Jade Empire (PC) - Review

The waning empire.
Definitely spoilers.

Have you ever come across a game that is almost offensively bad at living up to its potential? I'm guessing most of us who play games come across some every now and then that are more or less not to our liking, either because they don't strike any of our chords or because they're simply very uninspired.

I can't say that about Jade Empire though. It seems extremely inspired and could strike many of my chords but it never managed to bring any of its many, good, ideas to an interesting and fun fruition.

I had long been interested in checking out Jade Empire once I had first heard about it. A Bioware RPG? That no one really seems to talk about? A bit odd, isn't it? And it's about martial arts? Definitely sounds like it could be something I'd be having fun with.

Jade Empire was released in 2005 as an Xbox exclusive. That explains a bit about why it took me so long to take notice of it at first. In 2005 I had just started my 8 year adventure into World of Warcraft and was nowhere near an Xbox (I have still never played one). I don't think it was until 2007, when it was ported to PC or maybe even later than that, that it first caught my eye. As information about the game slowly trickled into my consciousness across several years my curiosity grew. It seemed really odd to me that the company behind games like Baldur's Gate, KoToR, Mass Effect and Dragon Age had also developed another (action) RPG that I at least seemed to be hearing very little about. Even more oddly, it seemed to have been originally well received and then fallen away into obscurity, at least when compared to the above-mentioned games.

KoToR, another game that frustrated me but for completely other reasons.

In it you play as a "Spirit Monk" and start out as the top disciple in a school for martial arts. So far so classic martial arts movie. I thought the game was off to a pretty decent start. The graphics looked typical for the time and functional enough without exactly being eye candy (I kind of have a nostalgic thing for those graphics though). 2005 was a year when game designers were able to start making character models detailed enough to not be laughable but still had pretty bland environments (just look at before mentioned WoW as another prime example).

Your master tells you of secrets he wants to finally divulge to you and you also get to try out some of the rather (wannabe-)intricate combat system that you'll be spending a truck load of time using throughout the game. In that first hour as you run around the school and try to make and break friendships the game seems quite promising. But it was also within that first hour I got the first glimpse into one of the bigger issues with the Jade Empire game design - the story telling and the pacing.

The overall story is nothing special nor worthy to write home to mommy about. You turn out to be, as mentioned, a special kind of warrior and you are quickly set on the path to save your martial arts master when the school is being attacked. As you travel through the world you meet new people that join your cause, for varying reasons, and also get involved in a bigger plot to save the kingdom from a seemingly evil emperor that has set the spirit realm in unbalance causing the dead to come back to haunt (and kill) the living. The story is fine, it's not bad and the characters you meet actually have the seeds of being quite interesting.

Might not look like fun, but I still wish I could spend more time in each area.

It's really unfortunate then that the pacing seems to have been set to "FTL". "Quickly" is definitely the key word here. Wherever you go or whomever you meet you barely get a chance to be there or talk to them until it is time to move on. When it first happened and I was unceremoniously thrown out of the martial arts school very early in the story I didn't think that it had to be a problem. But before long I noticed that this wasn't something that was limited to that first area. The second area you come to, a swamp filled with pirates and other scum people made it very clear that this was the style of the game and I started to get a bad feeling. In the swamp you get a quest to save a woman from pirates who have kidnapped her and are keeping her in a cave. One of the pirates is also linked to the martial arts school and your master, so seems to be a character that deserves a fair chunk of story time. Not so, the cave and the quest took some ten minutes to finish and that was basically the very swift end of that story line.

The game just continues at this break neck speed. Just like in Dragon Age and Mass Effect you're soon surrounded by an entourage of characters with which you can build relationships. Apparently. It was only by chance I managed to get into some sort of love story with one of the characters. Trying to build a relationship with them seems to not be encouraged, and whenever I try to strike up some conversation they shut me down after a few lines of dialogue by saying something with the essence of "enough talking and more action!".

