Jade Empire

[Shockeye]

I bought Jade Empire.

The box is pretty.

[Strazos]

I played through the first village assault. Good stuff thus far. I'm really going to dig the "on-the-fly" style changes. I actually had to think about what skills to upgrade when i dinged.

On the SCA: funny, everyone I know who does "that' sort of thing is a damn neanderthal. Granted, I would love to do some medieval fighting, but I won't settle for anything less than 100% authentic replica armor and weapons, and we can all imagine how much that stuff costs. Screw that ratan and pipe insulation nonsense. I also fail to see how it's "the easiest way to get laid".

[schild]

Screw that ratan and pipe insulation nonsense. I also fail to see how it's "the easiest way to get laid".

You wouldn't believe how much chicks dig cardboard and styrofoam. </tongue-in-cheek>

[Strazos]

Get with the program schildy baby, it's all about the green.

[MrHat]

Get with the program schildy baby, it's all about the green.

/stab

Edit for relevance:  Played about 2 hours of it.  Enjoying it quite a bit, it does feel a lot like the adopted asian kid of gay life parteners KotoR and Fable.  Needless to say, it's fun.   Mad props for the 1942 mini game.

[Trippy]

Fry's is indeed having a sale on Jade Empire which ends today, 4/14. The price is $36.99 for either the limited or regular edition (they had both in my local store, lying Bioware marketing scum). Their online store, www.outpost.com, also has it on sale for $39.99 but it doesn't say if that's the LE or regular edition.

[Murgos]

On the SCA: funny, everyone I know who does "that' sort of thing is a damn neanderthal. Granted, I would love to do some medieval fighting, but I won't settle for anything less than 100% authentic replica armor and weapons

I fenced in high-school (among other things) and there was some overlap between that group and the SCA group, the SCA'ers who were serious about the fencing were cool people for the most part, the SCA'ers who showed up to one or two practices and then wandered off were usually cretins and to this day I am still not sure what they expected to find there other than excercise and lots of repetition.

I look back at fencing rather fondly and out of all the martial arts type things I've tried I think I would most like to go back to it for a couple of years, well that and Bag-gua (Pa-Kua) kung-fu.

[Cougar]

Unless I have to beat the game to unlock the Monk. Then it'll take a few days longer.

That second disk you got with the Limited Edition? Pop that sucker in and select the option to unlock the monk and you are good to go.

[Daeven]

The official word about Jade and the PC is "We have not announced any plans of a PC version of Jade Empire, but we are exploring the possibility."

Translation: "dude. Are you people freaking retarded? We port everyting to PC if it sells even remotely well. Now go buy another copy so the good Doctors who founded the company can go buy another Porsche."

[HaemishM]

Or, "Why would we want to take the time and trouble to port it to the PC, when we can sell twice the copies for four times the profits than the measley amount we'll make selling it on the PC. Buy an X-Box, kekela."

[Murgos]

C'mon Haemish you know perfectly well that when they run the numbers and if income - port cost = large profit then exclusivity is just a pipe dream.

[HaemishM]

Oh sure, unless Microsoft got them to sign a deal saying they couldn't port it. Or they couldn't port it until some ridiculous amount of time later, like Fable.

[Murgos]

The only way Microsoft would have got them to agree to that deal is by telling them they would cover part of the income they would have made from ports with money they make from Xbox sales due to Jade Empires being exclusive.  I am sure they have the option to pay back Microsoft any amount of money granted to them plus a little extra, probably, and break the contract.

No one would sign an exclusivity agreement that hurt them financially.  Especially since the point of the exclusivity is to sell more X-Box's which equals profit for Microsoft.  There is no doubt in my mind that Bioware can break the contract if they see it as financially reasonable.  Alternatively, I would be very surprised if there isn't a vague and nebulous clause about voiding the contract automatically if XBox sales don't hit a certain peak, a peak which I am sure will be open to interpretation by a suitably motivated law team.

[Nija]

Funniest part of this game is how the dialogue camera angle makes all the girls look like they have down syndrome.

Yes, I know what asians look like and it's not because they are asian. In some places it makes me wonder how it even got by QA.

[Nija]

"Port times" don't bother me. I'm still waiting on GTA San Andreas to come out on xbox, so I can play it with decent graphics + framerate, and for it to come out on PC, so someone can hack in multiplayer. Shrug, it's just going to get worse and worse as the years go by.

[Riggswolfe]

Funniest part of this game is how the dialogue camera angle makes all the girls look like they have down syndrome.

Yes, I know what asians look like and it's not because they are asian. In some places it makes me wonder how it even got by QA.

I don't have that issue. The biggest problem I have is that Dawn Star looks very familiar, like maybe she's modeled after an Asian actress and it is driving me crazy.

