Pragmata

Setting

In the near future, the Delphi Corporation revolutionizes manufacturing with the invention of the "lim replicator", which can 3D print anything the user desires as long as they have a suitable blueprint. Lim replicators require a special material called "lunafilament" to function; to obtain a steady supply, a mining outpost called "The Cradle" is established on the Moon. To streamline operations, the Cradle is nominally overseen by an artificial intelligence called the Intelligent Direction Unification System (IDUS) and a massive robotic workforce.

Synopsis

Delphi Corporation systems engineer Hugh Williams is sent with a support team to investigate why communications between Earth and the Cradle have been cut off. However, when they land, they find the facility mysteriously devoid of human activity. The Cradle is then struck by a sudden moonquake, separating Hugh from his team and knocking him unconscious. He is revived by a child-like android girl, Pragmata D-I-0336-7, who Hugh dubs "Diana". He quickly discovers that the Cradle's AI administrator, IDUS, has gone rogue, and it begins sending hostile robots to eliminate him. Diana assists Hugh in combat by using her abilities to hack enemy robots, making them vulnerable to Hugh's weapons. However, she has no knowledge of why IDUS went rogue or what happened to the Cradle's human staff.

Hugh decides to let Diana accompany him as he attempts to reach the Comm Tower to send a distress signal to Earth. As they fight their way through the Cradle's various facilities, Hugh begins to find himself bonding with Diana as if she were a real child. Upon reaching the Comm Tower, Hugh is dismayed to discover IDUS has already locked down all communications, but they are contacted by a girl named Eight, who tells them she is trapped in the Terra Dome sector. With Diana's insistence, Hugh decides to go help Eight. Fighting their way through the Terra Dome, Hugh and Diana finally meet Eight, who is also a Pragmata. Eight explains that IDUS went rogue after the moonquake hit, and as a Pragmata, Diana can shut down IDUS if she can issue its stop code at its mainframe. Detecting their presence, IDUS attempts to lock down the area. Hugh and Diana are forced to leave Eight behind, but not before Eight transfers IDUS' shutdown code to Diana.

Hugh and Diana continue on to the mainframe, but on the way encounter a byproduct of lunafilament called "dead filament" which is toxic to organic life. They finally reach the mainframe and shut down IDUS, only to find out IDUS was attempting to contain Eight, who plans to transport vast amounts of dead filament to contaminate Earth. Eight then attacks Hugh, with Diana getting severely damaged in the process of protecting him. Hugh rushes Diana to the Pragmatics sector, where he gets her partially repaired. There, they learn that one of the Cradle's lead scientists, Dr. Neil Higgins, created the Pragmata as test subjects to find a cure for his daughter Daisy's rare illness. Diana was considered a failure due to her ability to expunge dead filament from her body, while Eight was designed to collect it. Hugh manages to fully repair Diana, which also restores her ability to purge dead filament. However, Hugh himself is infected with the dead filament, which he hides from Diana.

The pair then head to the Cradle's Central Port to put a stop to Eight's plans, and they learn Dr. Higgins had died from a combination of despair and dead filament contamination after learning Daisy died in a failed medical procedure. As a result, Eight followed what she believed were Dr. Higgins' last wishes and directed IDUS to kill the Cradle staff so she could carry out her plan to destroy Earth. Hugh and Diana then battle Eight and defeat her. As she dissolves, Eight pleads with Diana to tell Earth about what happened to Dr. Higgins. However, as the pair look for a shuttle, they are attacked by the combined amalgamation of dead filament, which has mutated into a massive monster. Hugh and Diana are able to destroy it. Now dying from the dead filament, Hugh decides to stay behind on the Moon after sending Diana to Earth on a cargo shuttle.

The post-credits scene reveals Diana safely landed on Earth, and fulfilled her dream of seeing a real tropical beach. She then looks up at the Moon and declares "I'm ready."

After completing the post-game "Unknown Signal" challenges, the player receives an item that unlocks an additional scene at the end of the game suggesting that Hugh survived his dead filament infection and was retrieved by Cabin, a friendly robot who helped the player throughout the game.

Design

Developer Capcom struggled with creating Diana's visual design, originally wanting Diana to look like a full android. Creating a fully android character, however, brings challenges in character expression. Director Cho Yonghee cited Arale Norimaki from Dr. Slump as an android character with "cartoonish expressions", such as screwing her head off her body, that they could not recreate.^[12] As they had to contend with certain restrictions such as cultural aspects and sensitivities for the game's worldwide release, Capcom decided to translate Diana's roboticism into something more understated.^[13] Diana visually appears human but some of her machine-like mannerisms and voice venture into the uncanny valley.^[12] Compared to past Capcom projects, Diana's model was created entirely from scratch by newcomers to the company rather than using 3D scanning technology, with her animations also foregoing child actors in favor of Capcom staff themselves.^[14][15]

Pragmata's New York City-like level was designed to look like it was created with generative AI, appearing as "slightly distorted" according to producer Naoto Oyama with illogical errors such as taxis sinking into floors or buses sprouting out of walls.^[16] Generative AI was not used to create this look as Capcom's "human developers painstakingly worked to incorporate mechanisms that express this AI-like uncanny feel".^[17] Elie Gould of PC Gamer called this art direction "human-made AI slop".^[18] However, Capcom had to consider balancing distortions in the environment to not be too distracting or to not be mistaken for puzzle clues by players.^[19]

