Capcom had revealed one of the environments that players will get to explore in Pragmata during a State of Play showcase last month. The environment, bearing a striking resemblance to New York, allows players to walk around in a human-looking city that looks like it may have been created by a machine. In an interview with 4Gamer, director Yonghee Cho and producer Naoto Oyama revealed that the studio went to great lengths to make this environment look like it was “AI generated”.
“For Pragmata, we set the premise as ‘a fake New York generated by AI,’” said Cho (via machine translation). “When familiar locations appear, players can relate more easily. On top of that, to make it clear that this isn’t the real New York, we wanted something slightly distorted.” It is worth noting that the environment was made by human developers.
“It mirrors reality, but its unique appeal comes from the setting errors and how they feel out of place, such as taxis sinking into floors, or buses sprouting from walls. Although the premise is that it generated by AI, actually, our human developers painstakingly worked to incorporate mechanisms that express this AI-like uncanny feel,” explained Oyama.
Cho went on to reveal how much effort went into the “AI errors”, since developers would have to manually create them while also making sure to strike a balance between being visually interesting and not distracting for players. “Distortion is when something takes a shape that people have never seen before, and things unseen before are considered unique. But if the shapes are too unusual, players might think they’re related to puzzles or that the terrain has some hidden meaning. Balancing distortion to be both unique and merely background was difficult,” he said.
Cho has previously spoken about the development of Pragmata, and how difficult it was for the studio to design android companion Diana.
“When creating a game, you are faced with various regulations, so there are certain barriers that somewhat restrict your expression,” he said. “We really wanted to pack Diana’s character with many different expressions that would only be possible precisely because she is an android and not a living, breathing human. But we ended up going through a lot of struggles, even when it comes to her visual design.”
He brought up the manga character Arale from the late Akira Toriyama’s gag series Dr. Slump as an example of a typical depiction of an android character. However, Pragmata‘s Diana couldn’t do any of the things that Arale was capable of, like detaching her head from her body to carry it around. “It’s really difficult to pull off more straightforward expressions like, for example, how Arale-chan from Dr. Slump literally carries her head off her body,” he said.
Pragmata is coming to PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch 2 on April 17th. A free demo for the game is available on all platforms. A recent report has indicated that there is plenty of excitement for the title, with 2 million players having wishlisted it. The demo has also been quite successful, having been downloaded 2 million times.
