Celestial Master Difficulty

I've played Jade Empire for years now and have loved the game since it debuted on the original Xbox. That said, having played the game so many times over the years, the difficulty of the game, even on Jade Master, does not present that much of a challenge anymore. This mod aims to correct that.

What this mod does is change the damage values for both the PC and enemies as well as the amount of time that enemies are idle in between attacks. Damage values for the PC's attacks are halved and any damage received is doubled; this is true for all difficulty settings and also applies to the minigame. The amount of time that enemies are idle should now be practically non-existent in any difficulty above Student; while enemies will not always be attacking, they will always be moving, either to get away from the PC or to close in and attack. This will force the player to always be aware of their surroundings, as a martial artist should be, and will also force them to constantly be on the move to assess the situation and formulate a strategy.

The mod also changes the amount of style points gained at level up as well as the cost of points required to level up styles that the player knows. The amount of style points earned at level up are half of their original value and the cost of leveling up a style has increased between 20 to 25 percent per each level of the style's different attributes, with the exception of the first, which was doubled, as the first level of an attribute only costs 1 point to increase in the vanilla game (thus bringing it up to 2 points). This will force the player to truly focus on a specific set of styles as well as focus on only on precious few styles within that category, as there will not be very many style points to spread around.

Points gained for base stats at level up remain the same but it is recommended to either focus solely on one stat or spend 2 points in one stat, 1 point in another, and ignore the remaining stat. Many enemies in the game can now easily one-shot the PC, and even when they don't, the PC's health will be nearly completely gone when struck. The PC must therefore have a large health pool to survive the attack, a large chi pool to restore health, or have a large focus pool in order to put some distance between the PC and their enemies in order to regroup and use weapons.

The mod is only tested up until the encounter with bandits in Two Rivers, but thus far seems to be working as intended.

Before installing the mod, make sure to backup the diffmodify. 2da, StylePoints. 2da, and StyleAdvance. 2da files. To install the mod, simply unzip the contents into the override folder and overwrite the files present. To uninstall the mod, simply copy the previously backed up 2DA files back into the override folder. Alternatively, if you only wish to adjust the damage modifiers, only extract the diffmodify. 2da; to adjust only the amount of style points gained at level up, extract only StylePoints. 2da; to adjust only the amount of points required to level up styles, extract only StyleAdvance. 2da.