A Deep RPG and visual spectacle marred by technical limitations

It’s hard to avoid the rise of Chinese game studios these days. From the legendary exhibition of Black Myth Wukong, we are starting to see an explosion of Chinese indie or purely developed games hit the market. We’ve now seen games such as Wuchang: Fallen Feathers hit the market, with many more on their way. However, the spotlight now turns to NetEase for their purely Chinese-developed IP with Where Winds Meet. This game is truly massive, hitting the 10th century setting with a Wuxia theme on the head with precision.

For those unaware of what Where Winds Meet is, it is a game that has been out for nearly a year now in the Asian markets. The game has had success and is several patches deep into content. It is taking a page out of other Chinese, Korean, and Japanese markets, dropping a targeted global release with translations for those getting the game officially. So, we’ve got an idea of what to expect from the game with its rumored massive systems and extremely deep time sink. And those rumors are not wrong either, as getting hands on it might be one of the biggest games we’ve ever played. Thirty hours in, I’ve barely scratched the surface enough to recognize the content loop in the game, yet nowhere near enough to have seen everything.

Grounded Story Meets Wuxia Souls-like

Players start Where Winds Meet as a generic hero in a narrative developed story cinematic. Who are we? Who are these guys? What’s going on? You’ll get a tutorial on the action RPG’s mechanics, squaring off against a bandit lord, brushing shoulders in some dusty square in a classic Chinese mythological duel. You’ll get to grips with your standard souls-like combat, learning the parry, blocking, perfect parry, and perfect dodging features. Albeit WWM gives you a new taste of the action as you learn martial arts and spiritual skills, the Wuxia style of the game.

These are pretty big features, giving players two different toggle sets of spiritual skills, which serve as ways to counter player and NPC moves in some fights. You’ll get a set of skills, offering a mixture of defensiveness, utility, and special attacks, giving you a taste of what you can expect from the game. Meanwhile, your martial art skills are special weapon attacks for the weapon you’re using, giving each weapon a unique tool for movement, crowd control, alongside some special light attack combos, heavy attack, or charged heavy attack. It gives players a very unique set of skills, builds, and playstyles.

You then finish your cutscene, create your character, in typical Asian character customization fashion, and then start the game proper. When you awake, you find yourself a young master with a basic set of martial arts skills. You’re somewhat okay with a sword and spear, but nothing too fancy, and you don’t have any of the mystical martial moves you had mere moments ago.

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Some of the early main story quests have you aid your family members in a tale of simple life. Image via Gamer Guides / NetEase.

From here, your journey begins tackling the very grounded questline of how your character is just a peasant in the Qinghe region of China. My first ‘quest’ is chasing down my younger cousin, who’s at our uncle’s abode in the forest. She yearns to become a master like the legends, but she’s only a child. You agree to wander with her to see how others train to become warriors, especially the looming threat of war. Then I’m perched on a hillside, bow in hand, picking off birds to practice my aim and to get some meals for the times ahead. These aren’t epic hero moments; they’re chores. But they ground you in this world in a way most RPGs skip entirely. It’s the day in the life of a local in the time of war, establishing the setting incredibly well. You’re a journeyman learning their craft in a time of looming war, where the lowborn can live and die by the sword in a heartbeat. It’s your task to live that normal life, but also gradually improve your martial arts and spiritual skills to become a true master in this dangerous era of China’s history.

I have to say it’s one of the most in-depth RPGs I’ve ever played. The way the game builds its world for your rise to become a hero, learning new skills, and then using them in group content and solo bosses, makes it very deep. It’s easily a game with strong skill sets, skill improvements, and traditional Asian MMO-like grinding nestled into a surprisingly strong open world action RPG for single player gamers.

A Beautiful, Social World

One of the most talked about things about Where Winds Meet is whether the game is an MMO or not. And you can be easily forgiven if you have a strong opinion on the game. Everstone and NetEase designed the game to be a mix of both. By and large, the world and gameplay are designed to be a single-player RPG with a main storyline, with co-op elements here and there. There is a setting to enable a large-scale MMO with more social elements around the world, helping it feel alive. Its odd image of a game is surprisingly one of its better systems.

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An example of one of the open world World Bosses you can fight for huge rewards, either solo or in online mode. Image via Gamer Guides / NetEase.

