Games good, it feels like an older version of PW:I with a few different  things here and there. The Auto bot system which you can understand a bit more on the official forums has a lot of controversy. I would say its good for casual gamers, but leaves hard core gamers out in the cold with nothing but mediocre kill X number of Y mob quests available.

Its worth trying the game, only if you have not played PW:I, If you already have done much in PW:I There is very little in Jade dynasty to see new. A easier leveling system, and a bit less inspired quests, as well as a decent storyline, and solid conflict. Graphics like Atlantica online, not as good as PW:I but decent.

Overall from my experience level 1-42 the game so far is solid, Nothing major, nothing that  makes it stand out and original. Its basically PW:I minus 1

I actually like JD better than PW. First of all JD is using different graphics engine. I'd say more advanced and I think they use DX10 elements. When I crank everything to max in PW and JD, JD wins my pick. And I don't need to say that JD has perfect modern graphics.

JD also feels more casual player friendly. Meditation and Dream World are very useful. Dream especially. You go AFK for a few hours - live your character in a dream world, turn PC off and come back later to find a good amount of exp gained. Game has 150 levels, so its not gonna take a few day to level even with Dreamworld :). There is a catch though. You have to either have money to pay someone for a Dream Scroll which gives you 1 hour per scroll of dream time. Or you have to buy it from Item Mall. It costs 25 cents. So if you want to dream for 8 hours it will cost you either 2$ or whatever person who has them will ask.

I like battle skills animation. Very flowing and not just character standing in place and swinging its arms. You jump, do all kind of kung-fu moves, fun in other words. Skills system is fun too. You have different tiers of Tomes, so as higher your level gets as more powerful abilities you get access to.

Enchanting and everything else is in game as well. And of course Item Mall since its free 2 play game. So far I am enjoying it. I've abandoned Atlantica Online and Runes of Magic for Jade Dynasty. RoM has stupid Item Mall with bind on acquire items, so it feels more like waste of money, Atlantica has annoying gamble boxes. JD is a good mix of fun features and pretty balanced Item Mall with items that are not BoA.

I agree with reanor for the mostpart, but I also want to add somethign about the clan/alliance system.

Where in PW, you the largest guilds cramp 100 people into the same guild, with a single chat, and expect them to be easily coordinated in Faction PvP, JD has separated into Alliance and Clans, each clan can take 15 members, and join with an alliance to gain more members. (I'm unsure exactly how much is the max amount of members, but I think I heard 200 somewhere)

During Alliance PvP, this makes it MUCH easier to coordinate where everyone goes and so on, and as such, players who are in it to run a guild and play PvP on an Alliance scale, get allot more out of it, and of course, for those who wish to socialize, instead of competing with 99 other players to be heard, you can go into your Clan Chat, and have a pretty normal chat.

Also, the fact that you choose a Faction (AKA class) at lvl15, instead of during character creation is a good thing. You get a feel for the game, investigate what you think would be good to play, and then choose, instead of just going for what you normally play in other games.

And the fact that instead of the regular Warrior/Priest/Mage/Rouge names for the classes, you get names that makes you actually investigate all of the classes before picking them, so you know what they do.

If you ask me, JD feels like PW pluss ES times 2 :p

before you decide to play it or try it out, I want everyone to know of something I was no aware of until recently. Once you reach level 135 or so, you have to become "reborn" in order to have acess to some of the best skills and abilities in the game, what this means is take your character back to level 1 from 135/150.  And re level back up to 150 to obtain all the good abilities. For me that alone is a game braker.

Originally posted by Calintz333

before you decide to play it or try it out, I want everyone to know of something I was no aware of until recently. Once you reach level 135 or so, you have to become "reborn" in order to have acess to some of the best skills and abilities in the game, what this means is take your character back to level 1 from 135/150.  And re level back up to 150 to obtain all the good abilities. For me that alone is a game braker.

I have never heard of this, but then, I've never talked to anyone who's been to 135.

The reborn might be true, but if they place you back to lvl1 or not, I doubt it. There's few players who'd stand for something like that, and keep playing. Though, and extra 135 lvls of gameplay might not be so bad, if they actually go through with this "rebirth" thing, and don't just reset your lvl to 1, and have you go through everything you've already done, one more time.

I havn't tried it but the screenshots remind me of Ethersaga.

Irony to fact that it's from the SAME people who made PW AND Ethersaga.

I might give it a try though. Wouldn't hurt.

To be honest I didn't have much faith in this game before. It looked alright, especially video clips for different factions are awesome. Well CGIs always are hehe. But now after I've been playing it for a little while and finally got to 45, so far I can say that this game is alright. It may be frustrating at times to people who used to games like WoW where you literally being guided by your hand everywhere.

JD has some elements that are not explained and player has to figure it out on their own. Some items have no description or give any clue what they are for. Banking (Jadeon gold exchange system) is very unpolished. Very few people know how to use banker and even if you do its not intuitive. Some other things like there is no Auction Hall but only personal Vending system (become a monkey for the night like you were a kitty in PW). Thats the only way to sell items to other players.

Some quest NPCs are not in game yet and some events are not available even though they are included in list.

Game is still in Open Beta and I hope that they not gonna commercially "release" it with all these bugs and "bits and pieces that need to be worked on". I like how this game supports casual play and will be definitely playing it for a while. Game does need some time to get balanced, and they really need to release some kind of guide or manual otherwise it may be discouraging for people who are less into gaming than our regular teenager with a mind of a super computer :).

