poor performance when handling massive player events, showing worse performance in that regard than large private servers such as Nostalrius.
The biggest technological advancement in the past couple years that could help explain their sudden and dramatic improvement is AI, in my opinion. I think it's fantastic if AI is indeed a large part of the reason for their rapid improvement.
I'm struggling to be honest; on the one side Blizzard has 20+ years of experience with large scale launches and nowadays access to all the servers and compute they could need as long as they pull out a credit card (this goes for all large scale projects really). This has been a thing for... actually AWS is coming up on having been a thing for 20 years now. In theory, scaling and day 1 launches and peak load have been a problem that has been looked at and solved for 20 years now.
I don't, therefore, really understand why AI would have made such a big difference this time compared to the launch of Classic. But I can only dream of projects and launches of such a scale.
I'm perplexed why you just apply the learnings that a company like AWS has gotten to a company that has up until recently clearly been struggling with scale.
That some company has solved something doesn't mean another company can just use it. You can't just "from aws import scale" at the top of your fresh new project and be fine with millions of concurrent users.
Wow Classic was fine except for the queue. Any limitations were arbitrary to fit into the no changes mentality that the community had (e.g. queues etc due to limited layers and servers.)
It's dangerous to fabricate connections between dots - between a cause you happen to know and an outcome you see. It really is buying into preconceived notions and prejudices, because lacking evidence there is no way to test it. It's the opposite of science (and law and any other serious rational field) which requires objective evidence, specifically to cut through our subjective perceptions.
Not nostalgia for me, I play Quake 3 about 15 times a week with a group of people, it's still awesome fun. We're all so good at it, it's genuinely a difficult competition every time. After 15 years we still get in ridiculous/interesting situations in the same maps all the time.
Same here. My BFF and I have played Q3 on and off since it was released. But we've clocked more hours in the past couple years than in the previous ten.
Even after all this time we have a blast and sometimes situations erupt into huge bouts of laughter. I'll never not think that an errant rocket splash knocking him off the map is hilarious.
There are some gameplay issues with the WoW Layering tech (Layering is World of Warcraft's name for where you there are multiple shards for the same zone, and players may transfer between each layer as it balances. So instead of different servers, everyone is on one "server", and each zone is sharded to accomadate large populations). But the layering and single realm tech is just really well done. It scales to huge populations seamlessly. There is some polishing on zone boundaries and pvp, but the tech was pulled off without a hitch for a massive launch, millions of concurrent players.
This is the type of change I am referring to when inferring that AI may have helped develop the changes that enabled such a massive improvement over previous launch events.
I am not a Blizzard employee and don't have insider information. I'm just impressed with their improvements and hopeful it was at least partially enabled by their use of AI to help ideate, design and implement.
I don't think there is any evidence AI has helped them do this. They almost assuredly used AI, sure. But this seems like its the result of investing in their platform team and infrastructure over many years.
> I have no qualms about whether AI finished this, just enjoying the fact that nostalgia can be invoked more easily and cheaply than ever before.
Maybe making nostalgic experiences available so cheaply is not a good thing. For me seeing mods and reimaginings of old games is interesting because people puts lots of effort into them with attention to detail and their own ideas. Someone recreating Half-Life 1 with modern graphics using AI is not going to create something as cool as Black Mesa, for instance, which didn't attempt to make a 1 to 1 recreation but to improve things and make it fit with more modern graphics.
LLMs can also greatly streamline this process as well. For a silly gameplay example, if you wanted to enable double jumping in Quake you could do it in a few minutes and a single prompt instead of what would have previously been the start of a pretty significant dive into the code.
Basically I think what we're seeing is that LLMs make everything easy, and so the standard for success is going to increase somewhat significantly simply because there are no longer any barriers whatsoever to doing things.
>The Quake 3 demo was one of my favorite games I wasn't allowed to play as a teenager. Loved blowing people up with a rocket launcher and laser beaming with a railgun. I have no qualms about whether AI finished this, just enjoying the fact that nostalgia can be invoked more easily and cheaply than ever before.
My first IT job (when I was 12ish) was running a small popup internet cafe in the 90s. Quake 3, probably due to OpenGL was one of the few games I could run on the server, instead of one of the revenue generating PCs. Big Nostalgia.
It really depends on more than that, as someone who's played a ton of WoW at various times of my life I would say that it's the best case scenario for an MMO that can offer something to everyone, if you have the time it's worth trying. The game itself gets about as deep as you could possibly want and the community can be incredible. it is however best enjoyed when you have at least a few hours to dedicate to it a night to put in the work to be a good community member yourself.
You really get what you give with a game like WoW. The rewards are great, some of the best of any video game experience, but they do not come for free. It really REALLY rewards people who are outgoing and engage in the social aspect.
WoW Forever is probably the best version of WoW for someone looking to start now (I personally like classic better and think retail is trash but ymmv and really good community can be found in all flavors of the game), and there's a lot of hype around it right now.
WoW was the only time in my life where I actually went to go meet online people in real life, i.e. we had a massive guild meeting in-person at someone's home back in the day when a WoW raid was 40 people, meaning the guild had like 60-80 members to be able to "staff" those raids multiple times a week.
