HomeNewsSquare Enix AI Tech Preview: The Portopia Serial Murder Case
Square Enix turns Dragon Quest creator’s classic visual novel into an odd “AI Tech Preview"If only The Portopia Serial Murder Case came out a year later, the 1984 jokes would write themselves
If only The Portopia Serial Murder Case came out a year later, the 1984 jokes would write themselves
SQUARE ENIX AI Tech Preview: THE PORTOPIA SERIAL MURDER CASE【English】Watch on YouTube
SQUARE ENIX AI Tech Preview: THE PORTOPIA SERIAL MURDER CASE【English】
In 1983’s version you didn’t interact with The Portopia Serial Murder Case through preset dialogue choices, unlike most visual novels today. Instead, you’d type commands to interact with characters, and finding the right combo of nouns and verbs was part of the game’s unique puzzle-solving as you tried to solve the mystery. Multiple endings, a non-linear structure, and a still eyebrow-raising gimmick made it a quite popular release, going on to influence other iconic devs such asHideo Kojima.
Square Enix aren’t even calling the new version a game anymore - it’s now an “AI tech preview,” or an “educational software demonstration.” Squeenix are experimenting with a bunch of weird tech here, so let’s run through them quickly.
There’s NLP (natural language processing) that lets computers gain meaning from the natural language that we often use. NLP isn’t enough for a computer to truly understand what we’re saying though; that’s where NLU (natural language understanding) comes into play which “aims to make computers correctly understand natural language.” In the game (if I’m still allowed to call it that) NLU is being used for your junior detective, so he can better understand your written commands.
Square say that language generationwasimplemented into the game’s re-release, but it’s been removed because of the risk of “unethical replies.” Although, thepublisher that thinks blockchain is a good ideawill “consider reintroducing this function” in the future.
Anyway, AI-generated writing tools were in the news recently whenUbisoft unveiled Ghostwriter. It was marketed as a development tool used to generate first drafts of dialogue and it sparked a fair bit of backlash.