Throughout the game you get the feeling that the designers have been extremely careful not to allow the player to grow bored of anything. But this is taken to the extreme where instead I am also not allowed to grow attached to anything. Areas come and go like I am looking through a Viewmaster. I am bombarded with new fighting styles a lot faster than I have time to try them out, develop them and have fun with them. The same goes for the characters that you meet. While they are all potentially interesting, from the young girl possessed by a guardian demon, to the crazy inventor or my childhood friend who can sense spirits, I am never given enough time nor opportunity to develop these relationships.

Speaking of the combat, it is another area in which the game unfortunately fails greatly. It almost saddens me to say it though because it really feels like a lot of love and thought has gone into the combat system, as there is, at least superficially, a lot to do and tinker with. Like I mentioned you get many different combat styles to fight in, and also magic and weapons. To use these you have both Chi (basically mana) and Focus (basically stamina) and depending on what you use to fight with you'll deplete one bar or the other. To add to this you can transform into various demons and ghosts and all of these different options have their own strengths and weaknesses depending on what enemy you are fighting. Each option can also have different areas strengthened with points you gain each time you level. For instance you can make a style or a demon hit harder or cost less chi/focus to use.

Enemies are varied, but not fun.

So there is a lot to do and take in and none of it is even particularly confusing. But why is it so gosh dang clunky to use? Your character moves like she is cosplaying a refrigerator and you get a lot more stressed about trying to wrestle your character around the fighting field than you ever are about the enemies. At normal difficulty the enemies aren't too hard, but the controls are so incredibly bad that you end up failing anyway because you can't target the right way, get in proper position to hit your target or avoid damage smoothly enough. It is extremely frustrating and feels through and through unfair whenever you fail a fight. It only took me a few hours into the game before I put the difficulty down to easy (something you at least thankfully can do) because I just couldn't take the rage-inducing struggle of the combat system any longer.

At the easy difficulty the game is unfortunately extremely easy. At normal difficulty it is probably quite doable but every fight becomes about a fun a chore as doing the dishes and just kills any desire to play the game. On easy I could at least breeze through the game quick enough to want to finish it despite its many flaws.

The soundtrack is one area where this game gets it right though. Heavily influenced with eastern sounds for obvious reasons, most (but definitely not all) of the tracks still manage to stay away from cliché territory and keep things interesting and fresh. But overall I find the tunes strong enough to hold for listening to even outside the game and I always consider that a mark of good quality. The sound effects too do their job well and there is a lot of different moaning, groaning and punching noises to accompany you in the many fights.

The transformations are fun and varied, but equally clunky to use.

Somewhere in the middle of the game you get to the Imperial City and I don't know why but suddenly the game really made me think of the first The Witcher game and how much better that game is than this one. Overall the two games feel similar in style and gameplay but The Witcher ends up being way more fun. While The Witcher is two years younger, it was pretty much agreed upon at the time that it was a bit outdated graphically and gameplay wise for its time. And still The Witcher gets everything right that Jade Empire doesn't. You get to spend more time in each area and with each story-character, allowing you to build relationships with them that make you care about what you do and what happens. The big city you end up spending most of your time in (Vizima) and the outskirts around it where you do a lot of the quests feel a lot more lived in and real and immersive. Quests and characters link together, you revisit them and they allow you to be a part of them. In Jade Empire it always stays at feeling like a stage that you will soon leave and even sooner forget everything about.

Yet it really seems like so much love was at least meant to go into this game. It's like they had all the time in the world to develop the ideas for the game and no time or money to actually create the game. Because, yet again, there is so much about this game that could've been truly great! You get to infiltrate an assassins guild and your master turns out to be the main bad guy in a plot twist that I stopped caring about before I even knew it was going to happen. You end up dying and have to fight your way out of the spirit realm. It could've been cool! It could've been fun! What happened?

