4Players: KotOR provided a moral system and different endings. What kind of freedom can we expect of jade Empire? Could you give us an example of the consequences that our decisions cause in the world?
Kevin Martens: I think that attaching a moral layer to our games really enriches the experience. With Jade Empire, we’re continuing to refine the system to give the player a wider variety of options rather than just a black/white or good/evil option. Of course, as part of the moral system, we will have multiple paths or endings to a majority of the plots as well as to the main story in the game.
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I don’t want to give away any of the plots in the game, but if, for example, someone was in danger, you don’t just have the option of either finishing them off or saving them heroically. You might choose to save them only after they promise you everything they own, or you might only save them because you need them to finish another plot. If this person that you could save or kill was an evil man, the moral choice becomes complicated.
Saving a child is a very obvious choice; saving a murderer is a much harder choice to make. We want to make the player think and worry about the choice that he has to make, and we’ve found that the experience is more meaningful if we do.
4Players: The fighting system uses a lot of martial arts styles. Can we expect an intense tactical combat rather than fast action à la Tekken? And how do you want to prevent so-called button mashing?
Kevin Martens: The great thing about the Jade Empire combat system is that is a fully real-time action system that still maintains a tactical side. We’ve managed to keep these two seemingly disparate elements together by making the system really accessible. The combos and moves are all individually simple to perform. The moves are basically two buttons at once or one of the buttons pressed three times quickly. So, in any given style, each of the moves or combos does something very different from the previous style but with a similar theme. For example, X and the X-X-X combo are basic hard strikes but that means very different things depending on your style. With Dire Flame, that means throwing a fireball, while in Legendary Fist it means your kick attacks.
The purpose is that none of the moves are difficult to perform; rather, it is how you use them together that makes the combat challenging and tactical. Quickly changing styles is very intuitive, and you’ll always know the general purpose of a particular attack regardless of the style.
4Players: Jade Empire seems to be an eye-catcher. The screenshots and the trailer promise a very intense visual experience. What did your team improve in comparison with KotOR?
Kevin Martens: Jade Empire has a totally new next-generation graphics engine. We’ve taken everything that we learned from making Knights of the Old Republic to make an engine that gets the most out of the Xbox for a truly immersive gameplay experience. Our characters and our levels have a lot more polygons now, for example.
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We also have more than twice the render paths in Jade Empire to make everything look very realistic within the setting. It’s kind of a magic-realism approach to world design. Using features like physics cloth, rim lighting, overbrightening bloom, and so forth, we can make all of the surfaces and movements of the objects within the world look very realistic even while the objects themselves are magical and fantastic.
We’ve also added a very advanced skeleton system to our characters that supports motion captured data. The combat is fully motion captured, and it looks really great with every pass that we do.
4Players: Thank you for your time, and good speed with Jade Empire!
Weitere Infos zu Jade Empire findet ihr in den First Facts oder auf der offiziellen Webseite!
