A ridiculously awesome idea

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Sadivinedevil
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A ridiculously awesome idea

Post by Sadivinedevil »

This will probably never happen, but what if the entire .hack series was put onto one blu-ray disc for the Playstation 3? This collection would include .hack IMOQ, G.U. Vol 1-3, and last but not least a localized and remastered version of Link.
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Kite
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Re: A ridiculously awesome idea

Post by Kite »

wont make enough mony for the effort. besides some places haven't even got gu yet
Sadivinedevil
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Re: A ridiculously awesome idea

Post by Sadivinedevil »

Kite wrote:wont make enough mony for the effort. besides some places haven't even got gu yet
Well if this did happen and it was released everywhere it would give those who haven't played G.U. and Link a chance to play them. Then again like I said before this is very unlikely to happen.
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Kuukai
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Re: A ridiculously awesome idea

Post by Kuukai »

It would cost them a lot less money just to release the games on PSN, like they did with Silent Bomber. Of course that ended up being for Japan-only, so that gives you an idea of what to expect...
Sadivinedevil
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Re: A ridiculously awesome idea

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Kuukai wrote:It would cost them a lot less money just to release the games on PSN, like they did with Silent Bomber. Of course that ended up being for Japan-only, so that gives you an idea of what to expect...
I definitely agree that it would be cheaper to go through the PSN in fact I wish they would have PS2 games on the PSN sometime in the future instead of making the collections. At the moment though that seems unlikely. Bummer that Silent Bomber isn't on any of the other PSNs yet. :(
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phoenixv5
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Re: A ridiculously awesome idea

Post by phoenixv5 »

It's not exactly a 'ridiculously awesome idea'. It's a ridiculous awesome idea!
It is nice, but how many would buy it?
Also, IMOQ+G.U+LINK=7x4.7GB+1GB=33.9GB.
A blu-ray disc contains 25 GB right?
Besides, I don't know about you guys, but it'll take me months to download that much (if it's PSN that is).
Last of all, aren't remastered games supposed to be better graphics/larger size or something?

It is a great idea.
I would buy a PS3 just to play that game.
But it's also ridiculous :D.
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Re: A ridiculously awesome idea

Post by Sadivinedevil »

phoenixv5 wrote:It's not exactly a 'ridiculously awesome idea'. It's a ridiculous awesome idea!
It is nice, but how many would buy it?
Also, IMOQ+G.U+LINK=7x4.7GB+1GB=33.9GB.
A blu-ray disc contains 25 GB right?
Besides, I don't know about you guys, but it'll take me months to download that much (if it's PSN that is).
Last of all, aren't remastered games supposed to be better graphics/larger size or something?

It is a great idea.
I would buy a PS3 just to play that game.
But it's also ridiculous :D.
Actually all four of the first games would take up about 5GB if they were turned into one game because they all have the same engine and layout. Think of it this way .hack//Quarantine contains all of the information from the previous games that came before it, and all that information fits on a 4-5 GB DVD if it was enhanced it would probably be around 2-3 GB larger. The same could be said about the G.U. series which would probably be less than 8GB when all three games are made into one. Not to mention that the original series and G.U. could be remade to take up less space on one disc with today's compression technology. .hack is the only series I know of that literally released the same game multiple times with minor tweaks to each entry, so it would be easy to put the 7 PS2 games on one disc, aside from the programming nightmare that might be associated with doing this. Link on the other hand could be remastered to work on the PS3 like other PSP titles have been which would end up being around 4-8 GB if it was HD enhanced. Overall Space isn't as big of an issue as it seems because the series is technically 3 games instead of 8. It would probably be a programming nightmare to make the collection of them work properly though, so this idea is very unlikely. Also you're right about one thing. Who would buy it? The fans probably have the first 7 games, maybe link if they imported like I did, and there is no incentive to buy them again unless Link was only localized through this collection, this collection would probably do well in Europe since they didn't get .hack//G.U.
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phoenixv5
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Re: A ridiculously awesome idea

