The White Demon Martial style is the most powerful Martial style in the game. The main problem being that with power, you lose speed. Due to this, the White Demon Martial style also happens to be. Jade Empire in Style. Check Out This Mod. In terms of complexity, no other mod comes close to the Jade Empire in Style mod. It introduces a massive number of changes that almost make it feel like a completely different game. This is more than just a gameplay overhaul. The White Demon Martial style is the most powerful Martial style in the game. The main problem being that with power, you lose speed. Due to this, the White Demon Martial style also happens to be. There really are very few mods available for Jade Empire, unfortunately. However, I can direct you to 'Jade Empire In Style', which adds several new styles and techniques to the game and even modifies existing ones. Weapon styles are the most useful styles, in my opinion, and Focus Mode can save your life. When I start a game, my character usually has 2 for Body, 3 for Spirit and 5 for Mind. Then, when I level up, I alternate between spending the three Character Points equally between Body, Spirit and Mind and spending two in Mind and one in Spirit.
This is a mod for the game Jade Empire that offers over 20 new styles to players, changes the rules to give the game more variety and adds numerous techniques, gems and other goodies.
The mod is available in an English and a German version. This site is English-only, though. (Tut mir leid!)
Intro
In vanilla Jade Empire you are rather limited in your combat options. Partly because you cannot acquire most of the game's combat styles and partly because you can only level a fraction of the styles you do acquire. There are a number of mods out there, that attempt to change that by making more styles available. Unfortunately they are all incompatible. And so 'Jade Empire in Style' started out as my personal compilation of these other mods. While I made those other mods play nice with each other, I figured out a lot about the game myself and eventually this became a mod in its own right. Pretty much every style Jade Empire knows is available to the player now. And then some...
I can say without the slightest bit of exaggeration that this is the largest mod for Jade Empire. In fact, it's many times larger than all other mods combined. This mod has gone beyond a few minor changes here and there. It has turned into a total overhaul.
Let's start with the basic changes: You can learn new styles from the enemies who use them. Simple as that. Well, almost as simple. Whether you do or do not get the chance to learn a new style, depends on how well you hold your own. Or to be more specific: how much damage you allow those enemies to do to you. If you emerge out of combat unscathed, your chances to learn from your opponent are 100%. If you only get a few bruises your chances are still pretty high. But the more damage you take, the smaller they become...
But what good are more styles, if you cannot level more of them? So I also added a new mechanism for upgrading styles. In vanilla Jade Empire you get the required style points for free. Not so in my mod. In my mod you have to fight not only for new styles, but also for the points to level them. The same principle as previously applies: How well you stand your ground, decides how many points you will get. If you offer yourself as a punching bag to your opponents, you won't get a lot more points than in vanilla Jade Empire. But there's a substantial number of points to collect in my mod - if you play the game well...
Did I just make it sound like this is some sort of hardcore mod? It's not. Not really. My aim was to add more flavor, more color and ultimately more replayability. That is all.
The basic ideas are layed out in more detail - and illustrated with a number of video clips - on the Concepts page. If this intro has raised more questions than it answered, I suggest you start there. I've also created a page for each and every of the new styles. Some of the old styles were heavily modified. Those are featured here as well. Every style is illustrated with a video. All in all there's over an hour of video scattered around this site. Oh, and there's lots of new stuff other than styles! There are new Gem Armors... There are Specializations... And so on...
Or just continue on to the download... Either way: Enjoy!
Jade Empire
Download
This mod is still quite young and a bit wet around the ears. There may still be bugs. There may still be typos. There may still be areas in need of polishing. And it isn't entirely finished. Certain features are still disabled, because they do not work as well as I would like, yet. So expect to see one or two updates per month! You can bookmark this page and check back for new versions, if you like. But it's probably more convenient to subscribe to the update notifications.
You can download the latest version at the Mod DB.
Forums
Your ideas, suggestions, bug reports and whatever else you like to discuss about this mod are very welcome. Please post them in the forum!
The old forum at social.bioware.com is now locked, I'm afraid. Your old posts are still there, but you won't be able to add new ones. The old forum was seriously lacking in features and had a few rather annoying bugs. So I decided to move the forum to the Mod DB instead. Regardless of location: I will read everything you post!
