A quick one to end the day. While Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has done a fair-to-miraculous job of reviving enthusiasm for the despised QTE, players remain suspicious of minigame-style mechanics in combat systems – and when I say players I mean you, the people who fretted in the comments for my recent article on Pragmata.
Capcom’s upcoming space-me-daddo-shooty-doo has a debuff mechanic whereby the android girl riding on your back hacks the robots you’re fighting – a process of moving a cursor around a grid of glyphs to deactivate shields and so forth.
It’s the kind of subtask that may seem annoying on paper. I didn’t find it intrusive during my Summer Game Fest hands-on, but why should you pay attention to me, the melonhead who almost got himself kicked out of the demo session by losing his temper when the PR told him he couldn’t take a picture of the controller diagram print-out? The very same dipstick who then insisted on passive-aggressively drawing the print-out in his notepad, spitefully frittering away five minutes of the session and probably getting himself disinvited from future events? The exact same consummate wellington who has now written all this down for public consumption, just in case those PRs had forgotten?
No, I think you’re better off trying Pragmata’s hacking for yourself care of this brief browser demo. It’s a cursory but solid approximation of the combat system I sampled this month, though obviously it doesn’t factor in all the strafing, reloading and such.
I feel pretty positive about Pragmata as a whole, though I doubt it’ll set the world on fire. It’s a cleanly-built and straightforward shoulder-shooter with just enough intricacy to make you feel clever, even when you’re smouldering with outrage and wondering if you can get #Capcomgate trending on Bluesky.
