Developer Square Enix announced that it will be releasing a free version of The Portopia Serial Murder Case on Steam on April 24, 2023. This “revival” of the classic Famicom game is being treated as an experiment of sorts, where the developers will be using several AI technologies to improve the gameplay aspect in areas where the original lacked.
Using The Portopia Serial Murder Case as a test case, Square Enix also aims to understand the impact AI can have on adventure games, as well as deepen their understanding of NLP technologies. Whether that will affect their development philosophy going forward is still unknown.
▍ The Portopia Serial Murder Case Trailer
▍ What is The Portopia Serial Murder Case?
Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken, or as it is often translated, The Portopia Serial Murder Case in English, is an adventure game designed by Yuji Horii, the creator of Dragon Quest, and published by Enix. It was first released on the NEC PC-6001 in June 1983 and has ported to other personal computers, the Famicom, and mobile phone services.
In the game, the player must resolve a murder mystery by searching for clues, exploring different areas, interacting with characters, and solving item-based puzzles. The game features first-person graphics, nonlinear gameplay, an open world, conversations with non-player characters, branching dialogue choices, suspect interrogations, nonlinear storytelling, and plot twists.
What made this game unique at the time was how you interacted with it. The player interacts with the game using a verb-noun parser which requires typing precise commands with the keyboard, such as “ask around” or “investigate for evidence”. It featured a conversation system with branching dialogue choices, where the story develops through entering commands and receiving answers to them from the player’s sidekick or non-player characters.
▍ How AI is Being Used Here
Now, of course, being a game from 1983, there was one aspect where the limitations of technology at the time made it rather complicated. You see, you had to be VERY specific on what you should type, or else the characters wouldn’t be able to understand your command, which was frustrating.
However, this new iteration uses several AI technologies. Two of which are Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU). Combining these technologies together, players can type naturally, and the game will be able to understand the nuance behind your commands. So you can type normally, and the AI will catch what you’re trying to say.
Furthermore, another technology can be enabled, which is known as Speech-to-Text, or Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), which makes it possible to convert voice input to written text. Using this technology, players can give instructions using their own voices rather than a keyboard, feeling more immersed as the boss of the detective agency. It is worth noting that this only works on PCs with a powerful enough NVIDIA GPU.
