Abandoned Quake 4 expansion finished by modders and now playable
moddb.com
moddb.com
I've replayed Quake 1 and Quake 2 dozens of times but I'll never play Quake 4 again.
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 remember buying Quake 4 but I don't remember playing it. Tells you a lot right there.
But yes, Quake 4 feels like another Doom 3 game.
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.
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.
Lets agree to disagree, happy to attribute llm wins where respect is earned but not more, to balance out various horror stories
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.
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.
I think they were saying that tools like AWS -- which provide access to near infinitely scalable infra on demand -- are now commonplace which make scaling greenfield projects much easier than it was 20 years ago.
I don't know about blizzard but a lot of game providers do run on hyperscalers nowadays so I understand what they're getting at.
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.
It's a game that I still have fun playing, and yes, even with the bots. Just a really fun game. Unreal Tournament too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
yea that opening Quake 4 sequence came a little too early for me D:
If you wanna try a MMO, wait until someone makes a decent one again in the next 10-20 years using an llm.
But also like all things they're subjective :)
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 :)
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.
This is a well built "episode" of a few levels built by a one-man team. He even recorded some voice lines. The mod borrows some shader effects from Sikkmod, but actually uses them tastefully.
This is a finished, polished product and IMHO more worthy of your time.
(I was not involved in this, but discovered it a couple years ago and was very pleasantly surprised)
[1] OpenQ4 is not binary compatible with the original game libs
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.
And it's sad that most people fall for the superficial take of "12 new levels" of a nearly-finished expansion, but as you correctly pointed out (in great detail, thank you!), there is nothing once you look beneath the carpet.
As a reminder: This expansion was supposed to bridge the Strogg Quake 2/4 universe with the eldritch Quake 1/3 but what we see in the alpha is a far cry from that. Overall, this looks like an expansive fan expansion with ambitious ideas but struggling with the id tech 4 technology.
I remember the time when id tech 4 was made public and we were hoping for a similar revival of the games built upon it but id tech 4 was an engine that was built on old hardware foundations and tooling that was geared exclusively towards experts to make it work.
Wow, I had no recollection of this. I certainly had no idea whatsoever when playing it! From the alpha, Awakening just seemed like a second take on the same "lone marine saves the day", but happening within hours of the first. Story-wise, it severely undermines the impact of what you do in the main campaign: the Strogg can just spin up another Makron like that? Pff... way to deus ex-machina your parent product.
Maybe that's part of the reason(s) the project was canceled!
If you are curious about the whole premise of the expansion, the following video summarizes it nicely. Or perhaps this is all just speculation, it's difficult to know for absolutely certain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6R99ShYpZU
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!
But in general, these tools are the least evolved. Outside of the Doom, Q1 scene and maybe a couple of related engines, "modern" level designers are just used to throwing models around and counting on engine/hardware to manage culling for them. In the stock Q4 engine, this doesn't scale well, especially not at high fps for competitive multiplayer. I shouldn't need a CPU with a ton of threads and a 4080 to run a map which, in ultra settings, still looks worse than what we were doing 20 years ago (actually, the 4080 barely matters. A 1070 would still be twiddling its thumbs, the bottlenecks are with the CPU). I shouldn't have to kill all light sources and impair shape and depth perception to get good performance, which was the thing in that game.
Anyway, DR dropped support for a number of Q4isms, namely declarations in sub-folders (why the hell would you remove this) and material guides, a form of template with macros added by Raven to simplify common texture definitions. As a result, working on Q4 files in DR has by default some missing items (entities being defined in sub-folders of /def) and missing textures (a bit of this from materials in sub-folders, and lots of .guides). So I had to write a little script to just expand all the materials etc. just so I could open a map and be able to place stuff.
It quickly became apparent that DR was annoying in a number of other ways so I ended up settling on NR-Custom as its complement for refinement and texturing, despite its (at the time) broken handling of grouping/ungrouping in func_groups/statics (losing the origin, awkward texture locking etc)... so I also had to lose the use of layers, which although super useful, are a purely DR construct and require its own file format.
