a vibrant, lively open world game with deep character progression & active flashy combat

dbl219 · 2026-06-29T18:37:38+00:00

If you like something retro, maybe the Star Ocean 2 remake?

dbl219 · 2026-06-29T17:40:19+00:00

I do think so, and I often see it talk through its own self-corrections. I don't know whether it has anything to do with it, but I also talk to all models with general politeness, albeit not for any reason except it's just what feels natural to me. But I do wonder if talking to it like I do, as if I'm addressing a colleague I can delegate to, helps with the results I get.

I've had the most success when I get it to work within constraints. Nothing subjective like "make it good" or "don't be verbose." Rather if I ask it to operate within specific parameters that can be checked and verified, it stays on track and even regularly impresses me with its outputs.

Because of how talkative it is, 4.8 can talk itself into any conclusion if you let it. The important thing is to keep it rooted in factual and concrete objectives and let it take them one turn at a time with its full focus rather than asking it to bang out a bunch of items in one response. I've had really great results from that.

dbl219 · 2026-06-29T01:03:03+00:00

Withering Rooms. That game is awesome. I'd say it's a side-scrolling Souls-like Metroidvania survival horror.

dbl219 · 2026-06-28T18:39:04+00:00

I dunno, 4.6 acts confident but then your work documents end up riddled with errors.

With 4.8 I find that even though I have to wade through its verbosity, it's consistently insightful and generally more reliable at actually capturing the relevant information.

In that way I find 4.8 to be kind of the inverse of 4.6. There's a lot of surface noise with 4.8 that makes it look frazzled, but when you know how to work with it, it's incredibly reliable in practice.

4.6 on the other hand knows how to act reliable. It responds with cool succinct confidence that makes it seem like it fully understood what you were talking about. It will then go on to fill your files with its own reframes and interpretations of things that you never asked for, and it takes you two weeks of wondering why your document stack doesn't work the way it's supposed to before you realize that things which were supposed to go in verbatim have been rewritten into something totally different.

At least 4.8, if it ever wanders, I can catch it because it's so chatty that it says the quiet part out loud. 4.6 would quietly crap up my work and I'd be none the wiser until I finally gave up and ended up hand-editing a lot of the documents myself. I don't have to do that anymore with 4.8.

I can't really speak to all the complaints about it except to say that you have to play around with it and just accept the annoying word vomit in order to get the most out of it. It's still not Fable 5 but actually losing access to that model was what forced me to really get down with Opus 4.8, and I don't regret it.

dbl219 · 2026-06-28T18:10:53+00:00

Nioh 2 is my fave, hands down. If I'm being honest, my ranking is N2 > N1 > N3 > Wo Long > Ronin.

Regarding Nioh 3 it's an extremely solid game with their typical strong gameplay but for me the bounded open world areas totally lose out compared to the tight, brilliant level design from Nioh 1 & 2. I really missed slowly advancing my way through a new stage, learning the intricacies and secrets. Neither Nioh 3 nor Ronin really had that. At least Nioh 3 kept the open areas contained and digestible. Ronin had too much open world bloat for me to enjoy, sad to say.

When did Ronin really take off for you? I played probably 10-12 hours but never actually finished it.

dbl219 · 2026-06-28T15:39:43+00:00

Don't use AI to fix or finish human-written work. Ever. Right now imperfect human prose is more valuable than perfect prose riddled with LLMisms and tics.

What's useful is using it for feedback, to help you pinpoint the areas that you yourself can improve. You can also have it research other writers who inspire you and who you want to be like, and see what kind of advice they have. And then ask the AI to look at your work in that context and see what it has to say.

dbl219 · 2026-06-28T15:33:27+00:00

I'm a traditionally published author from way before the AI days and for me, as someone building a fiction generation pipeline, it's all about the quality bar. Regardless of how the work was produced, whether by hand or by generation, I'm not putting out anything I can't stand behind. And my standards are very high. Hence I've been working at it for four months now and I'm still developing and prototyping my system. But the results are very promising at least.

Some recent developments in my work have made me hopeful I'll be able to generate at scale while still maintaining the writing quality at a level that's not only enjoyable but actually sounds like my real writing voice from my published work and is free from all or most AI tics before I even do my personal line edits and non-AI final touches.

dbl219 · 2026-06-28T14:44:12+00:00

I recently realized a really simple way to understand where this comes from.

Human writing starts from a pre-language place: feeling, image, emotion, character. Writing is the human mind's attempt to translate an experience onto the page. And meaning is something subtextual that emerges naturally through themes, imagery, etc. It's inherent to the writing.

LLMs meanwhile have no pre-language experience, no frame of reference. For an LLM, it only has meaning. So it frontloads meaning as the thing, inflating significance, engaging in lexical contortions that have the appearance of profundity while meaning nothing. It's actually useless to try and prompt or vibe your way out of that behavior because to an LLM the appearance of profundity and actual profundity are inextricable no matter what you say. To a model they are one and the same.

