Square Enix’s artificial intelligence division recently released an updated version of the classic mystery game, The Portopia Serial Murder Case. This new version of the influential mystery game was developed as an educational demonstration of Natural Language Processing (NLP), an Artificial Intelligence technology that promised to give the classic a new face by offering better interactivity. Well, that was only a promise, since, despite being free, the game has been widely criticized.
The new version of The Portopia Serial Murder Case is available for free on Steam, but has not been well received by its users. In fact, it currently has an 89% negative user rating. Although the developers promised to fix the frustrating limitations of the original, the game has trouble responding to different commands. Players have reported receiving unhelpful phrases like “I’m not sure what to say about that” or “Maybe we should focus on the task at hand” when giving clear instructions to the game.
One of the biggest promises of the technology was making video games more accessible by reducing the need for precise phrases. However, it appears that this is not yet the case with The Portopia Serial Murder Case. Simple tasks like asking NPCs questions or showing them evidence require exact wording, which can be frustrating for players. The AI wizard Yasu often struggles to differentiate between seemingly similar phrases, making progress slow and frustrating.
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Different players have criticized the new version of The Portopia Serial Murder Case, with some lamenting how this classic and influential game has been treated. Especially since it has the potential to damage your image and that of a technology that, in many ways, is still in its infancy.
“It requires a big improvement. I have asked him basic questions: Any witness?, Any enemy?, etc, and almost always he has answered me with “Maybe we should focus on the task at hand?” or “hmm…”. I understand that it is a test, to check the possible scope of this technology, and that it is a free game. However, it requires improvements,” said Steam user Mendex.
“It has significantly worse text input processing than adventure games from the late ’80s and early ’90s. I don’t think there’s any reason to play this and I don’t think there’s any reason Square Enix would try to go after the AI ”” another player pointed out.
It is worth mentioning that Square Enix originally wanted to include a feature based on natural language generation (NLG) technology, where the system would generate natural responses to questions that did not have a pre-written answer. However, the NLG feature was omitted in this release due to the risk of generating unethical responses.
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