Square Enix recently developed an experimental remake of the 1983 Enix mystery adventure game. Portopia serial murder case, has been reimagined as a technical showcase for AI technology. The original game was released during the boom in classic text-based adventure games, allowing players to find clues by entering specific word prompts. The 2023 remake aimed to expand on this edict by allowing the AI to interpret the player’s commands in creative ways, but as it turns out, the AI just doesn’t work very well. .
Players who jumped into the game reportedly found the AI to be very limited, barely able to interpret even basic commands. It uses a powerful natural language processing (NLP) system to try to translate player input, but users report that they can’t even tell the difference between phrases like “go to study” and “go to study”. increase.
One player asked a character, “Who are you?” For basic context, I got a general pushback answer: “Maybe you need to focus on the task at hand.” Interrogating the same characters about enemies and friends of murder victims yielded similar results and repeated unhelpful conversations.
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“It’s basically a text parser that searches for specific keywords like names, or specific words like ‘survey’ or ‘do’. Variants return nonsensical answers even if they’re far from the list of known keywords,” a user reported via Steam.
Similar sentiments are shared elsewhere in the game’s reviews. Players argue that they get nothing tangible from the game’s AI, and its dialogue system is much more than classic text adventures, which were usually hand-programmed by meticulous humans. Many agree that it is limited to
But despite this negative view, Square Enix seems confident about the release of this game and how AI will help games in the future.
Square Enix said in the game’s description, “When the game was first released, most adventure games were played using a ‘command input’ system. Players were asked to enter text to determine their character’s actions. “Such a free text input system gave players a great deal of freedom. , which I couldn’t do because I couldn’t find a suitable expression.
“Four decades later, PC performance has improved significantly, and so has NLP technology.”
According to the game’s “extremely negative” Steam rating and legions of reviews who flagged the game as nearly unmanipulable, that “dramatic improvement” isn’t delivered at all in this experiment. Portopia serial murder case was an early success for Enix and contributed a lot to the adventure game genre, but this remake doesn’t seem to do justice to how great the game is.
While the current conversations about AI focus on its future potential, this is one way to highlight how far AI must evolve before it becomes viable as a robust storytelling tool. Case.