Good things for DR:
- Editing lights and 3D preview are nice.
- Material preview and editor
- Hot-reloading of images, materials, models
Good things for NR-Custom:
- VERY usable texturing tools, somewhat Trenchbroomist; also some of that in the shaping and cutting up of brushes. Great time-saver.
Oh, and I also invite you again to try HellForge. I've fixed most of the issues around Q4 and Prey mapping. They're not stable yet to go into upstream DR, but it's good. Oh, and you can quickly import and re-scale any Q1, Q2 or Q3 map.
With some graphic mods like Sikkmod, Quake 4 and likes also look surprisingly good and there are many neat ideas hidden in these games, along with some breathtaking architecture and overall geometry. Give it a second try, I'd say.
But I’ll need to play the expansion first.
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.
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.
Basically id had Raven do a more single player focussed Quake game.
379 downloads at this time...
It always annoyed me that the headshot and multikill sound mod in CS:S was called “quake sounds” when clearly it was from UT!
Ever played Xonotic?
I probably spent a lot more time in TOSOK [1] on AssaultCube though.
I'd like to be able to play Warsow like I used to as well, but I'm in my 30s now, old and slow, can't react fast enough to hang like that anymore
1. (Team one-shot-one-kill)
Anyway, the Male audio pack says: "Oh, yeah!"
immediately followed by: “I just slaughtered that guy!".
Lately I have been thinking of throwing AI at retrogame rewrites and hacks. It would be fun to see what improvements I could make to old 8 bit games using modern tricks.
So there wasn't the same level of hype.
> https://censorship.fandom.com/wiki/Quake_4
> https://www.reddit.com/r/quake/comments/1namarb/quake_4_on_s...
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.
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.
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?
- 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.
There are exceptions of course.
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.
!remindme 74 years.
https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMw_f6980a4a-d6af-4ec9-ad4f-b1...
There is no agency in the model.
The humans committing the code are still responsible - through and through.
Use the saw correctly.
To create something and to be responsible for it are two correlated notions, but they are not one and the same.
> There is no agency in the model.
Of course there is. Agency is what allows it to be useful. If it had no agency, you would have to ask it to do every step of what it does. Why does asking Claude to "make me a website" work? Because not only does it spit out the HTML, CSS and JS, it also starts trying to test it by starting a local server and so on. Agency is what has made LLMs so useful - the ability to actually execute the bash commands they spit out and react to them. Without tool-use and chain-of-thinking - effectively the two features which allow them to express agency through their reactions - they are truly little more than fancy autocomplete.
> These models CAN direct themselves - in the same way a circular saw can.
This is a hopelessly shallow comparison. You're really comparing an entity that reacts to its own output with what is effectively a blade stuck onto a motor. A circular saw has exactly one job and that is to cut whatever comes in reach of its blade. An LLM given the same inputs and access as a human developer can do their entire job end-to-end. Perhaps the long-term quality won't be as good - but the LLM can definitely do it.
Agency is what has made AI service providers useful.
Just throwing a single model at a task with its own autonomy is exactly what’s been repeatedly highlighted as the largest weakness in LLM output and security.
…because, as a technology, it’s a probabilistic parrot with no agency. Just some artificial agency strapped on - sometimes.
Said another, perhaps simpler way: if you instruct a chatbot “make me a marketing website for a store” (and it’s not great), you’re an asshole. Not the chatbot. Not the industry or FOSS community providing them.
An LLM has exactly one job: autocomplete with the text that it thinks comes next, based on what was input.
Anthropomorphize it all you want - that’s what the models do.
The rest is humans making offerings, humans taking offerings.
I said commit.
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.
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.
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?
Wrong. Lack of inspection is a process issue symptom, not an AI issue symptom.
Never has been, except in rare instances.
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.
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.
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.
Nothing has changed in that respect since 2025, despite the many claims to the contrary. LLMs still hallucinate quite regularly.
(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)