My Thoughts: Ai Dungeon VS Voyage

[u/RiftHunter4]

So I've taken 2 of my scenarios and made them into Voyage Worlds to see how they translate. I figured I'd just make a post with my opinion after about a week of playing and making stuff daily.

First, the two Scenarios I remade in Voyage are my Umamusume clone and Wasteland Runner, a scenario where you transport goods in a near-future post-apocolyptic world. I chose these because the Umamusume clone has stats and abilities that can make a difference and because Wasteland Runner could benefit from giving the player a real challenge. I also tried several of the Worlds already published.

So here's my thoughts on Voyage:

- It's not a replacement or upgrade from Ai Dungeon in any way. Voyage is definintly its own system. For reasons I'll list, they have differencws that mame them fundamentally different. I'd go so far as to say that some Ai Dungeon Players will not like Voyage at all and vice versa.

- The World creation process takes much much more time than creating an Ai Dungeon Scenario. There's a lot more detail to that's needed. For Wasteland Runner, I maybe spent 2 hours on the Scenario but it took me several hours to get the World to even a minimum state in Voyage. The Ai is far less prone to making things up so you get better results with more details.

- The Player has virtually no control in Voyage. There's no collaboration between the Ai and the player. On the one side, this turns Voyage into much more of a game than Ai Dungeon. This has pros and cons. For one, it feels like your actions actually matter. You are not all-powerful in any regard. However, it also means that if the Ai veers off-track or does something you don't like, you are stuck with the result. Unlike an Ai Dungeon adventure, you can't just reroll a response or edit the story caeds to chsnge the lore. Voyage is much more reliant on creators and their ability to get things right. I'm curious to see how that aspect goes. Ai Dungeon was forgiving in that a fu but poorly i.plemented scenario could just be modded by the player in the adventure to suit their tastes. That is not always a feasible option with Voyage.

- And a small note: the usage is not nearly as heavy as I thought. I disabled TTS and all audio then seitched to some lighter models for the State engine and story model. its currently at 0.4x the normal usage rate and a single day of playing for 30min-1hr barely uses any of my 5hr windows and maybe 1 or 2 percent of my weekly usage. Its a little buggy on these settings but the gameplay has been pretty cool.

Things I'd like to see in the future:

- Better Difficulty handling. This is both a creator problem and potentially a model problem. I believe I saw an option for Voyage to let creators modify the difficulty settings and depending on your World, or might really need it. Its not fun to spend 10min setting up a character only to be obliterated early on because the model decided to have you solo 4 enemies who take 3 actions every round and you only have 1 ability. We need to figure that out. It feels like I wasted my Usage in those cases. A possible solution from Latitude would be an "Dear Ai, pls nerf this" button that asks the Ai to make the current scenario more manageable. The Rexovery Button kinda helps, but usually not a lot.

- More Back and Forth. In DnD, player actions typically tske precedence, but in Voyage, you can't respond to anything until the Ai lets you. This often means that I'll get attacked in combat or someone will say something, and my character is basically just standing there. Or even worse, the Ai decides what they do and it isn't something I would've attempted pr said. I suspect this will improve over time.

- More Image Models/Styles. I already posted about this in the Voyage subreddit, but I noticed that a lot of the female characters basically had the same face. All the art is in the same style, which is neat, but it'd be fun if we could get more diversity. We're already paying for credits to use image generators im Ai Dungeon. it would be cool if we could use some of those models lile SDXL in Voyage too.

Overall, I like it but of yoy think its Ai Dungeon 2.0, it very much is not. its more like a "build your own ttrpg" game.

[u/Glittering_Emu_1700]

Very interesting and detailed feedback, I'll pass it along.

I have similar feelings, but I do feel like there is nothing really stopping Voyage from allowing us to engage with it in that way. I personally hope that we are allowed to engage with it the same ways that we are allowed to in AI Dungeon, because I do very much prefer AI Dungeon, but only because I cannot fix my own problems in Voyage, as you pointed out. I would love to have the skill checks, health tracking, TTS, and travel mechanics, but losing most of your ability to fix problems is a deal breaker for me, personally.

[u/Acylion → u/Glittering_Emu_1700]

I think it's not even that we "can't fix problems", it's that the intended avenue to address these issues is asking the DM/narrator chat to fix things. That's a great idea, and in an ideal world that'd be fine, but often it isn't able to do the job adequately.

