“AI=/= text adventure.”
Downgrade
Square Enix has released an AI-powered remaster of one of its most revered video games, The Portopia Murder Case. But don’t get too excited. According to journalists and hundreds of angry gamers, it absolutely stinks, especially because of the new AI.
On Steam, the gaming client for PC gamers, “Portopia” has an embarrassing “very negative” rating, with only 13% of over 350 reviews positive. This makes it the lowest rated Square Enix game on Steam.
One user who wrote “AI =/= text adventure” gave up on the game less than an hour later.
Unfortunately, the game seems to have turned out to be a very lazy AI vehicle. This shows the gaming industry’s precarious and continuous adoption of new technologies.
old problem, new solution
Originally released in Japan in 1983, Portopia is considered a highly influential classic of text-based adventure games. However, it never received an official English translation until the new remaster, so the prospect of getting one with a fresher paint job would help especially the new AI work out some of its wrinkles. Especially when there were old-headed gamers who had high hopes.
Among the text-based wrinkles that could use a fix, the game can’t figure out what to do without entering the exact command the developer intended.
With the remaster, Square Enix promised to fix that using a natural language processing (NLP) AI model. This theoretically allows players to enter more complex commands without pedantic wording. In the words of a video game conglomerate, “computers will be able to glean meaning from the kinds of languages we use in our daily communications.”
It may be the same with other apps, but based on the voices of people who actually played the game, “Portopia” was actually created by AI. bad And Borderline is unplayable.
“It doesn’t really work,” writes Luke Plunkett. Kotakuadded that “machine learning is broken.”
Many of the negative reviews on Steam ridiculed how often the game confusedly responds to seemingly simple commands, with unhelpful and overly generic “hmm…” and “need to focus on the task at hand.” may there be?” only.
As one reviewer quoted Kotaku The game would be great if they just “removed the broken AI junk and added redundancy” [wording]’ is a proven solution for old text adventure games.
At least the game was released for free and is more of a tech preview experiment than a fully remastered version. But it’s a slap in the face for loyal fans and interested newcomers, and a blemish on the game’s legacy.
AI details: These 5 words help determine if a review was written by an AI
