No joke, in high school I beat Jade Empire using every character type in the game, and using pretty much every fighting style. This and Fable are probably the Xbox games I played the most. I have so many fond memories of playing through the game and loving the setting, characters and combat. I really appreciate you putting out this video, it was not only a blast from the past for me, but it was great to get so much insight on the development of the game. Truly a shame that a sequel was never made, as much as I loved the original game, it felt like so much could have been expanded upon in a sequel in regards to the mechanics and setting. That said it was cool to hear some ideas the team had for a possible sequel. Anyways, thank you again for sharing your time making this game and thank you for being a part of one of my favorite games growing up.
I’m literally playing this for the first time ever in 2024! Regardless of the huge chasm of time since Jade Empire released Ive been pleasantly surprised by how well it holds up! You all created something really special with this one! Cheers!❤👍🏾
I loved Jade Empire. I was always hoping a sequel might come out...even though I'm also a huge Mass Effect/Dragon Age fan, I would have jumped at a Jade Empire 2 game, or a remake. It was such a different kind of game than most RPGs at the time, and the game play was really fun, all with still having an engaging story!
There was once an AMA with a bioware employee, he tried pitching jade empire 2 during an ideas meeting with modern bioware and they laughed him off, we will not get a sequel for a long time
I love these videos explaining the behind-the-scenes creation of games. As someone who has loved gaming for 20+ years these answer a bunch of questions I wondered about
KOTOR is what made me aware of BioWare, but it was Jade Empire that caused me to fall in love with them. The pseudo dice-roll combat of KOTOR never felt fun, but the other aspects were enough to allow me to gloss over that aspect but the switch to real-time combat combined with the story and characters blew me away. This reminds me that I've haven't gone through another playthrough in a while and needs to be addressed.
That balanced fidelity point is so interesting. There's a cutscene at the end of the second mission of Marvel's Midnight Suns which is so low quality in comparison to everything that just happened around it that it really sticks out and makes the cracks of the game more visible in my opinion. I never really thought about it in the context of this balanced fidelity motiff, but I think that's so on point and important to keep in mind when crafting your game. Fun vid as usual!
I loved this game so much. The characters, the art design and the music were so well done. I'm a sucker for Wuxia and loved Bioware's previois games so it felt like it was made for me. I'm going to dust off my old Xbox and play it again after watching this video. Thank you for sharing your insights, I will check out more of your videos, Mark.
I really appreciated your thoughts throughout! A lot of what you were talking about irt people getting too into the weeds makes a lot of sense. You frequently discuss how important it is to have things done. Polish can happen after, but done is done and it's so true. I know it's tangential, but it translates into other aspects of life. I don't need to load the dishwasher completely optimally without a single wasted space. just loading it period is good enough. It's really helped me in my life to have this reinforced. (sorry I've not been commenting lately. I was healing from that surgery I mentioned on twitter. I did appreciate your well wishes!)
I was highly critical of this game when it came out, because I insisted action combat was never appropriate in an RPG. I still think that, but Jade Empire was the game that taught me that action combat can be fun. It's not my preference, but it can be fun. And the dialogue-based roleplaying was still to BioWare's silent protagonist quality (still the gold standard for CPRGs).
I started playing Jade Empire in hopes of finally completing it for the first time a while back, and your point regarding balancing is exactly the type of feeling I felt when going through it. With the overall hierarchy of Martial styles favoring DPS reaches over pure might or quick pinches, as well as the three attributes allowing different ways a player can be able to overtake the battleground with ease - in my case, I specced onto Focus with a near-max Leaping Tiger and Iron Palm, a near-max Staff Weapon style, and a fully maxed Mirabelle, allowing for either Slo-Mo or Weapon dominant plays - the skill ceiling for each encounter dissipates, soon becoming a game not of resource management and/or careful positioning, but rather how fast you're able to take the opponents down. Couple with how easily exploitable AI patterns can become such as block-baiting (throwing up the shield then dropping it when they either get into range or are unleashing a power attack), animation cancelling being a snap to pull off, and your own partner doing much better on Support than on Attack, the overall challenge factor relies heavily on how many guys the game can throw at you before you can call it quits. None of this really matters _too_ much (it'd be nice if the AI can at least put up a fight and some Styles had more flair to them...) for me because, well, it really did make me FEEL like a Wuxia hero, focusing solely on the techniques I trained and honed myself over with and best utilizing them against my foes. Though the woes of the difficulty are surely felt, even on Special Edition which is supposedly tweaking the difficulty to be 'better', I still found myself enjoying it purely because breaking it to tiny pieces gave me my own twisted sense of fun.