I started playing Jade Dynasty after I heard that this game is huge in China.  Interested, I started playing right after JD was released.  It took me quite a bit of time to get started as I found the beginner's guide was "coming soon" and some of the quests/items didn't have much explanation.  I kept playing on and was pleasantly surprised by the depth of the content, awesome graphics effect, and nifty, unconventional systems such as the pet system and marriage system.  As time went on, I also noticed that some of the less-than-ideal things have been fixed.  When I first started JD six, seven weeks ago, I recall the game looked weird (not knowing that I should adjust some of the settings under system).  Two weeks ago when I installed the game on another computer (now you can tell how much I enjoy the game), the game looked great from the start (I think Perfect World Entertainment automated the display adjusting settings).

Overall, I like Jade Dynasty a lot and have recommended it to my friends once I got a hang of it.  I think the game probably has 90-95% of an excellent FTP MMO.  The missing 5-10% is to make it a little easier for gamers, particularly considering Chinese mythology is not the most familiar theme for US gamers.  Based on the frequency of the updates, however, I think the team has been working on improving the game diligently.  So I am hopeful that when Perfect World Entertainment officially releases Jade Dynasty, it will be a kick-ass FTP MMO (I am all for FTP by the way).

JD has been in open Beta for a while now. most of the updates just add new items to a marketplace. There are still buncha things missing in game, like events and quest NPCs and its been a few months now without changes in those aspects. While game is really fun and has potential they need to take care of the game itself while keep improving marketplace item selection.

Valid points Reanor.  I am taking my time leveling up, so I haven't had much issue with the NPCs.  Some of the updates I really like are the improved tooltips and description.  My guess is that the NPCs probably take much more effort to localize and, therefore, longer.  I wonder if we gamers can somehow provide Perfect World Entertainment a wish list of prioritized updates.  One thing that gets me is that when I switch window to a different application, the game pauses.  Ideally, I'd like it to continue as I do enjoy multitasking sometimes.

BTW, I have been playing Jade Dynasty on my laptop for a while and it runs just fine.

I may play JD again if they scale UI to resolutions. I am sick of having my screen all busted up with gadgets and what not. I play at 1920x1200 and my UI is as big as if I was playing at 800x600. Thats the biggest no for me. I stopped playing now for a while, got to around lvl 100 and can't do it any more. Logging in from time to time to get some new outfit.. hehe.

The resolution kinda shocked me when I first launched it.  I almost abandoned it right there.  It got better after I adjusted the settings.  Just like you, I think the resolution could be better (good for my laptop for now).  Totally agree with you that there are too many gadgets.  Why wouldn't they scale up the resolution or make more economic use of the game window?  Or are Chinese gamers just happy with the resolution and overwhelming gadgets in the game window?

It's amazing how fast people level up.  There is already an lvl 150 player.  Wish I could lvl up faster.

I got tired of leveling up. Thats basically all you can do there. If there were no pets and no events it would be quite boring game. Its a good casual game though.

Yep, I am definitely playing it at a casually pace.  My (somewhat selfish) hope is that, by the time I leisurely reach a certain level, most of the glitches at that level would have been fixed.  So far it's been more or less the case (thanks to you and other hard-core gamers).  Hopefully when the official version is launched, most, if not all, of the desirable improvements will be there.  Then we'll have more players and, most importantly, more fun.

To support Perfect World Entertainment and perhaps more importantly to get them to improve the game faster, I buy stuff from their marketplace here and there since I play it for free.  I also leave my torrent with Jade Dynasty upload on so that more gamers can download the game faster.  Hopefully more gamers translate into more income for the company and enable them to improve the game in a more timely fashion.

Yeah, I "support" them too by buying some things from the marketplace now and then, I want to hope that my money goes on support. So far I've only seen new marketplace items. I yet still have to see Skydweller quest getting fixed, the rest of events finally added and fixed etc. They are talking now about creating Open PvP server, without the PvE realms.
I do understand that this game is a lot about PvP and everything in it supports that type of play, but they really need to fix things that were there staring at you from day one of the release of Open Beta. Game is still officially in Open Beta stage. Its been at least 2 months... Sometimes it feels that developers have coded what they have coded and just gave it away to publishers unfinished and someone else supports the game now and only knows how to add new items into Marketplace.

Agree that JD is a lot about PvP.  Meanwhile, it's quite good for casual players (like me).  Setting a PvP only server will probably meet the demand of both hard core PvP players and casual players.  Plus, some of the servers are crowded anyway.  I think PWE should do it.

Re the changes, hopefully some PWE guys would check out this forum once in a while and report back some of our feedback.  I don't know how PWE collects gamer survey or feedback, but I imagine they do.

BTW, I responded to your post on FTP a few days back.  Not sure if you saw it.  Would be interested in hearing more of your thoughts on FTP.

Can you remind me please, whats FTP? :)

Sorry, by FTP I meant free to play.  It's under this thread "F2P article and my thoughts on Jade Dynasty".

 A more elaborated way of saying "F2P or FTP" Is "Free 2 play pay 2 win" 

yeah I used to F2P, cause for me (IT) FTP means - file transfer protocol. :)