The commitment was huge tho, yes. Our main tank was there every single raid (my best real life buddy from school) AND he'd farm his own potions during the week for the weekend raids.
Was a blast with sooo many people sleeping in a tiny row house on all levels in their sleeping bags, on like 3 different floors, tiny backyard, awesome BBQ. Looong drive. Back when we'd all have/bring a desktop and a huge monitor and such :)
No. Save your time, the game is pointless, like many other games, and offers really nothing except for those with nostalgia. But if you want to waste a month or two grinding for no reason, go ahead.
Wat, wow has very little in common with cookie clickers, is your thesis here that games that have a progression system where numbers get bigger are the same as cookie clicker?
I watched a playthrough of the expansion and it was a bit more forgettable than Quake 4 itself. It didn't do much of anything new that the main game didn't.
Loved UT. As a young kid with his dad’s hand-me-down computer without internet, the assault mode with the bots was super cool. That intro as well! It was like a movie!
It always annoyed me that the headshot and multikill sound mod in CS:S was called “quake sounds” when clearly it was from UT!
At least in Germany, at the time when Quake 4 was released, basically everybody who was slightly interested in gaming topics (independent from whether one loved or hated this game) knew about it because of the huge outrage that the German version of Quake 4 was so censored:
Halfway through the game there's literally a pivotal plot point that entirely hinges on a particularly gruesome event immersively experienced in first person.
Not to mention the various details in the environment that are incredibly repulsive but are a key part of the unspoken lore, ambiance, and general plot.
The game artistically and thematically entirely falls flat without the reviling experience of the Strogg that is witnessed at every corner.
> Halfway through the game there's literally a pivotal plot point that entirely hinges on a particularly gruesome event immersively experienced in first person.
I have never played Quake 4, but if you are talking about the "stroggification" cutscene: according to (*), this scene was simply removed. In (**), this particular topic is handled at 7:49.
Players at the time indeed complained that because of this change, quite a lot of things in the story did make much less sense.
My memory of quake 4 was me and my friends were excited because it was one of the first PC games to have a DVD release instead of a bunch of CDs. This felt revolutionary at the time.
Far Cry came out when I was 13 and my dad bought it. We played FPSs together back then. I got the fun of installing it (and reading the manual that was cool back then). Imagine my confusion when the CD drive wouldn’t play a disk?! And why was there only one disk?
I think a cool middle-ground for the future could be that AI-based modding becomes a first-class service provided by game companies. That way, they could reasonably own the IP of mods (especially if they provided the AI services), and it'd sort of end-run around like, "oh but you just copy the game or make the game" but instead, the fundamentals are there, the platform is there, etc. Make it easy for customers to play their mods with friends, etc.
I don’t understand why this isn’t more common including long before AI. As in, why don’t game companies make source code available to modders and take a cut of sales? Even if mods sell for a fraction the price of the main game, some are bound to take off, so for the game studio it’s like being given 1000 lottery tickets where a handful are bound to win, and at no cost.
Most modding communities see it as a creative hobby, something that they do for the love of the games and communities. Paid mods are generally not something they're very receptive to. These communities are mostly people who are into retro or indie games and reject modern gaming's various monetization methods.
Leaked source code,flame wars, toxic fanbase making shitstorm why work with this modder but not that one, same idea as secret internal plans .. and unclear legal situation in general with hiring people om the other side of the world is what come to my mind why this is not happening more often. But it does happen sometimes, usually the modders get a individual offer from the company.
That's like saying my house was framed by a hammer instead of a carpenter. AI is a just a tool with no agency. The people wielding the tool finished this expansion, just as the title says.
AI is fundamentally different to other tools because it directs itself for the most part (i.e. has agency) - the user typically only provides direction, that too usually vague direction. It's like calling a vending machine a tool for producing soda.
Less like a carpenter using a hammer and more like a Sorcerer's Apprentice using brooms. Your give them instructions, and they mostly take it from there. Hopefully your understanding of those instructions aligns with theirs, and hopefully when it starts to diverge you'll know how to course correct.
To be honest, you make a good point. The problem is generally that AI erases many of the tells of a quality work, because even bad works tend to carry the exact same level of language. When I see that the entire description was AI-generated, I wonder how many of these points were actually inspected by a real person or just hallucinated by the model. Surely there is some quality to it, but I feel like I would need more qualifiers than "finished" to know if it's worth trying, you know?
It's not exactly analogous to a hammer, even though I agree that it is a tool. If a carpenter got the framing all wrong, the hammer wouldn't fix it. If a prompter got the instructions all wrong, or didn't supervise enough, or didn't verify enough, the AI still makes something that appears to pass initial muster.
That's a good point about the carpenter getting the framing wrong. If that happened, it would be caught during the required inspection (by someone else), and the construction would be halted until it was fixed.
The issue with using AI as a tool to build software is that the inspection step is not required. I'm not sure an AI-generated description is a sign of bad inspection processes. I think maybe in the case of a game mod, the description is not as important as it would be for some software that someone is selling.
I guess my point is that quality can't be assessed merely by whether something was built with AI. A trustworthy team will have carried out inspections along the way. The question is how can we know that?
