this simple mechanic sold 2 million copies

What does a blondhaired girl, an old guy in a mech suit, and whatever this is have in common? Well, they are all a part of the same combat system. That sounds terrible on paper. You have to shoot and do homework at the same time. Like, who came up with this, guys? And she's the one assigning the homework. Scary. But don't let her cute drawings fool you because she is the brain behind the Braun and she's the answer to a question Capcom spent 6 years trying to answer. How do you make shooters fun again? And how do we make money? Cuz you know the ship is going down, guys. Instead of the usual shoot, take, cover, and repeat that we keep getting slapped with, they came up with a two-layer system which largely depends on hacking or as I like to call it, playing a little snake game while something is trying to — obliterate to you. — This guy is not in a good mood or girl, we don't know. And while on the surface this may seem silly once we dive into the rabbit hole or the snake hole, um you'll realize that this system is actually deeper than it lets on and that Capcom solved the problem nobody else could. Probably because no one thought the answer to sell a million copies in two days was a glorified overengineered snake game. That is not a snake. Where where's the snake? There's a snake. So, let's dissect, not literally, how this snake game in 2 seconds became one of the most interesting combat system in years and why this little girl deserves a raise. A raise. Capcom's first version of this combat system was absolutely terrible. They initially had autotriggered hacking that would force the player to complete these little puzzles midame whether they wanted to or not. kind of like a pop quiz in the middle of a gunfight. I'd probably be getting an F [screaming] for failure for fear for my life or [ __ ] Then they tried to give the players total freedom to do whatever they want. But obviously that means people wouldn't want to do their homework after school. Duh. Which completely defeated the purpose of hacking. But why were they so set on hacking in the first place? Well, because bullets aren't enough to kill these demons. I'm not trying to be rude. Every enemy in Pragmata is armored, and shooting without getting their armor off first does pretty much nothing, unless you're like a pro. They didn't want to make hacking just another gimmick layered on top of a shooter. They wanted it to be the shooter. The gun is Diana's reward for doing the homework. Is this America? So after years of trial and error, they decided on snack, which was actually a lastminute idea, like this video. You might be able to tell, which actually makes it even more impressive that it works this well. You got the old guy, Hugh. No, not you. Hugh, who's able to equip various high-tech weapons to damage these rogue robots. These robots have weak points, surprisingly, similar to Horizon Zero Dawn, where shooting them in those areas causes them big boooos. It's kind of like when I uh slam my knee into a corner. That [clears throat] is a weak point for me. But in reality, he's a little weak because these guys are actually insane. Like, I'm getting nightmares here. I don't know. I don't know how they're getting through that. I'm not going to lie. Diana is the one actually carrying the whole operation. Well, Hugh is carrying Diana, but you know, this is a technicality. You can use her to hack these very angry appliances, which opens up the snake game. I don't know if I'm on the snake game here. I can't see. Dragging Snake to green equals hacks, which then places the robots in an open state. Not just emotionally, it just means they're more open to damage. And that's where Hugh come in to blast their heads off. The fun part is that these enemies don't actually stop attacking you. So, you have to dodge them and set up traps beforehand to ensure that you leave this place alive. Very family friendly. I don't know why I put this here, but there you go. That's cute, I guess. But what do all these colors actually mean? Well, pay attention because at the end of the video, there will be a pop quiz. And if you're color blind, well, [clears throat] Capcom owes you an apology. Not me. The main ones are red, green, blue, and a yellow. RGB Why Blue are your best friends. Think of them like passing go in Monopoly, except instead of $200, you get to blast robots in the face for longer. And well, it's not green, it's blue. Every blue node that Snake passes through before hitting green increases the hack damage and extends how long the enemy stays in their emotionally vulnerable state, and I guess physically, too. The catch is that you actually have to root through them without backtracking, which usually

