Square Enix’s AI tech preview released on Steam, but reviews haven’t been kind

Square Enix has released SQUARE ENIX AI Tech Preview: THE PORTOPIA SERIAL MURDER CASE as a free title on Steam.

The tech preview is based on The Portopia Serial Murder Case, an adventure game by Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii, and serves as an educational demonstration of Natural Language Processing. In the original version of The Portopia Serial Murder Case, players advanced through the game by using a command input system, where character actions were determined by the text that the player input. Although this system allowed players a great deal of freedom, it was also the source of a common issue where the player knew what action they wanted to perform but not the correct text to achieve it. (Note that the Famicom version of the game uses a command selection system, where players choose from a list of set options.)

This new version, however, uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to interpret the text that is entered by the player. By conducting deep learning on a large set of text data, it becomes possible for the system to understand complex text and generate responses. Through the use of this technology, the tech demo was developed so that it could handle more complicated or vague text commands than the original version. The goal behind the project is to help deepen player understanding of NLP technologies.

In addition to NLP, the tech preview also uses Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Speech To Text (STT) technologies. It originally featured a conversation function based on Natural Language Generation (NLG), but this was intentionally omitted prior to release due to the risk of the AI providing unethical responses.

During an interview with IGN Japan, development member Youichiro Miyake commented on NLG, saying, “I think that a higher level of security is required. We would like to consider what kind of form we can release it in after we have thoroughly researched the safety and security of the system.” An explanation stating that the tech preview does not include NLG is featured on its Steam store page and in the press release from the time of its announcement.

When it comes to AI chatbots, AI VTuber Neuro-sama has proven to be especially popular. But the extreme remarks often generated by Neuro-sama’s AI have gotten her temporarily banned from Twitch in the past, and even after being equipped with a filtering system, she still manages to utter a multitude of risqué statements. For a piece of software released by a major corporation such as Square Enix, it’s likely that careful consideration was required when deciding how much freedom the AI could be permitted in its responses.

On the other hand, the range of questions that the AI is able to answer in the current version of the tech preview is rather small, which is possibly due to the lack of NLG. The words and questions that you need to use in order to get an appropriate response are to some degree fixed, and deviating from those specific phrases even a little will result in generic responses, like “I’m not sure what to say about that” and “Are you okay, Boss?”

You could almost say that the tech demo ends up being faithful to the original The Portopia Serial Murder Case, but there are many Steam reviews from players expressing dissatisfaction with the narrow range of responses. Some have even suggested that they should have released the tech preview after they were ready to add the NLG function.

There are also AI chatbot services, like ChatGPT and Bing AI, that are capable of providing responses to even questions that are a little absurd. But this tech preview was developed using a standalone AI that does not use NLG nor is it able to use the API of other AI services. It’s no surprise that many players would be disappointed if they had been expecting it to function similarly to other AI chatbots.

Of course, we should remember that it is only a tech preview at the end of the day. The developers themselves (in the aforementioned IGN Japan interview) stated that it was being released as an experimental project and that no adjustments were made to make it easier to play. Additionally, if they did decide to implement NLG in a future update, then there’s the possibility that it could provide a very different experience.

The Steam page for SQUARE ENIX AI Tech Preview: THE PORTOPIA SERIAL MURDER CASE can be found here.

Written by. Marco Farinaccia based on the original Japanese article (original article’s publication date: 2023-04-24 11:19 JST)