Castle Magus

As seen in my Steam Discovery Queue.

This seems like a potentially interesting idea, but I have enough experience with things like AI Dungeon, NovelAI, Character.AI and the like to know that this is probably a trainwreck in the making. I mean, as long as you care about things like the AI keeping on track and not hallucinating a lot of bullshit, anyway. In any case, the early reviews of the game are indicating it's not going too great, in that regard (and apparently also crashing and stuff).

I wonder how long it'll take for the AI in this to try to porn it up, given that's something like 66.6% of all experiences I've had with AI like that, even the ones that supposedly had filters in place to prevent it. I never wrote a post about it, but Character.AI occasionally went that route as well. It did a better job of steering away from it and would shut things down entirely if it got too explicit, but when it did veer that way of its own accord, it was just way more vague about it than even "SFW mode" AI Dungeon was. And NovelAI just doesn't give a shit, one way or the other, having no filters at all.

With character.ai this time, namely the "Text Adventure Game" module. This time, I managed to refrain from breaking out all the awful Bible quotes, at least.

Basically, I'm just going to come in here all in media res, same as with that AI Dungeon post from a few years ago (because, oddly enough, that came into discussion during this as well). Initial context for the below is that at some point prior to this, I had received a mysterious letter that had a hidden message in it that said "Find me" and was signed by "The Author." That is all. That's all I ever knew about that, and was never given any additional clues, until the below. (And just to note, too, this was a story that started, way back at the very beginning, with me being caught in a giant spiderweb, which is apparently the default prompt for this "Text Adventure Game" module.)

Also, just to note, when you or the AI encircles text with *asterisks*, it gets auto-formatted to italics, but when you copy/paste the AI's stuff from there to somewhere else, like here, it gets reformatted back to *asterisks*, so I had to manually change them all once again back to italics here. (When I copy/pasted my own stuff that had similar *asterisk*-to-italics back here, though, the formatting was stripped out entirely, for whatever reason.) Anyway, my point is that, while I think I got them all, if there are any *asterisks* instead of italics in the below, that'll be why and I just missed it as I was copy/pasting.

So, here's where I'll jump in. (Though, I'll just say, a lot of the stuff before this point was similarly weird, too, e.g. "metanarrative bunk" and all that. Not going to share any of the prior stuff here, though. Sorry.)

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( Huge wall-o-text behind cut )

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And... that's pretty much it. After the religious debate stuff, when things were wrapping up, it started getting a little bit maudlin, which was another part of the reason I felt like I needed to bail for the night. Only once, surprisingly, in this entire thing did the "inappropriate" shitcan censor get triggered and killed that most recent AI response, and as I was reading it, while it "typed it out" before it got deleted, I'm not even sure what the AI said that was different from things it had already said that would've triggered it. *shrug*

I'll just say this much about character.ai, generally speaking. I don't know what model they're using their stuff, but I feel like it is at least as good as AI Dungeon's old-school, pre-fuckup Dragon was, if not even better. I very rarely felt like I had to use the retry/redo functionality here, outside of the occasions where I simply didn't like the way the story was headed and just went all the way back to an earlier point, sort of like what I mentioned above. The nonsensical, non sequitur stuff is almost nonexistent in this one. It's pretty damn good, for the most part.

And the best part of it is that I haven't yet had to pay a dime to use it, at least so far. The only problem I have with it is that the entire UI pretty quickly gets rather laggy the longer a session goes on, but a simple refresh of the browser usually fixes that issue, at least until it crops up again.

I'll definitely try that "Text Adventure Game" module again at some point, though I'm pretty sure this particular story is well and truly finished.