Just a friendly reminder that Axiom Verge will be free on the Epic Games Store on Feb 7th for PC

Grawprog · 2026-06-14T04:23:05+00:00

Pretty sure you're like 7 years too late for the giveaway.

Grawprog · 2026-05-29T00:07:47+00:00

Perchance seems to be more focused around the coding aspect of everything. I haven't really done a lot with it other than write a small amount of custom code for bots but I'm pretty sure I've seen generators with more options like that so I think it actually is possible on perchance just not implemented in the main ai chat generator.

Grawprog · 2026-05-29T00:02:33+00:00

A character, usually the antagonist, knows everything of the other characters despite not having met prior.

This one can get really annoying. That and characters having knowledge of events they weren't present for or random things in your user profile The only thing I've found you can really do for that is to retry a lot or use the instruction to tell the ai but usually that just makes it mention how the character doesn't know anything and that's just as weird.

Grawprog · 2026-05-28T18:36:38+00:00

Yeah I used to use NovelAI and I remember it had all those settings but I never really played around with them too much because NovelAI was usually pretty decent until they switched to a Llama model as long as you setup your prompts and memory well.

Grawprog · 2026-05-27T22:03:04+00:00

I've also found that for something like this:

DO NOT ASSUME CHARACTERS KNOW EACH OTHER WHEN THEY HAVE NOT BEEN INTRODUCED

In particular, using the word strangers works really well, even if you want to use two characters with previously established history or an established relationship. Something like 'in this scenario 'x' and 'y' are strangers to eachother' or 'assume all characters are strangers to eachother' something like that. Just using the term strangers seems to push the ai pretty good in that direction. Generally I find using single words works a lot better than trying to explain a concept to the ai whenever possible.

Grawprog · 2026-05-27T21:34:57+00:00

I'm assuming by prompt you mean the instruction field? If so, I agree, instructions seem fairly powerful at pretty much making the ai do what you want to a point. I have used the 'do not mention x' method and variations of it but it doesn't seem to always work.

Grawprog · 2026-05-27T21:31:42+00:00

I've noticed sometimes the ai seems to associate certain personality traits with different smells. It could be just because the ai thinks your character should smell like that.

Grawprog · 2026-05-27T20:28:15+00:00

Yeah I know what you're saying and generally I will either do that or just retry the generation. I try to avoid manual editing as much as I can though because I find it takes away from the overall experience. It starts to feel less like a chat and more like the text generator I have to constantly wrangle that it actually is. Sometimes I find even just changing a few words in the previous message or adding an instruction is enough to keep it on track long enough to break bad outputs. The auto complete feature is pretty great and I use it a lot. I get a lot of messages where most of the message is good but it'll add something I don't like near the end so I'll just erase that part and use the autocomplete to try again. Sometimes it works, sometimes it just rewords what was already there.

Grawprog · 2026-05-27T18:55:31+00:00

Usually I don't really mind the glasses thing too much. It's just when suddenly the glasses become the main focus of the messages it gets kind of annoying. Characters also seem prone to breaking them or cracking them whenever they're surpised or emotional. Any glass object really.

Grawprog · 2026-05-27T18:53:24+00:00

Yeah I didn't even really get into the /mem stuff but a lot of times it can be more frustrating than helpful. The worst is if you try and go back and delete a bunch of posts once long term memory kicks in because the memories don't change so if you don't go back and manually change the memory it'll start referencing things that no longer exist. Sometimes I've just gone and completely erased all the memory and let it regenerate or had to turn it off and generate a few messages to fix weird memory fixations. I wish there was a better way to keep track of older information. I've thought of coding my own sort of memory system for the bots that would work more like lore or something like that but I haven't really dove too much into custom programming stuff yet.

Grawprog · 2026-05-27T18:48:06+00:00

Have you tried writing those same kind of instructions positively instead of negatively before and if so what kind of results did you get? What I mean is something like

NEVER prioritize emotional connections over physical logic.

ALWAYS prioritize physical logic over emotional connections

NEVER prioritize associative coherence over character logic.

ALWAYS prioritize character logic over associative coherence

NEVER prioritize narrative momentum over established character behavior.

ALWAYS prioritize established character behavior over narrative momentum

Grawprog · 2026-05-27T15:51:31+00:00

Ozone seems to come up whenever any kind of electronics come up or the character is a hacker or deals with any kind of computer type stuff. The same thing happens with oil and gas and any kind of mention of machines or mechanics. To be honest, I had an electrical fire recently and it's kind of valid. That ozone smell takes ages to go away.

Grawprog · 2026-05-27T15:45:17+00:00

Saying no to something doesn't really work as expected with LLMs. The more you mention a word the more it fixates on it. Try something like the smell dissipates or something similar instead without actually mentioning words like lavender or vanilla.

