Final Fantasy IX PC steam page is up http://store.steampowe

>>2899719
Did you really expect them to re-render the entire game for a Steam release? lol

>>2899719
Honestly I'd love these ports if the graphical style wasn't so damn mixed due to old and new assets

>>2899735
This is all old assets with a filter, though.

>>2899730
Failing that, then leaving it the fuck alone would be the next best thing, so as to have a homogeneous visual style.

It sells well
>Square: Well I guess they're okay with these low effort ports. Let's make more.

It sells poorly:
>Square: Well I guess no one wants to play these old games. Let's stop all ports in the future.

Fans can't win.

I still have the original discs. Exactly what am I gonna miss from these ports?

>>2899750
People have been clamoring for a re-release for years. There's no way that it would make anywhere near enough money to justify a full on remake, so obviously this is what they would do.

Don't like it, just play the PS1 version.

>>2899762

Who knows. But they might increase the frame rate to something manageable. Hopefully 60fps. Loading times too.

those backgrounds are actually how it originally looked if i remember correctly.

but why they felt it necessary to redo the characters and nothing else is beyond me.

at the very least this is less bastardized than the FFV remake that we were talking about here a couple weeks ago

>>2899803
i would actually be into it if they fixed the loading times. the one chink in FF9s armor is the load time between battles

>>2899719
So, it's basically just upscaled emulation that the rest of us have had for a decade? And not even a nice CRT shader option or anything?

>>2899815
Oh they do list a speedup option in the steam page.

>>2899815
Do you have a PS2/3? That also solves that problem.

>>2899719
Why does Squeenix have to half-ass every single FF-port?

>>2899816
Just wait until they keep the loadtimes in.

>>2899759

What happened to japanese integrity?

>>2899730
They hired an original artist to deal with the sprites. They could've done the same with the backgrounds and everything would probably be peachy for the most part.

>>2899915
*FF V/VI sprites

>>2899858
Because people will buy it.

Not to mention; how often do they develop for the PC? They seem to forget how textures work.

i can almost deal with how this looks

but you know they're gonna replace the really nice FF IX font with some garbage looking system standard ttf rendering shit

The idea is fundamentally flawed. You cannot upscale prerendered backgrounds and expect them not to look like utter shit, and it wouldn't have been cost-efficient to hire an artist to rerender all the game's environments from scratch. Every environment in the game (minus battlefields) is prerendered, so there are hundreds of these images.

Those blurry backgrounds really make the characters pop out, for better or for worse.

>>2899749
Really? They look quite different when rendered at a higher resolution I guess. Regardless, the clash is still there, high res detailed characters on blurry backgrounds is a mess

>>2899972
Honestly the best thing would be to have an option to play it at the original resolution, or at least scale the backgrounds up a bit with nearest neighbor at integer than scale down from there

>>2899972
Honestly, how much would it cost SE to do that? It can't really be that much, and the port would be perfect. They did that with the FFX port for PS4 it seems, so why not with FFIX?

>>2899759
Fans can win, they're just lazy fucks who'd rather complain about it in an anonymous imageboard instead of actually trying to contact any of the staff involved in the port to explain the problem.

Not you guys, of course. Much love.Yeah, keep denying your blame, faggots.

For pre-rendered backgrounds designed to be displayed on SD TVs, I'd say they aren't awful. You can tell what things are, at least.

>>2899719
I expected it. But damn, clearly rendered characters with cleaner textures look like PS2 characters in a PS1 game.

>>2900082
If you're trying to re-render and do every single background up from scratch?
You might as well get a whole damn development team for a remake at that point, because the sheer amount of effort (especially for FF9) would not be worth it just to HD-ify the backgrounds in what it otherwise a port.

>>2900104
what the fuck would explaining accomplish? you want an explanation, they were saving money

>>2900082
>Honestly, how much would it cost SE to do that? It can't really be that much, and the port would be perfect.

FF9 cost like 30 million dollars to make. A good portion of that was to the backgrounds.

>>2900141
>If you're trying to re-render and do every single background up from scratch?
Well, they might still have the old art resources lying around and they could just render it at higher res.

>>2900157
To re-render them won't cost them anything that much. Just find the original files and render them at a higher resolution, right? Anyone could do that if they had the original files?

