If you stay on Hard I think you’ll need to use cross-class combos routinely - the damage compared to normal autoattacks is huge. I basically never quite bothered figuring out how they worked because it involved having one set of advanced abilities set up another characters’ set of advanced abilities in rock-paper-scissors fashion with the classes. It was just too abstruse until I saw it in chart format at which point I sort of slapped my forehead and went “Oh, like that.” The DA:O shatter combos were far too easy, but the DA2 ones were a little bit over-complicated.
For me, with “good dragon age micro” and a good handle on the control interface but no cross-class combos, I found “Normal” to be well-balanced for difficulty. I would have found hard pretty miserable unless I added all that extra dps (and it would’ve made normal pretty trivial.)
Quitch
3142
Seriously? The Jade Empire combat had almost no depth to it at all, you flipped around and then spammed for a bit before flipping around a bit more. It was the lightest combat they’ve ever made.
I can’t say as I see there being a lot of depth anywhere else in the game either.
I’d have to agree that JE combat was not fun and was the reason why JE:SE is the worst of the BioWare games I’ve played. Fortunately for JE, I liked the setting, characters, and story and felt it would have worked so much better as an old-style adventure game. I enjoyed DA2 combat more than JE combat despite DA2’s failings.
Sarkus
3144
I’m just going to point out that there are reasons why Jade Empire is the only major Bioware RPG that has never generated a sequel and leave it at that.
Jade Empire’s combat is deeper than Mass Effect 2’s. Not that that’s saying much. And I agree that it’s not really fair to compare Dragon Age 2’s combat to it since even though DA2 went to a faster paced model with substantially less depth, it’s by no means an action RPG.
You obviously didn’t play da2 then.
DA2 isn’t an action rpg, but it isn’t a party based rpg (whatever you call it) like da1 either, mostly. Da2 makes manually controlling party members a lot harder and more irritating than da1 due to an interface severely crippled for console controls. Now, this would be fine if you could just control one character 100% of the time, but your party members are so stupid (standing on top of repeating traps, running in front of dragons when they are mages) that you need to be frequently taking control of them. This is made increasingly mind shattering by fights that require intense micromanaging of your party members.
Now that i think about it, jade empire is a game that did this right. In both games, the mechanics are designed assuming you will never switch characters (obviously since if i remember right, you cant in jade empire). In da2 you need to do it anyway to stop your party members from dying or doing something stupid. in jade empire your party member’s main purpose (other than flavor/dialog) is to give you a major passive buff. They also do damage, but not much and if they die, it is no problem, so you don’t have to fight the system to micromanage them.
This thread makes me want to play jade empire again, but i don’t believe it works on windows 7. A severely underrated game.
Zing? C’mon man.
DA2 isn’t an action rpg, but it isn’t a party based rpg (whatever you call it) like da1 either, mostly. Da2 makes manually controlling party members a lot harder and more irritating than da1 due to an interface severely crippled for console controls.
I had issues with the interface too - specifically the requirement to select all party members to really disable party member AI. But again, having played KOTOR a bit recently I recalled exactly how annoying that micro used to be, and noone disses KOTOR. DA:O just got that stuff right, to the extent that some manageable polish issues with DA:2’s interface stuck out.
Nesrie
3148
I am pretty sure I played the entire game under Windows 7. I didn’t even own the game until this last year. I loved it. I know it’s not perfect, but I don’t really require perfection. I found the combat, the story and the music to be highly enjoyable. I was sorry I waited so long.
Kotor did not have any situations that required intense micromanaging of party members though. At most you would switch characters to get them to use specific actions or pick their targets. You could also queue skills on characters which helped a ton.
It has been a while, but i’m pretty sure the player character in kotor did SIGNIFICANTLY more than one and possibly both party members combined damage wise. This is not the case in da2 obviously.
Basically, even assuming the players ability to micromanage their party is worse in kotor (and i’m not sure it is because you can queue actions in kotor), kotor is designed in a way that lets the player control one character in almost all situations without switching a lot. DA 2 is not.
Nesrie: That could be. i haven’t actually tried it myself, but i recommended the game to my friend when she was using Vista and she complained a ton about it not working, so i just assumed that was the case. She isn’t very tech oriented though so that could be it…
Nesrie
3150
I just loaded it up to make sure since it’s a recent play for me, and it runs fine. God, how I had forgotten what a pain the save system in that game… hated that.
As a preliminary aside, I’m all for an order queue, at least as an option.
But, “required?” I dunno, probably a lot of battles in any BW RPG could be won with tons less micro than I do. But I micro! And in KOTOR that means about every 1-3 combat rounds I go through 3 characters and go “delete delete delete” whatever silly things the AI has added to their order queue, besides manually retargetting all party members on the best possible targets and manually doing any CC/other casting that’s required.
It adds up to a ton more clicking than DA:O, and indeed more than in DA2 I think. I forgot how much time I spent fighting with the interface because I didn’t mind, I liked the game. Similarly, while I wish I didn’t have to “figure out how to run the interface” in DA2, it wasn’t a dealbreaker or even front of mind issue for me, just weird and kind of undocumented. And it was way less click intensive than KOTOR, unless you were blithely confident in your party setup.
i’m pretty sure the player character in kotor did SIGNIFICANTLY more than one and possibly both party members combined damage wise.
It’s been a while since I read about the numbers side of things. I also usually played light-side Consulars, probably the lowest DPS.
Ooo, good one. Is this where I bow down to your better knowledge of my enjoyment of one game’s combat system over another? Where’s the mind police when I need them?
But perhaps you are just adding in information that isn’t present in my post. I never said I thought DA2’s combat was good, just that I enjoyed it more than JE’s.
I honestly barely touched my party members in DA2, outside of certain very micro-intensive fights (e.g. the Ancient Rock Wraith) and occasionally to force the use of certain skills/potions. But then I was playing on Normal and, halfway through, Casual (due to almost everything being a pointless grindy slog).
Not really a convincing argument, given that Jade Empire also had the least popular setting of any Bioware RPG. All the others rode on the coattails of Dungeons & Dragons or Star Wars. Dragon Age and Mass Effect dropped the actual licenses but retained very similar settings; ME merely swapped out lightsabers for angry bald space marine guns. The Shaw Brothers backdrop of JE isn’t nearly as popular in Western games.
The ironic thing is that one of the most common complaints about jade empire at the time was not having much in the way of equipment upgrades and yet bioware is once again treading that path with their recent games.
But now it is a “revolution in RPG design.”
Razgon
3157
And has gained the series MANY, MANY, MANY new fans…
ShivaX
3158
Almost as many as it lost!
(sorry had to do it)
Yes, at the time people angrily accused jade empire of dumbing down equipment management, but now it is happily called streamlining.
It is indeed funny how things turn out. Maybe in a few years flight sims will become the fashion again.
Quitch
3160
In Mass Effect 2 you had multiple weapons (styles), upgrades (same in JE, though linked to levelling) multiple ammos (more than means to use a style) and then abilities on top of that. In addition you had two companions (one in JE) who could use both passive AND active abilities in combat (one or the other in JE) in combination with yours, and the powers you would use would depend on the multiple (as opposed to two in JE) types of enemy you were fighting. In addition, the (up to) three layers of defence an enemy had (one in JE) would determine how you attacked an enemy. To top it off the terrain was relevant where as in Jade Empire it simply defined the limits of the arena.
So how was JE combat deeper?
