The last year has been a significant period for Chinese-developed action games. Last August,Black Myth: Wukonglaunched to much fanfare,earning itself a Game of the Year nod at The Game Awardsandtens of millions of copies sold. And just last week,despite some rough edges,Wuchang: Fallen Featherswas unleashed to a similarly warm reception.Lost Soul Aside, a game born as part of PlayStation’s China Hero Project, is also set for release in less than a month.
It doesn’t stop there either, withWhere Winds Meet, an ambitious “open-world Wuxia RPG” launching on PlayStation 5 and PC later this year, set to follow in their footsteps. Ahead of its impending Western release, I flew to China to visit NetEase, where I was able to play around three hours of the spellbinding title.
The game released on PC in China in December last year, and on mobile devices in January.
A Game With Wuxia At Its Heart
For those unfamiliar with the term, Wuxia is a genre of Chinese media focused on martial arts, weaponry, and a fight for righteousness. These were all evident in Where Winds Meet’s opening moments.
After making my way through the game’s incredibly detailed character creator, one ripe with so much potential it arguably puts the likes of InZoi and Monster Hunter Wilds to shame, I was thrust into Everstone Studio’s stunning depiction of historical China.
It was immediately clear that a lot of love had gone into crafting the game’s world, with a huge range of breathtaking vistas and diverse regions available to explore across its open world from the off.
Many of the in-game buildings were actually constructed as distinct miniatures inside the studio, before being imported into the finished product, showcasing the commitment to craftmanship that went into development.
Matching levels of detail could be felt throughout the entire experience. NPCs felt alive, with differing daily routines and responses to player actions. For example, characters would respond in unique ways to the player stealing their horse or barging past them in the streets.
It later transpired that, depending on whether you told a side-character that her kidnapped husband was alive or dead, she could be seen trudging across the game’s world to find his captors or instead be found mourning at his grave. Where Winds Meet’s Wuxia spirit is embedded into every corner and every character within its ambitious world. Dynamic weather and changing seasons only helped add to the immersion, giving you reason to keep on exploring and stumbling across bold new discoveries.
With much of the Wuxia genre being focused on martial arts and combat, it was vital that Everstone Studios nailed this in Where Winds Meet, and for the most part, it has.
Each of the game’s seven weapons varied greatly, and while some (the umbrella) were more powerful than others, they all handled wonderfully. Everstone’s combat designers told me that Monster Hunter was a big inspiration for the combat, and you can see elements of the Japanese behemoth’s DNA throughout.
While every weapon felt visceral and punchy, the playstyles when using them allowed for much player freedom. The spear was slower, but more powerful and allowed greater reach, while the standard sword was a lot quicker and easier to chain combos with, but dealt far less damage. The ability to wield two weapons, switching on the fly, meant no encounter felt the same, especially when combined with Weapon Arts.
The seven weapons each have a range of skills and abilities, known as Arts, with each feeding into Where Winds Meet’s Wuxia overall ambitions. These were often more fantastical than just swinging a sword around, incorporating elemental damage or widening the AOE, and they could be combined with other weapon arts for some serious synergy. There was one boss fight that required me to get close to the enemy, but it often came at the detriment of my health. Thankfully, one of the other weapons came packing a healing art, allowing me to use one weapon primarily for damage, and the other to heal in a pinch. You’ll be mixing and matching constantly, and I can’t wait to see how this folds into a full playthrough.
Doing Too Much For Its Own Good
While there was a lot to like about Where Winds Meet, I did leave my hands-on preview with a couple of pressing concerns.
Ahead of time, Where Winds Meet was pitched as being a “150-hour game,” with the title’s producer telling me that the team has plenty more content in the pipeline, given that it’s a free-to-play title. This feels like a daunting amount of time for anyone to put into a single game, even for someone who covers them for a living like I do.
Everstone admitted that this estimate includes all current main quests and side content, suggesting that you should skip the side stuff if you don’t have time, but that defeats the purpose of a game like this.
Where Winds Meet boasts an incredibly immersive world, and like I mentioned previously, NPCs each have schedules and routines, the landscape is constantly shifting and changing, and it feels like this is the type of experience where you want to see everything. Having to make such sacrifices based on real-world time constraints would do a massive disservice to the efforts put in by its creators.
I’d also hate to be left with a sense of FOMO when a friend of mine has an encounter that I hadn’t even considered before. I appreciate that you’ll never see anything, but I definitely appreciate shorter experiences these days.
And this is only the beginning. During one of my interviews with the game’s development team, I was told that, on release, the protagonist’s story won’t be told in full. It has “endings for each of the regions,” but “as for the main questline, at this point, players will get clues about the original story, keeping them interested for future updates.”
At launch, there will be no definitive ending for our character and it will be released in future updates, making Where Winds Meet an unusual live-service single-player title. I’m not sure this is how I would want to consume a story like this one. The team assured me that the decision was “thought about very carefully”, citing a lower barrier to entry for players — I’m just not sure this is the right move.
I couldforgive the game’s length if it were purely focused on delivering a strong, single-player narrative experience, but it’s not. Being a free-to-play game, NetEase has to monetize things somehow, and it plans to do this through a range of additional modes.
The company confirmed to me that all in-game purchases will be purely cosmetic, and players won’t lose out on story content if they don’t pay, which is a great move; however, it means there are numerous additions that will be tacked onto the game that feel like they don’t truly belong.
Alongside its rich story, Where Winds Meet offers seamless co-op, which again, is excellent, but it also includes “intense guild wars, challenging multiplayer dungeons, and epic raids,” as well as a battle pass. The team is also working on huge base-building elements with “thousands of building components for you to use”.
This makes Where Winds Meet’s vision feel a little messy and has the potential to detract from the core premise it executes upon so well. Of course, you don’t have to interact with any of this additional content, and it’s clear NetEase and Everstone are trying to draw in as many different types of players as possible— I’m just not sure if the effort would have been better spent elsewhere.
There was truly a lot to like about Where Winds Meet. Its array of weapons all felt ferociously capable, each one playing distinctly from the last, and its depiction of ancient China has the potential to be unlike any other in modern gaming; it just needs to decide what type of game it wants to be.