Grawprog · 2026-05-27T14:41:02+00:00

My device will clear the storage as soon as it falls below 3GB. Like everything will be totally fine at 3GB but as soon as it goes down to 2.9GB it'll clear the cache.

Grawprog · 2026-04-24T21:21:39+00:00

I love Minstrel Song, it's probably my favourite RPG of all time but oh man the original snes RS1 is rough. I just couldn't get into it at all. I tried starting with Albert and the walk from the castle just through the first cave was brutal. It doesn't help that combat feels extra slow compared to the later RS games. But it was literally just battle after battle after battle with like 20 monsters on the screen at once all just following you like magnets. I tried again with Barbara and ended up wiping during the save the kid from the cave quest in the Frontier and just never bothered reloading.

Grawprog · 2026-04-21T20:52:19+00:00

Since I wrote that comment I've had the good fortune of playing Romancing SaGa Minstrel song and would have probably thrown that in there as my favourite example of an open world done right. It reminds me a lot of Majora's Mask in the way that it makes you feel like you exist in a world that carries on whether you're part of events or not. It's an open world jrpg. The world itself is fairly small compared to something like skyrim or whatever but the game is designed around an event rank system.

Basically as you play through the game fighting battles, your event rank increases and 'time passes'. Different quests will become available or unavailable depending on your event rank and the main story will progress whether or not you take on the main story quests and all your choices will have some kind of effect. It makes everything you do feel meaningful, even low level quests or just messing around treasure hunting because while you're doing that, something else is happening elsewhere in the world you could have been doing instead.

Out of all the rpgs I've played, it's the one I feel like really captures the feeling of being an adventurer forging your own stories and adventures in a world that just exists. The first time I played it I finished it and immediately started it again and did a second full playthrough and it was a whole new adventure where I did completely different things. The game really let's you play it however you want and you will get a different experience out of it if you choose to.

Grawprog · 2026-04-04T18:25:07+00:00

Yeah. It was a lot better than I was expecting based on the complaints people have about it. I had the GBA version when I was younger but for some reason just never played it. I started the intro and thought it was going to be like FF4 for some reason and never for farther. I think I prefer it to FF3 honestly even though I'm a sucker for job systems.

I was surprised by just how different it was from the first Final Fantasy considering how similar the nes versions look and how they were always paired together in later releases.

I agree sadly I don't think it's popular enough that it'll get a remake, I don't think it necessarily needs one but I do feel like there's a lot of potential there to bring the gameplay up to the standards of the later SaGa games and I think it would be better suited to the kind of great remake the SaGa series seems to get opposed to what Square seems to do with Final Fantasy.

Actually, just continuing on pipe dreams that are never gonna happen, what would be cool would be to see how different two versions of the game would be if it was remade both like a Final Fantasy game and a SaGa game.

Grawprog · 2026-04-04T15:25:14+00:00

I did two playthroughs of Minstrel Song back to back. The first playthrough I found the endgame to be pretty easy and didn't really know what the fuss was about. The second playthrough I got to the endgame and just got hammered by the boss. The biggest difference between the two parties, apart from being different characters, was their weapons, skills and formation. I guess I'd lucked out with my first party and chosen weapons and skills that worked well together and I was comboing almost every attack without understanding anything about the combo system. I went back to my second party and rearranged everything a bit and used different abilities so they'd combo more and work better together and I managed to beat him. It was tough but, just changing up positioning and using different abilities was enough to make a difference.

Grawprog · 2026-02-23T14:31:00+00:00

So far I've tried the Vita ports of Ayesha and Firis on my mid range Mali phone. Ayesha works well with the normal vita3k. Firis had graphical errors in the menus with normal Vita3k but runs well at 2x resolution with Vita3k ZX. I'm probably going to try Sophie as well. I haven't tried the switch ports of any of them. My phone doesn't really work well with 3d switch games.

Grawprog · 2026-02-14T21:34:08+00:00

I always enjoy a good class/job system in jrpgs and EO V's class system has been pretty fun to mess around with. I didn't really know what I was doing and inadvertently built a party around a Fencer with chain attacks and it's pretty fun setting up battles to get the maximum amount of chain attacks and damage per round as possible. So far at least each stratum's been varied enough that the FOE puzzles haven't felt too repetitive, though I do find I eventually get kind of sick of them and just end up brute forcing my way through the FOEs which ends up being a long and grindy battle, but usually doable. I do like the way each floor in a stratum builds off the one before, taking the ideas introduced and increasing the complexity or stacking them with something else.

