Yet another Hacker News

Abandoned Quake 4 expansion finished by modders and now playable

96 points klaussilveira 2 hours ago 30 comments

LoganDark 1 hour ago | parent

Finished by AI

stronglikedan 1 hour ago | parent

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.

LoganDark 1 hour ago | parent

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.

fresh_free 1 hour ago | parent

never say sorry. always double down

LoganDark 1 hour ago | parent

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)

sublinear 1 hour ago | parent

> 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.

jasonvorhe 1 hour ago | parent

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.

LoganDark 1 hour ago | parent

> 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.

stronglikedan 1 hour ago | parent

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?

LoganDark 1 hour ago | parent

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.

darkwater 1 hour ago | parent

> 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.

dag100 1 hour ago | parent

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.

mithr 59 minutes ago | parent

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.

esikich 1 hour ago | parent

Ok and?

fosron 44 minutes ago | parent

so what?

lavendermon 1 hour ago | parent

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.

ecshafer 1 hour ago | parent

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.

chrisfosterelli 51 minutes ago | parent

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.

lavendermon 22 minutes ago | parent

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.

imbusy111 1 hour ago | parent

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.

markus_zhang 11 minutes ago | parent

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.

johnnyApplePRNG 1 hour ago | parent

This feels wrong... like releasing post-humous musical albums the original artist never finished or intended to finish.

LoganDark 1 hour ago | parent

But Michael Jackson - California got us this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp4_7T9J6Fg

k12sosse 30 minutes ago | parent

are... you arguing for, or against his comment with yours?

nukanse 15 minutes ago | parent

I would love to have more pink Floyd with as good style and quality of what I like from that band

k4st 1 hour ago | parent

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.

nomilk 1 hour ago | parent

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.

lukan 25 minutes ago | parent

"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.

dleslie 17 minutes ago | parent

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.

tiahura 58 minutes ago | parent

Who knew there was a Quake 4?