This game just went on sale for pretty cheap on Steam. Should I get it or has it not aged very well?

It's a Bioware game so, referring to our handy dandy Bioware Cliche chart you can see that it is basically the exact same game as KOTOR. The plot twist is sort of vaguely okay, the romance subplot is just as stupid as any other Bioware game, the gameplay is better than most Bioware shit but still is Bioware shit. It's pretty damn short though so if you wanted to have a trist with an old mediocre game this could be the one.

Not sure. I remember enjoying it a while ago, but I couldn't say if it would hold up. I think it probably would, but I don't remember how I controlled it. You would probably need to do some special mapping to use a controller, I bet it wouldn't work out of the box.

I'm playing it right now and I think it's a pretty good game. The combat is way different than what Bioware of that time period usually used and the fantasy/Chinese setting is not something you see everyday.

Well, it was an XBox game originally, so hopefully controller support would be obvious

@jothel: I actually played the game quite recently. It has a lot of good ideas, and I love the setting and the mythology. The game always had some major problems with how it executed on those ideas, but I wouldn't say that those problems have gotten bigger by time. I'd recommend the game.

I played it again when it came to Steam, and I think it still holds up. Good character driven narrative (for a video game) and the setting was refreshing because there has not been many games like it that have come out.

@joshwent: Yeah I just wouldn't count on that (steam says it has partial controller support), most console -> pc ports until relatively recently (current generation at least) didn't have good controller support out of the box.

Not if you have a 64 bit processor, it doesn't.

Bought the special edition on a steam sale, fucking thing doesn't run because of my processor.

@jothel: As someone who played the Xbox version a few years ago, and tried to replay on PC this Summer, I'd lean towards "No." If you have a modern computer, the Steam version simply WILL NOT LAUNCH until you do a ton of tweaks and a couple of rain dances. If you glimpse at the game's Steam forums, it is always a ton of people flipping their shit, comparing system settings, and asking why Steam is even allowed to sell the game in this state. Once I got it running, it does fully support the 360 USB gamepad, but the combat was far more wonky and laggy than I remembered. I could no longer enjoy the story very much, because there was a 1.5 second pause between each line of dialogue. That may be a side effect of all the things you have to do to trick your computer into running it.

In the same Summer I replayed KotOR and played KotOR 2 and Vampire: The Masquerade-Bloodlines to completion. They are all older than Jade Empire, but more fun.

If you catch a GOG sale of Neverwinter Nights 2 Complete, that would be a better call.

Play Street Fighter III Mask of the Betrayer. It's a good game.

Jade Empire is also on GoG now so he can also wait for a sale on it to come back (It just ended). I've had no trouble playing that version on my laptop. Neverwinter Nights 2 is also a great game.

ArbitraryWater posted a pretty good blog about the game, which should give you a decent idea.

huh my special edition boxed version i got a few years back runs fine, though the aspect ratio seems weird and the fonts look cruddy. does it not have true widescreen support?

I played it recently for the first time and it holds up pretty well. The combat is pretty fun, the story and characters are interesting and it's a pretty good looking game for its time, even on xbox where i played it.

There are worse ways to spend that amount of time, if you have no other options that are of less ambiguous quality.

@galacticpunt: I have had the similar pains trying to get this game to work on STEAM. Luckily, I found the xbox version on Ebay and have started to play that.

I hope they bring this franchise back.

Its a fine game with typical Bioware strengths. Characters and dialogue are both good. Never really loved the combat though. KOTOR is definitely the better game in almost every way.

I asked my friend who's played like every bioware game about. He said that pretty much no matter what, if you're interested in this game you should go play kotor 1 and 2 instead. After beating them, then maybe you could go on to play jade empire.

Needless to say he considered jade empire practically the same as kotor, but worse.

I never liked Jade Empire much. It was not nearly as good as KotOR. The XBOX version is playable on 360 which is how I played it again a few years ago after having played it when it came out on XBOX. But I got bored quickly.

I take it you are not a Bioware fan? You say that the gameplay is better than most Bioware games that you call shit but Dragon Age Origins and the newer Mass Effect games have great gameplay. I can see if you are not a fan of Dragon Age II but almost everyone would agree Origins is great and Mass Effect eventually made the shooter/RPG thing work with ME2 and in ME3 it is good enough for a multiplayer game to become popular. I would say Jade Empire has the weakest gameplay compared to the other Bioware games.

Just to prove a point I will mention that all Mass Effect games have over 90 metacritic, with ME2 at 96. Doesn't get much better than that. Origins is at 91. You are entitled to your oppinion about Bioware but it is far from universal.