uring the Game Developers Conference, BioWare’s own Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk were on hand to demonstrate their latest Xbox title, Jade Empire. Game Informer Magazine was the first to bring you the word on this highly anticipated action-RPG, and now Game Informer Online gives you the latest details.
Jade Empire begins with character creation, and you choose from 7 different character types, all of which have different levels of Body, Mind, and Spirit. Depending on what kind of way you want to play through Jade Empire, you’ll choose your corresponding character. Wu The Lotus Blossom, for example, is a more balanced character, and her attributes are divided fairly evenly. Scholar Ling is a more magical character, who is stronger in Chi. You can actually modify your character progression whenever you want, so you can learn magical styles, or faster styles even if your character doesn’t start off strong in certain areas. You can also assign ability scores as you gain levels to whatever abilities you want to strengthen – thus allowing the player to really be able to modify their characters.
While very tightlipped about the story line in Jade Empire, your characters starts out in the game as a student in a martial arts school. Ghosts and spirits are terrorizing the village and your master heads off to figure out what’s going on. Later on it becomes your job to discover out why all these problems are occurring. Dr. Greg Zeschuk suggested that there are some very strong themes in the game, “like what would you do with absolute power – would you use it for good or evil?”
The demo started us out in the Grandfather River Region near the town of Two Rivers, which is your starting town that’s located close to your martial arts school. This area is being invaded by lotus assassins. The first thing you notice about Jade Empire is everything in the game happens in real time – button press equals action. A punches, B dodges, X kicks, and combinations of these allow for higher level attacks. The Y button controls “focus” which slows down time for your enemies, allowing you to effectively take out your opponents.
There are over 30 mythical styles in the game that your character can learn throughout the game, including weapon, magical, and martial arts. While these are fictional styles, some of them are based on actual traditional styles. On the fly, via a menu on the bottom of the screen, you choose which style you want to challenge and decimate your opponents with. You can link multiple styles together to take advantage of your opponent’s weaknesses – which you’ll need to do because not all attacks will do the same amount of damage to different enemies. When battling the first wave of assassins, Zeschuk used Paralyzing Palm to freeze an opponent, and then switched to Legendary Fist, and shattered him. Fans of traditional turn based RPGs will be pleased to know that you can slow things down, and even though this game is very action oriented and plays in real time, you can still pause the game (ala Knights Of The Old Republic), and plan out your move set in advance.
If an enemy is really giving you a hard time, you can unleash a transformation spell and transform into a being that you previously have beaten. While you won’t be able to transform into any character, Dr Ray Muzyka said that they are planning on making the cooler enemies and bosses that you fight against in the game as transformable styles. For example, during a boss encounter that was demonstrated, they transformed their character into a demon form to be able to compete with a previously towering enemy. You won’t be able to be transformed for long, because transformation styles are heavy users of chi. But you will, however, be able to take a sizeable chunk of life from formidable foes.
Since Jade Empire at its core is an RPG, you can receive experience points by defeating enemies or completing quests. When you gain levels you receive ability points, which you can assign to your primary abilities – body, mind, and spirit. You will also obtain style points that you assign to your different styles in your style tree. Each style has a separate progression. It’s very deep, and very reminiscent of KOTOR.
You’ll once again be faced with many moral choices, and much like KOTOR, depending on how you play the game your character can be aligned good or evil. Certain martial arts masters will not teach you specific fighting styles unless you’re aligned good or evil, which will increase replay value.
Visually Jade Empire is nothing to scoff at. Trees, grass, and clothing blow realistically in the wind, which is all affected by wind velocity. There’s a lot of advanced rendering passes that take place which make environments and characters look amazing. This will all look especially fantastic if you have an HDTV – Jade Empire supports 480p. Sonically, the title will also support Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound.
Jade Empire will also support Xbox Live. While BioWare wasn’t revealing any specifics, they want to do much more than just your run-of-the-mill downloadable content. Even though Jade Empire is a single player experience, they’ve got a couple interesting new features planned for Xbox Live content.
On the surface, you could almost call Jade Empire a pseudo Kung Fu KOTOR, but it seems like the folks at BioWare are brewing up something much more special. If it’ll be possible to super serve both the traditional RPG fans and action players at the same time, we’ll have to wait and see. We look forward to getting our hands on a newer playable build of Jade Empire at this year’s E3.