Oh, I wasn't saying AI made the quality bad! I was just saying the title inspires some confidence that AI could bring into question. ("Modders" are typically quite dedicated and passionate, so if it were a fully organic effort, you'd know it'd be good!) Of course, you can always just audit the code yourself to establish whatever you might need, I never meant to imply otherwise! I just think it's better to know about the use of AI when it happens.
The project is quite transparent about it, saying it was "proudly vibecoded". The entire "not sure what was hallucinated" narrative seems stuck in 2025.
Some friends of mine play old games that are on community life support with official servers having been shutdown years ago. I sometimes support them when they have some tech issues and whenever I stumble upon documentation of these projects being spread over forums and vintage 2010 era gaming portal websites I'm glad that we have AI now.
> The project is quite transparent about it, saying it was "proudly vibecoded".
Oh, I didn't spot that in the submission, is it behind links? I read a few paragraphs of the description and left because it didn't seem organic. My bad.
> whenever I stumble upon documentation of these projects being spread over forums and vintage 2010 era gaming portal websites I'm glad that we have AI now.
I love AI! The submission title just gave me hopes and the non-organic feel was a bit of a bummer. But nothing against the project itself.
> even bad works tend to carry the exact same level of language
Maybe this is one of the better times to encourage "literate programming" all over again?
If the majority of the source is detailed prose comments instead of "code", you would be able to tell. I think you're correct that this is an information problem (like the law of small numbers).
I strongly believe that if a new project is interesting enough for someone to be reading the source of a literate codebase, the prose that goes with it will be distinct enough that the first publisher would necessarily have to be human.
I have the neurodivergence or mental illness that makes me overexplain everything :D
(Technically not "makes", but I always feel like it's better for both sides to understand each other more completely in order to have a more fruitful debate)
Quake 4 was decent. It's the Doom 3 engine in the Quake 2 universe.
I've replayed Quake 1 and Quake 2 dozens of times but I'll never play Quake 4 again.
For me it's the opposite. I played Q4 first, easily played it 5 times since then. I played Q1 later and have have had multiple replays.
Q2 is the only one where I don't get the hype. Sure, it's an interesting window into what games can become when the narrative guides the player rather than "find the exist button and kill everything in your path". But by Q2 too many important faces of id have left and I feel it way too much. No Sandy, no Romero... it just feels stale and generic.
I like Q1 the most. I played Q1 the first time around 2010 or so, after playing Q4. So it is not rose tinted glasses. Just Q1 is a lot of fun! Quake 4 is good, but I think I never finished it. While Q1 is something I now install on all my PCs just for a little fun when I want. The enemy and level design is simply good. And there is tons of content online.
Yeah agreed - I played Quake 4 in... I don't even remember 2007 or 2008 maybe. It was fine but don't feel the need to revisit it. I've played Quake 2 a couple of times though and would happily go again.
I remember pirating Quake, got it in August before the Nov launch (gotta love early 0-day releases) and playing the hell out of it. Played so many mods and the early machinima mods. By the time Quake 2 came out I had money to buy the game and did so, great game. I setup my first Ethernet network between two machines and the first thing I did was call a few friends over for 1v1 Quake 2 matches. I can still remember my friend Jose killing me in that lava room trap and the laughs had. I wasnt a big twitch gamer but my brother and I did a little bit of Q3A DM but it wasn't my thing; I prefer a story and casual game play.
I remember buying Quake 4 but I don't remember playing it. Tells you a lot right there.
It wasn't a good game though. I tried it a few years ago and it felt very sluggish. Definitely not some classic worth playing now.
I actually love Q4 as it packs so much into the game. I guess it’s a love or hate game.
But I’ll need to play the expansion first.
> I actually love Q4 as it packs so much into the game. I guess it’s a love or hate game.
I guess it is, and if we're being honest I'm a certified hater.
I played all of the Quake games online, a lot, at their corresponding time of initial release. First on software, then accelerated on 3dfx Voodoo cards, then later on NVIDIA RIVA TNT and the original GeForce cards (to tie this into some of today's other big news).
I played untold hours of multiplayer online netQuake, Quake II and Quake III Arena and have my own semi-controversial opinion that Quake II was actually the best of them all (most people tend to either prefer the original, or III). But you may be the first person I've ever encountered online or IRL who has professed love for Quake 4. (I'm sure there are others out there, I just haven't run into them).
I barely played any of them in single player, to be fair, so that could very well be a factor in the difference of opinion(?).
Yeah I think that's the whole difference.
For single-player, Quake 4 felt more related to Doom 3 and the later Doom remakes. A more modern, atmospheric, FPS dungeon crawler.
For me, Quake 3 was the end of my appreciation for Id games, since I am only interested in single-player and it didn't even try to offer that. I am drawn to the immersive FPS environment, but I have no competitive urge nor enjoyment from having random participants disrupting the experience.
Online games are too fast to let the atmosphere sink in. Playing the new Quake anniversary levels and they are a real treat. I hope to do the brutalist game jam levels next.
Q4 is actually by Raven Software using the Doom 3 engine, id tech 4. Raven also did Heretic and Hexen.
Basically id had Raven do a more single player focussed Quake game.