This was, if possible, my favorite game that BioWare made. There are definitely other games BioWare made that I have enjoyed, but this game is one that just grabbed me like nothing else. The characters, the story, the combat were all incredible, and I thought the combat was a pioneer in many respects; the combo system that Dragon Age would eventually use for combining effects I feel was first developed in this game (Harmonic Wave alt fire into something like heavy Thousand Cuts to make health globes or whatever it was). I do however attempt to remember the rose colored glasses though. I don't think there were systems that 'didn't work', but there were some development decisions made that I always thought was baffling - such as weapons using focus when swung. Did weapons do more damage than martial styles as a default? I don't remember if they did but I didn't think they did - but that could be those rose glasses! What does 'arquitect' mean? Is it just a a bad misspelling of Architect? Is Architect even the correct word to use? I am pretty sure the Cultural Appropriation point has been covered before (is this a previous video but split up/redone/cleaned up? I seem to remember having the same gut reaction before), but to me that seems a really strange way to phrase it. You would undoubtedly know better since you were there, but BioWare to me didn't seem to be insulting the culture as it examined its mythology etc, it was being respectful I thought. Perhaps if anything it lampooned its own culture with John Cleese's memorable character. Saying some 'white guys from Canada' can't do another culture because it's appropriation to me sounds like saying an actor can't play a scientist until that actor has indeed won a nobel peace prize for science (that seems to only allow the late Hedy to be in the running), or you can't have someone play Darth Vader until the actor murders a room full of younglings. Maybe it's true that you won't understand the intricacies of a culture without someone from the culture you're trying to pay homage too being part of the development process, but I would argue that in this case you're trying to evoke the Chinese mythology and feeling - not duplicate it and make a facsimile. If you set the game in China while doing all this; then I think I would agree with your point. Your Balanced != Fun point I couldn't agree more. I think BioWare has failed to learn this lesson repeatedly to be honest, and is probably their biggest issue. The one item that continues to make me think this is Andromeda and changing combat profiles incurs a cooldown for whatever reason. All this really manages is to slow combat down. As far as I recall, there is no such concept as a 'profile' in multiplayer which makes me think it is their attempt to making 'balance' for its single player portion. But to me (and I surely can not be the only person who feels this way) it isn't at all fun. If EA Shanghai remastered Jade Empire; I would be all over it like a loving rash. EA could count on my dollars as being spent already.
Watching the part about Paper Prototypes, I'm curious if you and the team ever played the card game Lunch Money. Also, the fact that you threw together the DM client for NWN at the last minute is absolutely bonkers. I remember seeing that as a feature for NWN and thinking how ambitious it was. I'm curious how the reception to Dreadwolf will go, you had mentioned "you're not competing with the past, but rather the memory of the past" and I wonder how much of Dreadwolf will be the corollary to that: the given enough time between games you're not competing with the previous version of the game, but rather the version of the game that the fans have built up in their head and have been playing for years.
Why is everything from Neverwinter Nights amazing? Subbed! NWN is incredible, I played it for years and still would, but I’d need friends who would with me or for PrC to not be bug-ridden. I tried to solo play Pathfinder 1e to supplement but it just seemed reptitive, I couldn’t get it to be exciting like NWN. Jade Empire is of course incredible, and was probably the most challenging game of my early childhood I completed. For some reason I maxxed magic and discovered toad demon form annihilates everything lol
oh, Jade Empire. Talk about a game that should get a proper remake, it is such an awesome game. (edit: more memories from way back when but not so good: PM with Excel spreadsheets urghhh!)
When I was 10 i love playing jade empire I always love the story the world building and history and mystery of the spirit world and i always dreamed of going to places think it was called golden delta it's a real shame that it never got a second chance to shine show its full potential but still my favorite action rpg of all time
Do you think a remake could ever be made on this? I'm sure Bioware would need to make sure they could make money from it or that there is a demand for it. I feel as though there is a lot of potential for a remake. Bioware could still use the main story but expand the world massively. There were a lot of areas in the world that we heard about but never got to visit like Phoenix Gate. Final Fantasy VII remake did this well. They took the first section of the game and were able to stretch it out to around 40 hours of game play but it never got old or tiring. Bigger area maps, more side quests, and updated companion dialogue. Sounds like a good idea but thats just my opinion.
@@MarkDarrah Didn't the Mass Effect remaster do pretty well ? One would think in such a case that a similar remaster trilogy would be justified for the DA series.