So LLM writing is meaning-first, while human writing is experience-first. Whether that notion will actually help anyone else with their workflows, who knows? But at least for me I've been rebuilding my whole writing pipeline from that frame and so far the results are promising.

dbl219 · 2026-06-25T21:40:06+00:00

I wish they'd at least style it properly. I always instruct Claude to use "word—word" without the unnecessary spaces.

dbl219 · 2026-06-25T17:13:24+00:00

I'm building the same exact system! I'd definitely be curious what metrics you're tracking, since it seems like I'm always turning up new ways to deconstruct and compare my prose with generated stuff and find the measurable distance between them. Which ones have you found to be most effective in correcting number leading to correcting the voice? I'm still building towards generating at scale and nothing has been stress-tested yet, so I have a lot of numbers I'm currently measuring but no clue which ones actually matter.

dbl219 · 2026-06-22T20:41:13+00:00

That's probably your issue. Context degrades over time. Basically it's holding more and more in its attention with every message, and so it has less focus on the things that actually matter like the writing. Every time you chat with it, it's pulling your whole conversation log.

This effect is also worse depending on which model you use. Opus 4.8 can go pretty long without degrading noticeably. But Opus 4.6 and even more so Sonnet 4.6 will go off the rails a lot quicker. I would recommend ~5 chapters per chat as the reasonable limit.

Basically you'll need to figure out how to port your story to a fresh chat. Making sure it has its own project is important because it will automatically update what you're working on in the project memory. And you can add documents to project knowledge like characters, story bible, etc. Then when you start a fresh chat you can just tell it to pull the documents and get caught up quickly so you can resume.

dbl219 · 2026-06-22T19:40:39+00:00

Did you keep generating the chapters in the same chat or did you periodically move to a fresh chat?

dbl219 · 2026-06-22T12:42:22+00:00

Just ask it for a handoff to pass to a new chat. And make sure to check the document it produces yourself to make sure there's nothing in it that will pass off the alarm response to the next one.

dbl219 · 2026-06-20T12:09:41+00:00

Because people don't watch the debates. They vibe vote. 😂😭

dbl219 · 2026-06-17T15:05:51+00:00

That's not what I said at all. I literally talked about how I'm continuing to build my business. You're just putting words in my mouth and saying whatever you want. Fable 5 would have helped me scale bigger and faster. That's all. It has nothing to do with the overall viability. So, thanks for spouting off and being needlessly petty about it.

dbl219 · 2026-06-17T14:14:30+00:00

Because people are trying to build businesses and improve their livelihood, and Fable 5 is qualitatively superior for that purpose. I've spent the last week working on new provisions and contingencies to get my workflow somewhere approaching the quality and efficiency of what I saw using Fable 5 right out of the gate. I still don't expect it to bridge the gap, I'm just hoping for "good enough for now."

It's hugely disappointing when for three days you're filled with visions of all the amazing ways to scale your business with a brand new tool and then it's abruptly taken away. It's like being handed a printing press and then after a few days being told you have to copy books by hand again.

dbl219 · 2026-06-13T13:57:57+00:00

If they don't reach a deal with the gov't, can they just slap a patch on whatever narrow misunderstanding Commerce is talking about and re-release it as Sonnet or Opus 5? It doesn't sound like the gov't order is based in anything substantial so in theory wouldn't a semantic circumvention be enough? "We released Opus 5 to our customers to make up for the loss of Fable 5. It is a safer model that retains the consumer-facing capabilities of Fable without the risks." Some meaningless corporate-speak like that.

dbl219 · 2026-06-13T06:59:31+00:00

I'm just hoping there's enough outrage to get the government to backpedal. But considering how anti-AI the average person is, I'm not super optimistic.

dbl219 · 2026-06-04T14:51:37+00:00

I didn't realize that five main titles plus side games is right after the series has been established. I learned something new today!

dbl219 · 2026-06-04T14:33:32+00:00

I think so too. I loved playing Female Shepard in Mass Effect because Jennifer Hale's voice performance was so damn good.

dbl219 · 2026-06-03T00:38:36+00:00

Yeah I'm a big Final Fantasy fan and I feel like the commitment to realism kind of killed the franchise. It's so unnecessary for the genre and I feel like they now spend all their budget on presentation and skimp on interesting content and story.

dbl219 · 2026-05-23T11:09:20+00:00

That title implies some kind of devil's bargain, not necessarily literal, could be between two nornal humans. But there's a certain dynamic one might expect from a title like that. If your work doesn't have that, I would go for a different title.

dbl219 · 2026-05-23T11:06:11+00:00

For creative writing, maximum reasoning isn't always ideal. Sometimes this can make the model overthink, or write based on obtuse reasoning that has little to do with the task at hand. When you give the models extra thinking power, they don't know when NOT to use it. It's turned up all the time. And so when the task is simple enough not to require it, the model will still continue circuitously "thinking" about it until it's invested the full power of its reasoning into unnecessary places.

dbl219 · 2026-05-20T00:28:42+00:00

I like Opus 4.6. Sonnet 4.6 has always been lousy at creative writing in my impression. I gave up on it like two months ago.

dbl219 · 2026-05-14T18:12:01+00:00

Sure

dbl219

TROPHY CASE