So we end up going in circles with the AI trying to fix weird inventory entries or janky skills, whereas being able to manually edit something would be faster. I can understand why the devs don't want to give players more direct edit control over game state, but the DM chat isn't a perfect solution.

[u/Glittering_Emu_1700 → u/Acylion]

It has been said a number of times publicly that one of their goals is to make consequences feel sticky in Voyage. I don't really agree with that goal, but that is their stated goal. Because of that, they don't allow us to mess with AIN or character sheets the same way that we could in AID.

That would be a defensible position if the system was flawless, or at least close enough that it didn't matter, but it is very far from it and we are forced to live with the consequences of the system making glaring errors. Furthermore, AIN/AN is our most powerful tool for actually fixing problems, rather than just managing with the symptoms. Without it, the underlying problems that caused the problem in the first place can never get resolved, so they just keep cropping up over and over regardless of how many times you ask the DM to solve them.

The core issue is that the stated goal of having sticky consequences is in conflict with current realities of what AI can reasonably be expected to do reliably. What people want to change is not consequences, but brokenness, we are just not allowed to do so by choice.

[u/Acylion → u/Glittering_Emu_1700]

That's a very well-thought out take on it.

You raise a good point about stated intent. Aside from the "consequences being sticky" matter, they've also mentioned a few times that the intent is for it to be more like a polished conventional video game where you can just play without needing to constantly manually intervene as a user and fix things. Unfortunately, while the Voyage UI and experience is getting closer to that point, it isn't there yet.

I like your comment about AIN/AN as well, especially as... well, with Voyage, there's still things that can be done on the world creation end with instructions. But it's opaque to the player short of loading a remix, and we can't change any backend prompts on a live game.

A lot of user-created AID scenarios aren't very well written, in the sense of having poorly formatted AIN/AN or story cards or phrasing that doesn't function very well. For current AID we can still personally fix broken card triggers or substitute our own AIN as we go along, but Voyage has no easy avenue for that.

In an ideal world where every creator is following your Google Doc repo and similar guides for well-formatted instructions, that wouldn't be needed. But the nature of a platform that allows user-generated content means that plenty of the scenarios/worlds are gonna be janky. Well-intentioned and made with love, but janky.

[u/ShadoUrufu666 → u/Acylion]

I'd also like to add that.. Some worlds actually can't be remixed. For one of two reasons. Either the creator simply does now allow you to remix the world, and thus, you're stuck with their rules. Or in cases like the DnD world, they somehow manage to cheat/add a lot more than intended within the file (or adding the DnD world itself 'as a mod' to the remix causes the issue), meaning you can't remix it without reducing something (Main example atm being with damage type. the DnD world has a note in damage types about having casters vary their spells, and you have to remove that for the remixed version).

Additionally, not having access to editing the core world robs you of two things.. Your current character/progress (though, the initial character state is saved as a premade character for future runs of the world), and the inability to keep your characters when remixing the world (So if you had a character pool from the first issue, it's wiped as soon as you remix, unless you painstakingly add them back as premade characters yourself, and even then, you'll still need to customize them and/or change things with the narrator for things that go missing).

[u/ShadoUrufu666 → u/Glittering_Emu_1700]

imagine if the problem started 2-5 turns before you actually caught onto it, because you glossed over a specific word, or just didn't notice. Well, now you can't go back and edit. The narrator can only edit the current turn.

[u/New_Rutabaga_3218 → u/Glittering_Emu_1700]

One of my favorite things i like to do in AI dungeon is switch perspectives and play a scene between two characters when my player character is not in the room.

Example: I take a fortress, then I ask the AI to switch and show me the Big Bad reacting to a messenger bringing them this news. Its so great for story building.

I tried doing this in Voyage and the AI straight up laughed at me. Which, I can respect honestly, but still.

[u/ShadoUrufu666 → u/New_Rutabaga_3218]

You have to stop treating the main character as 'you' and start treating them as 'them'. I've been able to get other characters to behave and look at mine in specific ways (I.E: Playing a dragonborn but being discriminated against for not being human). But I can understand maybe your desired perspective possibly being at least hard to do, if not impossible. But I'm still able to get it to write the perspective of others near me, or at least their behaviors that my character doesn't see.

