- BioWare co-founder laments Jade Empire's commercial failure and blames it on 'the worst advice, absolutely moronic advice' from Microsoft - 27 February 2025
BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk left the company with fellow founder Ray Muzyka in 2012, four years after the pair had sold the storied RPG developer to Electronic Arts. It's fair to say that both are probably watching recent events with interest, after the lukewarm commercial reception to Dragon Age: The Veilguard saw the publisher react by slashing jobs at BioWare, leaving a smaller staff focused entirely on the next Mass Effect game... Read more.
- Jade Empire 2 was "cancelled on its best day" - 22 October 2021
Following the release of BioWare's Jade Empire in 2005, the studio had been working on a sequel alongside the development of Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect - although it was eventually sidelined for those projects . Now ex-BioWare developer Mark Darrah has shared details on Jade Empire 2, including how it was "cancelled on its best day". Darrah, who recently served as Dragon Age 4's executive producer until he left in December 2020 , has been posting videos about his 23 years at BioWare. The most recent in his "memories and lessons" series is on the development of Jade Empire 2 - which you can see below - and includes how the project progressed to a modern-day setting through to a new project codenamed "Revolver", before ultimately being cancelled. Darrah reflects how Jade Empire 2 started as a "fairly direct" sequel set a few decades after the original before the move to Mass Effe…
- BioWare share artwork from the cancelled Jade Empire 2 - 22 January 2021
A long, long time ago in video game years, before BioWare were known primarily as the Dragon Age and Mass Effect studio, they were working on a sequel to their action RPG Jade Empire . After multiple internal reboots from Jade Empire 2 to Jade Empire Modern, to spiritual successor Revolver, the project was eventually cancelled internally without ever being announced. BioWare art director Matt Rhodes has now pulled out some old artwork to share a look at what it could have been. (more…)
- BioWare share artwork from the cancelled Jade Empire 2 - 22 January 2021
A long, long time ago in video game years, before BioWare were known primarily as the Dragon Age and Mass Effect studio, they were working on a sequel to their action RPG Jade Empire . After multiple internal reboots from Jade Empire 2 to Jade Empire Modern, to spiritual successor Revolver, the project was eventually cancelled internally without ever being announced. BioWare art director Matt Rhodes has now pulled out some old artwork to share a look at what it could have been. (more…)
- BioWare share artwork from the cancelled Jade Empire 2 - 22 January 2021
A long, long time ago in video game years, before BioWare were known primarily as the Dragon Age and Mass Effect studio, they were working on a sequel to their action RPG Jade Empire . After multiple internal reboots from Jade Empire 2 to Jade Empire Modern, to spiritual successor Revolver, the project was eventually cancelled internally without ever being announced. BioWare art director Matt Rhodes has now pulled out some old artwork to share a look at what it could have been. Read more
- Cancelled BioWare project Revolver shown in concept art - 21 January 2021
Previously-unseen concept art from cancelled BioWare project Revolver has been posted online by artist Matt Rhodes. Revolver, a spiritual successor to Jade Empire, was never officially announced. Bits and pieces about it surfaced over the years, before BioWare finally went into detail on the game in its recent 25th anniversary book. Set in the near-future, the project was designed to spread BioWare's trademark narrative and character-driven efforts across a more open-world and action-heavy setting. Huh, sounds familiar. Read more
- Being the boss of Dragon Age - 25 May 2018
Mike Laidlaw can still remember his first day at BioWare, even though it was over 15 years ago. He even remembers the date he answered the phone and found out he had got the job: 23rd December 2002. Laidlaw was used to answering the phone; at the time he was working at Bell, Canada's largest telecommunications company, in the province of Ontario. When Laidlaw first joined Bell's call centre, he worked the phones. Later, he got promoted to lead a team on the phones, "which was somehow way worse than being on the phones," Laidlaw told me last March, the day after his star turn at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. "I went in and said, I'm sorry, I'm quitting. I'm not coming in tomorrow. They said, 'you can't quit two days before Christmas! If you quit you'll never work here again!' I said, 'that is pretty much the plan, yes.' So I walked out, and a bunch of people high-fived…
- BioWare's Jade Empire is free on Origin - 1 December 2015
