kill vehicle

Recently, like almost everybody else I know with an Xbox, I’ve been playing Jade Empire until my eyes bleed.

I lack the patience to write a full review, so if that’s what you need you should read peterb’s review, which is pretty much on the money. The game isn’t especially innovative, but it’s very well executed and has a great story. Sure, it isn’t a daring experiment, but not every game needs to be. Sometimes you want a creative and interesting meal, and sometimes you just want a hamburger. Jade Empire is a very tasty hamburger.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about the demo for JE that the April Official Xbox Magazine disc had. I bought the issue just for that demo. I don’t think I so much as cracked the cover of the actual magazine. I’d been waiting for JE for about a year and a half at that point, devouring every little scrap of preview news that Bioware leaked.

Normally I try to avoid the preview hype machine. If you go by gaming magazine previews, every game is the best game ever, right up until the point when it’s released and the magazines switch to “Oh yeah, it totally sucks. Sorry for describing it as the second coming of Christ for the past two years.” mode. Every part of a preview other than screenshots is worthless.

Why the exception? Simple: Bioware. Baldur’s Gate. Baldur’s Gate II. Neverwinter Nights. Knights of the Old Republic. MDK2. With that track record, how could Jade Empire be anything but great?

I wanted the demo for a little taste of the game, not because I wasn’t sure whether it’d be any good. And yet, after I played it I thought “well, maybe I’ll wait for the price to drop”. It shook my confidence in the game enough that I probably wouldn’t have bought it if the reviews hadn’t been so strong.

That’s… probably not the reaction Bioware expected. What happened?

So far, what I love about JE is exactly what I expected to love — a strong story, interesting characters, and fun combat. The demo didn’t have any of this.

There wasn’t really any story. Your character is flying to a temple for reasons that aren’t clear to do something that isn’t clear either. Pretty much, the demo is just “Here, fight these unexplained monsters. Don’t ask why.” I can’t expect too much story in a short demo, but c’mon, at least give me some idea of what I’m doing and why I should care about it.

The demo doesn’t really explain who your character is. Apparently you kick ass professionally, but it’s not entirely clear why. You’re on some sort of quest, but that’s assumed in an RPG. The actual game sets up a compelling backstory for your hero, but as far as the demo is concerned you might as well just be named Generic Martial Arts Hero #1. Admittedly, it’s hard to expect a lot of character development in a short demo, but this did very little to draw me into the game’s world.

Now, since the demo’s game excerpt is almost nothing but a battle, you’d expect at least that part to come across well, but the demo manages to make the combat un-fun. That surprised me much more than the story and character problems. I have friends who were apprehensive about the realtime combat (see peterb and psu’s bet about it), but I was looking forward to it. I like fighting games, even if I’m usually lousy at them. Turn-based martial arts action would have been boring anyway.

And yet, once I got a chance to play with the new combat system I didn’t like it at all. The problem here is like the story and character problems — there wasn’t enough context for me to be able to enjoy and play the game well.

JE’s combat is more or less the basic rock-paper-scissors system used in every fighting game since the dawn of time (blocks defeat normal attacks, power attacks defeat blocks, normal attacks interrupt power attacks, etc), but there are still a few unique bits. You need to conserve focus and chi. You have a few different fighting styles to switch between — martial styles, weapons, magic attacks, support styles, all with different characteristics. There are different ways to block, some of them acrobatic. Positioning and timing matters in the battles. Focus mode and chi attacks change the dynamics.

The actual game introduces you to these details slowly, and it doesn’t take long until it all feels familiar and fun. You know when to switch to a support style, you know when it’s worth spending chi on a strong attack instead of saving it for healing. It makes sense, and the battles are exciting and flow smoothly.

The demo, on the other hand, just dumps you right into a fight with little more than “Oh yeah, hit A to punch and B to block. Good luck!”. You don’t know what the attacks mean. You don’t really even know what your attributes mean. All you can do is flail around randomly until either you die or your opponent does. Without any information on how the combat system works, it feels jumbled and unfocused, just like the vague story.

So even though the actual game is great, the demo made it seem like something I didn’t want to play at all. It was pretty and had plenty of asskicking, but it just wasn’t any fun. It might have made a good convention demo, something for a chipper Bioware employee in a Jade Empire t-shirt to put through its paces for a crowd while a voiceover fills in all the missing details. As something to ship out to customers, though, it failed completely.

I don’t know anything about making games or excerpting in-development games to produce demos, but this can’t be the best they could have done. The game’s first chapter might have worked well — it’s the usual “here’s your character, here’s how to play, here’s what you’re supposed to do” training session, so releasing that would have drawn players in without requiring Bioware to write another intro for the demo.

About the only reason I can think of for releasing the demo they did instead of the first chapter is that the story wasn’t done enough — maybe they just had the engine and had to whip together something quick to put around it. If that’s the case, though, I think they’d have been better off just not releasing a demo than releasing one that showed their game in such a bad light.