The BioWare co-founder says it ”would’ve been great to put off a bit” and polish it some more. The studio also missed a trick when Mass Effect missed its launch title window.
One of the ‘regrets’ Greg Zeschuk has from his game development days is not having produced a launch title for any platform as it ”could have changed a lot of dynamics.”
”There were a few instances where, if we could have really pulled it off, I think making Jade Empire a 360 launch title would have been massive. That’s a really specific example, but we made a choice, and there are a lot of factors that go into these choices and you can’t revisit them,” explained Zeschuk in his interview with GamesIndustry.biz.
”But it’s interesting, because it reminds me of what’s going on right now with analysts saying that game sales are down because people are waiting for new consoles, and we released Jade Empire into that kind of window. In retrospect, it would’ve been great to put off a bit and polish the game a bit more.”
Jade Empire is regarded highly by BioWare fans and a sequel has always been highly sought after. It followed on from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and used a lot of the same tricks except that combat took a more action-styled approach, ditching the real-time turn-based rolls of the die that KOTOR used.
”We never really had a true launch title right at the beginning, and that would’ve been fun to have done that once. Mass Effect 1 was in a launch window but ended up kind of being about nine months later or something,” he added. ”It would’ve been cool to have a game at launch because it could have changed a lot of dynamics.”
Jade Empire released on Xbox back in April 2005.
