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The announcement trailer for Pragmata was released all the way back in June 2020 and reveals a very different Diana, with Capcom then promising to release the game in 2022. As you may have heard, Capcom was a bit late. Pragmata's had a happy ending after its April 2026 launch, but as the years and delays piled up, the team couldn't shake a familiar sense of regret after revealing the game so early – or at least director Yonghee Cho couldn't.
We spoke to Cho (and producer Naoto Oyama) about the making of Pragmata, looking all the way back to that announcement trailer. It ended up being a surprisingly big deal within Capcom, not just because the date it promised loomed over the team as they worked to reinvent the game after internal mechanical reboots, but also because it got a much bigger response than Capcom ever expected for a new IP.
"When we made that initial announcement trailer, we honestly did not expect user interest to be as high as it was," Cho explains. "Of course, the dev team wanted to make a good, fun game. But when we saw the player reaction and expectations, we realized making just a good game is now no longer enough. We have to make something that's even better than we initially imagined."
Thinking of Todd Howard grimacing over The Elder Scrolls 6's eight-year-old reveal trailer, I asked Cho if he regretted that announcement in hindsight. He says there is some measure of regret, but in the end that trailer and the response it got was a boon to the team.
"It was very encouraging to see that, even after so much time had passed from the initial announcement, players were still so interested in the game," he adds. "That helped boost the spirits of the dev team."
In many ways, the early player response was "a huge element that pulled Pragmata through its development," and it certainly could've used the boost. "Ultimately, had we not released that trailer when we did, we wouldn't have the Pragmata that we have now," Cho says.