Yeah I get that. I also came from the Quake I era but I rarely played multiplayer games. I get why many Quake players dislike Q4 because it has little to do with the original Quake games gameplay-wise. Quake 2 is of the same universe but the style is different.
I tend to treat Q4 as a good FPS and that’s it. It is a polished game with a lot of contents so I love it. Quake I is still my fav FPS but Quake 4 is a good game as well.
I also love DOOM 3 for a similar reason —- completely different from the other DOOMs including DOOM 4 but still a fun game. I guess I prefer slower pace when I grow into my 40s…
That said, I still haven’t played my dream game —- a first person RPG —- something similar to Hexen/Skyrim but with richer contexts. Something like a first person D&D game.
The late Q2 era and Q3A/Q3TA era were amazing.
Q2 was a great vehicle for various mods (both offline and online).
I remember really enjoying the single-player campaign for Quake 4 at the time, but I don't know how well it holds up. I still have the discs in the original retail packaging, tucked away in a closet somewhere.
"finished" is a bit misleading, I'll try and explain.
Long time Quaker. I was quite involved in Q4 Multiplayer (in fact, I adapted and rebuilt a Quakeworld map for Q4MP a year ago "for fun", and got to see what the idtech4 modders have been up to). Every now and then, I replay the SP campaign and every time, I am reminded of why I forget so much of it. The expansion, despite some interesting twists, was shaping up to be very much the same, and you can see why it was canned. Some of its completed parts were rolled into Q4MP when id Software had taken over maintenance from Raven
I played the Ritual expansion as-is when it was leaked a few months ago. Impressions:
- First couple levels had gone through enough art passes to be about as good-looking, if not better in places, than Raven's. As an aside, from the levels and the new creatures/weapons, you can definitely tell Ritual had the chops to pull it off. There were some awkward sections to navigate (cramped corridors where the marines would just block you), probably little playtesting had occurred - makes you wonder when they consider a level works well enough that you can art it up, because building levels in this engine for hardware of that era is somewhat tricky.
- Level quality then progressively degrades to what you expect from alpha. Not necessarily wholesale, but maybe a quite fleshed-out section is poorly connected to the next set piece, encounters are weird all over, etc.
- You acquire powerful weapons and upgrades way too quickly, including the new ones - I assume this was made to be able to get a feel for the whole thing quicker, before playtesting and balancing passes. You even get the new guns, one of which (I can't remember) was essentially a different look of a gun you already have, with different ammo (no wonder I forgot what it was). This is something I also remember from Q1/Q2 expansions: you could totally do without some of the new guns. You're just happy you get a "spare" of something else for bullet-sponge enemies.
- In this game, you remain a regular marine. You don't get the base HP, stamina and running speed enhancements from being stroggified (they couldn't have pulled this twice, understandably). So to veteran Quakers, this would have felt even more Call-of-Duty-Quake than retail Q4 already did.
- Retail Q4 had some quite tedious vehicle sections. There is still some of that in the expansion (good and bad), but Ritual tried some interesting twists, and some of these sections actually could have been an improvement over Q4's. Unfortunately, this is particularly sensitive to pacing IMHO and the alpha suffers from pacing problems everywhere.
- Placeholder content everywhere, including in the more complete sections: barren cutscenes to try and get some time allocations here and there, temporary voiceover/animations or none at all (you wouldn't burn too much money on mocap at this point).
One of the vehicle sections, you're a gunner on a ship. Every now and then you have to get out of the turret and perform some task in the back. The task, in alpha state, is essentially click a GUI and go back to gunning down infinite enemies, and you're not sure how your ship is still going somehow.
- New monsters and bosses - except they're super buggy. Interestingly enough, some of the jank carries to enemies already existing in the Retail game: either they made it worse in code, or missed some supporting level design elements, or started working off an incomplete pre-release Q4, and this is prior to them merging in some of the fixes Raven would have made.
- You start getting some new enemies early, but since you also have access to too much firepower, you barely notice they're supposed to be tough. You can still get near one-shot by some basic troopers thanks to the wonders of Alpha Jank TM, though. There's one miniboss encounter where the door opens right on him, and you can get insta-killed at range because you turned left instead of right trying to get cover in the maze of boxes facing his closet. If you turn the other way, you can just trivially cheese him behind a pillar (except when the collision is bad, and you get insta-killed anyway).
- Another thing from Retail this suffers from is, your cohorts seem invincible and their rifles are better. So, no need to bust your ass: you can just let them work (when they don't block you). Except since this is alpha, sometimes they die in weird ways (maybe the game designers were trying to make them more important?), but the game doesn't care (yet), and you can continue with events that would depend on them being triggered :)
- Final level was so janky in all of the ways I just had to go through it with /noclip and /god to see the end.
Some of these problems can be addressed in code, and going by the moddb page, it seems this is what has happened in this fixup release of that vibe-coded Q4 source port, quoting:
> Where the alpha's own code or content stopped something working as designed, openQ4 fixes it.
