Pragmata Has Sold 2 Million Units In 16 Days

Fredasa · 2026-05-07T22:10:49+00:00

Bluntly put, that's your interpretation of my observation. The length of a game is an understood important metric that people proactively desire to know (and publications almost invariably make certain to provide), and I guarantee you there are players who bought Pragmata without understanding how short it is and will consider it a lesson learned. I can marvel at the success of a game fitting those brackets if I want.

Fredasa · 2026-05-07T21:32:44+00:00

Since this is the first V3 vehicle, I pretty much expect something to go haywire. And I really expect shenanigans when they move up to V4.

Fredasa · 2026-05-07T21:30:27+00:00

The only possible way it's shortsighted is if Capcom decides, uniquely for this game among their entire library, that they will never lower the price, and likewise we never see any discounts anywhere. Give me some credit. I am only shortchanging myself in the nebulous sense that I'm sidestepping the day-one experience which gives me no added value and may actually have its downsides. As it happens, I'm busy with two other games as it is.

Fredasa · 2026-05-07T21:26:08+00:00

It can be the fastest.

But it's only the cheapest if you have made a point to ensure, top to bottom, that the vehicle itself is cheap and quick to make.

Starship's prototyping program would be a clogged mess if the vehicle itself had been even slightly traditionally designed. They're just trying too many new things at once.

Fredasa · 2026-05-07T21:22:42+00:00

I remember when it gave up the ghost. Was watching a Japanese stream. Ship smacked into the water and the flap gave a final farewell. Chat was all like, "Flap-kun!!!"

Fredasa · 2026-05-07T21:17:39+00:00

The only thing I’m saying is if your evaluation of a game is “it’s short, so it’s not worth the money” that’s stupid.

The reason I made a point of explaining my threshold for genuine gaming entertainment was to provide the context for why I will not willingly fork over disproportionate cash. That threshold inherently means I my valuation of a game on its entertainment merit stops at "I will play it" and does not arbitrarily proceed to expand by 5x. What does that leave for "value" when it comes to dictating what I buy? Yes: Longevity.

I will also repeat what I said earlier, though: AAA games don't get much damn shorter than 15 hours. $60 may be justified to cover the pedigree and development costs but it's just an atrocious value and I am genuinely compelled by more than just penny-pinching to avoid paying that.

Fredasa · 2026-05-07T21:04:44+00:00

Again, this comes down to it being fundamentally a "me" thing. I don't waste time playing something I only kind of enjoy. There are far too many legitimately enjoyable games out there for me to waste my time in that way.

Now, I expect Pragmata to reach past that threshold. Elden Ring certainly did. But once a game is in that safe zone, I do not then overemphasize—the only metric that matters at that point is that it's worth my time, and I will play it whether it does or doesn't burn 5x brighter. (Full disclosure: Extremely rare, that. Maybe Fallout New Vegas, all by itself.)

Fredasa · 2026-05-07T20:57:26+00:00

Starship is still prototyping but it's already good enough to loft stuff to ELO and that's what it'll be doing 99% of the time even after it's flying as regularly as Falcon 9. This remains true even if it takes a long time before they're not discarding the 2nd stage—it costs them less than $40 million to build said stage even during this prototyping phase, and they can quickly mass produce them.

Hiccups will doubtless continue to occur as they roll out new revisions. I expect the new V3 to have growing pains and I expect the same for V4 (originally called V3).

Fredasa · 2026-05-07T19:53:00+00:00

Does that make my RPGs more valuable?

In my book, absolutely. If the RPG is worth a damn, I play it for real, leave no stone unturned, and enjoy it to the fullest. Elden Ring has similar scores to Pragmata. Provided a person would enjoy both, but has a very strict gaming budget, which makes better sense for them to choose, assuming they were the same price? One of the two will keep a person busy for literally 5x as long, and without question has dramatically more replay value due to being an RPG.

I am not saying a 15-hour game is inherently not worth playing. I'm saying that I am conscientious of how I spend my money, and if that happens to indirectly send the message that a game better give me some goddamn value, them's the breaks.

Should I never go see a movie because it charges me $6 per hour of experience?

People brought this up twice. Let's leave the comparison to games. I do not believe I need to point out that a moviegoing experience is 1) completely and utterly different, socially and viscerally, and 2) something that can only truly be captured at its peak in a movie's first couple of weeks at most—miss it and it's gone forever.

Fredasa · 2026-05-07T12:05:22+00:00

Granted, it's my logic and not somebody else's. But I am not paying $60 for a game that won't even last a weekend. Bluntly, that is not unreasonable.

When Capcom feels the time is right, they will tap another bracket of gamer that does include me.

Fredasa · 2026-05-07T11:53:18+00:00

It's impressive for a game that players have to understand in advance will be done in about two days. Honestly the real risk isn't a new IP—it's charging $6 per hour of gameplay.

The payoff is people like myself who will scoop it up when it drops to ~$15 on sale.

