Looking Back at Jade Empire and The Bioware We Know

For extra effect, feel free enjoy Jade Empire’s beautiful OST while reading this article: YouTube

Jade Empire didn’t have any sequels. It has a theme that is a total oddity in the western RPG tradition. I wouldn’t blame today’s gamers for assuming that it can’t have been one of Bioware’s most interesting games. But having recently completed it (almost twice), I found it to be very interesting indeed.

This game lies at the centre of a transformative period in Bioware’s history during which the type of game they made changed dramatically, starting with Star Wars: Knight’s of the Old Republic and continuing more or less to this day.

Before KOTOR came along, Bioware had been working on Dungeons & Dragons games for more than five years. It’s no great surprise that the Star Wars franchise, coming as it did from cinematic origins, inspired Bioware to take a different approach than the pen-and-paper RPG roots of Dungeons & Dragons did.

In fact, the world of Star Wars had a lasting effect on Bioware in a number of ways. Take the two-pronged-alignment system, that most Bioware of things, a fit for the light versus the dark side of the Jedi. The success of KOTOR solidified that system, along with many others, for all of their future 3D games as well, resulting a sort of reliable Bioware blueprint.

If KOTOR was the first step to the modern Bioware game, Jade Empire, which they made immediately afterwards, was really just taking that template into an original setting. But the introduction of an original world was also key in the development of the company.

Jade Empire is the first time Bioware had made a world for an RPG from scratch. That’s significant, because for the next 10 years the company would be known for their original IPs, their own universes, Mass Effect and Dragon Age in particular, which somewhat took the place of the Star Wars and D&D universes that had made them famous.

But Jade Empire was neither space-fantasy nor swords-and-sorcery. Bioware took a step away not only from the themes that they had found previous success with, but a step away from the themes that make up the foundation of western RPG culture in general.

On this point I can declare Jade Empire a success.

Take the streets of Imperial City, the largest hub in the game and an utterly refreshing place to be. The sparkle of harp music and the rush of waterfalls and rivers — it’s enchanting. Just outside you’ll find the Necropolis, the most gorgeous graveyard in all of videogames, with an entirely different vibe from what you would expect. Rolling hills patterned with narrow paths, calming twilight shaded by lucious golden underbrush. You’re always surrounded by massive plain grave marker stones, and the eerie silhouette of the massive temples to the dead impose over each hill. Really quite stunning. I’d rather be here, or at the quaint, rural Tian’s Landing, or the secluded retreat of Two Rivers, than in the colder, more eerie sci-fi structures of Mass Effect, much as I love them.

These levels are pretty little snapshots, woodprints of theme, beautiful — but stationary. Each area is smallish and far from deeply simulated. Many NPCs stand in place all day, and there is no day/night cycle, either. This is in stark contrast to the Bioware games of the Forgotten Realms, the Baldur’s Gates and the rest, which were nothing if not intricate.

This change was in-character for the company at the time, which was transitioning away from the very complex, bird-eye view RPGs of its past to cinematic, third-person-camera games with console-friendly controls. KOTOR was more of an action game than Neverwinter Nights, and Jade Empire went even further than KOTOR. Bioware wanted to make you feel like a martial arts master. The only way to achieve that is by making the player sufficiently involved in the action.

The fights in Jade Empire have a real drama to them. You lose health quickly, but can regain it quickly by spending chi. You can also spend focus to engage slow-mo. Chi and focus, however, aren’t so easily recovered. As the drums pound the battle drives inexorably to a conclusion as you either use your powers to wrestle the upper hand, or fail shortly after the last reserves of your magic evaporate.

With no regenerating resources, combat has phases, stanzas. You might spend thirty seconds attacking from a distance until your chi runs out, then another thirty sweeping up the stragglers in close quarters. Meanwhile, you have a partner who is either fighting alongside you (and you feel like brothers and sisters in arms) or they are holding back but buffing you (in which case you feel like the lone warrior hero, surrounded by ten foes but with the strength to take them on).

It’s easy. It’s exploitable. It’s far from precise or smooth. But it’s evocative, and it earns Jade Empire the title of RPG-Brawler at least as much as Mass Effect does RPG-Shooter. It’s the “RPG” side of things that requires additional investigation.

Compared to the Baldur’s Gates and Icewind Dales of the world, Jade Empire’s item-game is trivial. There’s no gear at all, only gems, of which only a few can be equipped at a time, and which have only a very small range of effects. There’s no real inventory and no consumable items. When it comes to improving your attributes, you’re only choosing between health, chi and focus, and it feels balanced (or overbalanced) in a way that any spread of points works fine. A balanced distribution (ie. the most boring option) seems very effective. The skill points that you put into your martial styles aren’t much more interesting.

