New player experience + Feedback

Hello,

I'm a new Fables player. I've played for about 15 hours, half of which I played with my brother.

Here is my new player experience feedback:

My new player starting experience

So I started the game as one of the preset rogue characters. I got a quest, found an NPC friend, and together we went to do it. We were ambushed. For some reason, initiative did not start immediately, and I role-played the first two attacks with a dagger.

Then initiative started. All right, I got my turn. I attacked… I realized that I had attacked with bare hands. So I fixed that by spawning a dagger into my hand (not very newbie-friendly; I had to search for it in the entire item database).

Then I attacked with the dagger… for some reason, I only dealt 1d4 damage… where was my Dexterity bonus? It turned out that the dagger item was not properly set up; it did not have Finesse, Light, and Thrown checked. I guess I had to do that myself, too. Thankfully, I know a little about D&D, so I realized I needed to fix all these things, and I kind of knew how.

I attacked with the dagger again. It turned out finesse did nothing; it still used my Strength modifier. So then I had to edit the dagger attack itself. To do that, I had to actually study how D&D attacks work and what numbers to put in. Finally, my attack was working.

Wait… Shouldn’t I have a sneak attack? At this point, I was like, okay, whatever, I’m not Googling how much that should do. I just added 10 damage to the dagger attack, but all this editing of attacks made me feel like I was cheating… and I couldn’t be bothered to check all the rules about how exactly my character should attack.

Then I remembered I should probably have more attacks in one turn. I guess I'll just do the dagger attack twice, applying the sneak attack twice. At this point, I didn’t care about D&D rules anymore.

Okay, so now my character finally worked, and I knew how to fight. I pressed "turn," and my NPC friend, Yelina, got a turn. Guess what she did? She attacked with a fist. I facepalmed. I checked her inventory. Yeah… I guess I had to set her up, too. It turned out that none of the characters had any equipment. Gearing them up was extra tedious, as I had to look for each item, and they weren't even set up—not even simple leather armor (which caps your AC bonus from Dexterity).

After setting everything up, it kind of worked, and I had a decent time.

Problematic features:

Map

Basically, everything the AI inserts into the map is placed in the wrong location... and by wrong, I mean terribly… Like putting a forest area inside the city area.

When I look for something, for example, a potion shop, it just creates one right next to me instead of having me actually move across the city.

My position also often does not update properly. I tell it that I travel to Whispering Woods; it moves me 0.02 km inside the city (very far from the woods, still in the city), but the message from Franz says I have entered the woods, describes it, etc.

Basically, the map rarely works. I always fix all the locations, but the AI still does not travel properly, and I have to teleport myself, too. NPCs' locations are not updated either when they move.

NPC generation

All new named characters are unequipped and have no spells, which is especially bad for villains.

You meet a powerful, evil, dark wizard? Guess what… he's level 3, naked, and has no spells—making it the easiest fight of your life.

Another issue: NPCs like shopkeepers are generated the same way as adventurers. This is problematic when a potion shopkeeper, for some reason, is a cleric, and their entire character description only talks about adventuring, not even mentioning that they are a shopkeeper.

Encounter generation

I don't know how the AI decides which creatures to put into an encounter, but there should definitely be a more balanced system. Sometimes I face a single wolf and end the encounter in one turn. Other times, it puts three treants against me… and they delete me in one turn. I'm not sure I could even handle one at my level. If I manage to kill one of these overpowered creatures, I instantly gain a whole level.

Item generation

Generated items are cool; the images are cool. I like it. One big issue with items is that their descriptions lack context, such as where you found them, the related quest, and their function.

For example:

You buy a healing potion—it doesn't say how much it heals, so when you use it, the AI gets confused.

You find a note—it doesn't say what is written on it. This is very bad because its contents change each time you read it.

You find a wooden/ornate box—this also needs context regarding where you found it and its contents (which could be hidden from the player). Without this, the result is similar to the note: when you open it, there are unrelated things inside because the AI no longer remembers its origin.

Quests

Quests work okay-ish, sometimes the AI generates too vague goals and then fails to fulfill them - for example “Navigate the Misty Marshes“… well I’m ‘navigating‘ the Misty marches and quest is not progressing, instead random stuff is happening giving me plot hooks for random things totally not related to the quest, making the AI forget about the actual quest even more.

Spells

Issue 1: When I try to use a spell during combat, its level gets downgraded to Cantrip. This happens for all my spells.

Issue 2: Healing/utility spells do damage and don't allow selecting a friendly target (or self).

Issue 3: Non-damage spells do damage to the target (for example, polymorph).

Issue 4: Bug - inside “Choose Attack” Favorite tab the button to edit attack does not work.

AI model

While the current AI model is okay at storytelling, I think many of the issues above are caused by the model's lack of intelligence.

I'm not sure which model you use, but I'm guessing it's a small one, maybe an 8B Llama. I think for $30 subscribers, you should be able to run a 70B Llama, which would be a huge improvement for premium users. You could even add a higher subscription tier; for AI Dungeon, many people pay $50 monthly, some even more, to get the larger models. I know that bigger models are expensive, but some people are willing to pay for a better experience.

Additional bugs

Rolling dice/making a check doesn't show up until Franz responds. Sometimes I have to refresh the page to see that both the check and the response are already there. This is especially bad in multiplayer, as you have no idea whether the other player rolled or not, and you are just waiting pointlessly. During multiplayer, I find myself refreshing the page about every 20 seconds because of frequent desynchronization issues, where another player has done something, but I'm unaware of it.

Overall, the game looks cool and promising but still needs a lot of work. I think the developers should focus on polishing, improving, and finishing existing features instead of adding new ones at this point.