Jade Empire

Last year, Bioware’s Knights of the Old Republic brought the Star Wars franchise to a whole new level by offering a free-form RPG experience and one of the most compelling Star Wars storylines in recent years (including the recent crop of movie prequels).  The game went on to win several awards, including Game of the Year from several different publications.  Now, Bioware is preparing Jade Empires, a new RPG set in the magical world of Chinese and Japanese mythology.  The game will feature Bioware’s unique brand of storytelling and non-linear conversations (as found in Knights of the Old Republic), and a whole new combat system.  If all goes according to plan, Jade Empire should be one of the best RPGs (not to mention games) to hit the Xbox next year. 

You start out the game by configuring the attributes of your character.  The stats are divided into three different sections, Body, Mind and Spirit.  These are important not only in the combat portions of the game, but also important to your interactions with NPCs.  If your character has high body stats and is pretty tough, then they’ll be pretty good at intimidating NPCs, if their spirit stats are high, then they’ll be naturally persuasive and charismatic, and so on. 

The new combat system is real-time, meaning that you perform your attacks like you would in an action game.  You can dodge and evade enemy attacks.

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