Jade Empire Interview

ComputerAndVideoGames.com has conducted an interview with BioWare's Greg Zeschuk, in which the joint-CEO talks about their soon-to-be-released Xbox RPG, Jade Empire. Here's a little something to get you started:
Q: It must have been fascinating just doing all the research for Jade?

A: 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'.