Pragmata’s Developers “Painstakingly Worked” to Make its New York Environment Look AI Generated

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During last month’s State of Play, Capcom showed off one of the environments players will explore in Pragmata. This area, which strongly resembles New York City, lets players wander a city that appears both human and potentially created by a machine. In a recent interview with 4Gamer, director Yonghee Cho and producer Naoto Oyama explained that the team worked hard to make the environment look as if it were generated by artificial intelligence.

According to Cho, the team building Pragmata decided to base the game’s setting in an artificial version of New York City created using AI. They chose this approach because recognizable locations help players connect with the world, but also intentionally added subtle distortions to emphasize that it isn’t the real city. Importantly, the game’s environment was actually designed by human developers, not solely by AI.

Okay, so the game world looks real, but it’s the glitches that are seriously cool. It’s not just random stuff breaking, though – it’s like things are fundamentally wrong, you know? Taxis falling through floors, buses growing out of walls… stuff like that. The funny thing is, everyone assumes it’s all AI-generated, but our developers actually spent ages building in those weird, unsettling details by hand. They really worked hard to make it feel like an AI messed something up.

Cho explained that creating the game’s “AI errors” was surprisingly difficult. Developers had to design these glitches by hand, carefully finding a sweet spot where they looked interesting without pulling players’ attention away from the gameplay. He described how they aimed for distortions – unusual shapes – that were unique enough to be noticeable, but not so strange that players would assume they were part of a puzzle or hidden feature in the environment. Finding that balance between being visually distinct and blending into the background proved challenging.

Cho has talked before about creating Pragmata, and the challenges the team faced when designing the android character, Diana.

Game development often involves restrictions that limit creative freedom. We specifically designed the character Diana to take advantage of her being an android – allowing for expressions impossible in a human. However, even with that freedom, we faced challenges, particularly with her appearance.

He used the manga character Arale from Akira Toriyama’s Dr. Slump as a classic example of how androids are often portrayed. He pointed out that the character Diana in Pragmata lacked many of Arale’s abilities, such as being able to detach and carry her head. As he explained, “It’s surprisingly hard to replicate simple things, like Arale-chan from Dr. Slump casually carrying her head around.”

The highly anticipated game Pragmata will launch on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2 on April 17th. Players can try it out now with a free demo available on all platforms. Interest in the game is strong, with over 2 million wishlists, and the demo itself has already been downloaded by 2 million people.

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2026-03-26 17:41