In Pragmata, Capcom's upcoming third-person shooter, you explore a lunar research station taken over by hostile AI, but it won't be all grey corridors and harsh fluorescent lights.
One quite different environment that's been shown off is a cityscape that's very reminiscent of New York, but there's something a bit off about it. That is by design, says the game's director, Cho Yonghee.
Speaking in a roundtable interview (via 4Gamer and translated by Automaton), he explains that this environment was intended to look as though it was created by artificial intelligence.
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In-universe, Lunafilament is a miracle material that can be used to construct pretty much anything, and it seems it's been put to use to recreate Earth-like cities such as NYC.
"For Pragmata, we set the premise as 'a fake New York generated by AI'," he said, explaining that the team wanted to present a familiar location that appears "slightly distorted".
Producer Naoto Oyama elaborated further:
"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's generated by AI, actually, our human developers painstakingly worked to incorporate mechanisms that express this AI-like uncanny feel."
In other words, Pragmata's dev team went to great effort to design a space that feels like it could've been AI-generated, but it was all created by hand.
Cho said it was tricky to balance, because distorting the environment too much could distract players or give them the wrong impression.
"Distortion is when something takes a shape that people have never seen before, and things unseen before are considered unique," he said. "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."
In our recent hands-on preview with the game, we came away very impressed by this New York area. The game is coming together very nicely, and we're pretty excited to play the final game when it arrives in a few weeks on 17th April.