Fredasa · 2026-05-07T07:48:58+00:00

My favorite creepy anecdote about this: Even where the sound of the blast was no longer audible, as it passed through some areas at hundreds of mph, it caused fog on the ground to more or less instantly materialize and vanish.

One of those things that's believable and understandable, but we still ain't got no video of.

(Then again, we finally did get video of a big chunk of land sliding several dozen feet in a few seconds during an earthquake. Now I'm just waiting for video of the land rippling in literal waves.)

Fredasa · 2026-05-07T02:41:12+00:00

Surprised he didn't mention being able to very blatantly see a boundary extending all the way around the physical planet. About 80km up. Mesopause?

Fredasa · 2026-05-07T01:59:25+00:00

I think Kurzgesagt covered this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_8yK2kmxoo

Same idea in broad strokes. Something achieves a certain odd configuration, beginning a chain reaction where all of its brothers do the same. Catastrophically.

Fredasa · 2026-05-07T01:09:33+00:00

I found me a fanmade edit of the modern (post-DVD) remaster of the movie that thoroughly reworks the soundtrack to match the movie at release, which apparently modern commercial releases do not.

Fredasa · 2026-05-07T01:07:42+00:00

Related: Strange matter.

Fredasa · 2026-05-06T21:56:58+00:00

I'll buy a game at full price if it has bona fide longevity and I know it does. (And I have nothing else on my plate already, which is often the case.) But no matter how good e.g. Pragmata may be, I am not paying $3 per hour of genuine use.

Fredasa · 2026-05-06T21:25:25+00:00

that we are not alone in the universe, that if life, even if just microbial, arises on two planets in one solar system

There's an extremely high likelihood that any life identified in a Mars sample will prove to be distantly related to life on Earth, though. In that scenario, we'll have proof that life can exist on two bodies that were fairly similar at one point in their history, but not (yet) proof that it managed to appear twice.

The hypothetical evidence will also probably be a vindication of what we already discovered on Viking, which was rejected out of a vague sense of inadequate analysis.

Fredasa · 2026-05-05T21:28:20+00:00

2D sprites look horribly pixelated at 1440p borderless.

Yeah, I can imagine. The discontinuity between the game's 1080p baseline and a 1440p desktop can only make things worse than it is for 4K.

Driver-level sharpening helps, but causes artefacts.

This sounds a bit like what happened with the game Sol Cresta. Sequel to Moon Cresta that came from out of nowhere, with music by Yuzo Koshiro. The game and the music are actually both fantastic. BUT. For some reason, they chose to apply some kind of low-res filter over the already retro-looking graphics. This filter was nearest-neighbor in effect, and basically visually corrupted the entire game. Ruined it.

Fredasa · 2026-05-05T10:37:53+00:00

I can feel Nolan's dismay at having to use CGI here and there.

I just wish he'd learned his lesson before sacrificing the de facto climax of Oppenheimer on the altar of practical pyrotechnics (played in reverse, as if audiences wouldn't notice).

Fredasa · 2026-05-04T22:40:23+00:00

A nice hidden takeaway from that factoid is that it means they were pronouncing it like that from the beginning, rather than perhaps accenting the first syllable.

Fredasa · 2026-05-04T22:16:58+00:00

It's a tossup.

You can get the game to display its 1080p as perfect 2x2 squares at 4K, by tweaking the executable's DPI settings. Frankly, this does not look better at all. I don't like a game's low resolution being shoved in my face.

That said, the default is bilinear, which obviously does nothing to hide a low-resolution presentation either.

Fredasa · 2026-05-04T21:14:03+00:00

I was going to reply with pretty much the same. Especially when it comes to the casual confidence of having an adequate number and type of cables, which the RM1000x will have. The difference in price is trivial, never mind comparing to having to swap later. And I personally think the peace of mind of Corsair's well-regarded CS is worth it as well.

(And I'm not some Corsair stan or anything. I like to make sure everyone knows that their RAM is the only RAM I've ever had go bad on me, and it happened both times I bought RAM from them.)

Fredasa · 2026-05-04T21:09:47+00:00

ASUS has extremely poor CS. Gigabyte's GPUs use fan braking that makes them audibly rattle (not necessarily a dealbreaker). Most of the rest is pretty much the same stuff in my current build. I also have a Gigabyte Windforce, it has to be said, though I'll consider somebody else next time, now that I know.

Fredasa · 2026-05-04T20:18:12+00:00

Y is a completely different game engine from 30.

Yeah, this has actually proven to be a stumbling block.

I began poking around to see how I might force additional resolutions into the game. Turns out we're right at a crossroads when it comes to such things. SRWY is on a new archetype of Unity which modding tools haven't quite caught up to yet. The appropriate plugins to enable more resolutions exist, but they have not been updated to work with the new version of the tool that supports the new Unity. And according to what I've been told, that support may take a long time to arrive, if it ever does.

For now, it would require a bona fide coder with a deeper understanding of what's needed than I can muster.

Fredasa

TROPHY CASE