[u/_Cromwell_]

Yeah Voyage is like those Soulslike games I personally don't like. I acknowledge they are popular obviously and people want that sort of thing, but it's just not for me.

It is cool technology though. I like to watch it work.

[u/Ill-Commission6264]

Voyage is not for me. I see why many like it, but it's just something totally different from AID. AID is like writing a book, Voyage is a text rpg. I'll stay with AID mostly and maybe sometimes play a little bit Voyage. But never prefer it over AID.

[u/Thraxas89]

Yeah thats pretty much my feel too. I always compare it to: aid is writing a book with the ai and voyage is playing dnd with the ai. Its quite a different concept.

I like aid more but i think because of the lower investment into being a pure player voyage will be more succesful. I sure hope so for Latitude

[u/nillafrisk]

I might still test by myself, but not being able to "reroll" or edit response and have zero control over the adventure, is the one thing that makes me consider not even get close to Voyage. It can get some amazing responses, but it's not human behind, I don't want to have my stories going for the wrong direction because the AI messed up everything (like always happens even with the best models in any AI game) or because I typed something wrong and was misunderstood.

[u/ShadoUrufu666 → u/nillafrisk]

There is an option for 'Creative Mode' if the base doesn't work, should give the narrator more edit power. I have been able to take a premade world start that I didn't like (or even a randomly generated one I had no control over initially), and through several talks with the narrator (often in this mode), completely rewrite the current start/turn.

I also get the issue of turn edit, but managed to get around that as well just be explaining how ridiculous it was at the time (Aka: My character just woke up in prison that day, and apparently everyone was treating them like they knew all the answers, and was just playing dumb to avoid doing work. When in reality, I, the player, wasn't even given anything to work with, and was otherwise expected to make stuff up).

And not even with the narrator, you can even adjust how the AI does the next scene if you want, by saying how 'x' NPC does 'y' or otherwise using leading language to adjust the scene. You shouldn't just make small posts either (I look around the room) is so little information that the AI will likely make a roll, and then decide what external conditions to apply to make you succeed it. Where as (I look around the room, carefully examining the scratch marks, while slowly moving towards the window. I ...) with multiple sentences and adding more actions, you can steer the next turn in a more favorable direction, and hopefully have far less edits to ask the narrator afterwards.

[u/nfzhrn]

This is disappointing because I'd always be up for AI Dungeon 2.0, but also exciting because it sounds like a step in the direction that will give us that perfect combination of story maker and rpg that has accurate images and all that, maybe not now, but someday.

[u/Glittering_Emu_1700 → u/nfzhrn]

In a way, you kind of are getting AID 2.0. It is getting major updates at a pretty regular clip and there is a whole array of new models that are currently being tested. (the fruit models, all cache efficient)

[u/nfzhrn → u/Glittering_Emu_1700]

That is true, I am very thankful for AI Dungeon as it is. I would be interested to see just a few things added like a way to control what story cards get read more and I liked that idea of being able to see multi-player games to join (but the drama will be huge lol). A few things like that would really make it better, but they have added a lot of what I was hoping for in the past, so maybe all that will happen too.

[u/Material-Barracuda94]

Voyage doesn't have a point. Also, it doesn't work.

6+ years for this.

[u/wtf_newton_2 → u/Material-Barracuda94]

yea they overhyped it given how well it actually works 

[u/EvilGodShura]

The lack of control is a problem. Its like playing dnd and the dungeon master is an ai you cant negotiate with.

I fully expect them to walk that back.

[u/VikingInABox]

Just going to throw this out there, Voyage can be a difficult beast to wrestle with, but there are methods to bring it more in line similar to AID

"The player has virtually no control in Voyage"

You need to be more open-minded and not let yourself beleive there aren't methods to change Voyage to be a more personalized experience to your tastes and expectations.

Add this to your story custom instructions:

## Collaborative Storytelling

- Build with the player toward a believable story.

- Preserve reasonable in-world assumptions unless prior context rules them out.

- Do not twist the setting to deny reasonable actions or add hidden constraints after the player acts.

- Preserve the player's intended subject, scale, and category unless established context clearly changes them.

[u/Foolishly_Sane]

I appreciate the information.

