April 19, 2005 - A journey through BioWare's Jade Empire means facing a range of adversaries who attack in diverse ways, each having particular strengths and vulnerabilities. In order to defeat them, it's advantageous and perhaps even necessary to be skilled in various styles, allowing you to select the approach that is most advantageous against each enemy. Should you employ the quick yet potent Leaping Tiger method that can make your hands strike like deadly claws? Perhaps using Dire Flame magic to throw flames and explosive balls of fire would be better, or Stone Immortal, harnessing the immense power of the earth element into crystalline projectiles, encasing opponents in stone, or even opening the ground beneath them. Then again, you may wish to transform yourself into a creature such as the mighty Horse Demon, or wield an armament like the Golden Star staff.

The techniques named above represent only a small portion of the many martial arts, magical and weapon styles you can learn and then draw upon. Collectively, they comprise a key component of the so-called RPG system the team has created to underlie the character portion of the Xbox title, which shipped last week. From the player and media reactions we've seen to date, we know that this scheme has been very favorably received, as have many others in the endeavor, which fuses the developer's ability to tell exceptionally compelling stories with fast-paced action as you strive to ascertain and conquer the source of a mysterious malevolence that has taken control of the titular domain and its sovereign. Naturally, we were interested to examine both the system and the thinking that went into it. Recently, we had the chance to do so.

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Jonric: How would you summarize the RPG system in Jade Empire? How does it differ from those BioWare has used in the past?

Lead Technical Designer Georg Zoeller: The idea behind the rules system in Jade Empire was to create a system that provides the depth in character advancement and integration into the story people have come to expect from a BioWare RPG while supporting the faster pace of the new real-time combat engine. Since Jade Empire is BioWare's own IP, we had, for the first time, the freedom to create a rules system tailored to the type of gameplay we wanted instead of trying to make the gameplay fit an existing rules system.

The rules system in Jade Empire is designed to keep control over the combat experience with the player at the controller. Questions like "Did the enemy hit me / did I hit the enemy" are determined by the player's actions rather than by a die roll behind the scenes, while questions like "How much damage can I take / How much damage did I dish out" are dependent on your character's attributes and styles. I think as a result, the game manages to keep the pace and "in the action" feel of combat without sacrificing the RPG elements like character development and customization.

When talking to people around the office about what they think is the best way to build your character, you get a lot of different opinions - everyone has their little tricks

Jonric: What high-level goals did you initially set? Were you looking for particular levels of depth, granularity and simplicity / complexity?

Lead Designer Kevin Martens: First and foremost, we wanted the RPG system and the combat in Jade Empire to be accessible. Both the rules and the combat are brand new systems built from scratch for the game, so we approached it with these goals in mind. I think that the same elements that made our AD&D; games popular apply to any RPG system made for electronic gaming - tactical combats, strong reward curve, cool items, level up and upgrade options, etc.

All of these elements are present in Jade Empire with a filter of accessibility. Baldur's Gate, for example, required a fair amount of background knowledge of Dungeons & Dragons or a solid review of the manual for the player to really understand the rules system. Jade Empire's basic structure is simple enough that it can be learned in-game over the course of the first chapter. There are still a ton of options; we've just used what we learned on our other games to present them as simply as possible.

Jonric: Where did you draw inspiration from, and what was the process you followed to build the system's framework?

Georg Zoeller: We took the overriding themes of many books, movies and legends, extracted the core concepts we felt would be applicable to a game like Jade Empire and spent months developing the basic system on paper, even prototyping different approaches by creating our own card game version of the rule set. Once we got a running engine, we tested several different prototype systems in the game before selecting the one that was found to be the most authentic, accessible and satisfying to our testers. From there it was a lot of revisions, focus tests (internal and external), more revisions, more tests, and so on.

Jonric: What are the benefits and pitfalls of mainly focusing on a small number of areas versus taking a more even approach?

Georg Zoeller: Both approaches work well in the game, and in the end, it's up to what the player wants his character to be. The system is forgiving enough so you don't have to worry about creating a failure of a character by making a wrong choice since each of the attributes is useful on its own. When talking to people around the office about what they think is the best way to build your character, you get a lot of different opinions - everyone has their little tricks, from "I concentrate on upgrading the Longsword and Leaping Tiger styles and increase Mind and Body so I can use the sword more often and have enough health to go head to head with the bad guys" to "I only increase Spirit on my character so I can defeat enemies from distance using magic styles and still have enough Chi to heal myself in case I get cornered into close combat."