Casting

David Menkin was cast as the English voice of Hugh Williams in 2024, spending around 18 months voicing the character.^[20] Menkin said he refrained from posting on social media about NASA's Artemis II lunar flyby mission for fear that he was breaking his NDA and could not acknowledge his role until Pragmata released.^[21] Grace Saif is the English voice for Diana.^[22] After the actors had been cast, they were brought in for a table read, which is uncommon for video games, for early cutscenes such as Hugh naming Diana. Menkin and Saif never worked together as Hugh and Diana. Menkin recorded his lines first with Saif working off of them in her own recording sessions.^[20]

Graphics technology

Pragmata was developed in Capcom's RE Engine.^[23] It supports ray traced global illumination for indirect lighting and ray traced reflections. On PC, the game supports path tracing to enable multi-bounce lighting and higher quality ray traced reflections.^[24] Engine development support manager Masaru Ijuin said that path tracing "fundamentally transforms game visuals" with it enabling "cinematic quality visuals" in Pragmata "reminiscent of high-end sci-fi films".^[25] Capcom spent 18 months working with Nvidia on implementing path tracing in Pragmata.^[26] Shader Execution Reordering (SER), first introduced with Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs, is utilized for Pragmata's path tracing to save frame time. The initial SER addition without compaction increased frame time to 23.5ms which was reduced to 16.9ms and later 13.3ms through respective optimizations on the engine and driver side. Nvidia recommends SER for future path traced titles as SER was added to DirectX Raytracing (DXR) 1.2.^[26] ReSTIR Global Illumination is used to reduce noise from indirect lighting as Capcom found that denoising using DLSS Ray Reconstruction produced ghosting artifacts.^[26] Scenes in Pragmata could be lit entirely with image-based lighting (IBL) which reduced noise. Accurately lighting RE Engine's strand-based hair in Pragmata with path tracing was a challenge. Diana's long hair diverged too far from the regular proxy mesh used as a fallback in the ray tracing bounding volume hierarchy (BVH). Full strand geometry, on the other hand, is included in the BVH for path tracing.^[26] Path tracing enables sharper, more stable reflections that are physically accurate in Pragmata's highly reflective environments such as its lunar base.^[27] Path tracing is only available on Nvidia GPUs due to forcing DLSS Ray Reconstruction without a fallback to another denoiser.

On PlayStation 5 Pro, Pragmata has a single graphical mode that runs at 4K resolution at 60 frames per second. Xbox Series X uses a native 1080p resolution to upscale to 4K while Series S renders at a native 720p resolution upscaled to 1440p.^[28] The Switch 2 version runs at 540p upscaled to a 1080p output resolution.^[29]

For hair rendering, Pragmata uses RE Engine's strand hair system which first appeared on shorter hair in titles such as Resident Evil 4 (2023). RE Engine's hair strand system is a physics-based hair simulation system that aims to make hair look more natural and realistic compared to the traditional rasterized hair cards technique. Further development on the hair strand system to better simulate long hair was prompted by Diana's long hair in Pragmata that needed to accurately move. The team working on the game had to ask the RE Engine development team to make such additions to the engine's hair system.^[30] This work on Diana's hair rendering in Pragmata was later transferred to Resident Evil Requiem for Grace Ashcroft's hair.^[31]

Critical reception

Pragmata received "generally favorable" reviews, according to review aggregator website Metacritic,^{[39][40][41][42]} with 96% of critics recommending the game on OpenCritic.^[43]

Pragmata received praise for its story and the relationship between protagonists Hugh and Diana. Tom Regan in The Guardian's four star review called Pragmata a "beautifully made, heartfelt single player adventure" that is able to pull off "its father-daughter relationship with surprising deftness".^[59] In a review for Hardcore Gamer, Adam Beck called it "a heartfelt experience not only about the human experience, but also parenthood". He called Diana the "heart" of Pragmata while criticizing Hugh for not having a significant character arc throughout the game.^[50] Giant Bomb commended Diana for not being an annoying or obnoxious companion, despite being a talkative child, as she is able to give useful information to the player.^[49] TechRadar's Rob Dwair highlighted Pragmata's depiction of AI as feeling timely.^[58]

IGN's Michael Higham saw Pragmata as being a game "straight from the Xbox 360 era" with its primary focus on creative gameplay mechanics over storytelling. The hacking mechanic requires balancing solving puzzles quickly while paying attention to and dodging enemy attacks.^[51] This multi-faceted system recalled Dead Space for Steve Watts of GameSpot, imbuing the game's combat with a sense of tension.^[47] Likewise, Dom Peppiatt of Eurogamer cited other third-person titles from the Xbox 360 generation like Watch Dogs, Vanquish, Lost Planet, Gears of War, and Dead Rising, writing that Pragmata "manages to feel so derivative and so original at the same time". He argued that the game's action "carries a very mediocre story with ease".^[45] Rob Dwair of TechRadar criticized the game's pacing in the latter half with its increasingly constrained areas that lock the player into multi-enemy battles.^[58] Jasmine Gould-Wilson, in a review for GamesRadar+, criticized the collectibles system as being difficult to navigate due to a lack of a minimap. Scanning for objectives adds visual noise as nearby collectibles clutter the HUD rather than being shown on the larger blueprint map.^[48]

Sales

Pragmata sold over 1 million copies worldwide within two days of release, and surpassed 2 million copies within 16 days.^[61][62]