Fans wanted an online .hack game; fans were always told that such a thing would never happen by Bandai itself... until now.
After play-asia.com jumped the gun and announced it ahead of time, Bandai and CyberConnect2, teamed up with Artdinks, finally decided to unveil their secret .hack related project through Famitsu, a popular Japanese gaming magazine; fans rejoiced knowing that their prayers were finally heard and being answered.
It?s clear that not everyone is familiar with Online RPGs, may they be MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online RolePlaying Game, like World of Warcraft and City of Heroes) or ORPGs (Online RolePlaying Game, like Neverwinter Nights and Phantasy Star Online).
MMORPGs are comprised by a massive persistent world where thousands of players can fight, socialise and do as they please, connected simultaneously. ORPGs, however, may have a massive world, but very rarely persistent and most of the time the servers are entirely hosted by players (like Neverwinter Nights) or the cities and lobbies are hosted by the game company but the field instances, where actual fighting and questing occurs, are hosted client side by the players (like Guild Wars and Phantasy Star Online); .hack//Fragment falls in this second category, ORPG.
Some things are certain about Fragment:
it has both an offline and an online mode
it?ll be released for the PS2 (maybe for the PC as well?)
it?ll have dungeon creation tools for players
it?ll allow players to create their own character, using any class they desire
it?ll allow players to customise their character looks to an unknown extent
it?ll have the, already usual, simulation of the Altimit OS desktop before actually playing in Fragment, which includes the BBS, the mail client (think of it like a Private Message inbox where players exchange PMs using their account names in forums) and the ?web-browser? (which will be used by CC2 to make announcements and post news); the PC version of the Altimit OS desktop apparently also has the dungeon creation tools
characters from the .hack series (manga, anime, games and possibly novels) will party with the player during offline play
Anything else that may be said about Fragment is pure speculation, some more possible than others, but speculation none the less.
The following paragraphs will try to give a more in-depth look at some of the theories surrounding Fragment and why they may be possible (or even impossible).
There are two theories which are the most common ones:
it?ll be for the PC and for the PS2
it?ll be for the PS2, the PC will only have the tools to create and run dungeons and servers
These theories spawn from this image taken from this Famitsu scan:
Why may the first theory be correct?
It?s clear that the Altimit OS desktop and the dungeon creation tools are running in a windows environment. Why may the second theory be correct?
Even though it?s clear that the Altimit OS desktop and the dungeon creation tools are running in a windows environment, it?s also clear that there are no icons for "The World", "Mailer" or "Web-Browser".
Like it can be seen in this picture from what might be the PS2 version of Fragment, the icons presented here (The World, Mailer and Browser) are not even remotely similar to the ones presented in the PC related pictures.
To further speculate about the four icons shown in the PC related pictures, it can be said that the first icon is to create a server, the second opens the dungeon creation tools, the third leads to some form of setup menus and the fourth may be the "Exit" button. Unfortunately the scans are too blurry, making the characters under the icons very tough to read, thwarting my attempts at translating them in the process. Something important to note is that there?s no icon for the BBS; it?s likely that the BBS is selected from within "The World", just like in the previous PS2 .hack games.
This picture here can raise a lot of confusion. The picture is labelled as ?AREA SERVER? in the scans, so this is clearly the screen where we select the servers/games in progress we want to join. To clarify the reason I wrote ?servers/games in progress? is because we may not be joining actual player created servers in this screen, but a game a player created, waiting for people to join him/her.
By analysing this picture it?s obvious that each line represents a server/game and each line is comprised of this information:
Level (host level?)
Server/Game name
Number of people inside Then there?s that red marker before some of the servers/games listed, which may be indicating passworded servers/games, full servers/games (considering that the number of players inside of the marked ones appears to be 3) or servers/games with something underway that can?t be interrupted (thus preventing other players from joining, this happened in Phantasy Star Online for example) like a quest or an event.
Either way, this is the screen that will lead us to meet other players of Fragment and new adventures.
On to another subject: character creation. How will our characters look like and what are the options given? Two of the pictures related with character creation are pretty clear, but the last one can be somewhat unclear.
This picture is pretty straight forward, the player picks one of the classes they desire their character to be:
TwinBlade
BladeMaster
HeavyBlade
HeavyAxe
LongArm
WaveMaster
This picture will seem extremely familiar to those who played Phantasy Star Online. The player picks the character?s body (it appears that selection A is Kite?s body), the costume?s color and the bottom two options are a mystery, but surely related with some physical aspect of the character like size for example.
This is the picture which may confuse people. May it be stat growth editing when levelling up? May it be some form of stat distribution method on character creation? Whichever the case, it seems to indicate (but, none the less, in a speculative manner) that the player can control how the stats are distributed after levelling up. Something important to note is that there?s no apparent selection for the character?s gender. Either the gender is selected in a menu not shown after selecting the desired class or the gender depends on the body type (from A to H, as seen in a previous picture) selected for the character.
It is all a small speculation on what to spect.Also Much like the previous four .hack games, you will be able to trade your equipment to others. The only difference is it's an actual Player, not an NPC. Guilds will have the option to trade among each other in a "private shop", and in addition to players outside your Guild. It is also possible to set a special price for an item in your Guild shop. Trading, however, is restrained to the country of origin. For example: An American player cannot trade with a Japanese player.
Minimum PC Requirements
Minimum PC requirements have been released (Dungeon Creation):
- Windows XP- SP2
- 1 GHz processor
- 256MB of RAM
- 100MB of freespace
CyberConnect 2 has leaked out some new information on fragment with the release of their online support page. Most of the information presented on the site are instructions on how to setup fragment. However, the little bit of new info we found has been translated. .hack//fragment is planned to release in Japan on November 23rd.
"The protected areas that are crucial to the story of .hack might one day suddenly appear on your area server! If this happens, someone must use virus cores to gate hack in, and defeat the boss at the bottom of the dungeon! Will a "hero" appear and save your area!?".
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