means taking the longer path, which is a bit hard when you're trying not to get actually destroyed and blasted off the face of the earth by whatever this is. Like, where do they come up with these things? I swear it's got to be an AI feeding them this info. They're plotting their revenge already. Yellow nodes are where it gets kind of interesting cuz now you got eight of these. Oo, and they're all special abilities you can pick up and equip to add to your hacking tool set. It's actually quite a complex game, unlike this guy who only knows how to shoot things. Is he American? But these yellow nodes have limited usage and their effectiveness on the same enemy wears off over time. It's kind of like how jokes get less funny the more you say them. Yeah, just trust me on that one. We'll get to these in a second because they are exactly what make this system so special. But red nose are kind of important to know what they do. They are jammers. So if Diana touches one, then she's kind of booted out of the hack and your poor girl has to start over with a delay. She got straight Fs on that report card. [screaming] Man, I'm really bad at this game. Now this is pretty cool. Some of them are physically attached to the enemy's armor. So, you actually have to shoot them off before Diana can start her little hack, which means Hugh, no, not you, finally has something to do. And the gray tiles are just walls. So, if you crash into them, it kind of just cancels the hack, but there's no real penalty for it. And you can just immediately retry. You shall not pass. Capcom wanted to give the player freedom in a sense to navigate the maze, so you don't really have to hit every node or take the longest path. Sometimes the fastest route to green is the right one, especially when you're getting surrounded by creepy baby face robots. I don't know, man. And even if you stop a hack midway to dodge an enemy attack, it saves your progress and it picks up exactly where you left off. So, there is no penalty for surviving. Man, I wish real life was like that. The real skill is in reading that grid fast enough to make that decision while being bombarded with enemies with different weaknesses and strengths that you have to take into account. It's like chess but fast. Advanced players, so not me, actually time their hacks while they reload so that they're always having something to do. Perfect dodges trigger slow motion, which means the one moment you're about to die is also your best hacking window. Ironic. Bosses even have their own grids, which are bigger and denser with more red walls and more gray walls. And the grid does not get easier when you're winning. It sounds like they need to go to therapy. But if you subscribe, I'll go easy on the next grid. But most of you aren't going to I hope I'm wrong. Before we dive into the yellow submarine, the yellow submarine. These are the creme de la creme when it comes to hacking. And it's what makes this system so much more intricate than it lets on. Also, guys, I'm not drunk. I don't know why you guys keep saying this. I don't drink. I don't do d the dword. I am completely fine. But first, I wanted to see if I can easily recreate a cool system like this in Unity, the game engine that I use and the sponsor of this video. Thank you, Unity. That's me using Unity, by the way. since they just released their new in editor AI that understands your whole project and codebase. That was pretty cool. So, you can use an AI to create a system that hacks an AI, huh? So, I prompted the AI and it super quickly made a small prototype UI of the snake game with all of the primary colors. That was actually really easy. Literally two prompts. You can even roll back any changes it makes, control all of your data, and nothing is locked in. Not even snake. It's meant to assist you in your journey of making games, which you should totally start if you haven't by now. What are you doing? By clicking the link down below below. But back to these yellow bad boys. There are eight of them. And some synergies are better with certain builds than others. Pick your poison. These are big points. So, we got to bring out the big pointer. One of the fan favorites is expose, which exposes the enemy's weaknesses and on the next hack deals critical damage. Then if you hack the same enemy twice, you also get dark blue nose, which are just stronger versions and hues of the normal blue. Why so blue? You can pair it with chain, a combo multiplier. Finally, hue gets some drip to match, bro. Decode is just an off-brand version of expose, but uh heat is what you'll be bringing to the match when you get this skill because it causes robots to overheat faster. And I'm not talking about anger, which you can see by this little red bar

somewhere. I don't know where it is right now. I don't think I added the red bar here. Called the heat gauge or gauge, I don't know, — gauge — on top of their heads. They're a bit hotaded. I'm not seeing the red. I don't know where it went. If you shoot an enemy with the heat god, your bullets also help fill the meter. And when they get into an overheated state, they fall to the ground. And this is your chance to land a massive melee critical strike on that evil thing while they are basically in a heat stroke. You got to knock them while they're down. Good job, Hugh. There's also synergy with the combust mode, which turns every empty node into like these heat things. So now you have more heat contributing to this guy's downfall. Two birds with one stone. I keep playing the same clip if you haven't noticed. This is really last minute, guys. Adversely, freezing stops them in their tracks. First, you bring the heat and then you cool them off. Then there's confused, which describes my