Update Notifications
If you would like to be notified of new versions of my mod, you can subscribe to the update notifications. You can expect one or two releases/mails per month. If you'd like to move on to another game, you can, of course, unsubscribe at any time with the second of the two forms.
I will not use your email address for anything other than update notifications. I will not share it with anybody. And if you choose to unsubscribe, your address will be deleted permanently.
Please, enter your email address without additional name information!
History
08.08.2011: Version 0.3
The feature list of this release is rather small. I have more new stuff in the pipeline, but since I've gotten an astonishing number of bug reports over the last release - some of them severe - I figured it's better to postpone the new stuff, rather than the next release. So this is mainly a maintenance release.
The console no longer requires that you equip the Hummingbird Gem. You can talk to the animals at any time now.
Since vanilla Jade Empire does not feature a single animal anymore once you've left chapter three behind, I also added a bunch of new beasts to pretty much all of the later levels.
The only other new feature are improvements to the Heart of Darkness gem armor. Until now all enemies who hit you with either a martial or a weapon style lost a small amount of their Chi and Focus to you. This version of my mod also adds the contact attacks of support styles to that list. In addition it modifies the amount of Chi and Focus this armor leeches. Previously it was a fixed amount, now the amount depends on your level and your alignment. The more Closed Fist you are, the more this armor will reward you.
Bugfixes:
- The player was able to pick up wine for the Drunken Master style while playing as Black Whirlwind
- The tutorial events were intercepted too early and prevented the tutorial fight from ending. [Thanks kentek!]
- The Ironclad Mind technique was awarded after completing each and every bookset. [Thanks 7ty7!]
- The fight against Aishi the Mournful Blade would not end, if you fought her in the Black Leopard School [Thanks 7ty7!]
- Should you decide to poison the water dragon, you would have to fight your former companions. That fight would not end. [Thanks noimageavailable!]
- The fight as Sun Kin against Death's Hand would not end [Thanks Amberon!]
- The console store would collide with the inventories of other merchants [Thanks 7ty7!]
- A 'copy' of the Black Whirlwind would stand with Spear-catches-leaf, while you were fighting him.
- The fight against Lucky Cho would not end, because the combatend animation collided with the dialog scene. [Thanks 7ty7!]
- If you chose the appearance of another player character after your demise, your appearance would be set to the 'living' and not the 'dead' appearance.
- If you did not give the right potion to Kia Min, you had to fight the pirates, she would otherwise kill, and the fight would not end [Thanks Rewels!].
- If you went to the clearing right in front of the entrance to the inn in the great forrest a few times too often, you found yourself in a random fight, that would not end. [Thanks Rewels!]
- The fight in the dream version of the school before you leave for the palace one last time would not end [Thanks Grundir!]
- The canons at the beach would fire at you during the combatend animations, when you were unable to dodge them.
17.07.2011: Version 0.2
The biggest addition of this version is the new cheat console. I'm not going to list all of its functions here, since it has its own page. Hopefully it will make the use of the savegame editor and other cheating tools unnecessary. Those tools do not set certain variables on which my mod relies and as a consequence may cause the game to behave quirky or even crash.
Other Changes:
Jade Empire Best Character Build
- Flame Armors, Storm Armors and Stone Armors:
- These gems now give a damage bonus and a Chi-cost reduction to their respective magic styles.
- The stat bonuses these gems previously granted were removed again.
- The gems have been completely redistributed to make them easier to acquire. Consult the spoiler sections, if you want to know their locations...
- There's a new technique, that reduces the Focus cost of all your weapon styles.
- I wrote a brand new system for weapon upgrades, swapped pretty much all the weapon models and changed their advancements...
- Staff:
- The animations and stats were altered in order to turn the Staff from a defensive style into an offensive style. It's also quite good at crowd control now...
- A third upgrade for the Staff was added: Tien's Justice.
- Spear:
- The animations and stats were altered significantly. The Spear has become, what the Staff used to be: the perfect defensive style.
- A new upgrade for the spear was added: the Halberd.
- A new weapon style - the Morning Stars - was added. This one has some very unique properties...
- Cobra Venom is now an upgrade instead of a technique.
- To make Death's Razor a little less cheesy, I added focus costs to the strong attack and the area attack.
- The description of the Gem of the True Initiate now shows the current specialization
- Wine and Reprieve are now available from a multitude of merchants and they all carry an infinite supply.