I know you probably feel this much more than I do, but I loved Jade Empire to bits and the fact that it never got a sequel is easily my #1 "biggest tragedy of gaming," and in my fantasy of what I would do if I had a bajillion dollars, "call up EA and ask how much money they want to make Jade Empire 2" is right up at the top of things to do. I do very much disagree that JE is really "cultural appropriation" though. I have never understood why it's taboo for one culture to try to make an interesting cultural depiction of another, provided that you try to actually be sensitive to how you represent that culture, which I think JE did just fine. You even mention Kung Fu panda, which was of course a Western product but even in China it was a huge hit because of how respectful it was of the culture. I am of course not Asian so maybe I'm missing something, but I really only see JE as a love letter to Asian cultures, and it's one of the major points of entry in my interest in Asian mythology. Another way to look at it is just asking if Dark Souls is cultural appropriation: it's a Japanese game that uses a ton of traditionally Western iconography and mythology, from standard knights and dragons to specific Nordic myths like the world tree. But I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone that has a problem with that. That aside, I also want to thank you for all you did, both JE (and other games of course) and your channel. I'm working on a game of my own now and one of the best lessons you've had was to try to make games data-driven - it's something that I started with and found to be a complete pain to build from the ground up, but now that I'm working on tools and content creation I've been enormously thankful that you were so adamant that that is the right way to make a game, because after that initial pain it has made the production as a whole go a lot smoother.
@@MarkDarrah I suppose that's fair, but I think it is also an inherently negative term, and I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who has something negative to say about JE's use of Asian mythology - and if there isn't really any negativity towards it, is it even fair to classify it using a negative term? When the only offense is that it was made by people who's skin color doesn't match, I'd say it's safe to say that it isn't offensive. Not to berate the point, but again Kung Fu Panda sparked some very serious discussion in China about how they depict their own culture because of how well a foreign company did it, so if anything I'd say it's a *good* thing when an outside culture gives an honest and respectful take on another culture (provided that that culture is okay with it, which again I would bet money that you'd have quite a difficult time finding people that have a problem with it simply on principle).
@@MarkDarrah That may be true, but honestly how meaningful is that on its own? This is the internet, you can easily find anyone that will get outraged about anything - the fact that JE's criticism is no longer on Wikipedia should be pretty telling about how meaningful that criticism really was. Even Googleing "Jade Empire cultural appropriation" now you can barely find anything beyond random social media posts about it, and equally if not more popular social media posts defending it. Literally the top result (for me) is from a Chinese person on reddit gushing about how relieving and impressive it was to see a Western developer that clearly respected what they were working with and didn't want to put out the typical racist garbage. Of course everyone is perfectly entitled to feel their own way, and I totally understand not wanting to potentially open a can of worms for any number of reasons. It just feels weird to see someone definitively label Jade Empire as culturally apporiatia....tive...(?) when it was clearly made by people who respected the culture, which to me is about as opposite of appropriation as it gets.
Forcing people to play the game to take away their rose tinted glasses was savage. I wonder if, when met with their cognitive dissonance, someone ever doubled down and said: "See? much better than Jade Empire!" rather than admitting they were wrong.
I was playing Jade Empire on my original xbox. the disc reader “bulb” went out. I had to take apart my xbox to replace the part. Now Im hearing jade empire rebooted my xbox multiple times without me knowing? Coincidence?
Listening to the whole story gives me a sense of a lack of technical prowess from the Bioware developers. From what I understand the last engine you developed in-house was the NWN engine. Pretty much after that you were depending on third-party technology to develop your games. I think this maybe be due to the culture of the company. I feel like a lot of these western RPG companies that started in the 90's were RPG player led companies, and not programmer led companies. And this is why the tech "stack" of the company is all over the place. I feel like both Interplay and Bioware were started by RPG nerds that became executives and started calling the shots. My view is that programmers should be the ones calling the shots, because without the programmer there is no game. I feel like David Brevik, and the Doom guys, Romero and Carmack, were maybe the exception here and perhaps they were not always good businessmen but nonetheless they were inspirational. Game development in it's purest form is inherently a deeply technical occupation. It's a bit sad that most western developers these days don't own their own technology, a lot has been "outsourced" to commercial engine giants, mostly Unreal. And even the developers that work on these commercial engines, very often they are Russian or come from another country of "slavic" ancestry, apparently math is still big in these countries because most graphics programmers seem to come from them these days. A western RPG company that I think very clearly lacks technical skills is Bethesda, they have been using the Gamebryo engine ever since Morrowind, even their latest game Fallout 76 engine is some sort of branching of the latest version they licensed of the Gamebryo engine. Still on the topic of Bethesda and lack of programming skills, if you check out their latest deep dive into Starfield, they interview dozens of developers in the 40 mins video, but aside from a single "UX programmer" chick, they didn't put a single programmer to talk about the game, and their technology. I think this tells us a lot of their views on the value of engineers. Thanks for the video and stories.