These deflated systems risked making exploration of the world less rewarding. Indeed, when I first played it felt like the only thing to find in the levels was gold from chests, XP from reading at book-stands, and gems. As a result, the levels, while still pretty, felt empty compared to other RPGs.

However, this was before I discovered “techniques”, which are rewarded for everything from reading all the books of a particular type (ie. finding all the bookstands) to finishing sidequests. I have to say, techniques are possibly of the most fun thing to find in a Bioware RPG to date. Novelty comes into it — as I said before, Jade Empire carries a is yet to be repeated, and this mechanic ties closely to that martial arts fantasy. But I think it’s more than that. Techniques are all unique — as far as I’m aware, each one can be acquired in only one way — and very thematic. If you are rewarded one at the end of a quest, the stat bonus it gives and the description it carries are usually somewhat related to what you did in the quest. There are quite a few little un-telegraphed side-tasks, like rituals that require gathering all the pages of a book, or meditations you have to prepare, that teach you new techniques. A bit of flavour also comes through in the technique’s description. For instance, “Porcelain Skin” (which just a throwaway, practically useless “technique”, but the way) can be acquired from an acupuncturist, and it improves your charm but lowers your maximum chi — because vanity is bad for the spirit.

(There’s not a lot of strategy in this method of powering up. It’s just a matter of the more you get, the more powerful you become. A collectathon style of RPG, you might say. But it does it very well.)

You’ll also be finding martial arts styles, which gives you basically an entire set of new combat moves in one go. They change how the combat looks and flows a fair bit. I’m much more inclined to find the three sacred scrolls of whatever if the promise is a new martial style than if the rewards has been, for instance, just a slightly better weapon. Each martial style is broader than that, a bigger “idea”, a better reward. That said, it does have to be balanced against the reality that the martial styles you already have are usually perfectly sufficient, and your new style will be upgraded. Still, I am at least a little interested in starting the game again and devoting myself to Drunken Fist style, or finding all the scrolls to learn the forbidden Viper style. It’s compelling.

Jade Empire managed to get me thinking about quest design. For instance, how some quests have “narrow openings” — they might only reveal themselves to you under very specific circumstances, but could lead to a wide pool of content. The quest for the Zither of Discord has many points where is can end prematurely, for example. This architecture must seem wasteful to the publisher or frustrating to the writers, each devoting their resources to a quest only a small percentage of players will see, but that’s exactly the quality that makes them satisfying to find and play (same as what makes for a satisfying secret in an action game). Also, because they are hard to find, because they aren’t handed to you but have just as much complexity as the quests that do, they lend the game-world a feeling of existing despite your involvement. A variety of quests — big and small; short and long; quests that are easy to get to and quests only open under rare circumstances; quests that have stubborn outcomes and quests that are sensitive to changing based on many factors; quests that have localised impact and quests with far reaching consequences; quests on a range of topics and themes — these is what adds to the feeling of a full, realised world, and Jade Empire, like most Bioware RPGs, does not disappoint on this front.

We expect these games to change based on our actions. We can grade this quality by breaking it down into a list of different things we want the game to react to and how we want it to reach eg. different dialogue based on a different type of player character, based on different companion characters, based on different dialogue choices (ie. the game not giving the same response or looping to the same place based on different options), the game world looking different based on our choices, and so on. Different RPG series will excel at different levels. Bioware games have always been very polished in this regard, with a high degree of attention to detail , like how Jade Empire will sometimes output different lines of dialogue based on your character’s gender — if you speak to Darting Lynx in Two Rivers as a female and ask her to teach you acrobatics, she’ll describe how much harder that job would be if you had been a man. Little things like this, added together, pull us into the world.

At the level of individual quests there are almost always at least two ways of dealing with an issue, and two related outcomes. But at the level of the plot as a whole, the main questline, you won’t see a lot of divergence regardless of the choices you make along the way. Jade Empire isn’t special among Bioware RPGs in this regard, but I think it’s interesting to point this out considering the backlash to the Mass Effect 3 got for its ending. If you’ve played Jade Empire, it shouldn’t have been that surprising. Divergence at the dialogue and quest levels, but a strong central plot that you have less control over, is part of the Bioware template we fell in love with.

