Forum - View topicINTEREST: Square Enix Applies AI Tech to Classic Detective Visual Novel
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JoelBurger
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[EDIT: Flamebait removed. -TK]
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Lizuka
 Posts: 288 |
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I definitely don't mind the idea of this game seeing some kind of remake, since it is one of those things that's like tremendously important to game history but has also aged like milk, but this also just reeks of being a continuation of how Square seems to eagerly jump up and down to hop onto every bandwagon they possibly can and exclusively for the worse.
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hexashadow13
Posts: 55 |
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There's been a pretty negative reaction to this with the majority of criticism seemingly just vague AI dislike without any specifics to respond to, though if you have more specific criticisms I can attempt to address them.
The primary criticism to LLMs and AI in general seems to primary be centered around two points. The first is that it's using the works of creatives to replace said creatives with art that lacks soul. The second is that it's hard to control and thus prone to giving bizarrely incorrect results and potentially reinforcing long term negative social structures such as racism or sexism. Neither are particularly applicable in this case because the use of AI is analytic and not generative and thus the work overall is still heavily guided by the creative vision of the developers with the AI basically just serving as an interface to more naturally interact the VN. And while I haven't tried to break it, it seems to work well enough. Though that's beside the point in that even if it were completely broken, at worst it would result in the choice the player wants to make being different from what gets picked, though that's already the case half the time with RPGs and VNs so it's a nonissue. There's complaints about the new UI being ugly and such which I suppose are fair, but they have nothing to do with AI and throwing in complaints about that when criticizing the use of AI here just seems like people are reaching for something of substance to complain about even if it's entirely unrelated. |
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Traptrix Lover
Posts: 111 |
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If we're already at this kind of stuff, I can only imagine how advanced things will be in 10 years time.
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Wyvern
 Posts: 1603 |
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This is kind of a silly flex on Square's part. They say they've used AI to fix the original game's text recognition problems. Okay, neat...except those problems were solved all the way back in 1985 when the game was ported to the Famicom and given a new and more intuitive interface. That interface has been the basis for almost every remake and re-release of this game (and there have been plenty!) for nearly 40 years.
This is a big problem with fad technologies like this one: advocates can't find an actual use for the tech, so they force a problem that only exists for the AI to "solve." The text algorithm is neat enough, but going "AI solved this problem! (Which we already solved 38 years ago with primitive 80's computers)" just makes Square look silly. |
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skafreak51
 Posts: 212 |
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Just like how techbros were coming out of all corners of the internet to talk about how NFTs were going to make things so much better, but every application they talked about was using it to fix a problem that doesn’t exist.
Also it’s baffling that Square is still so into NFTs and crypto when at this point most people have realized it’s just a big scam and don’t want them anywhere near games. Just keep making good RPGs and leave this stuff out of it. |
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AQuin1904
Posts: 270 |
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People have been experimenting with NLP in text adventures basically since NLP has been a thing (which is a hell of a lot longer than the current round of ML models people talk about were a twinkle in someone's eye). Maybe this is more advanced, since it's coming from a presumably much better funded team, but this doesn't seem remotely novel.
It also doesn't seem particularly interesting as a tech demonstration, since it's an enhancement of what is now an ultra-niche control method (akin to old PC adventure games and not sharing much even with the modern incarnation of the visual novel) and it isn't obviously applicable to input methods for dominant game types, including SE's current flagship titles. NLP is super cool and super useful for a lot of tasks, but I doubt mainstream gaming will prove to be one of them. Calling NLP AI is, as has become the norm, a hell of a reach that probably originated in a marketing department and only gets in the way of talking about the actual tech. |
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Tenebrae
Posts: 492 |
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So I don't know the original game but is the article trying to imply it was a text adventure game, or interactive fiction as called by enthusiasts. (Genre that has been around since about the seventies IIRC.) |
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NeverConvex
 Subscriber Posts: 2568 |
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Huh -- yeah. I assumed from the title that something traditionally regarded as AI by researchers (like ChatGPT's LLM ANNs) was in use, but the article is pretty explicit that this is NLP, and while there's some overlap, I wouldn't generally assume that NLP implies AI, at least not in the sense the research communities use those terms. |
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Rosiero
Posts: 127 |
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Changing the interface doesn't make the interaction more intuitive, it just changes the interaction. If you look at the King's Quest games for example, they changed from a text parser to an icon-based mouse interface for the fifth game. That eliminated battling the text parser to get the game to do what you want, sure, but it also considerably limits puzzle design because now there are very few distinct actions for the player to take. As a result, there was an increase in absurd puzzle design to try and maintain the same level of difficulty, while I felt less smart for figuring stuff out. I think it would be really cool if an AI-assisted parser could bring about the return of text-based interaction minus the annoyance.
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