>>2900189
>original files
>from the 90s
>implying people kept stuff backed up back then

The original files were probably wiped from some database to make room for the next game development project. Remember that data storage was more expensive back then. Its very rare that old original assets were kept.

>>2900201
>Enterprise-level data storage
>Expensive in the 90s

My sides are in orbit.

>>2900168
>>2900189
The original art files are long gone. They didn't save anything for their games even as recently as the original kingdom hearts, which had to be redone from scratch for the HD version. Redoing all the backgrounds would be a massive undertaking

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>>2899719
>Anonymous 01/06/16(Wed)22:22:32 No.28

>>2900251

Why do companies do this?

>>2901038
The idea of re-releasing old classics didn't really take off until part way through 6th gen. I'm sure a lot of companies just viewed their games as toys that would eventually be discarded and forgotten - if they're not selling the game anymore, why bother keeping the data around? Many of them didn't foresee that people would be interested enough in these games to want to preserve them and replay them. See Sega losing the source code and assets to Panzer Dragoon Saga, for example.

Can't wait for dat sweet sweet Dagger butt

>>2901412
>Dagger butt
>Not Eiko crotch
Are you gay or something?

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Didn't all the backgrounds get found recently?

>>2901434
If someone mods them in (at least the ones that were found) now that would be amazing

>>2901441
Considering all the ones for 7 and 8. I imagine it will haopen for 9 too

>>2901434
Those will be obtainable by DLC.

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>>2899719

yet, FF7 sold 1 million on Steam.
God, weeb...

>>2901038
Don't quote me on this but I remember reading an interview with one of the people that worked on the translations for one of the ps1 final fantasy games and how horrified he was to discover that they just threw out work like that when they were done with it. It just wasn't a concern at the time

>>2899719
and yet it takes 20gb of disk space. i suppose it all goes into fmv's, because what else?

>>2901618
Most likely the movies, but they've always been lazy with even this in ports, making them viable for latest machinery and that's it while everything takes fuckhuge space.

>>2901618
>and yet it takes 20gb of disk space.
That's probably larger than all FF games up to 12 combined.

I tought they'd lost all their work for ff9 because they didn't adapt it to PC at that time. Is anyone has any info on this?

>>2901618
>>2901673
This may be a good sign, a sign that we're getting the FMVs uncompressed.

>>2899953
They've already done that for the menu. Looks standard af.

>>2901549

They put all that work into the game and just....throw it all away?

...

I...I don't know what to say. As a hobbyist this...fucking depresses me..

>>2901860
Nah, you just download a million different language versions.

>>2902256
For what?

>>2899914
It died when Western Devs set the market.

>>2899730
given the game is 20gb download/install.. yeah I did.

>>2902256
Even if you had text files for every language in Europe it wouldn't get ANYWHERE near that.

>>2901434
No, some of them were only found because one of the members of Square's American division in Hawaii (Jake Rowell, whose signature is in all the files) -- who pretty much went uncredited in the game -- had several background renders in their portfolio on their personal website. It's could be that these are all the backgrounds Jake Rowell did but there were likely several other people involved that did the others. It could also be that he still has the original files intact, but that won't do much good if he's the only one with a handful of his own backgrounds.

>>2900189
>To re-render them won't cost them anything that much.

They'd cost a 16 year old SGI development box and the know-how to operate them, for one.

Or, some software that can re-render the assets in a modern environment, if such software does not exist it needs to be created, tested, etc.

And of course you also need the original art assets, which are long gone.

>>2900212
Square nearly went bankrupt a couple of times in the late 90s (in particular when that FF movie with the spirits of the planet tanked), so it's not surprising that they had to downsize what they could.

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They should have taken a hybrid approach like the REmake remake, where some parts of the game were re-drawn and others were upscaled.

Or at least make the upscaling look more pleasant.

>>2903146
>in particular when that FF movie with the spirits of the planet tanked

That was mostly bankrolled by an actual movie studio. Square's financial investment in that division was <$20M.

That is part of the whole "Square Enix merger" finance BS that gets thrown around a lot. It helps a lot when people ask dumb questions like "Why doesn't SE release any Enix IP games except for Dragon Quest?" to recognize that it was a takeover, not a merger.