Was it lack of time? Was it bad prioritizing? Like I mentioned before this game seems to have been quite well received when it was first launched, most of the complaints seem to have been regarding its short length (it took me 15 hours to complete playing about two thirds on easy, which to me seems like perfectly fine game length. But yeah, if you're comparing to Baldur's Gate that may seem short). Since I didn't play it at the time and haven't checked any revisited reviews of it I am unsure if it has just aged badly or really didn't click with me.

Jade Empire is just an empty shell of a lot of really cool ideas. It feels like such a waste both of your time but especially of all the things that actually could've turned out really well and made a good game. Some of these ideas Bioware did in fact take, either intentionally or not, and develop in later games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age. While I am not a huge fan of either of those games either I would definitely recommend you play one of those instead of this one.

Images from mobygames.com, gamerselixir.com, amazon.co.uk, jadeempire.fandom.com, lparchive.org.

WoW Classic - I Can Barely Believe It's Really Here

Here we are. WoW Classic is almost upon us, although I don't think I will actually believe it until I log in for the first time and run around with my fresh little character.

I remember when I was little and thought about turning 18 and how cool that would be. It's kind of odd having a memory of yourself looking forward to something that is now already way in the past. Now, at 34, I also remember when I was younger and thinking about how weird it would be to ever quit playing WoW. Here I am years later and I am way passed both those milestones. I've even come some sort of full circle and am going to start WoW all over (too bad I can't be 18 again though, amirite)!

I've probably told this story a billion times, so just scroll past it if you've heard it before:
My original WoW journey started in 2005, when I had just turned 20. My brother, who had played from release, allowed me to create a character on his account (my very first character was an undead priest named Lahmia, but I quickly swapped to a night elf druid to play on the same faction as him). This would become a big source of argument between us until I got my own account somewhere at the turn to 2006. My first character on my own account was a human warlock, but I was quickly required to move servers because of overpopulation and somewhere in the spring of 2006 Zinn the undead priest was born. She was my first character to level 60 and she remained my main character all the way until I quit playing in Mists of Pandaria, April 2013 - 8 years after I had first started playing WoW.

And here I am now, a bit more than 14 years since I first stepped into the world of Azeroth and perched to do it again. It's difficult to explain what I am feeling. My attempt at creating my new characters probably illustrates it quite well;

At first I decided for an undead warrior and an undead priest. Then I thought I didn't want two undeads, and I also really wanted an orc warrior rather than an undead one. But the undead racials are pretty nice, Cannibalize can be useful when questing (thought probably less useful than I remember). Also I had remembered the orc racial wrong, thinking it would give me rage with no debuff, but apparently it increases damage and reduces healing taking and so makes it less useful for tanking.

While I was pondering these things, which I thought would take no more than five minutes, my 5 yo comes up behind me and wonders what I am doing. I explain it to him and let him tinker with making a character himself. He settles on a "bull-man transformer" i.e Tauren Druid. He wants the name Gojira but it's taken so we go with Gojera.

It hits me then that here I am, introducing my son to this game. At 5 yo I think he is still too young, mostly because without being able to read anything all he can do is run around and kill stuff, maybe (even probably) that will be enough for him for a while. But somehow I am so happy that I get a chance to show him this Classic experience first, rather than the modern version (the same reason we decided to introduce him to NES/SNES/MEGA DRIVE before PS4). I even hope he ditches Roblox for this. I hope that when we sit down to play something together, this will be one of those things. Being able to play this game with my own kid would be so cool.

Right now I've settled on an orc warrior and an undead warlock, and though that might still change before I start playing I feel pretty good about my choice at the moment. Professions will be mining and blacksmithing, herbalism and enchanting respectively.

My initial plan was to stay up past midnight to be able to log in as soon as possible, but I scrapped that plan almost immediately for many reasons.

