Rebekah Valentine
Guest
Capcom's upcoming new IP, Pragmata, features a main antagonist that's really a rogue AI on the moon making the life of a spaceman and his android buddy difficult. But as much as artificial intelligence is in the news lately, especially in gaming, the developers of Pragmata say they had absolutely no idea it would be such a hot topic when they started developing the game.
Speaking to me at Tokyo Game Show 2025, game director Cho Yonghee and producer Naoto Oyama tell me that the concept for Pragmata simply came from Yonghee thinking about the moon, and asking the team to brainstorm ideas for a game set on the moon. From there, developers pitched a "black and white world" on the moon, and the concept of the enemy being AI came later.
But none of the team, they said, knew they were about to release a game about an enemy AI at a time when real-life AI was such a fraught subject.
"We really couldn't predict that AI would be this big from where we started from what you see now, but now that we have AI become this huge thing in the real world, we see like, 'Oh, maybe we should have added this or that from what you see in the AI right now,'" Yonghee tells me. "So we are like, 'We should have thought of that.'"
However, the pair confirm that the real-world shifts around AI didn't impact the game's story or direction. By the time it became a hot topic, the direction was already set.
"We have this sort of the idea of the AI in the game locked down very early in the development back when we released the concept trailer back a few years ago," Oyama says. "And so we had that as what you see in the game basically. And then we really couldn't predict that the AI would become this big right now."
"Yeah," Yonghee adds. "So the real life AI's progression or development, it's been so fast that it's perhaps overtaken what do we have in the game right now. So what you see in the game might not look as amazing than what'd you compared to real life."
I laughed a bit at this and remarked that I didn't think we had Dianas running around in the real world just yet.
"We created to be in the near future, but the future has come closer," Oyama replies.
"Yeah, just the word AI is getting a bit old right now," Yonghee says. "So maybe by the time that we reach the age or the time where Pragmata takes place, people are not using the word AI even anymore."
We recently got another look at Pragmata at Capcom's Online Program alongside TGS, and we had a hands-on preview of the game at Gamescom earlier this year. We also spoke with Oyama and Yonghee about early ideas for Pragmata, including the possibility that it might feature a talking dog. Pragmata is out sometime next year.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].