- Two new healing items were added: Cure and Heal. Cure is more potent than Reprieve. Heal is more potent than Cure.
- The minigame weapons no longer require button-mashing. Just hold down the mouse button and they'll fire as fast as they can.
- There is no longer a cutscene if the player declines to buy a new style. There are no animations or special effects either. It all ends quick and unceremoniously as it should.
- The regular combat end animations looked a little dull and out-of-place in the Imperial Arena. A victory in front of a huge crowd requires a bit of showing off, wouldn't you say? So I changed the animations...
Bugfixes:
- Due to a missing file, it was impossible to level the Blizzard style.
- Under certain circumstances the player character would become invisible in the Pit of Pain.
- The animations for learning Tang's Revenge finally play as they do for any other style.
- Several bugs in the dialog with the water dragon right before the finale were fixed. They caused the dialog to end prematurely and prevented the game from moving forward.
- The specialization animations collided with regular dialog under certain circumstances.
- One or two pirates in the fight against Gao's Lieutenant at the end of chapter one would occasionally spawn after the combat round.
- Non-deadly confrontations would occasionally end with your opponent 'paralyzed'.
- Players who had to retry the Imperial Engagement, because they lost the first time, experienced a premature end, because of a faulty counter.
- In the Arena (and only there) the stylegain animations collided with the armor animations
- The ocean effects of the mind battle shortly before the finale were broken.
- The Ogre Transformation's combat end animations collided with the gem armor end animations
06.05.2011: Version 0.1.21
There is a rather annoying bug - not only in the previous but all past versions of my mod so far: A lot of the important files for the new Transformations were missing. I did get several bug reports concerning the Transformations, but I never could make heads or tails of them. Everything worked fine on my machine. The files were there. They have been all along. They just never made their way into the download. Crap.
- fixed: Added the missing files for the new Transformations. See above.
- modified: Stone Immortal's Area Attack is now uninterruptable
- fixed: Chandler Ling's inventory was supposed to be identical to Songtao's. It is now.
- Elephant + Rhino Demon Transformations:
- modified: The range was increased.
- modified: The knockback of the area attack was increased.
- modified: Damage was slightly decreased.
- removed: The regeneration was removed
- added: A partial resistance to Martial Arts was added.
- added: A special weakness to weapons was added.
- Ogre Tranformation:
- fixed: Transformation-effect at the end triggered too early.
- added: Ogres regenerate now. The regeneration rate can be leveled.
- removed: Switching styles while in Ogre form was disabled. It was impossible, anyway.
- modified: Since Ogre-transformed players cannot transform back, I removed the Chi-cost
- Blizzard:
- fixed: Harmonic Combos did not produce 'unblockable' power-ups. (A file was missing.)
- modified: Unblockable power-ups have been made more likely.
- modified: Power-ups persist now for a while after the combat round has ended.
- Drunken Master:
- modified: Power-ups persist now for a while after the combat round has ended.
- fixed: The last advancement was never applied and the final effect never played.
- Resonating Crystal:
- fixed: The power-up's floaty appeared twice.
- fixed: I use the game's own shatter-effect now.
- fixed: Precedence and sequence of power-ups and alternative rewards have been cleaned up.
- added: When using a weapon and running out of Focus, the player will now automatically switch to Storm Dragon (if available).
- fixed: The Fox Demons in Heaven no longer block access to power-ups.
- fixed: 'Death and Agony' and 'Tang's Revenge' shared the same description.
14.04.2011: Version 0.1.20
There's an extremely stupid bug in the previous release. Specializations were not applied to styles you learned, while you were specialized. Not sure how I could have missed that, but I did. Now, when the time comes to undo the specialization - when you unequip the gem or switch specializations - my routines will dutifully remove the bonusses and malusses that were never applied in the first place. Depending on which it was - bonus or malus - this would leave you with an either completely overpowered or a thoroughly crippled style. If that happened to you, I recommend to 'reset' the style. The only way to reset a style, is to remove it entirely and add it anew. Unfortunately there's no way to programmatically detect if a style was learned while you were specialized or not. That means this will require some doing on your part as well. I will upload a set of reset scripts this weekend. Instructions will be included. You might also be able to do this with a SaveGame Editor, but I haven't tested that.
- fixed: Specialization is now applied to new styles as well (see above.)
- fixed: The vampiric gem armor did not enhance Spirit Thief and Storm Dragon as it was supposed to do. It does now.