First of all I doubt if I'll even be able to get onto the server straight away, these things just do not launch without major hiccups. I don't think Blizzard has launched any expansion without major log in problems even though they really should've learned by now. I noticed Blizzard has already added several new servers in the last few hours alone, so it seems they underestimated interest as per usual.
Secondly it's not like I can stay up several hours past midnight anyway, my kid has school tomorrow and my daughter does not care about my WoW playing and will get up at 6 am anyway. With what little time I can possibly squeeze in I'll only be able to get the starter quest anyway, so I'd rather just give myself proper time to do it.
Thirdly, related to secondly, I've got a lot of other things and plans tomorrow - life moves on even though it now contains Classic WoW. I need and want my sleep more than I want to play WoW. I want to be awake and fresh enough to be in a good mood for my kids way more than I want to play WoW.

Addons is another thing I've given some thought. To begin with I'm going to go au naturale, mostly because I am too lazy to tinker around with addons right now and also because I've been away from the game so long I feel like I need to see what it is I want to "fix". I remember a bag addon and maybe a UI addon being quite necessary, but we'll see if I think so this time around. It's not like I am going to sink anywhere near the same kind of time into this so I'll probably get away with not having to change too much.

You can rest assured that there are going to be a lot more posts coming on how this experience turns out to be for me. I am also going to be curious on what you think about it, if you happen to play it!

WoW Classic Is Nearly Here And I Am Not Prepared

In a couple of days my son starts real school for the first time (as opposed to Kindergarten). But more importantly, WoW Classic is released (kidding. My son starting school is of course more momentous. Ahem.).

Considering the first 500 something posts on this blog were pretty much all about WoW and I played it religiously for 8 years between 2005-2013, I'm a bit surprised at myself that I haven't even mentioned anything about WoW Classic yet. I am in this weird in-between state of "extremely hyped" and "not really thinking about it". It's possible to combine the two, especially when you're a mom to two little kids. As long as they're awake I don't really have time or brain power to think about anything other than making sure they're not unhappy. As soon as they're sleeping though… I am usually still to brain fatigued to think about anything except how much rest and sleep I might hope to squeeze out of my way too short "free" time. On occasion however, the reminder that WoW Classic is a thing pops into my head and I am immediately extremely hyped.

Me in 2006.

There is no way to overstate the (overall positive) impact WoW has had on my life. In that sense WoW is by far the best game I have ever played. In that sense also I would say that WoW transcends being "just a game" to me. I won't shy away from calling it just short of a way of life. While it never interfered with my life must-do's (study and work, eat and sleep as it happened), for a non-inconsequential amount of time in my life I played WoW a lot. Both my children exist because of it since I met my SO through it. And as mentioned, the vast majority of that time was very enjoyable.

Of course I had my fair share of drama. There is just no way to spend that much time with such a vast variety of people and not have drama. I also may or may not be considered argumentative and maybe even aggressive at times. I definitely have trouble letting doodoo just slide, even when not letting it slide means conjuring more doodoo.

The reason I stopped playing however was wholly undramatic, maybe that was even partly the main issue. At the time I was expecting my first child and had also started working a lot more. None of those were main contributors, but that coupled with the fact that I had to move server because most people I used to play with had already quit or moved on to other things meant I was feeling quite lonely. WoW, at least to me, is all about the community. It's probably a decent game on its own, but I don't think it's comparable to what you get when you have the whole package. The guildies and whatever crazy stuff that went on in guild chat. The chats you had with the random people you encountered doing quests and dungeons. The scheduled hang-outs with friends to do raids/pvp/quests/dungeons/whacky achievements/farming/you name it. To me the game was a (albeit great) framework for the social aspect. When that aspect was gone, the game part just couldn't fill that hole.

I used to love to experiment with my healing output.

This became even more clear to me when I tried to play for a while in what might have been Warlords of Draenor and I still just felt lonely. Even more so since I played without a guild and no one seemed to talk to anyone anymore anywhere, not in any chats nor any dungeons I did. I didn't have time to invest in raiding so a huge chunk of what motivated me game-wise was gone. I never minded grinding or levelling alts, but that was because I could either talk to people I knew and enjoyed spending time with or knew that it was going to go into end game efforts. Having neither of those motivations left me having not much fun.

