So Square Enix have managed to piss off a group of people who were really into classic literature with their latest release, a remake of a classic 1983 text adventure game known as “The Portopia Serial Murder Case” which was beloved in Japan and was apparently a big inspiration for writers during this time.
The main reason why this has managed to piss people off is due to the forced addition of an AI system into the game that is meant to help you solve clues and ask questions by interpreting text that you write into commands. Think like old Text Adventure games but with more lenience instead of only having a few phrases that advance your actions. However it’s abundantly clear that this new system does not work and, hilariously, is seen by many as even more restrictive than the old game. Sometimes the AI system just lies to you such as when you ask a ‘when’ question you get given a ‘who’ answer instead which in a murder mystery game is quite a significant flaw.
Regardless this game it seems has proven to be quite the failure but even funnier than that is the fact that originally this game was slated to have a better AI, in fact it had systems in place that work like modern AI assistance programs such as ChatGPT. However Square Enix decided to pull this out due to, get this:
“The NLG function is omitted in this release because there remains a risk of the AI generating unethical replies.”
So basically the chat bot was giving naughty responses and as such the plug got pulled, that is a very funny statement to me. It seems then that this showcase has been quite the failure and it reminds me a lot of Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor, a terrible Xbox Kinect game that was hindered by the fact that the gimmick introduced to make it stand out, controlling the mech with your kinect avatar, just flat out didn’t work and made the game unplayable. Seems lightning strikes twice sometimes…
That’s all for now, and as always. It’s not just a game, It’s a Life.