(NOTE: I wrote this weeks ago and then forgot all about it. Recently I was playing a different RPG which brought all of this to mind.)
Being a real-time fighting game, Jade Empire is very different from other character development systems. (“Character development” in this context means the player increasing the stats of their in-game persona – leveling up, and whatnot – and has nothing to do with developing characters in the sense of establishing personalities and getting to know NPCs.)
Some games are very level-driven. Diablo is a good example. In that game, having good equipment and decent skills at playing will tilt the odds in your favor, but never so much that you could overcome a monster ten levels above you. Levels are everything in that game. By the time you finish Diablo, you will be doing at least an order of magnitude more damage than you were at level 1. If you were to take a level 1 Diablo character and transport them to the final levels of the game, it would be impossible to play. Even the weakest monsters would kill the player in a single blow.
Jade Empire sits at the opposite extreme. Levels just don’t have much impact on the game. You have three stats (Body, Spirit, and Mind) and each level you get a mere three points to spend on these stats. In the long run, those points just don’t ammount to much. In my game, a majority of my points came through questing, and just 28% of them came as a result of leveling up. This means if I had gone through the entire game and remained at level 1, my stats would only be 28% lower by the end. Where in Diablo an end-of-game character might be doing ten or twenty times more damage than a new character, in Jade Empire your damage will – at best – double during the course of the game.
The other aspect of the leveling system is the sheer simplicity of it. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Jade Empire: Character System”
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
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