NovelAI has released a new model, Kayra. I’ve done some testing, and it’s quite good. Untuned, I’m getting a good response rate of about 7 out of 8 retries, and it regularly creates responses that are exactly what I’m looking for. Compared to older models, where the hit rate was more like 1 in 10, and perfect responses were rare as unicorns, this is an amazing step up.
It also seems to have a pretty good awareness of characters, and apparently can remember things about those characters, including speech patterns.
It doesn’t currently support custom models, but I’m not finding that to be a hindrance. It seems to be perfectly capable of generating good, weight-gain/feedist themed responses without a custom model.
Also, the new model was just opened up to all tiers, though YMMV because the amount of context it keeps track of depends on how much you pay.
I haven’t tested the text adventure mode yet, but I’m pretty curious to try it.