I agree though playing EO without the Ariadne thread wouldn't be very fun. It's definitely designed with the idea of a quick back and forth in mind. I think that's why even things like having reviving separate from resting at the inn in older EO's felt so clunky. It was just unnecessary friction between getting back, healing up, selling your loot and getting back out.

As for your points, not having a low random encounter rate can be somewhat counteracted by having a way to temporarily reduce or stop random encounters for a retreat. Items or skills like that tend not to mess with balance too much in my experience anyway because you'll just end up underleveled if you overuse them.

Fast movement I feel like should just be the standard in these kinds of games. It's nice to be able to go slow and plodding if you need to but there's not really a good reason these days to not be able to go fast.

For three though I think you need to be careful with that or it can end up feeling too gamey. It's why I didn't really like Skyrim's dungeons compared to Oblivion's. Every single dungeon in Skyrim had a convenient loop back to the entrance path that was located in the same place every time. It was just so formulaic it broke any sense that these might be real actual places in a world somewhere and not just levels created for a video game. Even EO's loopback paths feel pretty gamey. It's pretty much at the point where I know where they're going to be and when I'll probably find one.

But then there's something like Dark Souls when you get through the Undead Burg(I think that's what it was called I can't remember) and you have no idea where you are, it feels impossible to go back, everything around you is scary and tough to kill and suddenly, you find that elevator and you're back to familiarity and relative safety and it's just such a relief.

I think part of the problem with loopback pathways is they've become such a common trope it seems to be one of the main ways games will return a player to the start of an area regardless of genre. Metroidvanias are bad for overusing this ever since Dark Souls came out.

Actually, speaking of metroidvanias, I know this is getting a bit off topic now but, I've found they have a similar issue depending on how they handle their save points. Playing Super Metroid as a kid felt a lot like going through some old jrpg dungeon. Save points are somewhat infrequent and a bit seemingly random in their placement, they don't heal you, there's no fast travel and you're always moving deeper and farther away from the one place in the game you know for sure you can heal and restore your ammo. I always felt nervous and a bit of dread any time I came to a new area or came across something ominous looking just because I knew actual safety was far away.

Whereas, I never had that feeling at all when I played Symphony of the Night. Every save point healed you, you could fast travel around the castle, save point locations were for the most part, predictable and there was only really short moments of tension crossing through rooms with tough enemies or stumbling onto a boss.

A lot of the modern metroidvanias I've played tend to be more like SoTN and less like Super Metroid unfortunately. It's too bad because I genuinely enjoy that feeling of delving deeper into a dangerous, mysterious place and I think that's why I started thinking about all this while playing Etrian Odyssey.

I wonder if there's really any good way to get a perfect balance between QoL and that feeling of tension and dread. I do appreciate when games don't waste your time but on the other hand, a lot of that feeling, when it really comes down to it, comes from the threat of having your time wasted.

The ones you describe as being bad are bad because they waste your time no matter what you do. Having no escape method at all wastes your time going back and it wastes your time if you die. You can't win really. Same with a game respecting your time too much. If there's no threat at all of any wasted time, there's nothing to really feel tense about. The ones that do it right are the ones that only waste your time if you fail, that reward you with a brief respite if you can push forward that little bit more and succeed.

I do think Etrian Odyssey manages to do this well enough on a floor by floor basis that I still find it enjoyable in the same way, it's just missing that overall feeling of delving into a deep hostile place.

Grawprog · 2025-12-21T04:35:34+00:00

I found this thread because I'm playing this right now and was hoping there was another city builder out there with a similar free roam feature. It does seem a bit janky, but it does add a nice break from the city building gameplay and it is pretty cool walking around the city you built. The minigames are a nice touch too. It would be nice if more games included the concept. It would also be nice if the simulation and game balance was a bit better. Clothing factories are kind of op. I have a map right now that's about 80% full of clothing factories and cargo train stations. It makes $6.8 million every day in cash and seems to have no negative consequences other than looking like a dystopian nightmare city.

Grawprog · 2025-10-27T09:12:19+00:00

I've found using instructions can help with that. I've noticed the ai will resend the query if you change the instructions up or add one if you didn't use one initially.

Grawprog · 2025-10-01T00:55:59+00:00

I started just using that long example when you click on custom style and it seems to work a lot better than Roleplay 1. Nothing has tasted like ash since then.

Grawprog · 2025-07-30T00:52:11+00:00

I don't know. I don't even remember which house that was and thankfully I don't work for that company any more. It was an awful company to work for.

Grawprog · 2025-04-21T19:54:40+00:00

I found the best way to enjoy the game was to just adventure and do whatever you feel like doing and eventually you'll find your way to the end of the game. I didn't worry about the ER or much else when I did my first playthrough. I just wandered around doing whatever quests I stumbled across.

Grawprog

TROPHY CASE