[Nija]

Maybe it's a 480P issue, but the eyelids flicker and change around and the eyes always look crossed.

That and the heads are lopsided from that view. I'll have to take a picture of it later.

[Riggswolfe]

Nope. I'd notice that. The faces look awesome in this game. Not quite Half Life 2 awesome, but pretty damn close for a console RPG.

I installed the monk from my second disk. He's kinda cool looking. His monk spade style wasn't listed anywhere and I couldn't choose it through customizing so I'm guessing it's trainable somewhere in the game.

[schild]

First impressions:

1. 480p looks like ass. The game is as pretty as a good PS2 game (but not as good as say God of War). Yes, the faces actually look asian instead of anime-asian. But the voices are entirely uninteresting. These people should be speaking mandarian or something, not simolean and english.

2. The controls....Well, I don't know what to say. Uncontrollable would be a good word for it, if only because combos are near unavoidable. It's like RPG controls for dummies. But I'm enjoying it.

3. I like the wealth of styles. In the very least, it makes up for the controls.

4. I love the many characters you meet, despite the linguistic abomination that spills forth.

5. Worst writing in a Bioware game thus far. I miss Black Isle more than ever now. There's random bits of engrish, awkward dialogue, and weirdness. Some of the writing is downright surreal.

6. Gamespot's review is much more fair than the knobsucking IGN review - which they MUST have been paid to give. There's no other possible explanation.

7. As far as immersion beyond the language barrier, whoever programmed the "walk to" points and whoever was on QA for them sucks balls. They should be fired. Characters stutter, take little steps and jerk around. It's obscenely bad. I don't know why this happened - and really, there's no excuse. After playing God of War, this sort of stuff makes me incredibly angry.

8. The world is awesome. The story is great (despite writing issues). It's literally a situation where the no amount of writers and programmers could fuck up what the designer had created.

I realize I'm judging by God of War. Yes. It's the new measuring stick, get used to it.

9. Is it worth buying? Yes, no question. But be angry at Bioware when you make the purchase. One more month worth of QA would have fixed nearly every complaint. Someone got really fucking lazy and impatient.

[Aenovae]

Agreed with most of what schild said, except the following:

The dialog is great, but the writing is often tedious.  Basically, the characters have great personality, but you'll be rolling your eyes once they start long expositions about the plot.  They give speeches a lot.

The pathing, especially when opening doors and treaure, is blatantly buggy.  Your character stutters and pivots for a few seconds whenever trying to interact with an object.  It happens so often that I'm surprised Bioware agreed to ship with it.  QA is not the problem, the developers knew of this issue but decided it was acceptable for some reason.

[Riggswolfe]

Oddly I have no pathing issues. Could it be a hardware thing? We all know that XBOXs have slight differences, ranging from different CDroms to different hard drives.

So far it's pretty fun. The characters are cool. The voices do their part. I'm the type that tends to read dialogue then skip past the voices. The cutscenes are pretty cool. The flying parts feel like old school galaga or something.

Maybe not a 10.0 but I'd say it's better than KOTOR in alot of ways. My only gripe so far is that every single weapon is its own style, so if you put points into a weapon and change later, you've wasted alot of points for no reason.

[Nija]

To see the buggy pathing, start a new game, do the fight, then head out towards the beach. When you have to open the door leading from the school grounds to town, run up next to it, then hit A to try to open it. Instead of pushing A from far away.

[Strazos]

Or try opening a barrel or chest from the "wrong" angle. It seems this problem is inherant in the engine, which is derived from the original KotOR engine. Yeah, it's slightly annoying, but extremely minor in my book, and not really worth using as an insult towards the game or BioWare.

[schild]

Or try opening a barrel or chest from the "wrong" angle. It seems this problem is inherant in the engine, which is derived from the original KotOR engine. Yeah, it's slightly annoying, but extremely minor in my book, and not really worth using as an insult towards the game or BioWare.

I mentioned it as an insult towards QA. Who obviously sucked ass on this game.

If I could send a dead fish to the guy who was in charge of QA for movement and pathfinding, I would.

[Xilren's Twin]

I mentioned it as an insult towards QA. Who obviously sucked ass on this game.

If I could send a dead fish to the guy who was in charge of QA for movement and pathfinding, I would.

I tend to agree that it's an inherent problem with the underlying engine they are using, not so much bad QA.  Pathfinding was never steller in any of this engine's iterations, from NWN to Kotor1&2 to now Jade.

Still a fun game though, worth the money thus far.  I can also see why some people looking to force the issue would claim it's basically Kotor3 (not that that's a bad thing) but it's lineage is obvious, even down to the new dark side/light side split.

Had to groan that our hero is from...Two Rivers.  Gah.  Wheel of time is painful enough as it is without reminders...

