Square Enix fans aren’t pleased with machine learning test
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Square Enix recently released a free game on Steam called “Square Enix Test Preview: The Portopia Serial Murder Case.” This remake of a 1983 text-based adventure game used Natural Language Processing (NLP) to fix what the publishers saw as limitations in the game’s original input-based gameplay. However, users aren’t happy with this new feature, to put it mildly.
NLP is a form of artificial intelligence that helps machines understand natural or conversational language. Reviews of the game show that Portopia, on the other hand, is not a good demonstration of this tech, if only because it doesn’t seem to understand natural language. This would seem to indicate that, even if AI and NLP can be used in games, it’s not yet at the point where it should be — at least with regards to how much agency its creator is willing to give the player.
The Portopia Serial Murder Case is a murder mystery adventure, one of the most influential games in the visual novel and 2D adventure game genres. It was originally developed by Yuji Horii and released by Enix, one of the antecedents of modern Square Enix. In it, the player takes on the role of a detective trying to solve a murder in 1980s Japan with the help of their partner, and most of the gameplay involves bossing him around. This tech preview is the first release of Portopia in English.
As Square Enix explains, the original version of the game relied on “command inputs” that required players to type commands to the game. The page acknowledges the limitations of this: “However, they did come with one common source of frustration: players knowing what action they wanted to perform but
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