For one reason or another, Jade Empire is the one BioWare RPG that didn't really catch fire. It went over well with reviewers, but just couldn't find enough of an audience to merit a sequel. Perhaps that will change in the relatively near future, as it is now free on Origin. As is always the case with Origin's " On the House " giveaways, the Jade Empire freebie is a limited time offer, and it's for the full version of the game—technically the "Special Edition," which is what publisher 2K called the PC version of the game that came out a couple years after the original Xbox release. It features enhancements including improved graphics, new monsters, enemies, and fighting styles, better combat AI, a new playable character, and other bits of goodness you can read about at the Jade Empire Wiki . And it's free, and yours to keep until the end of days (or end of Origin) as long as you s…
- Weeklong Deals, November 18 - 19 November 2013
New Weeklong Deals, on sale until Monday, November 25th at 10AM Pacific Time
- Daily Deal - Jade Empire, 75% off! - 18 December 2012
Today's Deal: Save 75% off Jade Empire ! Look for the deals each day on the front page of Steam. Or follow us on twitter or Facebook for instant notifications wherever you are
- Retrospective: Jade Empire - 1 April 2012
I've played roughly a billion games with moral meters that paint in broad black and white stokes with the occasional sloppy shade of grey, but only one has ever made me turn . See, I usually stick to the straight-and-narrow goodie-two-shoes path on my first playthrough of these things, but in Jade Empire, I just couldn't do it. I spent all of my time at Master Li's school of not-so-hard knocks devoutly following the Way of the Open Palm - defending the innocent, and helping those who didn't feel like helping themselves. And I even made it through most of the drought-ridden Tien's Landing playing Kung-Fu Boyscout for a horde of overly trusting teashop owners, weak-willed ministers and cowardly townsfolk who categorically refused to solve their own damn problems. Then it dawned on me: I hated these people. Honestly, though, that's pretty much par for the course with whiny, knuckle-draggin…
- BioWare Drs on Jade Empire comeback - 24 September 2011
Jade Empire may return - BioWare is "just looking for the right way to deploy it". That's what BioWare co-founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk told a packed audience at the Eurogaer Expo 2011 today. "We've been talking a lot about that actually on and off over the years," said Ray Muzyka, BioWare CEO. "It's an IP, it's a setting that we're really passionate about, and we still are. Both Greg and I were big believers in the IP. "We're just looking for the right way to deploy it." "We have a lot of different projects now on a lot of different platforms, and you might see some of that in the future. You never know. "We don't have anything to announce on it right now," Muzyka added, "but it is a franchise that's near and dear to us." Knights of the Old Republic has a BioWare-developed sequel in the way of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Mass Effect now spans three games. Dragon Age has had two…
- Did BioWare work on Jade Empire 2? - 13 April 2011
It appears BioWare does more than talk about a Jade Empire sequel - an ex-employee claims he worked on Jade Empire 2 between 2006 and 2007. Rafael Brown , now a project lead at id Software, listed "Jade Empire 2 (360/PS3/PC)" under the unreleased games he's worked on. He also mentioned True Crime 3&4, Gun 2 and Nintendo's Thunder Rally. That one year and one month Brown spent at BioWare, between 2006-2007, pre-dates the release of Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins, as well as the acquisition by EA. How far along the Jade Empire 2 project was, Brown didn't say; it might have been purely conceptual. It's a leap of faith to believe Jade Empire 2 would have materialised on PS3, given that BioWare didn't enter Sony's market until late 2009, with the release of Dragon Age: Origins. The original Jade Empire, a martial arts game inspired by ancient China, was released on Xbox in 2004. Eurogam…
- Jade Empire "could make a comeback" - 14 March 2011
When will BioWare return to the ancient China-inspired world of Jade Empire? The Xbox original was released in 2004, and since then we've had two Mass Effect games (with a third on the way), two Dragon Age games and we're soon to have a new Knights of the Old Republic game - MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic. There have even been sequels KOTORII and Neverwinter Nights 2 courtesy of Obsidian Entertainment. Wasn't it BioWare which said last March that it thinks of all games as franchises ? And much earlier, in 2004, BioWare co-founder Ray Muzyka specifically referred to Jade Empire as "a franchise" . "Ha ha ha - we get asked that a lot," laughed BioWare's Mike Laidlaw, writer of Jade Empire, when asked about the prospect of a new game. "In fact I get asked that a lot because of my role on Jade." "The thing with Jade Empire is ultimately it's one of our intellectual properties, it's there, a…
