hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4074.txt

Episode: 4074
Title: HPR4074: Jade Empire
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4074/hpr4074.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 19:16:47

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4,074 for Thursday the 14th of March 2024.
Today's show is entitled Jade Empire.
It is hosted by Daniel Person and is about six minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is my experience playing Jade Empire.
Hello Hacker, let's talk about another game I played one more game during the holiday
break.
I played through Jade Empire by Bioware and I really love these kind of story based games
where the main part of the game is that you get a rich story.
You talk to a lot of people.
You get involved in the actual happenings in the game.
You have a rich world where there are a lot of things that goes on and so on.
Jade Empire, even though it was built by Bioware, it felt like it was a very early game in
their series and they probably haven't really involved by then and done a really good
game but it was still a good game.
It was a little bit strange.
There were some kind of tones in the game that didn't really work today but still very
fun, very interesting and so on.
The game mainly starts by you being some kind of martial art student at school and you
have a teacher.
That teacher ends up being kidnapped and you need to hunt down that teacher.
So that is pretty much the start of the game and what is setting up your journey.
You meet a lot of people during your journey and you do a lot of interesting stuff.
All things from trying to help ghosts finding rest too, helping people with their daily
problems and so on.
So there is a dynamic in the game but I felt that it was very much on rails.
You had some side quests that perhaps were not required to do.
You have some moral choices that were very blunt.
Like either you do this which will probably hurt a lot of people but you can get a lot
of money or you don't.
Those kind of moral decisions or you help that particular person but it will be your
really bad for this person or you try to help some people but if you didn't do it well
enough then you will fail that.
So for instance one of the things where a ghost that were searching for a son that had
died you needed to find his grave and I didn't figure out which grave was the right one.
So that was a really strange quest and you needed to do a lot of detective work and figuring
out how it could be that way.
But I still think it was a good game.
There were some twists and turns and there were a lot of interesting players, game characters
in the game.
Sadly there were like ten male characters that were very different and diverse and interesting
than you had one child and two women.
So it was not that diverse in the story but there were some differences between the different
characters at least.
So yeah it was interesting but I think there could be even more diverse and find characters
with a little bit more flavor and I think they have done that later years.
So I think they have solved that problem already but this was a very early game and because
I love all the other Bioware games I had to play this one too.
One thing to look out for in the future is actually some people that have been working
at Bioware and also been working on Mass Effect and other really great games that still
want to tell these kind of epic interesting stories have branched out and created their
own game studio now.
I think Bioware has been bored by Microsoft and that might have been the reason why they
actually branched out but games company to look out for in the future is worlds untold.
They have not released a game yet but the people that has started is really interesting.
So I'm really looking forward to see what kind of game they might release 2026 or 2027.
So these games take a lot of time to do and I don't think that they are even close to
releasing something but I will keep an eye on this gaming company.
So this was the Jade Empire, it's an old game.
You actually meet John Cleese at some point he is having a wonderful character that he
voices in this game which was a really fun experience that were too.
There is a lot of really good voice actors in the game, sadly the story and so on was
a little bit lackluster so yeah it was an early game but still a good game.
Have you played a Jade Empire, leave a comment about that.
If you want to discuss any of these parts you could make in your own episode or just leave
a comment to me and I will read those and perhaps talk about them in another episode.
So this was this episode, I hope that you liked it, see you in the next episode.
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