Square Enix's AI Division released an updated version of adventure game The Portopia Serial Murder Case as"an educational demonstration of Natural Language Processing , an AI technology," according to its. The original 1983 game was a significant influence on visual novels and graphical adventures in Japan, as well as inspiring a generation of game designers. The 2023 version, which is available for, doesn't seem likely to have the same effect.
The AI tech preview version of Portopia promises to solve that with the latest in Natural Language Understanding , which turns whatever you type into commands for your assistant, Yasu, who is assigned to help you investigate the murder of Kozo Yamakawa. In practice, it doesn't work great.
While questioning NPCs in Portopia, you can confront them with evidence you've found, so when the publican claimed not to know anything, I decided to show him a photo of the victim. Well, I tried to, but"show photograph","show photograph to bartender", and"show photograph of Kozo to bartender" all came up with the usual"Maybe we should focus on the task at hand?" responses from my assistant.
If anything, it feels like a step backward from previous attempts like Starship Titanic, which had a cast of robots you had to communicate with by typing sentences at them. While it was an annoying guessing game trying to figure out which words those robots were programmed to recognize, at least they were capable of occasional surprises, like when you asked one about the Spice Girls and it responded with an opinion on music. That was possible in 1998.