Back in the day, people weren't afraid to use the SDK to modify game behaviour you couldn't alter by just changing interpreted scripts. It was the most accessible, you already knew how to program. This somehow got lost, so recent "mods" largely remain at a basic "I changed this gun, altered a monster". It is now possible to vibecode yourself out of this, and thus we get a more playable alpha. But it is by no means _finished_.
You could probably generate some better-than-placeholder voiceovers and music with AI now.
The big problem before you can call this anywhere _finished_ was, and remains everything else pertaining to content:
- You need to take editorial, game-design decisions and run balancing and pacing passes on the entire product.
- You will need to get some good animators to invent what is barely there in the alpha expansion.
- You will need to complete some of the new models, etc.
Textures and modeling were a generational upgrade in tech4, leading to the foundations of the current art pipeline (high-poly -> low-poly+normal maps, diffuse, specular). You barely saw any of this at the amateur level, and when you did it often wasn't pretty. Nowadays, hobbyists have caught up, and i.e. in the D3 modding scene, they endlessly remaster the existing models.
- You will need to run design and art-passes over most of the levels.
Levels were tricky due to the tools and increased difficulty of texture making from reasons above. They started using more static 3D models, so you needed to level-up there too. Back then, it was comparably easier to make new levels, and you'd try to reuse stock assets as much as possible. You probably didn't understand how the lighting model worked and suffered performance and/or visual issues, assuming the 60fps cap and hardware upgrades would sort you out. That part has not changed.
Nowadays, the level editing tools have changed the least. No Trenchbroom for you, and vomiting meshes out of Blender only takes you so far. It has remained the most tedious part IMHO. Unsurprisingly, the tech4 diehards have output very, very few new levels, and at comparably low levels of quality. This is unfortunately a very, very visible aspect of this alpha.
My fork of DarkRadiant focuses on experimental editing, including editing in the 3D view like in TrenchBroom, as well as mouse wheel extruding (Cube-like), procedural tools, wall/floor tooling, etc. It also fixes all issues with Q4 and Prey. You should check it out:
https://github.com/klaussilveira/hellforge
I've been maintaining and adding new features to DarkRadiant as well, which aims to be more stable than HF and less experimental. NetRadiant-custom (https://github.com/Garux/netradiant-custom) also supports id tech 4 to some extent, and WifeRadiant (https://github.com/erysdren/WifeRadiant) aims to improve that support soon.
Plenty of tools!
The Quake 3 demo was one of my favorite games I wasn't allowed to play as a teenager. Loved blowing people up with a rocket launcher and laser beaming with a railgun. I have no qualms about whether AI finished this, just enjoying the fact that nostalgia can be invoked more easily and cheaply than ever before.
On a similar note World of Warcraft just launched "WoW Forever", a nostalgic throwback to vanilla WoW. Millions of people tried to play on the first day and for the first time ever during a major launch of WoW, everything went smoothly and players were able to log in and play without lagging out. Normally it took a few days after launch for servers to catch up to demand and allow people to actually play the game without lag or disconnections. I'm confident that AI played a major role in allowing Blizzard's team to navigate a WoW launch successfully for the first time.
It seems weird to attribute WoW's launch success to AI and not to the 20+ years of experience the industry has with modern online game architecture. When it launched in 2004 the state of MMO games was very different and a lot of those choices are hard to undo on an actively played game. I imagine AI was used but I doubt it had any great architectural insight that the experts at Blizzard didn't.
My belief that AI may have helped Blizzard plan, set up and smoothly launch WoW Forever is inferred and based on the poor quality of their other recent launches. WoW Classic released in 2019 and was a laggy mess for the first few days. Blizzard recently said WoW Forever is their biggest launch in history for peak concurrent players, bigger than Classic or any expansion they've released including Burning Crusade and WotLK.
Blizzard has long been derided for its poor performance when handling massive player events, showing worse performance in that regard than large private servers such as Nostalrius.
The biggest technological advancement in the past couple years that could help explain their sudden and dramatic improvement is AI, in my opinion. I think it's fantastic if AI is indeed a large part of the reason for their rapid improvement.
I'm struggling to be honest; on the one side Blizzard has 20+ years of experience with large scale launches and nowadays access to all the servers and compute they could need as long as they pull out a credit card (this goes for all large scale projects really). This has been a thing for... actually AWS is coming up on having been a thing for 20 years now. In theory, scaling and day 1 launches and peak load have been a problem that has been looked at and solved for 20 years now.
I don't, therefore, really understand why AI would have made such a big difference this time compared to the launch of Classic. But I can only dream of projects and launches of such a scale.
I'm perplexed why you just apply the learnings that a company like AWS has gotten to a company that has up until recently clearly been struggling with scale.
That some company has solved something doesn't mean another company can just use it. You can't just "from aws import scale" at the top of your fresh new project and be fine with millions of concurrent users.
Wow Classic was fine except for the queue. Any limitations were arbitrary to fit into the no changes mentality that the community had (e.g. queues etc due to limited layers and servers.)
So it could be anything and everything since you are no insider but you choose one specific reason.
Lets agree to disagree, happy to attribute llm wins where respect is earned but not more, to balance out various horror stories
It's dangerous to fabricate connections between dots - between a cause you happen to know and an outcome you see. It really is buying into preconceived notions and prejudices, because lacking evidence there is no way to test it. It's the opposite of science (and law and any other serious rational field) which requires objective evidence, specifically to cut through our subjective perceptions.
you REALLY want AI to be the linchpin here.
