Wuxia Games?

[hermit]

Hi,

I love watching wuxia serials but don't know chinese very well. Are there PC games based on wuxia novels? Can you name a few?

I loved games like Ultima7 and wish there's a similar game with Chinese theme and quests.

I heard Prince of Qin is one.

Thanks

[darkcser]

There was a very popular wuxia game back in the 90's called "Lian Shan Qi Jian" I believe. It was fairly linear though. Also heard about "Jin Yong Quen Xia Zhuan" from many years ago but I've never seen it. There's suppose to be a new MMP version of that which has graphics similar to Ultima Online.

In the last couple of years there's also been 3D versions of SOD, ROCH, HSDS and DGSD. I have both the SOD and ROCH ones. The graphics are a bit primitive -looks like they're still in the Quake1-Quake2 era at best. They tend to be rather story-intensive at times so not being able to read Chinese might be a problem. Game play mainly consists of wandering around until a random battle erupts. Guess you could say it's more like FF7 than Ultima 7

[James Ko]

I used to have a charactor on Ultima online named yang guo.... he was on great lakes... that was a long time ago.

[rabadi]

Well, I'm currently playing Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna, and I named my character Guo Jing

Anybody played Blade and Sword yet? How is it? Is it any good?

[Omniflame]

Do you only play as the main character? Or do you play as other characters in them too?

Ex.

Do you only play as Yang Guo in ROCH?

[kamii]

Never actually seen any of these games *sigh* stupid australia

[Ian Liew]

There are several good online wuxia games - Jin Yong Online and Gu Long Online are fairly popular, although GLO seems to be on the wane now. I still play JYO a lot, and it's currently in the 7th or so expansion, and improving by the month.

From a non-online point of view, most of the major wuxia novels have game adaptations, but these tend to be in the linear Final Fantasy kind of mold. The most fun would probably be the Jin Yong Qun Xia Zhuan, the father of JYO, which had you trapped in JY's world trying to solve quests and beat the bad guys, but that was a long time ago, and it's very dated by today's standards. If you can read Chinese, just play JYO - there's an immense depth of character development. I posted somewhere on the Games forums a short description of the game, but that was about 8 months ago - I should get around to adding a lot of stuff.

The official website is

jy.chinesegamer.net

The game is currently at the "Shu Jian Jiang Shan" expansion - based on Book and Sword (although it's not officially out - we're still playing the "Guo jing Da Xia" expansion - based on LOCH). It's best to find a JYO community near where you live - the friends you make RL will naturally be JY fans like you!

[Arisa]

or go for USERJOY products - they have quite a few wuxiabased gaems. its like FF series, and its packed with an occasional humor.

[darkcser]

Originally posted by Omniflame
Do you only play as the main character? Or do you play as other characters in them too?

Ex.

Do you only play as Yang Guo in ROCH?

In ROCH you mostly play YG although for a short time you'll play as GJ (when you take YG to Quan Zhen). Actually the GJ part was pretty cool since you get to use XL18Z to whack the Taoists. Later on you'll have people like XLN, LWS, CY, etc. in your party in addition to YG.

[darkcser]

Originally posted by Ian Liew
From a non-online point of view, most of the major wuxia novels have game adaptations, but these tend to be in the linear Final Fantasy kind of mold. The most fun would probably be the Jin Yong Qun Xia Zhuan, the father of JYO, which had you trapped in JY's world trying to solve quests and beat the bad guys, but that was a long time ago, and it's very dated by today's standards. If you can read Chinese, just play JYO - there's an immense depth of character development. I posted somewhere on the Games forums a short description of the game, but that was about 8 months ago - I should get around to adding a lot of stuff.

Is there a new single player version of Jin Yong Qun Xia Zhuan?
Where are the JYO servers located? Any in the U.S.?

[Ian Liew]

As far as I know, there wasn't a JYQXZ sequel, sadly. I tried playing the original a few months back but it looked and played so bad, mainly because I'm used to the JYO interface. It's still worth playing if you really want a good wuxia RPG, though.. nothing like having Zhang Wuji (with the amazing 9yang), Hu Fei (and the deadly Hujia Daofa), Zheng Lingshu (as healer, although if you do the Hu Qingniu quest you can train Zhang Wuji to be a healer too), Linghu Chong and his Dugu9jian, Xu Zhu with his 6yang zhang etc in your party. ZWJ, LHC, HF and XZ could literally win entire fights with one stroke using massive area effects. Other people you can recruit are Duan Yu (who unfortunately leaves quite early - never managed to develop 6msj beyond a 3X1 squares straight line), Nan fenghuang and her trusty whip, Tian Boguang and his hilarious fitness exercises, Ouyang Ke if your alignment is dodgy, and even Mr and Mrs Hu Qingniu - both excellent healers, and Mrs Hu has some pretty good poison attacks too.

JYO does have a US server, but only one - the Yi Tian 1 server - out of something like 20-plus, most of which are Taiwan-based. Malaysia used to have three, but they merged a few months back, so now we just have one big server. Makes me wonder if the solitary Singapore server will merge with ours eventually or not.