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Sadivinedevil wrote: Actually all four of the first games would take up about 5GB if they were turned into one game because they all have the same engine and layout. Think of it this way .hack//Quarantine contains all of the information from the previous games that came before it, and all that information fits on a 4-5 GB DVD if it was enhanced it would probably be around 2-3 GB larger. The same could be said about the G.U. series which would probably be less than 8GB when all three games are made into one. Not to mention that the original series and G.U. could be remade to take up less space on one disc with today's compression technology. .hack is the only series I know of that literally released the same game multiple times with minor tweaks to each entry, so it would be easy to put the 7 PS2 games on one disc, aside from the programming nightmare that might be associated with doing this. Link on the other hand could be remastered to work on the PS3 like other PSP titles have been which would end up being around 4-8 GB if it was HD enhanced. Overall Space isn't as big of an issue as it seems because the series is technically 3 games instead of 8. It would probably be a programming nightmare to make the collection of them work properly though, so this idea is very unlikely. Also you're right about one thing. Who would buy it? The fans probably have the first 7 games, maybe link if they imported like I did, and there is no incentive to buy them again unless Link was only localized through this collection, this collection would probably do well in Europe since they didn't get .hack//G.U.
Mmmm....
I guess you're right about the space.
About who would buy it...... I always wondered, how many .hack fans are there, on an average at least?
For instance, this forum has around 10000 members........
Sadivinedevil
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Re: A ridiculously awesome idea

Post by Sadivinedevil »

phoenixv5 wrote:Mmmm....
I guess you're right about the space.
About who would buy it...... I always wondered, how many .hack fans are there, on an average at least?
For instance, this forum has around 10000 members........
From what I can tell from the sales of the games on VGchartz there is probably around 300,000 to 500,000, maybe even more, people who bought at least one game from the series from all around the world. Not all of those purchases were by people who are fans of the series. Unfortunately, VGChartz isn't very accurate, and in the case of .hack it's grossly inaccurate, No Europe or American sales have been recorded. But going from the sales of .hack//Infection in Japan, which is at 260,000 right now, I can guess that is sold around 2 or 3 times that out of Japan. In the end the information isn't present on VGChartz so I can't make a more accurate assumption on the series' sales.

http://www.vgchartz.com/worldtotals.php ... sort=Total
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Kuukai
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Re: A ridiculously awesome idea

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I'm sure they'll have PS2 games in the future. Emulable PSP too. I thought the future was what we were talking about, I don't see them turning around and rereleasing Link now, retailers still carry it...

Both series have plenty of content that doesn't overlap. For example if you want to replay past cutscenes in Japanese you need to insert the previous disc. And that's not even counting all the stuff that isn't accessible from more than one volume. Or Parody Mode, if you want that. The engine itself is probably a fairly small part of the game. If you want to add Japanese to G.U. (I would recommend it) it would get even bigger. Likewise, take the install size of Link (1gb) and double it for English. And probably multiply that by 150% so it doesn't sound like the inside of a tin can. And we haven't even gotten to the Terminal Disc or Liminality yet...

.hack sold about 3 million games:
http://www.cc2.co.jp/en/company.html
Which isn't all that great. Star Wars Episode I racer beat that. And .hack contains racing!
Sadivinedevil
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Re: A ridiculously awesome idea

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Even if all of the content, with Japanese voice overs and game specific content, of the original 4 games were made into one game it still wouldn't be that much more than 5 GB. The bulk of the data for those games is the engine and the random dungeon generator system, which is relatively the same for each game. G.U. might be a be a different story though because the engine was somewhat improved upon with sequential entry, and the amount of game specific content is much higher than the original series. All in all I would expect that if each game in the G.U. series used the entire DVD (4.7 GB) putting all of the games on the same disc with the their game specific content would probably end up being around 6-8 GB. Upgrading these games to HD would increase that size by a factor of 1.5 - 2.

Comparing .hack to Star Wars Podracer is kind of one sided. Star Wars is one of the most popular series in existence and has a huge fan base that pretty much encompasses every person in the U.S. and many people outside of the U.S. while .hack on the other hand is a niche series that has a extremely small fan base in comparison to Star Wars. Podracer was an okay game, but it was pretty much like every other Star Wars game we have today, a game made to get a lot of money of the popularity of the Star Wars series.
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Kuukai
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Re: A ridiculously awesome idea

Post by Kuukai »

I'm pretty sure the majority of almost any game's data is media, not engine...
EDIT: This is true. After looking at Vol.2, it looks like each G.U. game uses about 3 gigs just for FMVs alone. And unlike the first series there's no cutscene replay overlap, so that's about 9 gigs just for G.U. just for movies, more if you want it in HD.

