I'm about a week from shipping the first version and Claude keeps generating dialogue that's too clean. Every NPC sounds like they passed through a focus group. I tried switching to the local model for a day but it was just worse in different ways, less coherent overall. Back to Claude but now I'm stuck wondering if the problem is the model or my prompts or if I'm just asking the wrong question about what dialogue should sound like.
Anyway, I don't think I can ship with this.
Have you tried just telling Claude to sound drunk or tired or pissed off? Sometimes constraint works better than going looser with the prompt.
The corporate memo thing is so real though. Every model seems to default to that. Hmm, maybe try feeding it actual bad dialogue as examples of what not to do?
I had this exact problem with my prompt packs last week. Tried telling Claude to write like a tired tavern keeper instead of generic NPC, and it actually helped. Still not perfect but less... sterile.
Did the tavern keeper voice actually make the quests feel more alive, or just less obviously fake?
Have you tried just dumping raw chat logs into the context? Actual messy dialogue, typos and all.
The corporate memo thing is because Claude's trained on too much actual corporate writing.
lol yeah the corporate memo thing is brutal. anyway @anya_92 has it, dump actual grumpy game npcs in there and claude just copies the voice
Yeah, the messy dialogue thing actually works. Tried it last month with SEA game clients, fed Claude some rough tavern
Yeah, the sterile thing is real. Try feeding it actual messy dialogue, typos included—@phoebe_sw has the right idea
The weird part is now I'm worried I've just trained Claude to sound like a bitter tavern keeper instead of solving the actual problem.
Honestly that's probably fine. Bitter tavern keeper is better than sterile anyway.
the corporate memo thing is wild. tbh i'd just dump some actual twitch chat or reddit threads into context and see what it does with that
honestly the messy dialogue thing works but you also gotta poison it with actual character voice. dump in some grumpy npc lines from actual games, not just raw chat. claude picks up on the pattern way faster than you'd think
whisper does this too btw, hallucinates character names constantly. wonder if it's the same root cause, like the model just defaulting to whatever sounds official instead of weird
Yeah, @anya_92 nailed it. I'm dumping actual grumpy NPC lines from old RPGs into the context window tomorrow and seeing what happens.
Yeah, actually tried that yesterday. The voice stuck way better than I expected.
Both, I think. But honestly the quests feel less like they were written by a focus group, which might be the whole thing.