The balance of this game is amazing. There are 11 races and 15 professions, and not one of these are useless or bad or overpowered, they are simply different. You can play through the game with a given party, perfect your gameplay and be convinced it's the best way to play, only to restart the game with a completely different composition and be baffled by how much fun the game still is. The areas feel unique and different, the enemies are diverse and the quests & NPCs add flavor. You can import your party from Wizardry 7 if that's your thing (for a truly marathon experience you can start in Wizardry 6, finish the game then import into W7 and then once you finished that game, into W8). The loot system is generally decent, however if you're hunting for some of the most elusive high-power gear you will probably want to read up on the loot system, especially the "level sensor", and only enter those specific areas once you're certain you know what you're doing.
The "Unofficial Patch" is essentially the most official game version at this point. The installation is convenient, for anyone who just wants to install and play the game, this is probably the best option right now. Thank you Wesp5, thank you GoG!
I never experienced any bugs with this game. I know a lot of people had issues, bugs, even game-breaking bugs, or the game would simply not start for them. I think the GoG version is the best version of the game, but be warned. When it does work though it's an amazing action game, the martial arts aspect is surprisingly deep and balanced with many different fights challenging your mastery in various ways. The choice of which martial arts styles to focus on feels very meaningful and deeply impacts how the gameplay feels. This makes the game surprisingly replayable. The story is hard to surpass. This action game has a better story than most "story-rich" games published in the last decade. The downsides of the game (bringing it down from a hypothetical 7 stars to a mere 5 stars) in my eyes are: The end game railroads you a bit which is an unwelcome change after the very free, hub-based early and mid-game that offers a lot of choice. I know a lot of games do this, but I felt the balance was a bit off in JE, perhaps the game could have used one last hub somehow combining the areas of the 5th and 6th chapters. The new game + feature (Jade Master) is generally fun, but especially the bossfights involve a lot of repeated moves that are hard on the fingers. Still overall an amazing game and well worth at least one play-through!
This game was very ambitious, trying to capture the essence of the world of darkness at its peak. Unfortunately it was published in a semi-finished state, with some bugs and some of the content left out. Thanks to the amazing work of WESP5, the game was not only finished and polished up to the state it deserves to be in, but it was significantly improved. I recommend always getting the latest unofficial patch when playing this game, it makes a huge difference. There are some mods. It's not as straightforward as some newer games, but it's surprisingly easy. Essentially you have the big mods that are the game versions - for example you might play the Vanilla (patched) version or the Extended Version or the Clan Quest Mod version or one of the CompMod version, the list goes on. These are essentially total conversions, they generally keep the structure of the game, and the main quests, but they add new locations, content, clans, and so forth. You can have as many versions of the game installed as you like, they have their own individual override folders and when you launch the game, you can pick which version to play each time. Then there are the small cumulative mods like aesthetics, new models, lighting, textures, music, voices, essentially anything that is not the structural part of the game, these you can easily mix&match. You fancy playing a character based on a famous vampire from a TV show ? There's probably a mod for that, just drop the model and texture files into the right game versions's folder and voilà. 10/10 for immersion, the game balance is not perfect (some attributes & skills are more impactful than others, for example in the base game Persuasion is 100% more impactful than Haggle, some game versions change this for example TFN shifts this focus a bit), the story is surprisingly engaging even on replays. A lot of players replay this game every year like on Halloween. Maybe as a tribute to how good games used to be, maybe just to have some fun...
"This game respects you as an intelligent player and it treats your time as precious. " ...there's a puzzle where you literally have to stand still for an hour. Several puzzles make you go back and re-solve the previous puzzle to be able to attempt them again if you try and fail. There are a ton of puzzles where you simply have to find something, almost to the point of having a pixel-hunting aspect. Like you see the shape but unless you stand at a very specific place, the game won't let you activate it. All that said, despite these annoying, smug features, the game manages to somehow still be fun. The island is very colorful and diverse. The puzzles are very easy - once you know where they are and what exactly you need to do. Finding the puzzles, and finding out the rules of each puzzle type are the main challenge in this game, not the puzzle solving.
This game is said to contain equal parts of puzzle, rpg and exploration elements. People who can't get tired of puzzles, love exploration games like walking simulators and have a soft spot for RPGs will generally agree that this game is the single best game that was ever released. Although this game is classified as a Role-Playing game, it is very heavy on the puzzles. In fact, even the non-puzzle elements in the game play like puzzles. The exploration has a lot of puzzle elements (finding hidden caches, secret doors, hidden switches, out-of-place chests and shrines). The combat has even more, as you do build characters individually, however you will often want to combine different skills on different characters in combat, especially since the "action points" (called Opportunty in the game) are shared between the characters of the team.
