Jade Empire

[linthat22]

Ya know, I played through the game alst year being the good guy and I just finished up playing the game again as a bad guy last night. And I tell ya, it's weird being so bad in a virtual world versus just being myself. Killing people just to do it and purposely making the outcome bad in other area's was so weird.

Ya'll ever experienced the same feelings when playing a game like Jade? Where you just kina sit there thinking "man, my character is a real asshole"?

 

[EndR]

Yeah.. I know the feeling..
When playing the bad guy I was feeling kinda "Oh shit, did I really do THAT?"

The part which was the "toughest" was in the "last" place where you make the choice, were you meet the captivated dragon... that was interesting..

Anyhow, I loved that game, a bit short but still one of the finest this generation. Can´t wait for Jade2..

 

[Falkster]

Even if it results in doubling the replay value, I never take the evil path in a game of choices like KOTOR, Jade Empire, or Fable. My problem is that the choices are often extreme, they either make you look like an over the top ass or an extremely nice person. Perhaps if there was some middle ground I wouldn't always take the nice guy route.

Jade Empire was a great game though, I especially loved the music and John Cleese's cameo appearance.

 

[Inane_Dork]

JE was very good but had lots of room for improvement.

Anyway, yeah, the evil path in RPGs often defaults to being a raging psycho, but if the game is well crafted, there are other benefits. KOTOR, for instance, allowed cheaper dark Force powers (which are cooler, hands down) and a second ending.

I just finished KOTOR2 last night as a pure good Jedi Weaponmaster, and I was surprised. I was able to remain fully in the light without being a simpering poodoohead. And by the end, my character was far stronger than light side characters I'm used to. He could barrel through a roomfull of Sith, killing them all with one attack per and not take any damage.

 

[Shark Sandwich]

The thing that annoyed me about Jade Empire was how they claimed that open palm and closed fist weren't supposed to be simply good and evil. They were supposed to be different philosophies that viewed reality in different ways. However, pretty much every open palm choice makes you into a boy scout, and every closed fist choice makes you into king jackass.

Anyway, I honestly wasn't very impressed with Jade Empire. It felt so half-baked in a lot of ways. There are people just standing around waiting to assign lame quests to you. The path-finding for NPCs was terrible. . . in a lot of cutscenes you would see characters run full-out in a straight line, stop abruptly, pivot 45 degrees, sprint again, etc. All of the NPCs were pretty much equally useless. They somehow managed to make the combat dull and repetitive despite having 30 something fighting styles.

I hope we see a Jade Empire 2 someday that realizes the potential that the original failed to reach. It would be an amazing game.

 

[scooby_dooby]

I loved JE, thought it was an amazing experience, but it was just too short, it ended too soon. I had such a blasyt while playing, and once you really master the fighting styles, stringing styles together seamlessly, the fighting is really really fun.

The good/evil thing was a little unbalanced though, closed fist was supposed to be about being strong, not cruel.

Bioware seems to be adressing the whole evil/good issue in the Mass Effect series where they are introducing multiple paths, so there won't be just good and evil, but hopefull more complex semi-neutral paths.

 

[chroniceyestrain]

Yeah, I felt bad taking the evil path in Jade Empire, you can do some terrible things. Did anyone ever get the neutral ending? I want to see what that is, but don't feel like playing the game again.

 

[deathstar121]

I love this game, but the gameplay was a bit Shallow for me, I think they need combine Fable and JE together it would be the greatest RPG ever, JE's Story with Fables Engine woot, woot.

 

[linthat22]

Anyway, yeah, the evil path in RPGs often defaults to being a raging psycho.........

Literally laughed out loud when I read that one. Couldn't agree more, lol

 

[Inane_Dork]

Did anyone ever get the neutral ending? I want to see what that is, but don't feel like playing the game again.

Give in to Master Li at the end, and let him kill you. The "ending" is that you're remembered as a great figure in history (complete with statue), but Li rules over everyone's life in every way. The latter is evidenced by near brainwashing a school class by telling them to not ask questions but just accept teaching.

It wasn't worthwhile, IMO.

 

[cthellis42]

I would indeed like to see the "good" and "evil" sides in games that push the players' ability to do both (since it's usually the biggest "multi-threaded" plotting option for games) reflected as more than "indescriminantly killing people" and "insulting people to their face," but we don't seem to have progressed too much beyond that yet. Heh...

Usually it's the "selfish lust for power" and "doing things without regard for their consequences" that leads to common evils, rather than "I WILL POP YOUR HEAD OFF AND DRINK THE BLOOD BECAUSE I'M BORED."

This may be a really weird aside for some people, but I think the CCG "Legend of the Five Rings" reflected the better way to go about it from time to time. As part of their "players determine the course of the world/game" design, they would sprinkle in certain cards/traits/powers into a set that favored one clan or another and see how they would be adopted. In the first notable example, these were corruptive influences for the "noble" clans that were simply powerful, and through tournaments AEG would track the winning decks and their construction to see how widely-used such influences were, and applied the results. The Pheonix clan almost destroyed itself after their powerful magic users went corrupt this way; the Crane clan went through a civil war--not because of the corruption cards, but instead because two different houses within their clan (one more military and one more honor-based) kept meeting up head-to-head in the final matches...

Overall, those kinds of touches kick ass. ^_^


It would be nice to see things more in that vein start working their way into RPG's. Spells that are powerful could carry negative affects in certain situations (causing forest fires, withering crops, etc.), leading you to put more thought into when and how often to use them; side-questing could have non-obvious affects (affecting local economies, NPC jobs such as guardsmen or local swords-for-hire) that could have consequences that make you think more about how often you go on them and how long you spend in one area...

I'm hoping RPG's spend more time figuring out how to make you really feel like you're playing in a world, rather than giving you two main storylines to follow and affecting how NPC's talk to you in general.