Interview: Jade Empire

Jade Empire has been on our 'most wanted' list for pretty much as long as we can remember. Ever since we first learned about BioWare's highly original take on a martial arts RPG we've been postively salivating at the prospect of one of the world's leading RPG developers giving the treatment to a hacky socky beat-'em-up role-playing game.

After giving Jade the full-on two continents one massive preview treatment recently, the game's so close now we can almost taste it; and we recently sat down with BioWare Joint CEO Dr Greg Zeschuk to get his latest thoughts on the game now it's almost finished and to learn more about BioWare's plans for Dragon Age, it's next big PC title and the prospects for the RPG as it goes forward into the next generation.

It must seem a long time ago now, but can you remember how the original idea for Jade Empire came about?

Dr Greg Zeschuk: Well sorta. Ray and I have been talking about a game like this for ten years, really from the beginning of BioWare. When we started the company we had some ideas for games that would be cool. One of those games was a top-down 2D role-playing game, which is ultimately what became Baldur's Gate.

Another game we thought would be really cool was a game where you became a martial arts master. Where you could sort of experience that thrill of learning all these martial arts styles. So really that was a vague, rather ill-defined idea. The other thing which is really ironic, is people ask: "Is it what you thought it was going to be?" The answer: "No it's totally way more than we thought it was going to be."

When we started making games ten years ago you didn't have 3D, you didn't have the cinematic presentation, you didn't have lip synching, all this incredible detail we have now. It's actually a lot richer than we ever imagined. It's great, the martial arts masters who did the motion capture, the animation in the game just makes it look more realistic. You couldn't conceive of that ten years ago. Look at Baldur's Gate, when that came out it was pretty state of the art.

It must have been fascinating just doing all the research for Jade?

Dr Greg Zeschuk: Oh yeah, the team is super talented and they're very, very passionate, this team and all the teams at BioWare. Any time we undertake something the team just gets really into it. The guys have watched innumerable movies, heh, it's funny because Shaolin soccer was on TV this morning and that's just one of the gazillion movies they watched.

Anyway we kinda went to the original source for a lot of the story stuff, we looked at Outlaws of the Marsh, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. But the game's not really drawn directly from those, it's inspired by them and of course a lot of art and architecture books, a lot of things we thought would be a good source of material.

So what we created was a world that was inspired by all these things, but there's not really one single real martial arts style in the game. They're all drawn from and creations based upon other ones. There's a language in the game called Tho Fan, which we had a PHD linguist who specialises in Japanese create for the game, to give the world a little more atmosphere. So certain characters, particularly demons from ancient times or older characters speak this language.

They create kinda like a beautiful facsimile of, something a little bit different, that's really what we want to create in the world. It's not like 'here's the actual historical representation'. We have flying machines in this world for example, it's a little bit different from 'real life'.

Creating a convincing game world must be one of the real development challenges for making a game like Jade?

Dr Greg Zeschuk: It was. I'd say the Jade team worked about a year on it, it was our first time we'd done a whole world. We have a lot of talented guys who've done a lot of hobbyist world creation and a lot of guys had done it for fun. It was hard, but not hard, we have a whole bunch of neat source books which have all kinds of detail in them, political, cultural and geographic references. It's interesting because we had a pile of detail to draw on.

When a writer would come on the project, they'd read all this background information so they'd be familiar with it. It's tough to generate all that, but once you've done it a few times... we're doing that with Dragon Age right now, our other game, and it's after that phase, we've done that phase already. We've got a third product that we're kind of midway through that process too so ...in none of the games have we really had a scenario where we've got hung up on the world creation, but it's a big task.

The problem with role-playing games is that you have to have the detail otherwise they just seem fake, right? It has to all hold together - players are smart, they ask the questions: "this doesn't make any sense, over here they said this and now it's changed". You can't have that.

How free form is Jade's game world? To what extent can you really influence different events and endings?

Dr Greg Zeschuk: There's certain events in the game where you actually do one big event and it has an impact, it's almost like a chain reaction, plots opening and closing, things changing. The world really changes depending on what you do... so it's really quite powerful, it kinda blows you away when you actually play it to see how different the game can become. I've played it multiple ways, multiple paths, there's really a lot of different ways to do it.

The other thing that's really interesting is that there's a lot of really optional stuff, like the martial arts Black Leopard school. You never really have to go there, but if you want to, you can go there and do some fun stuff. It's actually different from a lot of BioWare games where a lot of the meat isn't on the critical path.

But do you ever really veer off this critical path? How responsive is the game world?

Dr Greg Zeschuk: The critical path is very nice, you've got a lot to do, but there's a lot of stuff off it that you can also explore. The one example I usually cite is in the Imperial city. There's a couple of paths there, one involves the arena, one involves something else. You can go do the other one and never go to the arena once, or you can go to the arena and go all the way to become the imperial champion.

It's all optional, but you can do it, get some really awesome rewards and be able to go around the city and say hey and have people acknowledge you as the imperial champion. It's a lot different, we've added a lot of the world responsiveness stuff, with real difference and the different paths.