The biggest role-playing issue in the game actually lies with the conversational stats. Each are determined by combinations of your three mains attributes. High body and high spirit equals high intimidation, for example. That sounds clever, but it reduces your role-playing options because you’ll never make a decision on what stats to increase based on effect on the conversational abilities. I suspect the neatness of the system appealed to the designers. and they may also have considered that by separating conversational skills from main attributes the player would never have to choose between improving combat effectiveness and “wasting” points on conversational skills. But such choices help you feel more involved, more connected to your character, so something has clearly been lost here. The three conversational stats also seem to do more or less the same thing — if you succeed a roll on one, you might avoid a fight, or something like that. But you don’t feel like you’re playing a different character by the way you act in conversation. That feeling is key to a “role-playing” experience. There is something to be said for your impact in conversation being affected by your physical traits (good looks or imposing physique) or your martial prowess ie. them being derived stats, rather than self-selected. But I don’t think Jade Empire’s solution is the best one.

Thankfully, the dialogue system itself isn’t too linear, isn’t too simplistic. With Mass Effect there was a bit of a static order to the conversations. Choose left for extra information, upper right for a positive response, lower right for a negative response. It was predictable. But real conversations aren’t always predictable. Jade Empire has some order, but if you’re not paying attention to your primary responses you might get an unexpected outcome, including shutting down the conversation entirely. Sometimes I just chose the option that fit the conversational attribute I’m most skilled in, because it usually gives the most interesting response. But trying to use an “intimidate” option a philosopher in the scholar’s garden just scared him into permanent silence — shouldn’t have been a surprise, really. I like that realness.

What about the main story? It very much lives up to Bioware’s pedigree. A colourful cast of characters, betrayal, power shifts, emotional dilemmas, and… oh, I can’t put it off: the big plot twist in Jade Empire is freaking tasty.

Okay, okay, good-guy turning bad isn’t that exciting on its own. But it’s the details. Its how, for the whole game, NPCs skilled in martial arts have been been telling you how strange your fighting style is (“As if you show your enemy a flaw that isn’t there”), and you think it must be a strength — because of your special training from Master Li. In actual fact, it was a flaw after all, embedded into your style by Li so that he can defeat you when the time is right: “It’s good you remembered the basics of your training”, he tells you, “… including the flaws”.

Li is also a totally understandable villain. We’ve always known him as “the glorious strategist”, a military genius — of course a betrayal of this nature would be in his repertoire. We also know his family was killed, which made him sympathetic for the first half of the game, but you also understand why he is hungry for revenge. Each of the things we know about him have two sides. When he turns to show you his other side, it’s like a rain of pennies dropping. When you then see the events of Dirge a second time (the true events as described by the abbot), when you see Death’s Hand takes of his mask to reveal that he was Master Li all along, when you understand that of course Li was a prince as selfish and uncaring as his brother the Emperor after all, it all makes sense.

The overall plot is good, but of course there is a lot more to the story than what you see in cutscenes. There is a good amount of information about the main story that can be gleaned from scrolls. At the start of the game, you may learn about the Emperor Sun Hai and his two brothers from a history of the Empire you find on a book-stand. Later, you learn that Li is Sun Li, the Emperor’s brother. What Li tells you is all you need to understand the plot, but if it’s coming on top of what you learned in the scroll it has more impact, more weight, especially as you went to the effort to learn it yourself, not have it fed to you.

I think the rule here is keep information divulged during the main story to the plot essentials only, then all the exposition, backstory goes in optional dialogue and scrolls. You can keep the main story unburdened that way, light and quick-moving, but you’ll still have lots of interesting information left over for the optional content. The experience of finding out the rest is enhanced because it’s optional. It’s only with the combination of finding both that the player gets the greatest effect. Unfortunately, in Jade Empire there are also a lot of scrolls filled with what feels like fairly pointless information — treatises on obscure practices, tedious histories of sailors and their voyages, none of which seems to relate to what you are doing in the game — this is what a game should avoid.

This is a minor complaint. Something a little less minor is the pacing. The story picks up after the Imperial City and pretty much rockets to its conclusion from there. Chapters 5 to 7 are still good, but another open ended area like Tien’s Landing or the Imperial City would have been welcome at this point, perhaps focusing in more detail on the resistance to the new Emperor Li. We never really find out if Li makes a good or bad Emperor, or how the people take to him, before he is dethroned. This feels like an oversight.

The game also has a serious problem trying to explain game concepts through in-universe dialogue, as if your companions are half talking to your character and half talking to you, the player. It’s a problem I’ve never seen in any other Bioware game. There are lots of examples of it. In the Imperial Palace, Lian tells you something like “You can take one of your companions with you, because I do not want an all out battle in the palace. I would like you to take me, but if not I will catch-up when there is something important to say.” She may as well have just explicitly said “You are still restricted to one companion, and if you don’t choose me still expect me to show up in the cutscenes.” If a game is going to bring these things up, it has to be better veiled, better smoothed in. Otherwise it is just the most grating thing for the player to hear, patronising and immersion-breaking. Much like badly disguised exposition in a movie will take you out of it. This is the videogame equivalent.