Instant Quake 3 nostalgia here: https://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/ (actually predates AI)
Someone (you?) linked this here and I ended up buying Q3A and running it through ioquake. Quite a blast, even with just bots.
Not nostalgia for me, I play Quake 3 about 15 times a week with a group of people, it's still awesome fun. We're all so good at it, it's genuinely a difficult competition every time. After 15 years we still get in ridiculous/interesting situations in the same maps all the time.
Same here. My BFF and I have played Q3 on and off since it was released. But we've clocked more hours in the past couple years than in the previous ten.
Even after all this time we have a blast and sometimes situations erupt into huge bouts of laughter. I'll never not think that an errant rocket splash knocking him off the map is hilarious.
same here thanks to fpsclassico theres still a vibrant community
There are some gameplay issues with the WoW Layering tech (Layering is World of Warcraft's name for where you there are multiple shards for the same zone, and players may transfer between each layer as it balances. So instead of different servers, everyone is on one "server", and each zone is sharded to accomadate large populations). But the layering and single realm tech is just really well done. It scales to huge populations seamlessly. There is some polishing on zone boundaries and pvp, but the tech was pulled off without a hitch for a massive launch, millions of concurrent players.
This is the type of change I am referring to when inferring that AI may have helped develop the changes that enabled such a massive improvement over previous launch events.
I am not a Blizzard employee and don't have insider information. I'm just impressed with their improvements and hopeful it was at least partially enabled by their use of AI to help ideate, design and implement.
I don't think there is any evidence AI has helped them do this. They almost assuredly used AI, sure. But this seems like its the result of investing in their platform team and infrastructure over many years.
They've had layering for a decade.
> I have no qualms about whether AI finished this, just enjoying the fact that nostalgia can be invoked more easily and cheaply than ever before.
Maybe making nostalgic experiences available so cheaply is not a good thing. For me seeing mods and reimaginings of old games is interesting because people puts lots of effort into them with attention to detail and their own ideas. Someone recreating Half-Life 1 with modern graphics using AI is not going to create something as cool as Black Mesa, for instance, which didn't attempt to make a 1 to 1 recreation but to improve things and make it fit with more modern graphics.
LLMs can also greatly streamline this process as well. For a silly gameplay example, if you wanted to enable double jumping in Quake you could do it in a few minutes and a single prompt instead of what would have previously been the start of a pretty significant dive into the code.
Basically I think what we're seeing is that LLMs make everything easy, and so the standard for success is going to increase somewhat significantly simply because there are no longer any barriers whatsoever to doing things.
> Quake 3 demo was one of my favorite games I wasn't allowed to play as a teenager.
yea that opening Quake 4 sequence came a little too early for me D:
>The Quake 3 demo was one of my favorite games I wasn't allowed to play as a teenager. Loved blowing people up with a rocket launcher and laser beaming with a railgun. I have no qualms about whether AI finished this, just enjoying the fact that nostalgia can be invoked more easily and cheaply than ever before.
My first IT job (when I was 12ish) was running a small popup internet cafe in the 90s. Quake 3, probably due to OpenGL was one of the few games I could run on the server, instead of one of the revenue generating PCs. Big Nostalgia.
I've not even played a second of WoW. Is WoW forever worth playing for someone in my shoes?
It really depends on more than that, as someone who's played a ton of WoW at various times of my life I would say that it's the best case scenario for an MMO that can offer something to everyone, if you have the time it's worth trying. The game itself gets about as deep as you could possibly want and the community can be incredible. it is however best enjoyed when you have at least a few hours to dedicate to it a night to put in the work to be a good community member yourself.
You really get what you give with a game like WoW. The rewards are great, some of the best of any video game experience, but they do not come for free. It really REALLY rewards people who are outgoing and engage in the social aspect.
WoW Forever is probably the best version of WoW for someone looking to start now (I personally like classic better and think retail is trash but ymmv and really good community can be found in all flavors of the game), and there's a lot of hype around it right now.
MMOs are awful. Save your money and time.
As someone who has played a lot of WoW, this is a reasonable response.
MMO's are a wonderful social and community experience
But also like all things they're subjective :)
WoW was the only time in my life where I actually went to go meet online people in real life, i.e. we had a massive guild meeting in-person at someone's home back in the day when a WoW raid was 40 people, meaning the guild had like 60-80 members to be able to "staff" those raids multiple times a week.
The commitment was huge tho, yes. Our main tank was there every single raid (my best real life buddy from school) AND he'd farm his own potions during the week for the weekend raids.
Was a blast with sooo many people sleeping in a tiny row house on all levels in their sleeping bags, on like 3 different floors, tiny backyard, awesome BBQ. Looong drive. Back when we'd all have/bring a desktop and a huge monitor and such :)
Wonderful memory and makes me nostalgic. My Vanilla guild never got together like that but it would've been a great time.
It's the last mmo, yes. It can't really be re released again and have such a following. It's maintained in the style of 20 years ago but modernised
There's a lot of new players that never played wow in any iteration, so I would think so.
