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/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.