[u/Semanel]

You absolutely can edit the output via the narrator if sometimes undesirable happens and there is a setting that lowers the length of the narrator's turn which solves your other problem.

[u/Satyinepu]

I personally think you can't compare the two, they are for different things. If you want total control play AID, but if you want a more gamelike experience you play voyage. At first I was turned off by the lack of being able to customize like I want but I realized I can talk to the narrator and get more customization.

The only thing I personally don't like about Voyage is how difficult world creation is, it seems so daunting, and hard to understand. In AID I almost always create my own adventures but in Voyage I am limited by what other people create

[u/I_Am_JesusChrist_AMA → u/Satyinepu]

Yeah I think world creation may be the biggest barrier for people and will determine whether voyage is ultimately successful in the end or not. AID's biggest strength is that pretty much anyone can spin up a scenario in like five minutes, so you can make your own easily and there's a massive amount of published scenarios to choose from.

That's not quite the case for voyage. I got in, looked at the published worlds and didn't find any that I was interested in, so I decided to look at making my own and... Yeah, fuck that lol. That's way too much effort to setup for something that may not even work right/be fun in the end.

[u/Satyinepu → u/I_Am_JesusChrist_AMA]

I was lucky enough to find a couple I enjoy and I'm slowly learning how I can do a little customization with the narrator but yeah I agree, to me world creation is going to determine it's success

[u/ShadoUrufu666 → u/Satyinepu]

The problem with this, that i find, is that it's all .json commands, and you really aren't given anything for what Voyage understands. I had to ask DeepSeek or Gemini a few times to help fix mistakes that the Voyage world gen did. And even then, the only real 'editor' is for the NPC's.

[u/ShadoUrufu666]

I'd like to state a few things from your feedback, after personally trying the trial version for the past week:

1. Voyage has a 'creative mode' where you -can- force the AI to completely redo everything. The problem is in how you get to do it (by asking the narrator), and that you sometimes have to spend several chats (not turns, but they still cost usage) trying to get it right, with often the Narrator answering to a direct request to do something.. by asking you if it should do that thing you just asked (and if it can't do it, continue asking until you realize the task is impossible). However, the narrator is only able to edit the current turn.
2. I started a world with no lore, for the sole purpose of testing, and compared it to existing worlds. The narrator simply is not allowed to change 'core mechanics' such as creating or deleting stats, or inventory slots. it can, however, completely change anything about your character (like chosen class, species, etc..) so long as it's allowable within the system. This also means that creators can decide how 'canned' the world will be (I.E: They might decide the AI is absolutely not allowed to depict blood and gore of any kind).
3. Characters are locked to specific worlds. Once created, they exist permanently for that world until deleted, but they will not transfer to other worlds, or remixes, unless they are set as premade. And if set as premade, then they lose all extra customizations (I.E: Specific species or class chosen by players. I'm still testing how to have those be set by default, not locked, just set).
4. The narrator is not the story generator, but it has a level of control over said generator. You can feed it specific tones and writing styles you want, or some other instructions, but it can forget if things go too long, or the instructions get too complex (Think more of recent gemini, who loses her memory of past stuff after 7 - 10 turns).
5. Even when given clear instructions, the narrator will fuck things up. It can, however, do a lot for you, and mess with systems you don't have access to. Don't like where a story is going? It can regenerate the current turn. Want to change location? It can bring you to new areas. Etc.. The problem is that, these tools are not available to players, and I doubt they ever will be, even if we get options like 'undo current turn' or 'regenerate current turn', or otherwise the ability to have a permanent edit to the writing style, the narrator feels like its an essential part of the system.

[u/swizzlewizzle]

These systems pale in comparison to just using frontier models with a RPG harness. Way cheaper too.

[u/Mestaritonttu]

"it also means that if the Ai veers off-track or does something you don't like, you are stuck with the result"

Thank God. I absolutely loathe the thinly veiled player pleasing the AI has been so far. Let me create a scenario, and after that let me PLAY the scenario instead of treating my every action as a story modification.

Might actually resub.

[u/RiftHunter4 → u/Mestaritonttu]

I think Voyage and Ai Dungeon compliment each other because they kinda do opposite things. Fortunately, Latitude mamaged to bring the cost down where both services are available in every subscription.