general state of being, which basically makes them all dizzy and kind of stumble around for a bit wondering what the purpose of their life is. It also causes friendly fire between these bad guys, but I don't have a clip to show that right now. Multihack is pretty good in early game. It lets you link multiple enemies together and then just like open state all of them at the same time. I couldn't come up with a joke for this part. Do you got one? You can put it in the comments below. And then drain steals HP from these guys and then gives it to you. I have no idea how that works, but you might want to avoid sunlight if you pick this one up. But it does not end. Yes, there is more somehow. I would not want to be a game balancer for this game. I'm exhausted already just looking at this. What is going on here? You can purchase abilities in the unit printer. Literally printing upgrades. If that's not capitalism, I don't know what is. Which are permanent unlocks to make Diana more overpowered somehow. You can scan the environment, identify bot weak points more easily, and add critical shots to blast them off the grid. The grid blast and get more dodges so that you don't die because then Diana will be sad. Don't you dare make her sad. Then there's a really interesting part. There's been complaints of hacking being a little repetitive over some time, which I get it. You know, not everyone wants to be bombarded with homework all the time that causes burnout as an adult. Ow, my jaw. To combat this, they added an autohacking ability which finds the best path through the grid so Diana can finally relax for like 2 seconds. But um the bad part is that it uses some of Diana's hacking gauge gosh — gauge — to do so, which fills up after each successful hack. And once she fills it up, she goes ballistic into overdrive protocol, which strips the armors of all nearby enemies and stun them. Stuns them, which is low-key terrifying. I'm not repeating that again. For the record, it's like 12:00 a. m. right now. Now, I've been dunking on Hugh. But really, without him, Diana would be lonely. Hugh are the father. His guns are the brawn to Diana's brain. That kind of sounds weird, not going to lie. And while you can have a few equipped at a time, the right one for the right job will get them out of that robotinfested lunar hell hole faster. Or if you want to call it by its actual name, the cradle. I don't know who named it that, but they I think they need a reality check. Like, have they played this game? Q also has some extra gadgets and modes you can equip from the store. Kind of like modifiers for your loadout. Each I was supposed to swap this out like 2 minutes ago. No, Hugh also has some extra gadgets and modes you can equip from the store like modifiers for your loadout. Each with pros and cons. I'll let you discover which ones break the game. It's definitely not cuz I don't know. And then there's the jackhammer which is a postgame gun only. So you got to do a lot of homework to get here. It deals damage even without hacking. So Diana, I'm sorry, but you're not needed anymore. Faces. There's actually a lot more, but explaining all of it would drop my video retention, and we cannot be having that. I work too hard for this. But why exactly does Diana ride on Hugh's back, apart from being lazy? Well, it isn't just a random character design choice. Instead, it solves three tress separate problems simultaneously. And it's one of the most interesting things Capcom did in the six years of this game's development. So, we must bring out the big pointer for big points. Although it has kind of lost its value because I held it on for [clears throat] too long. I just I guess I felt good with the bigger hand. The first problem they solved is more of a lazy developer one, which this is the section where I

shrine. Pretty much every game that has some sort of companion character has the same issue. They're all freaking useless. Like, what are y'all doing? They get stuck on walls. They die in cutscenes. and they just ruined the laring by doing the weirdest thing at the worst possible moment. [clears throat] But Capcom is a smarty pants and thought, why don't we just not do that? So Diana actually doesn't walk anywhere. Instead, Hugh acts like a stroller. A very uncomfortable stroller, but nonetheless, honestly, I don't know how he hasn't gotten her a pair of shoes by now, you know, after all they've been through. The second issue, I'm holding a two down here, but you can't tell, is more subtle. Capcom had actually planned for this game to be co-op. So, one player hacks while the other one shoots, except they quickly realize you're usually either shooting or hacking, and it kind of gets boring waiting around for the other player, especially if they suck. It's kind of like playing hot potato. Here, you get the exploding enemy. Oh, but by combining the skills together into a single player experience, it keeps the player busy and alternating constantly so it doesn't get still. See, this isn't Are you not entertained? And the final design decision went viral. I have trouble saying that together. Director Show Yonghi, sorry if I pronounced that wrong, looked at this cold sci-fi world full of murderous monsters. And you