- fixed: The point requirements of leveling Storm Dragon's duration were wrong.
- fixed: Under certain circumstances the player would get stuck on a CF playthrough of the Black Leopard school in the Imperial City.
- fixed: After acquiring Training or Healing in chapter 5, the player's appearance would change from his/her dead appearance to the living appearance.
- fixed: The 'Three times no means no' tutorial screen would show up, when it should not.
- fixed: Removing the specialist gem from your amulet did not clear the percentages in the description.
- fixed: Under certain, very rare conditions the post-combat clean-up code wouldn't run and the player would start the next combat round with most combat buttons disabled.
- modified: Divine Void was underpowered. Damage and Speed were left mostly unchanged, but its radius was increased drastically and I enhanced all the knockback effects. It's a lot more dangerous now. And a lot flashier. :)
- modified: Monkey Paw was still overpowered. It has been re-balanced - if only a bit. The damage has been reduced, but the walk speed has been increased to compensate.
- modified: The effects of gems with negative stats have been enhanced.
- modified: After a lot of hesitation I decided to enable Gore in the German version. The English version is not affected by this.
- modified: While working on the web site, I realized that a number of descriptions of styles and items were too short or too bland. They should be more interesting now.
- modified: There are level caps for specialization now. The more your level progresses, the deeper your specialization is allowed to become.
- modified: Specializations have been re-balanced. Since the base damage of magic is the lowest, the increase was made a little more drastic. The malusses were increased noticeably for all three specializations.
- modified: Zin Bu now sells the Drunken Master's wine in chapter 5.
- new: The mod now includes my pirate workshop hack. This is a fix for a bug in the original game, that seems to affect some(!) Windows 7 users. The players report to get stuck in the pirate workshop, because two opponents do not enter combat and block a doorway. The hack that I previously wrote is incompatible with my mod. I combined the two now.
- new: Internal version management: You can now load a savegame from an earlier version of this mod and everything will be upgraded to the latest version. Currently that's only relevant for specializations. The 0.1.19 specialization (if any) will be removed and the 0.1.20 specialization will be applied instead.
26.03.2011: Version 0.1.19
- removed: my attempts to fix the bugs in the Transformation styles. See here for more.
- fixed: Instead of the Dragon Fly icon the Viper icon would display over Kang's head
- new: 2 more Autosaves were moved from before the cutscene to the moment between cutscene and combat start:
- fight against the Watcher
- fight against the pirates after the introduction of Sky
- new: The 'Jewel of the True Initiate' now provides feedback of your degree of specialization.
- fixed: There were a few bugs in my make that allowed debug-messages and unfinished code to slip into the final release. Fortunately nothing game-breaking got through, though, so you may not even have noticed this bug :)
- fixed: 2 bugs in the finale:
- The endgame movies would not play properly.
- When you were defeated in the finale, you wouldn't be presented with the OnDeath GUI, but instead a Jademaster save would be made and the movies would play.
- fixed: Using Dire Flame no longer cancels the visual effect of the Flame Armor(s)
Compatibility
It probably goes without saying, but with all the changes this mod makes, it's very unlikely to work with any of your existing savegames. So, please, start a new campaign! If you have a previous version of this mod installed, you will be able to use the old savegames after the update. You might not be able to see all the changes, though. Certain changes to combat styles e.g. will not be visible, if your character has already learned the style. Changes to merchants' inventories will not show, if you use a savegame that was made in the same area or at any point after that area was visited for the first time. Etc. None of these issues will prevent you from finishing the game, however.
Jade Empire Best Starting Style
Using a savegame editor seems to break the mod on occasion and cause the game to crash or behave erratic. You're better off not using one. If you absolutely must cheat, I suggest using the in-game cheat console.
There is no convenient way to make Jade Empire mods compatible with each other. That's especially true for this mod since it manipulates more than half of the 2DAs, a bunch of crucial DLGs and most of the SAVs. It's highly unlikely to coexist peacefully with any other mod out there. That being said... Most other Jade Empire mods out there, do what this mod does: They make new styles available. In that sense it is fair to say that each and every one of them is included. There's no need for you to install any one of them.
The Gay Kissing Mod and the Lesbian Threesome Mod are included as well. I even fixed some of their bugs.