Overall, though, high praise has to be given to the story of any RPG that makes you feel anxious for how the story will be affected by your actions. My barometer is whether I am brought to a pause when I get the urge to do something silly for a laugh. I played the path of the closed fist in my second playthrough, so when the offer to fix a fight with a wounded student came up (by giving her a painkiller instead of a healing balm but lying about it, so she fights anyway but her wound is exacerbated), I considered it. I was curious what the different dialogue would be, how other characters would react, how the rewards differ. Ultimately, though, I felt too bad about betraying the student’s trust and injuring her (maybe worse), so I couldn’t do it.

This is surely exactly what we want from a story driven game: to be tricked into caring about something not real. I couldn’t even play the way I intended to because I was made to care. I think that’s indicative of the quality of experience that we play Bioware games for.

In conclusion:

My view of Jade Empire is that it isn’t complex enough to be a great cRPG, and it isn’t responsive enough to be a great action game, but by finding a nice meeting point of the two, and with some great writing and world design, it manages to become a very good evocation of a world of wuxia action, achieving exactly what Bioware intended. It also introduced a lot of novel mechanics that closely fit the theme of the game, and, as you might expect, we haven’t seen much of them since. That makes it is a refreshing game to play even today, 14 years after it was released.

Jade Empire was inventive, colourful, brave and, frankly, a bit of a flop, so Bioware immediately terminated this creative offshoot and forevermore worked safe in the confines of traditional sci-fi and fantasy. Perhaps if there had been a wuxia movie franchise that made it big in the west, we would have gotten Jade Empire 2, 3 and 4 instead of Dragon Age. As it is, the world of Jade Empire remains solitary and unique among western RPGs.

The usually reliable Bioware is once again going through a transitionary period. Anthem is a new sort of game, and its success or failure may will mean the same thing for the company as a whole. If Anthem’s multiplayer-and-microtransaction-fuelled new venture is a success, who know how many games in the old style, the style established by KOTOR and Jade Empire, we will get in the future.

I raise a toast to the Bioware we know, however long it lasts.

Some other thoughts that didn’t fit into the review:

• Here’s some bad quest writing advice, for when you want your tedious quests to have that extra generic flavour: give the player a goal, then make them complete three (3) less interesting tasks at opposite ends of the current level before they trigger the next event. Yes, Lotus School, I am calling you out.
• I really didn’t like the Lotus School. They way the assassination is presented to you, you would think you’re Hannibal from the A Team, carefully choreographing a precisely timed plan. But mechanically you’re just ticking off quest markers before the final fight is opened to you. Moreover, the school is enemy territory, a ruthless, cruel training ground for the worst breed of assassin. You would think infiltrating it as a student would feel oppressive, that you would feel the risk losing your identity, your values, or that you would at least feel the threat of being found out as a spy. But you still prance around in the same clothes you’ve been wearing since the beginning of the game, even though everyone else is in uniform, you find a master who is super kind to you and doesn’t challenge you, you’re given access to every location in this secret hideout very quickly. So the theme of the mission and what you’re actually doing don’t mesh. Massive waste of a good scenario.
• All the player characters in this game are smoking. It just has to be said. Thumbs up to the character designers: it’s not over the top, not out of place, it’s just the right amount of sexy.
• I’ve found out that I enjoy the evil path in Bioware games just a little more. I think I’ve realised it is because I am not, entirely, an arsehole in real life, so it gives me something extra to think about: how is this character justifying their actions? It puts me in the shoes of another person, another way of thinking.
• You know, as a shmup fan you’d think I’d have more to say about the shmup sections. But I’m almost 4000 words into this review and it didn’t even occur to me to comment. The shmup sections suck, basically. If you’ve got an immersive 3D RPG, the least you could do for a minigame is to make it 3D. The 2D sections really don’t mesh well with the rest of the game. Simple cutscenes would have fit much better. But the shmup minigame is easy to ignore, and I avoid it when given the choice. Maybe if they do make Jade Empire 2 they’ll add in some 3D Panzer Dragoon style sequences. Or maybe more like Star Fox, where your companions get their own ships and fly in and out of the battles shouting “I’m hit!” and other charismatic things of that nature. If you want a good 2D shmup, try Mushihimesama. You fly a beetle, not a dragonfly, but you can see the parallel.
• Jade Empire is Bioware’s most colourful and bombastic RPG, which means it isn’t just borrowing from the east but competing more directly with the eastern style of RPGs, too. When forum-posters used to discuss JRPGs vs WRPGs (as if that made any sense), Jade Empire was a counterpoint to the argument that all WRPGs looked the same. You have to say, that’s something.