Well it's getting very close to release time, well for us PC gamers, so with your recomendation and PatrickWeeks I feel comfortable looking forword to this title in the next month.
It took me a second to realize that you were talking about Jade PC and not Neverwinter 2.
Has anyone heard if Bioware intends on releasing or supporting mods as in their other titles like NWN and KotOR?
I may have answered my own question there, but if Bioware does treat JE as their previous titles I am even a little more excited since this could mean many, many mods for JE.
Well, there's bad news and good news.
The bad news is that I haven't heard anything about doing stuff like that. That doesn't mean it isn't happening, but, well, there are only so many employees at the company. If there were huge plans afoot, it would probably be public at this point (uh, public to me, not public to you).
The good news is that the big happy difference between the PC and the XBox is that making mods and such available is a ton easier. So my incredibly bold and not at all wishy-washy prediction is that it's gonna depend upon the sales:
- If JadePC sells well, then people in the company will figure that it's worth supporting, and you'll see additional plots -- maybe some that open up during the game itself (simply adding new areas to the map, as happened in Tales of the Sword Coast, for example), and/or others that are short mods (the JadePC equivalent of Witch's Wake, for example).
- If JadePC doesn't sell particularly well -- and this isn't an "Oh, clouds of doom!" scenario; it's a several-year-old game, and yeah, there's a good chance that it will sell enough to help the overall Jade Empire IP but not well enough to be a smash hit in its own right -- then I'd be surprised if we saw anything more than, say, a few new monsters popping out in patches or a couple of additional models for the PC.
The hopeful news, in between the good news and the bad news, is that Jade PC uses the Aurora engine, which means that fan-made content is a viable possibility. That's going to be in there next to "If it sells well" -- I don't BELIEVE that Jade PC comes with a custom-content toolset, and I kinda think we'd be crowing about that at high volume if it were in there, but given how closely the conversation editor was to NWN's conversation editor, it can't be THAT hard to make new content. (Now, new maps? New maps are really hard. You'd need some experienced people to generate content for you that way.)
And to dash some hopes, I can pretty much guarantee that there aren't any new romances in the PC version. New monsters, new styles, and possibly a few new plots, but nothing that would have required bringing back the old voice actors for new material.
But we should probably be talking about this in a thread that isn't "JE Sawyer on Romance".
