Despite Pragmata's impressive commercial success, the development of Capcom's new game proved to be much more challenging than it might seem. During a recent Japanese broadcast, the developers revealed that in the early stages, the project faced extremely harsh internal criticism and was even at risk of being canceled.
Work on Pragmata began in 2019 at the initiative of Jun Takeuchi, head of Capcom Development Division 1, who gave the young team an unusual task – to create a "game on the Moon." However, the first years of development were accompanied by numerous difficulties: many ideas and concepts were never implemented, and test versions of levels were regularly sent back for revision.
According to the developers, they received extremely unflattering feedback from colleagues. In particular, they were told that the team "couldn't make interesting puzzles" and "wasn't capable of creating exciting action," and were directly told about their "incompetence in level design."
It was this criticism that prompted the creators to develop the signature hacking system, which later became one of Pragmata's key mechanics. However, even this initially received a lot of negative feedback during internal testing.
Among the most scathing comments were statements that the game's logic was "completely broken." One tester wrote: "Give me back the two months I lost working with this team. Is this really how you're going to entertain players?" Others noted that the hacking mechanic "fundamentally worsened the game," and the gameplay "feels like meaningless forward movement – incredibly boring."
After such an assessment, the team quickly prepared a new build, which was presented to Capcom management. The meeting was to decide the main question – whether to continue development or completely close the project. In the end, the publisher gave the game a second chance, effectively allowing the developers to restart production.
Pragmata director Yonhi Cho also admitted that he regretted the game's too early announcement. The debut trailer was shown back in 2020, and the release was originally planned for 2022. However, the project was postponed several times before it finally came out this year on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch 2.
According to Cho, the team did not expect such high audience interest after the first showing.
When we released the first trailer, we absolutely did not expect such a reaction from players. We just wanted to make a good and fun game, but after what we saw, we realized that this was no longer enough. We needed to create a project that would be better than we originally imagined.