AI should make the detective adventure Portopia much better, but there are almost only negative reviews on Steam.
Will AI change the gaming industry? One day maybe, but right now it doesn’t seem to be there, as a free game from Square Enix proves. The publisher has one Tech Preview
released a new version of the detective adventure The Portopia Serial Murder Case, which should benefit from artificial intelligence. But on Steam, the title falls through completely and stands at only 12 percent positive reviews.
What should the new game be able to do?
Originally released in 1983, the adventure required you to enter text commands to perform in-game actions and engage in dialogue. In principle, these could be formulated freely, but the game only recognized certain patterns from given words, which sometimes made it difficult to find the right formulation.
With the help of modern AI technology, such difficulties should be eliminated in the now published version of Portopia. According to the developer, the computer should be able to process and understand natural language, making it much easier to play the adventure.
In Portopia you have to enter sentences to ask questions in dialogues or to perform actions.
How well does this work?
Apparently not at all. The reason for the many bad ratings is that the players cannot see any advantages in the AI version of Portopia. Commands are still often not understood and very specific formulations are usually necessary to achieve a result. Zuro127 calls about in his review two concrete examples:
(The game) can’t even recognize commands like that Go to Study
and Go to the study
are basically the same.
You can tell your assistant Let’s go back to headquarters
and get no answer. But if you simplify it too Go to Headquarters
then he answers with Okay, let’s go back to headquarters
so with almost the same wording that you used first.
Incidentally, the Tech Preview was originally supposed to contain another function, namely AI-generated answers to your questions in dialogues. However, this feature has been dropped because the generation unethical statements
feared.
What do you think of the story about AI improved
detective adventure? Have you played the original Portopia and would you give the new version a try? And do you think that artificial intelligence will still be important for game development, or do you see the technology as black? Feel free to write it in the comments!
