Jade Empire was one of the biggests surprises of this EGN, the type of surprises that makes you go take an Eurostar and spend three days in a poor hotel to have the chance of seeing the game running. Showed discreetly in a small box of the London show by the co-CIO of Bioware himself, the very nice Raymond A. Muzyka, Jade Empire made a very strong impression, and not only because we knew that we were the only ones in the world to film what they showed us.
Jade Empire is a very big game, in terms of accessibility, simplicity, but also richness and depth. The wishes of Bioware was to make a RPG game that would be liked by both action fans and RPG fans, and they seem to have succeed. Jade Empire will surely be a very surprising game, because of its difference but also because of its many qualities.
The graphics are, as you'll soon realize, one of the prettiest of this generation. The levels are rich, with gorgeous textures and quite big. But the biggest evolution since KOTOR is definitely the animation. Stiff and quite bad in that game, they are now very fluid and natural looking. The Mortal Kombat syndrom is most definitely forgotten.
This presentation was mostly about fighting and we had the chance to see some brand new ennemies and powers. One of the most interesting was the transformation power, where you could steal the soul of your fallen enemy and use his body in the next fights. Very impressive, like you'll be able to see in the video. The fighting engine is very easy to master, chaining blows and powers is natural. You can still pause the game to change the locked enemy , prepare another power or choose another transformation. Very useful.
The following video is the first half of the full 30 minutes presentation of the game. Most of the first half is from levels you have already seen, but the second half is almost totally new and will be online within a few days.
Interview by Snoopers (enjoy his english !) and our friends of Sanqualis.com Ekinjo and Lugh. You can get the full english transcription of the interview on their site !
The second part of the video is now online here.
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Commented on 2004-09-08 11:26:35
Commented on 2004-09-10 00:59:18