Xilren

[HaemishM]

That pathing problem does sound like an artifact left over from the engine's NWN beginnings. I'm amazed at how many profitable games they've gotten out of that thing.

[schild]

I'm amazed at how many profitable games they've gotten out of that thing.

Well, it's not a terrible engine. My only real gameplay problem is the completely uncontrollable combos, but the enemy has the exact same issue. It boggles the mind, but at the very least, the game isn't harder because of it.

[Merusk]

Had to groan that our hero is from...Two Rivers.  Gah.  Wheel of time is painful enough as it is without reminders...

So do the female characters sniff and smooth their skirts all the time while the men sulk over how much better at understanding women all the other male characters are and the narritave goes on for about 3 pages about the inconsequential meal they had at some point in their journey?

[Xilren's Twin]

Had to groan that our hero is from...Two Rivers.  Gah.  Wheel of time is painful enough as it is without reminders...

So do the female characters sniff and smooth their skirts all the time while the men sulk over how much better at understanding women all the other male characters are and the narritave goes on for about 3 pages about the inconsequential meal they had at some point in their journey?

Not exactly, but that quest where I had to find the local gang mistress a husband so she'd stop beating up the poor baker over a promise of undying love he made to her when they were 6 years old was too close for comfort...

Xilren

[Aenovae]

I realize I'm nitpicking here, but this is a great opportunity to explain a reality of buggy games.

The pathing issue (more of a flaw than a bug), is certainly known to almost every developer at Bioware, and known to every single tester who ever picked up the controller.

The flaw is obvious and everyone who plays the game for more than an hour or so will see it.  Bugs like these are the kind that QA reports again and again and again until the programmers either fix it or just mark it Will Not Fix.

For games with a decent budget, ALL bugs that end up in the final product were in fact found and reported by QA.  But there comes a time in every project when the publisher and developer draw the line and simply kick the game out the door.  They know exactly how buggy their game is, they just decide to ship it anyway.

[schild]

For games with a decent budget, ALL bugs that end up in the final product were in fact found and reported by QA.  But there comes a time in every project when the publisher and developer draw the line and simply kick the game out the door.  They know exactly how buggy their game is, they just decide to ship it anyway.

I've seen bugs filed as "Will not Fix" and you know what? Fuck the programmer. And fuck the lead designer and lead programmer for allowing that. It's lazy bullshit. For every bug that isn't fixed, I want to pay $5 less. Lazy bastards.

[Trippy]

For games with a decent budget, ALL bugs that end up in the final product were in fact found and reported by QA.

I don't agree with that, even for games with large QA staffs. Games are just too complicated these days to catch everything. Even with good testers there's no way for them to even think up all the strange and stupid stuff players end up trying to do in the game. And PC games are much worse than console games in terms of bugs not found because of all the hardware issues involved.

But there comes a time in every project when the publisher and developer draw the line and simply kick the game out the door.  They know exactly how buggy their game is, they just decide to ship it anyway.

That I totally agree with.

[Trippy]

I've seen bugs filed as "Will not Fix" and you know what? Fuck the programmer. And fuck the lead designer and lead programmer for allowing that. It's lazy bullshit. For every bug that isn't fixed, I want to pay $5 less. Lazy bastards.

I've never worked at a game company before so they may have different standards but at all the software companies I've worked at it would be rare for a rank-and-file programmer to be making decisions about what bugs will or will not be fixed on any decent sized software project, unless "Will not fix" is being used a synonym for "Not a bug" (i.e. "working as intended"). The basic process is for bugs to be filed by the programmers and QA. Product management then reviews each bug with the lead/senior developers and QA people to understand the time needed to fix and retest each bug. PM then prioritizes all the bugs in the order they should be worked on and the programmers work down the list until time runs out.

[Riggswolfe]

Do any of you guys have problems with Harmonic combos?

As for the pathing, yeah, I know what you're talking about now. I thought you meant in general, like walking around, NPCs getting stuck or something. All I've noticed is you have to position yourself right to open doors and containers. But, since it's the same old engine I usually do it on instinct so don't really notice.

[Trippy]

But, since it's the same old engine I usually do it on instinct so don't really notice.

According to BioWare, it's not the same engine:

Jade Empire FAQ

Jade Empire uses an entirely new graphics engine and a new sound engine, both designed to take advantage of the unique power and capabilities of the Xbox console. The graphics engine has more than twice the number of render paths as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and the player character models have three times more polys than those in KotOR. Other enhancements include physics-based cloth, rim lighting, and an entirely new skeleton built to accommodate motion captured animation. The sound engine is designed to produce the most cinematic experience possible, and puts incredible control in the hands of our audio engineers.