Owning and controlling your engine is an all consuming endeavor. And this complexity has gone up exponentially. The Baldur's Gate engine is a few hundred thousand lines of code. Frostbite is well over 5 million.
@@MarkDarrah I understand that, Mark. However I think companies that have grown to be >1000 employees like Bethesda and Bioware (I suppose). Should have invested equally in their technology as they did in art, design and other arguably less crucial aspects of their games.
@@MarkDarrah To add some more info to this discussion. I know that Bethesda did find themselves in circumstances they couldn't keep on developing their own tech back in the day when they first decided to use the Gamebryo engine for Morrowind. At the time they just had released 2 comercially failed games, those were Battlespire and TES:Redgard (Todd's first game and the last attempt they made at building their own engine). At that point also, Julien Lefay (the programmer of TES 1 and 2) had left the company and with the flop of Battlespire and Redgard they had to fire most of their employees. So they were left in a situation they had no choice but use a third-party engine. And after that they never looked back. But from what I understand that was not the case with Bioware, so to me it was a curious decision that you guys made to stop making your own engine after NWN.
Strongly disagree re: programming > creativity in game prodution. Important? Hell yeah. But not MORE important. For example: Music reordings and movies are made today using tech that is far superior to how they were made in the past, but no one (OK, ALMOST no one) would say that 'Fast & Furious 26' is a "better" movie than 'The Wizard of Oz' or that Ke$ha's latest reord is better than Dr. Dre's "The Chronic" beause it was objetively made with better tools (and it was.) Without creative ideas, all you have is a well-made calculator or special effects machine. Worth $? You bet! But it's not a game. If you have $10 and it costs $8 to make a game and $8 to build a graphics engine, you have to do one or the other to do either well. As a fan of their work, I am glad that BioWare deided to make games instead.
If the game released today there will be a big issue about culture appropriation. What do you think about western game developers made Asian themed games also in the other way Asian game developers making western themed games? Dark Souls is western, but nobody complaint...
@@MarkDarrah What do you mean? The cover obviously showing a western knight, Lordran/Drangleic/Lothric is obviously Europe. The same with Bloodborne that have heavily Victorian Europe setting. Japan made so many western themed games and anime, but somehow nobody complaint. They get a free pass 😄
I think it depends on the people of the culture being portrayed, if they're ok by it then it is ok. If not then the companies must apologize or something. For example, most Muslims are not ok being portrayed as terrorists in combat games. The easiest way to create the enemy is by making them wear turban or the place where demons coming out are Muslim mosques. There are games being banned in Muslim countries for that reason. By right Muslims should be offended by it. There was an issue when David Gaider said Qunari is "Militant Islamic Borg" in Dragon Age 2, his comment about that being deleted in BSN 😂 There are people who don't mind how their culture being portrayed in medias, there are who take serious about it. I think it is more on how it being portrayed.
Cultural appropriation isn't just 'borrowing inspiration'. It's about the power relationship between the cultures that are borrowing and those borrowed from. If you have a culture that does not have enough representation from its own side, then another culture misrepresenting it or claiming its ideas IS a big deal. There's real danger of misunderstanding and erasure and so you're going to have voices taking issue with how that portrayal is done. Also, something else that's just always 'in the room' is that many western nations have historically had a coloniser relationship with asian ones. That's especially so in southeast asia where I'm from. But the reverse isn't really the case. Is the west really in danger of being 'misrepresented' or erased by Japanese creatives? I don't think anybody believes that. I do think that Japanese media has perpetuated plenty of wrong and amusing stereotypes about westerners, and if I were a westerner living in Japan I might feel more sensitive about it, but as a whole the west does not lack a voice and can represent itself well enough. As a Chinese person living in Asia, I'm fine with Jade Empire, Kung Fu panda and the like. I might make fun of them but I'm not outraged. But then again I'm surrounded by asian voices and media where I live. I can't say it would be the same experience for Asian-Americans or other asians living in the west.
I never liked this game. I will be honest, the chinese people didn't do it for me. Also, where are complex level stuff, I was like: what were they thinking? They want me to buy a new PC to play this new fancy game but the game is not as good as the games they did before...