But up until I didn't have fun I had so much fun. I don't recall WoW ever feeling like a chore or a slog (there were parts within WoW that weren't 100% fun obviously, but in general). I don't recall logging on to raid and thinking "you know what, I'd rather do something else right now". While I don't long for those days to be back, I live a different life now, I am definitely sentimental about them. There are few days even now when some WoW memory doesn't pop into my head at the most random times. I could be building with Lego with my son and suddenly think about running around in Stranglethorn Vale. I can be playing in the sandbox with my daughter and suddenly think about fighting The Lich King. I'll cook food and think about when that BoE epic dropped in Hinterlands.

Me in 2010.

I've understood every change that Blizzard has decided to make to WoW and I don't recall raging too much about any of them. But the honest truth is that I miss the old world, the way it was before the Cataclysm. I believe the Cataclysm was a necessary change, if not exactly like that then probably something like that. In fact I even think it's a bit of a stroke of genius to think of remaking the old world into something new and fresh. It's just an inevitable fact that as soon as something is gone, people (namely me) will be pining for what has been and remembering it with rose-tinted goggles. People don't want what they want and they don't know what they want. If that statement makes no sense, neither do the wishes of WoW-players since the roll-out of the game.

Personally I found that a lot of things were made a bit too easy and too streamlined. I often opted out of using Heirloom gear, because I didn't want to level my alts too fast. I never used the "instantly max level character"-option because I always found that levelling a class and spec was by far the best way to learn it. But as mentioned, they were just that - optional, so they didn't bother me. Then they started changing things like how the skill tree looked and worked, they removed what I considered key features of certain classes like catching your own pet as a hunter and crafting poisons as a rogue. I understood these changes and maybe, probably, they were necessary. But I wanted to be able to experience things the way they used to be.

Me in 2011.

Just imagine if you could return to some of your happiest memories and relive them? Blizzard has essentially offered me exactly that. That doesn't mean I expect my re-visit to Azeroth to be exactly the same. But just like smelling a certain smell or hearing a certain song can bring you to the brink of being "there again", I expect myself to reinvigorate some of all those amazing memories I've made through that game.

I'm not entirely sure how I want to play WoW Classic. Do I want to recreate myself from 2005? I'm leaning towards not going for that approach, for several reasons. Firstly, it's impossible to entirely go back to what I did in 2005. I simply am not that person anymore and more than 8 years of playing WoW means I can't go back to being someone who is seeing things for the first time. Secondly, I don't want to tread on my old memories. I want them to be intact and untouched. This time, I want it to be what it has to be - an older me revisiting an old playground, both to remember but also to create new memories.

One of my most popular posts was about a floating cat head. The internet just loves cats.

Not too long ago I replayed Pokémon Red, some 20 years after I had first played it. I had the expectation that while I would still enjoy it, some of the QoL changes made to later games would sour the experience to me somewhat. But I was wrong. The game was still fun as hell and nothing about it annoyed me. It is difficult to go backwards in gaming I find, unless you are specifically after those differences. And I think I am when it comes to WoW. I am specifically after gold being damn hard to come by. I am specifically after being forced to talk to people, talk a lot, to get through dungeons and some times even quests. I am specifically after my caster having to drink after every single mob. Farming Souls Shards on my warlock. Farming lockboxes on my rogue. Levelling and feeding my pet on my hunter. Having to pay through my nose every time I need new ranks on my skills. Having to get rage at the beginning of a fight as a warrior tank, and hope people hold off long enough for you to keep aggro. Almost all of the little "annoyances" that I can think of, that they've slowly changed throughout the years of WoW, are things that I am looking forward to doing again.

My first real character in WoW was a holy priest named Zinn, and I stuck to her, keeping her as my main throughout all the years. This time however, I think I am going to go with a warrior tank, as I found that I really enjoy tanking somewhere in the middle of Burning Crusade (though initially it scared the hell out of me). We'll see, I've still got a few days to think it through. But I am definitely extremely hyped. Hope to see you there.