I've tried the game for a few days now. Mainly the sandbox AI role-play. I won't comment on the main game too much because that seems to be still in it's early stages. The characters look really nice though but I was kinda stuck with the poem questions.
Then I tried the sandbox feature using a gemini key and Ellie. It was really impressive to interact with the AI at first and let me tell you, she can get really pissed off if you tell her you don't like the sex with her.
The thing I noticed, even on the first try, is that the IA kept including sentence after sentence lecturing me about the importance of mutual understanding, trust and communication as a basis of a healthy relationship bla bla bla.
While that is probably all true I really don't want to be lectured during gameplay.
So I tried koboldcpp running a local "AI"(LLM) . And if you do that - and you know almost nothing about it, read the help section in game. It really helped me to get started.
From this point on you'll realize that each of these local LLMs can be very different. You really have to dig a little into the matter to get a better understanding. Some have huge hardware requirements and others will run on a mobile phone. Some are very lenient during chat others are very strict. Some like to verbose, others don't. Some are super slow and others very fast.
The point being: You have to find one that runs on your hardware and the chat is to your liking.
It's gets even better when you provide a custom context to the sandbox characters (Patreon only feature).
You can set a little scenario, or give the characters certain traits and the AI tries to incoperate all of it.
But all that depends largely on the chosen LLM. For exmple: You define character X as evil. Depending on the LLM that can mean character X destroys your sandcastle or kill you in your sleep. (exaggerated)
The biggest gripe I have so far is with AI context retention: During gameplay you can meet character A and half an hour later you ask the AI about charakter A and she might know nothing about that character. The longer you play the more context seems to be lost. This is not a fault of the game though. It depends largely on the LLM, the settings, and the underlying hardware that is used.
I'd be curious to know if anyone has tried image generation or speech synthesis/recognition yet.
If the author reads this: Is there a specific way how to structure a custom context?
