IGN’s Best of 2005: Jade Empire

IGN has announced their “Best of 2005” awards, with BioWare’s Jade Empire receiving four different awards in the Xbox category: Best Artistic Design, Best Story, Best RPG, and Xbox Game of the Year. Good news for BioWare:

There were many great titles released for the Xbox this year and every one of them was great to play making the decision of which should take the best of the year. For instance, Half-Life 2 came out on the Xbox this year. Though it’s a year old at this point, it’s still a lot of fun to play. San Andreas, Ninja Gaiden: Black and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory were all top of the line, triple A titles, but none were as unique and engrossing an experience as Bioware’s Jade Empire. It combines all the elements that make a game great: deep character interaction, awesome graphics, an engaging battle system, tons of replay value and a world that’s affected by everything. Though it borrows a lot of its dialogue structure from Bioware’s KOTOR series, it also adds in true real time combat and an original, fully realized game world. As the Xbox console moves into 2006 in the shadow of it’s next generation successor, Jade Empire will live on to be remembered as, like Fable, one of the role playing games that defined a console, and is our choice for most impressive title of 2005.

Wow!