No. Save your time, the game is pointless, like many other games, and offers really nothing except for those with nostalgia. But if you want to waste a month or two grinding for no reason, go ahead.
Do you like Cookie Clicker? Do you think Cookie Clicker would be more fun if everyone clicking could interact with each other? If so, WoW is for you.
Wat, wow has very little in common with cookie clickers, is your thesis here that games that have a progression system where numbers get bigger are the same as cookie clicker?
Is there any video footage of it done? A graphic alone as a preview...
379 downloads at this time...
I watched a playthrough of the expansion and it was a bit more forgettable than Quake 4 itself. It didn't do much of anything new that the main game didn't.
Quake never really did it for me but Unreal Tournament... oh yeah.
Loved UT. As a young kid with his dad’s hand-me-down computer without internet, the assault mode with the bots was super cool. That intro as well! It was like a movie!
It always annoyed me that the headshot and multikill sound mod in CS:S was called “quake sounds” when clearly it was from UT!
When Quake came out in 1996 there was absolutely nothing else like it.
Ever played Xonotic?
https://www.oldunreal.com/ You probably know this already, but just in case. ;)
Wut
They said OH, YEAH!
Anyway, the Male audio pack says: "Oh, yeah!"
immediately followed by: “I just slaughtered that guy!".
Nice job Claude
Who knew there was a Quake 4?
At least in Germany, at the time when Quake 4 was released, basically everybody who was slightly interested in gaming topics (independent from whether one loved or hated this game) knew about it because of the huge outrage that the German version of Quake 4 was so censored:
> https://censorship.fandom.com/wiki/Quake_4
> https://www.reddit.com/r/quake/comments/1namarb/quake_4_on_s...
How does that even compute.
Halfway through the game there's literally a pivotal plot point that entirely hinges on a particularly gruesome event immersively experienced in first person.
Not to mention the various details in the environment that are incredibly repulsive but are a key part of the unspoken lore, ambiance, and general plot.
The game artistically and thematically entirely falls flat without the reviling experience of the Strogg that is witnessed at every corner.
> Halfway through the game there's literally a pivotal plot point that entirely hinges on a particularly gruesome event immersively experienced in first person.
Under
> https://web.archive.org/web/20121227232433/https://www.schni... (*)
you can find screenshots of the changes. A video about this topic can be found at
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru5RHmxFIYw (**)
--
I have never played Quake 4, but if you are talking about the "stroggification" cutscene: according to (*), this scene was simply removed. In (**), this particular topic is handled at 7:49.
Players at the time indeed complained that because of this change, quite a lot of things in the story did make much less sense.
It wasn't a real mainline Quake game by id, they got Raven to do it. Also it was single player focussed.
So there wasn't the same level of hype.
My memory of quake 4 was me and my friends were excited because it was one of the first PC games to have a DVD release instead of a bunch of CDs. This felt revolutionary at the time.
Oof. That’s brought back a memory for me.
Far Cry came out when I was 13 and my dad bought it. We played FPSs together back then. I got the fun of installing it (and reading the manual that was cool back then). Imagine my confusion when the CD drive wouldn’t play a disk?! And why was there only one disk?
There was a QuakeLive too, playable in a browser, but it was discontinued.
It is still available on Steam, just not the browser interface.
The browser piece is gone, but it's still alive, and it gets played at LAN parties to this day.
I think a cool middle-ground for the future could be that AI-based modding becomes a first-class service provided by game companies. That way, they could reasonably own the IP of mods (especially if they provided the AI services), and it'd sort of end-run around like, "oh but you just copy the game or make the game" but instead, the fundamentals are there, the platform is there, etc. Make it easy for customers to play their mods with friends, etc.
I don’t understand why this isn’t more common including long before AI. As in, why don’t game companies make source code available to modders and take a cut of sales? Even if mods sell for a fraction the price of the main game, some are bound to take off, so for the game studio it’s like being given 1000 lottery tickets where a handful are bound to win, and at no cost.
A few things:
- Splitting your community is a concern. The classic example is multiplayer DLC: if not everyone can access it then it will risk low adoption.
- Presales and first week sales are hugely important to financing projects. Not many games achieve a long tail.
- Developers are expensive. Paying a team of artists and designers and programmers demands that they generate enough revenue to make it worthwhile.
AI opens this door because:
- Its capacity to be constrained fits neatly into mod frameworks.
- It's incredibly cheap to operate, compared to the human team.
- Users are comfortable with its SaaS model and so won't be deterred by a subscription model.
Most modding communities see it as a creative hobby, something that they do for the love of the games and communities. Paid mods are generally not something they're very receptive to. These communities are mostly people who are into retro or indie games and reject modern gaming's various monetization methods.
There are exceptions of course.
"and at no cost"
Leaked source code,flame wars, toxic fanbase making shitstorm why work with this modder but not that one, same idea as secret internal plans .. and unclear legal situation in general with hiring people om the other side of the world is what come to my mind why this is not happening more often. But it does happen sometimes, usually the modders get a individual offer from the company.
"Play the original campaign"
!remindme 74 years.
https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMw_f6980a4a-d6af-4ec9-ad4f-b1...