So what was it like working with the martial arts masters?

Dr Greg Zeschuk: Oh it was wonderful. We started by creating archetype styles. So we wanted to do a fast style, we wanted to do a strong, heavy attack style. We ended up doing two motion capture sessions. We did one, where we got some basic moves down and honed them and we did them in a mo-cap studio called Giant Studios down in Los Angeles, they do a lot of movie stuff and other things.

We got martial arts masters from as far away as mainland China, people who are now in the US doing lots of Hollywood work. We got people who'd been in things like The Matrix and things like that who do these really spectacular stunts. They were unbelievably talented. We worked with them to say: "right we want to do three very powerful moves and maybe make the last one a little slower". So were able to kind of design it on the fly, but we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted.

We're really excited, cross fingers that when we do future Jade stuff, we've learned so much, next time we go back to a motion capture studio, we'll be so much better equipped, especially now we've finished the game and we know. There's a few things we would have done differently now in retrospect, but if we were able to go back, we'd change a couple of the ways the moves work. We need pauses in them and things like that to make them more natural.

What's cool about having the data is that we have guys who are tremendous animators back home, so if the moves weren't quite right, they could go in there and manipulate them and change them themselves. They're very skilled, but you don't need to do that if you know in advance to time things a certain way.

You mentioned the next Jade there briefly. Do you think the next logical step is to take these characters you've created online?

Dr Greg Zeschuk: That's an interesting question, Jade Online or something of that sort? You never know, we're a company that have done a lot of online games like Neverwinter Nights. Our first multiplayer game was co-op in Shattered Steel in 1996. We've been in that space for a long time and I think we're pretty interested in online, we look at the future and the next generation of consoles and see a big part of those are going to be online functionality.

The PC? One of its big strengths has always been that it's so easy to connect, to hook up with other people so yeah there's all kinds of possibilities. I think some kind of online features would be very interesting.

What do you think the next generation of consoles is going to offer to role-playing game developers in particular?

Dr Greg Zeschuk: It's a good question and I think a coupla things are relevant. With greater memory, with greater processing power, we can do so much more. It's as simple as that. We're starting to get into creating virtual actors, which is something we're trying to do as a company, but what you really need is a lot of horsepower to churn the AIs, to make the characters start acting realistically.

Just to run the animation and simulation systems, to do facial animation and gesturing is pretty heavy. Just at the outset more horsepower under the hood of the next-gen consoles will allow us at a base level to do a whole lot more with our characters.

The second? Well there's going to be a lot of new features like I think that's the thing we're not too sure about what we'll see. Some of the connectivity stuff, where you can connect other devices, some of the online features they are some of the things we're very interested in as a company.

We're not in any way limited or restricted, we see the next gen opening up a lot of possibilities in how you can connect and how other people can connect to each other. The biggest thing is really just more memory, more real estate to put our games in. You know our games are really big and that's one of the other challenges - trying to fit them into 64 meg is spectacularly hard, the guys did a great job of it, but holy cow it's tough.

As a company have you looked at the advent of the handheld at all or is it opposite of what BioWare aims for?

Dr Greg Zeschuk: Oh no I think handheld's really interesting for us. On the one hand we think handhelds are really cool, we play handheld games because they're a lot of fun. As a company though? It doesn't really fit specifically with what BioWare does in terms of the games we create, which are more of the big huge epic products. However, seeing our games on mobile or handheld or things like that would make a lot of sense, because we tend to create worlds with a lot of stickyness.

People really like the worlds we create and they want more, at the end of the game they want more and so I think we'd probably look at partnering with people who do that. We have lots of friends now, people who do mobile that we talk with, we explore possibilities with, so it's actually something that could definitely happen in the future.

Certainly now that BioWare is in a position where we have a little more control over our properties in conjunction with Microsoft, but they're also very open and flexible. We've had some things happen, like NeverWinter Nights is on mobile in North America and I'm sure it's going other places as well. Stuff like that is pretty interesting for us.

How's work progressing on Dragon Age? We haven't really seen a great deal over in Europe?

Dr Greg Zeschuk: No we're kinda keeping it a little under wraps on Dragon Age. It's going really well. I mean, we have a tremendously talented team on it and a number of the guys [who] originally worked on Baldur's Gate and NeverWinter Nights are working on Dragon Age.

People who helped build some of the foundations of the new RPG genre are working on that game so we've got some really interesting ideas on how we can extend it, what we think we can do from a technology perspective. The multiplayer activities stuff, you know we want to do something progressive there.

We tend as a company to be always taking on big challenges and some of the things we're thinking about right now on Dragon Age are some exciting challenges, things that will be really cool so we'll see.

Right now we're focussed on ...the world building is more or less done, we're focussing on content creation and finalising technology, character creation, once we've got that going we'll start leaking out more and more stuff.

Right now, we're not in a rush. For us it's a very long term project, so we want to make sure it's done right. We've got to do it carefully, it's a pretty sensitive project particularly with the PC audience - we're still very dedicated to the PC and we want to prove to them that we can come up with something pretty special for them.

John Houlihan