Mods that reskin characters should be compatible with this one. Mods that swap PC models or party member models against other ones are not. The next version of this mod will feature convenient ways to reskin and swap models, so in the close future those mods should not be needed anymore.
These mods are not included and incompatible:
- Easy Minigame Mod
- Jade Empire Difficulty Tweak
- Three Brother's Gems
- Smarter Allies
- any mods that change the models of party members
If there's interest to use any of them, let me know in the forum, please.
Known Bugs
- After battling Sun Li the screen fades to white instead of playing the combat-end animation.
- The player receives one of the Viper scrolls after defeating Jia - even so that quest has been removed.
- If you load the Autosave that was made before you fight as Sun Kin, you will see him standing already, when Sun Li tells him to get back up.
- Some weapons are not unequipped during the combat-end animation or the beacon animation.
- The combat end music is currently the same after every combat scene. There should be more variety.
- When fighting the novices in the Black Leopard School the last of them will not fall to the ground like the others and the other are affected by area attacks while unconscious.
Credits
The first building blocks of this mod where Sekan's Moonlight & Elephant Demon mod and Caramelboy's Leopard Fist mod. I learned a lot from both. Later I integrated the four new/reconstructed styles that Lothario created: Divine Void, Black Mantis, Seven Thunders and Willow. My mod also contains Radish's Gay Kissing mod and Tupac Amaru's Lesbian Threesome mod. While it may seem, that these two are in no way related to my mod, they are on a technical level. They modified a number of the same files, that I modified as well. Editing these two mods out, whould be too much of a hassle.
A very special thanks goes to the makers of the various tools without which this mod would not have been impossible. They all can be found in the modding thread at the Lucasforums.
My bread-and-butter tools were nwnnsscomp (the script compiler), JEFindRes (a search utility for almost all of the game's resources), K-GFF (an editor for creatures, areas, triggers and a number of other things), TalkEd (editor for the dialog.tlk) and of course JE DLG Editor for editing dialogs (DLG files)
That same thread contains a whole bunch of very useful tips and hints by a number of contributors, that everyone who wants to mod this game, should take a look at!
And a big thanks to papagamer for providing all the 2das in human-readable and -editable format. That was a big timesaver. An even bigger timesaver was Maian Leafblade's 2da research. Unfortunately that link is currently dead. If or when Bioware's old site will be online again, is unknown. If nothing changes I will try to make his findings available here...
The bulk of this mod is scripting, however. My scripting knowledge dates back to the Neverwinter Nights days. So it's rather old. If there's somebody I should thank for getting me started, I honestly can't remember. Sorry, about that!
Since I released this mod, I've gotten quite a number of very helpful bug reports and useful suggestions how to improve it. I can't mention all of you individually here, but let me especially thank Matthew Suter who tested my mod quite relentlessly since its first release and helped me ferret out some of the nastier bugs. He also gave me some very good ideas. Thank you very much, Mat!
Links
I used to recommend Bioware's own Jade Empire web site as a general intro to the game. Unfortunately that site is currently offline. It was the victim of a hacking attempt. Whether that site will ever come back online is unknown at this point. I suspect that maintenance of the old site has stopped quite some time ago and that the hack was the result of that. In other words: The site may be gone for good.
Instead I recommend Jade Empire's wikipedia page as a general intro to the game. I also collected a bunch of nice clips in my YouTube channel. And last not least there's a very nice (if a bit lengthy) feature at Giant Bomb.
A very detailed walkthrough can be found at gamebanshee.com.
The site you're reading features only what was added or modified. If you find yourself wondering about any of the other styles (or anything else Jade-Empire-related) you should take a look at the Jade Empire Wiki.
The official Jade Empire forums are a good place to start, if you want to discuss the game with others. If you want to discuss this mod you should - I'm tempted to say 'must' - use the forum at the Mod DB instead.
As mentinoned in the Credits, there's a thread at lucasforums.com that lists all the modding tools. There's a whole lot of modding advice in the remainder of that thread.
Falls Ihr Euch noch überlegt, ob Ihr das Spiel kaufen wollt, oder nicht, findet Ihr in der www.pcgamesdatabase.de Kritiken, Screenshots und allerhand andere handfeste Infos.
And make sure to also check out this mod's page at the Mod Db! Aside from the new forums, you'll find some additional features, videos and screnshots there...
I will also post all future news over at the Mod DB!