Jade Empire Preview & Interview
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The whole menu setup seems to be ripped directly from Knights, including the journal, character status screen, and even the Light or Dark Side meter, which will represent how close you are to Closed Palm or open fist. One huge improvement is the new onscreen map. One of the things that bothered me considerably in Knights of the Old Republic was the fact that the on screen map was almost pointless. The action always had to stop, then go into the menu, scroll to map screen, and then continue. The on screen map can now be made larger, and then your next objective is marked with a star. Unfortunately, you'll still have to go into the map to get location names, but BioWare said they may have textual representations as an option in the final version.
And a snip from the interview about Jade Empire 2:
Q: With Jade Empire being your own IP (intellectual property), what about your philosophy of doing sequels or handing off the game to other developers? Or do you think this might be one of the games where you might have a significant hand in doing a sequel?
Zeschuk: We don't really have a specific philosophy about doing sequels. I think we didn't do a couple of sequels because of that competing interest in that we wanted to do our own IPs.
Muzyka: We've done sequels in the past.
Zeschuk: In fact, we actually like doing sequels.
Muzyka: Our teams actually like doing sequels, too. They've expressed that various times. When they did Baldur's Gate II, for example, they really liked it because they were able to take that existing toolset and do all the things they wanted to in the first game and really continue to add to them. So, there's a lot of excitement around a sequel to Jade Empire and we'll most likely do that internally. We haven't announced anything about that yet, but that's probably the most likely outcome.
