alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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Instant Quake 3 nostalgia here: https://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/ (actually predates AI)
> 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.
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.
> 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:
I've not even played a second of WoW. Is WoW forever worth playing for someone in my shoes?
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.