Nice move
This feels wrong... like releasing post-humous musical albums the original artist never finished or intended to finish.
I would love to have more pink Floyd with as good style and quality of what I like from that band
But Michael Jackson - California got us this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp4_7T9J6Fg
are... you arguing for, or against his comment with yours?
Finished by AI
That's like saying my house was framed by a hammer instead of a carpenter. AI is a just a tool with no agency. The people wielding the tool finished this expansion, just as the title says.
AI is fundamentally different to other tools because it directs itself for the most part (i.e. has agency) - the user typically only provides direction, that too usually vague direction. It's like calling a vending machine a tool for producing soda.
These models CAN direct themselves - in the same way a circular saw can.
There is no agency in the model.
The humans committing the code are still responsible - through and through.
Use the saw correctly.
Less like a carpenter using a hammer and more like a Sorcerer's Apprentice using brooms. Your give them instructions, and they mostly take it from there. Hopefully your understanding of those instructions aligns with theirs, and hopefully when it starts to diverge you'll know how to course correct.
Hat der alte Hexenmeister
Sich doch einmal wegbegeben!
Und nun sollen seine Geister
Auch nach meinem Willen leben.
Seine Wort’ und Werke
Merkt’ ich und den Brauch,
Und mit Geistesstärke
Tu’ ich Wunder auch.
------------------
I like Goethe's German. In general, German does not feel very song-songy to me, but Goethe wrote some really good and catchy poetry.
No, if you used an LLM to do something you deserve zero credit. You applied no skill, you didn't do anything. Anyone could do the same.
Anyone could do a lot of things! =]
To be honest, you make a good point. The problem is generally that AI erases many of the tells of a quality work, because even bad works tend to carry the exact same level of language. When I see that the entire description was AI-generated, I wonder how many of these points were actually inspected by a real person or just hallucinated by the model. Surely there is some quality to it, but I feel like I would need more qualifiers than "finished" to know if it's worth trying, you know?
It's not exactly analogous to a hammer, even though I agree that it is a tool. If a carpenter got the framing all wrong, the hammer wouldn't fix it. If a prompter got the instructions all wrong, or didn't supervise enough, or didn't verify enough, the AI still makes something that appears to pass initial muster.
That's a good point about the carpenter getting the framing wrong. If that happened, it would be caught during the required inspection (by someone else), and the construction would be halted until it was fixed.
The issue with using AI as a tool to build software is that the inspection step is not required. I'm not sure an AI-generated description is a sign of bad inspection processes. I think maybe in the case of a game mod, the description is not as important as it would be for some software that someone is selling.
I guess my point is that quality can't be assessed merely by whether something was built with AI. A trustworthy team will have carried out inspections along the way. The question is how can we know that?
> The issue with using AI as a tool to build software is that the inspection step is not required. I
Wrong. Lack of inspection is a process issue symptom, not an AI issue symptom.
> the inspection step is not required
Never has been, except in rare instances.
Oh, I wasn't saying AI made the quality bad! I was just saying the title inspires some confidence that AI could bring into question. ("Modders" are typically quite dedicated and passionate, so if it were a fully organic effort, you'd know it'd be good!) Of course, you can always just audit the code yourself to establish whatever you might need, I never meant to imply otherwise! I just think it's better to know about the use of AI when it happens.
I'm confused.
The project is quite transparent about it, saying it was "proudly vibecoded". The entire "not sure what was hallucinated" narrative seems stuck in 2025.
Some friends of mine play old games that are on community life support with official servers having been shutdown years ago. I sometimes support them when they have some tech issues and whenever I stumble upon documentation of these projects being spread over forums and vintage 2010 era gaming portal websites I'm glad that we have AI now.
> The entire "not sure what was hallucinated" narrative seems stuck in 2025.
Nothing has changed in that respect since 2025, despite the many claims to the contrary. LLMs still hallucinate quite regularly.
> The project is quite transparent about it, saying it was "proudly vibecoded".
Oh, I didn't spot that in the submission, is it behind links? I read a few paragraphs of the description and left because it didn't seem organic. My bad.
> whenever I stumble upon documentation of these projects being spread over forums and vintage 2010 era gaming portal websites I'm glad that we have AI now.
I love AI! The submission title just gave me hopes and the non-organic feel was a bit of a bummer. But nothing against the project itself.
> even bad works tend to carry the exact same level of language
Maybe this is one of the better times to encourage "literate programming" all over again?
If the majority of the source is detailed prose comments instead of "code", you would be able to tell. I think you're correct that this is an information problem (like the law of small numbers).
I strongly believe that if a new project is interesting enough for someone to be reading the source of a literate codebase, the prose that goes with it will be distinct enough that the first publisher would necessarily have to be human.
never say sorry. always double down
I have the neurodivergence or mental illness that makes me overexplain everything :D
(Technically not "makes", but I always feel like it's better for both sides to understand each other more completely in order to have a more fruitful debate)
Hmmm that sounds like a rather interesting illness...can you please explain its symptoms in greater detail?
What an unkind thing to comment.
It's also a joke.
Relatively rare autism variant
Ok and?
so what?