I started AI dungeon only a week ago so this is a fresh review, focusing on it's state as of November 2024. I played it A LOT this week. My first impression is mixed but mainly positive. My first game I created has been the best, and I've struggled to recreate the magic in other games.

I am running (Print Your Own Paradise) a cyberpunk campaign which I have transitioned into a colonial revolution storyline. The flexibility has been INSANELY BETTER than any DND campaign I've played. I have inspired a revolution in my island and united multiple gangs and taken over the governor's mansion and am well on my way to becoming the president of our new nation, it's very exciting and I've gotten away with lots of stuff I could never do in a group TTRPG game.

My personal background is that I am an experienced Dungeons and Dragons dungeon master, I've read lots of DM books and made my own systems and gotten in depth with studying TTRPG game design. AI Dungeon seems to make some very severe game design mistakes (namely, telling what the players what they are thinking and doing / taking away agency from the players) I have seen the memes here about people complaining about the AI saying what they are feeling. I feel that.

I have also had a reoccurring problem in one particular (fantasy druid) game where it keeps on repeating the same 3 or 4 passages over and over. (I'm playing on the $15 a month membership using Mistral Small 8k.) It seems like the algorithm has been contaminated in this particular game. The problem started after I used parenthesis to tell the game I wanted to do a timeskip montage. In my cyberpunk game, the gameplay has been flawless, although I have avoided doing any timeskips. (It makes me sad because the whole game has happened so fast I haven't even had time to get any cyberware installed)

Overall the cybperpunk game has been really great. I do think my DM knowledge helps me a lot. I've learned a few things: It's very important to give emotional and intellectual context to your actions. Don't just say you're opening the door, say you want to open the door in order to see who is on the other side. And don't combine multiple actions into one command, because the game will only render a response to the first command, and then you have to keep hitting continue. And if you hit continue more than 2 or 3 times, the responses start to become VERY UNHINGED.

Also it's up to you to create the genre of the game. If you are in a firefight, you will never ever get hurt if all you do is talk about your character attacking others. You have to have discipline and stop and ask the game if the enemy returned fire, and if any of it hit your team mate. Similarly if you want any character to experience PTSD, you have to ask the game if anyone feels that way after a fight. Once you have introduced these elements to the game, then it will start to bring it up more in subsequent fights.

By routinely asking about certain types of information, it will color your game differently, and it slowly trains the AI on what type of responses you have. This is hard because you have to fulfil the role of the player and also half of the role of the dungeon master.

You have to cultivate the game. Think of each game as a different kind of fruit in a garden. 2 games can start in the same place but end up feeling very differently. In my druid game, I'm a basically omnipotent combo of the Avatar and Rimuru. I spend all day meeting with spirits and talking to them about philosophy. Once I have learned an important lesson from them, they grant me a new power. The game has 0 crunch (numbers and stats) and its entirely based off of vibes. It's great. And it feels very different from my cyberpunk game where I have money and assets and important relationships.

Overall I had very few game breaking bugs. When my free trial ran out and I went to the cheap version of the game, I noticed an immediate quality degradation where it became unplayable. It looked the same on the surface, but it forgot important details and wasn't engaging in the vibe anymore, it was just generic responses. The Mistral Small model has been good enough to keep me surprised.

When you want to be in control, then "take a turn" after every 1 or 2 responses. When you want a new challenge, hit continue 2 or 3 or 4 times. It will bring in a new character or do something else wild to throw you for a loop. You have to do both in order to keep a good flow to the game.

The most important thing is to give detailed prompts and tell it what you are looking for and anticipating, but make sure not to tell the game world what it is doing, just tell it your hopes and then ask questions and give it your actions.

Overall I would say this is a great product. It's scratching the itch I've had from not being able to play DND in person due to scheduling problems. Definitely worth 10 or 15$ for a month to get some stories out of your system.

As far as I know it can't really do classes and stats well. It's all just 100% storytelling. It's up to you to balance the game by deciding how often to ask if you're hurt, and deciding how many times in a row to press 'continue'.

I've only played it like 25 hours so far but I'm already much better than I was. Still, for it to be a really great beginner product, it needs to be more beginner friendly. I'm sure it will be even better in a year.

I tried playing a more detailed game (Isekai RPG) and it did NOT work very well. I made a character who was supposed to get a power up every time he ate something, but any time I tried to eat, my character had a seizure and died. I've had much better luck in my own custom games so far. Oh well.

So to preface this, I've pretty much been gone from AI dungeon for a while. I didn't delete the app or get fed up with anything, I've just been hit with burnout pretty bad. (Ai dungeon isn't at fault, I'm getting burnt out on a lot of things, it might be a "Me thing", if you get what I'm saying.) But I came back to a pretty interesting surprise to See Lat've stepped their game up a bit. The new Artsy style is pretty cool, I dig it. But let's go over them in paragraph format to make what I'm saying easier to get piece by piece.

1. The UI.
   I've seen people saying the new UI is annoying but personally I like it. Everything works as intended for the most part. The only gripes I have are that there's no "Undo to here" function currently, and that Third person prompts are weird and don't seem to work (but that cone ould be something else unrelated.) Having it all on a scrolling bar feels nice and streamlined, And there's easy access to memory, Author's note, Etc.

2. Griffin 2.1(? I think that's the model?) Part of me is cackling internally at those saying Dragon still feels lacking, Because the new griffin model feels nearly God tier. Old griffin would completely Omit things or forget certain aspects unless I beat it over the head Relentlessly with the info (Old griffin was Starbucks-level bad at remembering names, I stg) but this new model Is able to give some nicely in-depth responses, and Actually remembers Things from the Memory tab that I didn't even mention in the story yet, In ways that actually build off my inputs. I've actually gone "shoot man, the Ai put that better than I would've" several times. (If you're reading this, for the love of Azathoth, DON'T TOUCH THIS MODEL...unless absolutely necessary, please? It works exactly how I want it to.)

3. The current filter for regular FTP models is seemingly Not that bad. I don't know if I can recount many false positives. It does feel like it filters a couple more things than the old one that literally just filtered one specific thing (Badly might I add, I've tripped it on purpose and skirted around it before just to see how strict it was, and sometimes the filter completely let it slide without a single darn given.) But this filter currently doesn't feel terrible.

(I will say however that personally I'd rather Private stories have no filter at all and published content is what gets fully moderated. I understand latitude's discomfort wholeheartedly, But I've always Had one Hill and I'm gonna die on it. No matter how morally repulsive it is, I believe You should be allowed to write whatever Degenerate crap you want. Even if it's something that Grosses ME out. Why? Because it's a bunch of fictional text written by a nonjudgmental Text-spewing Robot. No real people or places get harmed and it's just between the Person and the Ai, so I couldn't care less what kind of Freaky Nonsense you want to write. Even if it's Warhammer level bad, You do you, Booboo. It's only when there's actual people involved that I start having an issue. Besides some of the crap I've written makes the Manhunt duology look like Bob the builder in terms of violence. Helps keep my Anger problems in check.)

My only main problem right now is that there's a current bug seemingly on mobile where it freezes on the gray startup background and I have to close out and Re-enter repeatedly before it works fully.

That aside I'm pleasantly surprised. Hopefully this burnout will die because I want to write some stories based on certain Shows I watched recently.

Discussion over, now come call me a Grassless individual in the comments please 😂