gamespot.com/xbox/rpg/jadeempire/review.html
It sounds pretty good, although I’m quite concerned about one point mentioned on the third page:
Long loading times I can handle, but framerate problems are not encouraging. I dearly hope that this game makes it to the PC eventually, where this wouldn’t be an issue. Bioware should’ve really stripped down the graphics instead IMO… I have similar feelings about certain sections of Fable. The Xbox wasn’t quite powerful enough to handle that game.
I was surprised that Gamespot gave the game a score in the 8 range, when most other online publications gave it near flawless grades such as 99/100 and 5/5.
Ditto.
If the so called hiccups are on par with KOTOR’s they won’t e a problem for me.
I’m just not sure if I should get Jade Empire right now or save my money for Advent Rising…
I’m sure I’ll have to own both but…
It’s probably because Gamespot is a little more objective with their reviews than other online publications. Or at least that’s how I feel about them. IGN’s “this game is so good that I wish I could lower the scores of past games” style of writing is just plain silly, which is why I never take their site very seriously.
That said, the PC version of Knights of the Old Republic was worse than the Xbox version as far as framerate stuttering goes, not to mention it was more unstable. It’s all in the code.
Hmm… I’ve played both versions of KOTOR as well, and I’d say that the PC version has a better framerate if you’ve got the graphics on a low enough setting. It’s all relative to the power of your setup, is it not?
I usually won’t let slowdown bother me unless it encroaches on combat like it does in KOTOR 2 for the Xbox. BioWare should have known the console’s limitations and toned the graphics down in Jade Empire wherever necessary to maintain a consistent frame rate.
Somehow I don’t think a little slowdown is going to stop this game from selling out, however.
As always, I will wait for the inevitable PC release.
It is, but I’m running an Athlon 64 3000+ with a gig of dual channel RAM, and an ATI Radeon 9800 with 128 megs of VRAM. I should not get even close to the amount of stuttering that I get from KOTOR considering the graphics aren’t all that amazing, but I do.
What settings did you have the game running on? I have an Athlon 2600+, 512 RAM, and a Radeon 9700 and I can run it on 1024x768 with Anti Aliasing on 2X and it runs with minimal frame rate problems. Compared to the Xbox specs it should run better of course, so I certainly agree that the Xbox KOTOR code being more optimized.
Anyway, I do hope that Jade Empire comes out for the PC eventually. PCs will only get better, so the game should run smoother when run on future PCs even if the framerate isn’t perfect, whereas with the Xbox version… you’re stuck with it.
Jade Empire should come out for the PC eventually, especially if it is sells well on the Xbox.
The problem with all games that are ported over from Xbox are that their codes will be optimized for the closed system, not the PC. Just look how the original Halo ran on a system far surpassing the recommended specs, and that game didn’t even look that good.
The one game I can think of that really showed how hard the developers worked to get it to run on all systems was Unreal 2K3, and 2K4. My friends computer is below the minimum specs and he is able to paly it at a smoothe frame rate, granted the detail is turned down.
The problem is lazy/sloppy ports. If they did so much work to make the likes of Splinter Cell run on a PS2 (okay, downgraded, but still…) then games like that should have run tons better on the PC especially when its ‘original’ platform was the X-Box which certainly has a lot more in common with a PC than with a PS2.
Still, ports have most always been a problem wether it was from PC to console, vice versa, or even from one console to another with the majoriry of them being downgraded regardless of the difference in specs between the two (or more) systems. I guess companies simply don’t want to waste resources for that.
By the way I can’t confirm but I believe that the Halo ECE (or something like that) pack - yeah, official patch thingie - gives the much needed performance boost the initial release should have had (and of course adds many things such as easier mod-ability and other developer oriented things). Still, considering the - imo - horrible work done initially, I don’t know if even this pack makes it run acceptably on the PC.
I was never interested in Halo that much so I never bought it anyway…
Max settings, solo.