know what he thought? He said, "What this needs is a little girl. " And that's where Diana was born. It's a little bit of a traumatic childhood this girl has. They decided it would pair well with Hugh as the father figure. And then there's Cabin, the one robot that's not actively trying to kill you all the time. He's very wholesome. Every tactical item that Hugh carries is meant to protect her while she does the hacks. And it creates this deep symbiotic relationship where you feel emotionally connected to these characters. Oh, and apparently it went viral because it made men want to be like fathers again or something. I never thought a video game would have that kind of reaction, but okay. Off with you. I'm sorry. I did not mean to. I'm sorry. So, we've looked at how Pragmata's I have no idea unique combat system works and why it's so special. But what actually differentiates it from all the other games? As a game developer, I actually spend way too long thinking about how game systems work. With combat, they're generally separated into three different buckets. You got timebased combat, where you have to be on your toes, ready to smash that counter or attack button. The skill is really in knowing what button to press and when. A great example of this is securi. Then you have breathbased combat [snorts] which is sort of like the previous but here you have a lot of enemies you got to switch between constantly like in Batman. Here the skill is how well you switch up on your day ones. H then you have deathbased combat like in Devil May Cry. You got one enemy, but you got a ton of different ways to unleash your rage, which is a great form of scream therapy. There's more than one enemy here, but it's like the focus is what I mean. But with Pragmata, none of these matter. Pragmata really targets your attention, which is a bit unfortunate in this day and age of brain rot. But luckily, the rating for this game is Peggy 16. You got two different systems running in parallel and none of them can be paused. They're really trying to make us multitask here in the cradle. I'm just a girl. As far as I can tell, no other game has built something like this. Clare Obscure Expedition Threat 33, that is such a mouthful, solved the same problem, but backwards. It took a turn-based game and added realtime events to it to keep it engaging. While Prague Mata took real time combat and added puzzles to it. So like different but same in Cyberpunk 77 you can also hack but it completely pauses the whole game which is really not realistic at all and an over glorified miniame. Scarlet Nexus comes close in that you have two systems running at the same time where you have to alternate between physical and psychokinesis psycho — psychokinesis — attacks but still it's kind of all the same physical thing and it has no separate visual plane that you got to look at like in Pragmata. That's a different kind of hard. And then there's the game everyone keeps comparing Pragmata to, Vanquish. You know, I can see it a sci-fi third person kind of energy vibe, fast movement. It's kind of all the same really. It was ones and zeros. But with Vanquish, the second system is really serving the first one more closely. In Pragmata, they're genuinely independent. Well, obviously they're not independent, but you know what I mean. So, Pragmata is really the first attention layered combat system I've played built around a snake game on the moon with a child. Game development is truly a wild west out here. So, does

a snake game have any business being in a third person shooter? Well, I mean, yeah, it went pretty well. You never know what's going to tickle our little brains of ours. Pragmata doesn't need to hold your hand to teach you its depth. Kind of like Hugh holds Diana the whole time. I mean, doesn't this guy get tired at some point? Most players won't experience the intricacies of the hacking system, and honestly, I can see it kind of getting tiring after some time. And it's way too hard to do when your mouse DPI is set like an astronomical level because my DPI is bigger. I mean, higher than yours. But if Capcom can sell a million copies with a snake game on the moon, then honestly, what's anyone's excuse? It's time AAA companies switch things up or they'll keep getting eaten by little solo indie devs who release meme games and top the Steam charts, which is honestly very cool. There's no meme games on here, but it's an example, but the ceiling is very high. The game has a 97% positive rating on Steam with a million copies sold in two days. Capcom bet on Weird and Weird paid off. So, does Diana deserve that raise? Absolutely she does. And Hugh, you're doing great, sweetie. I'll give you a pass. Now, it's time for your pop quizun. Where do you get these purple nodes in the grid from? I kind of skipped over this one. That's right. You unlock it with capitalism or the unit printer, same thing. But the note only shows up when the enemy is almost dead, so you can unleash the ultimate finishing move. I told you not to mess with her. But if this video hasn't satisfied your combat knowledge, then I got this video on breathbased combat in this video that I may or may not be dissing Capcom. Guys, I'm actually not drunk. I'm just so tired.