Square Enix’s AI tech preview of Portopia is off to a very rough start

destructoid.com:

Last week, Square Enix announced a remastered version of a classic adventure game, The Portopia Serial Murder Case, that would be a showcase for its AI tech. The tech preview is out now, and well, it’s not going over well.

For context, The Portopia Serial Murder Case is a classic adventure game from the ’80s, authored by Dragon Quest‘s Yuji Horii. This actually marks its first official release in the west, years later, and it’s got a new visual style and layout to go with it.

Much like the original Portopia, this new version is also a text-parser adventure. This means you type commands in, or speak them using Speech-to-Text in the new version, to investigate and explore. The 2023 Portopia uses the framing of you (the boss) ordering around Yasu, a junior detective. He apparently needs a more hands-on approach for murders.

The AI tech preview part of this comes through NLP, or Natural Language Processing. I wrote a bit about this around the announcement of Square Enix’s preview, but basically, it means reading and understanding casual language, then issuing the correct response. In essence, it’s something that many text adventure games have done for a while, from Zork up through Facade.

This new version would use Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to help the detective understand the player’s instructions. Originally, there were even plans to generate natural replies for situations where the system did not have a preordained answer. This was scrapped, though, as Square Enix was concerned about the risk of the AI generating unethical replies.

So, ultimately, it’s a remade version of Portopia with more natural language tools under the hood and Speech-to-Text capability. How’s it being received? Not very well.

At the time