Ok, here are single games that each sold as many or more copies than all of .hack:
-Personal Trainer: Cooking
-Clubhouse Games
-Croc: Legend of the Gobbos
-The Getaway
-Theme Hospital

As cool as it would be I just don't see it happening if we can't even get Link... Although I'd still like to be optimistic about Link...

But at least if you wait long enough you'll be able to play your existing .hack games on glorious HD emulators, which is actually legal (minus the bios thing)
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Re: A ridiculously awesome idea

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I can't see cutscenes taking up more than half of the data of a game, maybe a 4th but 3/4ths is just ridiculous. The thing is that the beautiful prerendered cutscenes in a game actually take up less room than the ones that are in game rendered because they are usually compressed video files, especially on the PS2. In game rendered cutscenes are usually built on top of the engine and vary from game to game, so the size of in game cutscenes is dependent on the engine and the information that is built on top of the engine. Music and voices on the other hand can take up a lot of data, this is the reason why G.U. didn't have a Japanese voice track when it was localized, depending on how much music and voice work is put into the game. The engine itself is actually very small, but the information that is built on top of it can make up most of the game. Models, animation, and the code that allows everything to work like the developers want it to takes up a good majority of data in every game. In the end the usage of space by each element is different in every game. You might be right about the media taking up most of the data, but it just seems unlikely that it would take up the majority in the .hack series in my opinion.

We shouldn't lose hope for .hack//Link, and I have tried out .hack//Infection and G.U. vol 1 on the emulator. The games work okay, but suffer from major slowdown when there is more than 3 or 4 NPCs on the screen. I still prefer my PS3s partial emulation over it.
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Re: A ridiculously awesome idea

Post by zaseo »

It would be a dream come truth, but they would likely just put things on PSN to release the game again. If only we could get Link.
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Re: A ridiculously awesome idea

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Sadivinedevil wrote:I can't see cutscenes taking up more than half of the data of a game, maybe a 4th but 3/4ths is just ridiculous. The thing is that the beautiful prerendered cutscenes in a game actually take up less room than the ones that are in game rendered because they are usually compressed video files, especially on the PS2. In game rendered cutscenes are usually built on top of the engine and vary from game to game, so the size of in game cutscenes is dependent on the engine and the information that is built on top of the engine. Music and voices on the other hand can take up a lot of data, this is the reason why G.U. didn't have a Japanese voice track when it was localized, depending on how much music and voice work is put into the game. The engine itself is actually very small, but the information that is built on top of it can make up most of the game. Models, animation, and the code that allows everything to work like the developers want it to takes up a good majority of data in every game. In the end the usage of space by each element is different in every game. You might be right about the media taking up most of the data, but it just seems unlikely that it would take up the majority in the .hack series in my opinion.
It's not that hard to see, check the game. For that matter, any ps2 game with that many cutscenes. If FMVs took up less space than uglier in-game cutscenes, why wouldn't you see a whole lot more of them? It's a pretty simple principle: a 1meg flash animation will produce a much, much larger video if you record it. If you have 30 puppets and take 10,000 polaroid pictures of them (30 min of video), the pictures are going to take up more space than the puppets. You can even think of an engine as a form of compression, it's the same way your brain breaks down and stores information, into discrete concepts and actors vs. into filter algorithms... Lossy compression is unacceptable for games nowadays, it would be kinda amazing if they made .hack hd just to put artifacting in the cutscenes, but even with it any space you save from compression you'll lose with HD.
Sadivinedevil
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Re: A ridiculously awesome idea

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I've seen what I can of .hack//Quarantine's structure, when look at the files through my computer, a lot of the data seems to be associated with the voicework, sound effects, and music (this is an assumption because there are 4 folders with the word Voice on them, and I can't play the files directly through my computer) which takes up 1681 MB, about 1.5 GB. The movies, which I assume are in the folder labeled Stream, on the disc take up about 2.24 GB, about 3 times as big as Infections folder. In this case the media does seem take up more space on the disc than the data used by the engine. Then again we can't determine whether the files in either apply to engine related information, such as animations and sound effects, or if they apply to cutscenes and voicework. We also can't determine whether or not the data has been duplicated from the previous games when looking at it this way.

G.U. vol 1 on the other hand is vastly different by comparison because most of the data seems to be combined together under the PSS folder in 3 different subfolders which is the complete opposite of what was done with the original series. The files under the folder labeled Data seem to be those that relate to the engine, and the files under PSS seem to be everything else. If the Folder EV, the largest subfolder (containing 2.24 GB of data) under the PSS folder, contains the prerendered cutscenes then we can assume that the cutscenes were not compressed because of their size. I'm not ruling out the possibility that some games have compressed prerendered cutscenes that take up less space than the engine and it's corresponding data. in the case of .hack//G.U. we can clearly see that there is a folder containing what we can assume are the prerendered cutscenes and that they take up the majority of the data. In this regard you were right, and I'm sorry for doubting you.

I'm more familiar with the concept of the prerendered cutscene than I am with a rendered cutscene because I have worked with programs like 3DS Max and making prerendered video files. Basically it's turning a rendered cutscene into a video file which is easier for a console to process, hence the name prerendered cutscene. What determines the size of the video file of the render is what is present in the render, how long the render is, and the resolution of the render. If the file is uncompressed a few minutes can take up gigabits of data. if it is compressed it will take up less space, but the quality of the render takes a hit. Before looking at the files on G.U. I clearly had my doubts about a 5 minute cutscene taking up more than 200 MB of data, but I think about how Mpeg 4 probably wasn't possible on the PS2 and it makes a lot more sense to me now.
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Re: A ridiculously awesome idea

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Sadivinedevil wrote:The movies, which I assume are in the folder labeled Stream, on the disc take up about 2.24 GB, about 3 times as big as Infections folder.
Wait a minute, doesn't Quarantine have all movie clips from previous games?
If I remember right, I could watch clips from Infection, in Mutation (still playing Mutation)!
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Re: A ridiculously awesome idea

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phoenixv5 wrote:
Sadivinedevil wrote:The movies, which I assume are in the folder labeled Stream, on the disc take up about 2.24 GB, about 3 times as big as Infections folder.
Wait a minute, doesn't Quarantine have all movie clips from previous games?
If I remember right, I could watch clips from Infection, in Mutation (still playing Mutation)!
This is why I chose .hack//Quarantine because it contains all of the prerendered cutscenes from the previous games. The only thing it doesn't have is the cutscenes with the japanese voiceovers from the first 3 games which might actually be different audio tracks. In which case we could assume that the video, not the audio, is less than or equal to 2.24 GB.
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Re: A ridiculously awesome idea

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Sadivinedevil wrote:I've seen what I can of .hack//Quarantine's structure, when look at the files through my computer, a lot of the data seems to be associated with the voicework, sound effects, and music (this is an assumption because there are 4 folders with the word Voice on them, and I can't play the files directly through my computer) which takes up 1681 MB, about 1.5 GB. The movies, which I assume are in the folder labeled Stream, on the disc take up about 2.24 GB, about 3 times as big as Infections folder. In this case the media does seem take up more space on the disc than the data used by the engine. Then again we can't determine whether the files in either apply to engine related information, such as animations and sound effects, or if they apply to cutscenes and voicework. We also can't determine whether or not the data has been duplicated from the previous games when looking at it this way.
We can probably safely say original .hack has less non-cutscene content than G.U., right? I mean just look at Mac Anu... If this is the case, it's <0.67gb
Sadivinedevil wrote:I'm more familiar with the concept of the prerendered cutscene than I am with a rendered cutscene because I have worked with programs like 3DS Max and making prerendered video files. Basically it's turning a rendered cutscene into a video file which is easier for a console to process, hence the name prerendered cutscene. What determines the size of the video file of the render is what is present in the render, how long the render is, and the resolution of the render. If the file is uncompressed a few minutes can take up gigabits of data. if it is compressed it will take up less space, but the quality of the render takes a hit. Before looking at the files on G.U. I clearly had my doubts about a 5 minute cutscene taking up more than 200 MB of data, but I think about how Mpeg 4 probably wasn't possible on the PS2 and it makes a lot more sense to me now.
Yes, most professional games want to avoid artifacting. Sure the bitrate is excessive, but at worst it's probably still somewhere around where you'd want it for HD... I imagine if we look at the FMVs for MGS4 or FF13 we'd get the same thing (although I don't have a good way to check). If you've done rendering it should be even more apparent how quickly a movie ca outgrow the size of its own ingredients, even with compression... If this wasn't the case, then like you said it would be less processor-intensive, and additionally better-looking and more disc-savvy to make basically every cutscene an FMV...
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