When you’re out in the world, you can enable solo mode, which unlocks the main storyline quests. If you toggle to co-op mode, those tend to disappear, but you can still wander the streets together. Players can build their own constructions, rent their own houses, and even partake in co-op challenges like World bosses, or do instanced combat like the trials, dungeon bosses for the gear treadmill, or even PvP together if they so wish. When you wander around the world, you can even find tables for co-op games, like Mahjong, and even co-op drinking games for the revelry and fun of it. The game even has a “seek date” feature, which basically means a dedicated co-op friend that has its own reward track. So, if you play a lot with friends, you’re considered dating for some reason - this might be a translation thing, which we’ll get to later.

While you’re out in the world, you’ll also find a mixture of social MMO and single-player factions in there. One such feature is the Sects. These are various dedicated groups of martial art enthusiasts, specializing in distinct weapons and training schools. These also tend to have their own rules, which affect how you rank up. One of them is a healer-focused one, which encourages players to actively go into the open world and heal NPCs in missions, or join co-op games and heal people’s wounds, so group content. Meanwhile, the assassin equivalent wants you to not avoid fights in the open world or go and play PvP missions to rank up. Others want you to get drunk in the world, explore, and do other things. These all engage you differently with the open world, require going to different areas, and do different tasks to help immerse you in that world. There’s even a social hub for these locations, with an event tracker to see if other players joined or got booted for failing to uphold the guild rules.

I pledged myself to the Midnight Blade sect, drawn by their dual-wielding weapon style and shadowy, red-robed aesthetic. After a few days of being part of the guild, doing some PvP, I decided to check the Sect for updates on my progress to a new rank. It’s here that I find that another player was kicked for being too friendly and not killing enough. In a game full of numbers and progression bars, this moment of emergent storytelling stopped me in my tracks as the system was not just a battle pass reward-like feature, but something that lived a little more with the antics going on in players’ sessions.

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Told you the game looks gorgeous. Image via Gamer Guides / NetEase.

Lastly, the open world content loop is designed for exploration rewards. There’s a lot going on in the open world, with different things giving you activities and events. These can give you a variety of currencies, upgrade materials, and more. Done in isolation, it feels like a busy open-world world Valhalla-like (Assassin’s Creed) game. But when used with the storyline, sect events, or general co-op activities, these help to support these features, while giving you other horizontal progression systems to chip away at.

The Winds Ripped a Hole in the Technical Sails

While the game has done a solid job of building a strong gameplay loop, an amazing world, and strong MMO-like aspects, it does have its downsides. These largely come from a more technical and UX perspective.

If you’re an MMO gamer, like me, attracted to the game for its social elements, its class-defining roles and builds, you know mobile MMOs are the enemy of our experience. Sadly, the game follows that mobile-first UI design, with different UI interactions scattered in various corners of the menus. From there, the submenus get even more cluttered, things are hidden in tabs you wouldn’t expect, and the context of items and features can easily get lost in the notices on screen. As a PC player, sometimes I need to use my mouse and keyboard to get to one menu, dropping my controller since it feels easier to get where I want to go using M&K rather than my controller.

In addition, while the game has done a good job of translating it from Chinese to English, there are still some issues. The developers are still actively working on translations post-launch, as we’ve been told, and the launch build may have some of this already implemented. By all means, the game is playable, but some things are worded weirdly, subtitles don’t match the flow of the voice actors, and some naming conventions are simply odd for what we are used to. It makes traversing an already difficult menu even harder at times, trying to figure out what means what. Take, for example, the Thundercry Blade, which is a weapon type.

But most of the time, those weapons are called Mo Blades in game. You’d be forgiven for thinking they are two different weapons. And take into account that the game has a co-op feature called Seek Date - we think it’s romance, but it’s actually just a play with the same people repeatedly feature to get a reward track for cosmetics.

Also, for a game in 2025, how it does not have a borderless window setting beats me. The game runs rather awkwardly in full screen, causing my mouse to lock up entirely until a hard reboot happens. It forced me to play the game in a lower resolution than my native resolution in windowed mode. Considering how gorgeous the world is at times; it’s a big letdown. Console players and mobile players won’t have this, but PC players might have more frustrations on top of the other things mentioned above.

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I get the immersion of talking to an NPC using AI… But at least make it work. Image via Gamer Guides / NetEase.

It’s also very current to have AI strapped onto something where it doesn’t need to be. The devs have merged an AI Chat with the classic comfy-friend making system from Asian RPGs. However, to do that and get rewards for it, you need to engage with AI Chatbots masquerading as different NPCs. This opens a menu where you can tell you’re talking to an LLM. Each NPC has different things to discuss. One mentioned it had a brother in a nearby location, which helped me discover a side quest (which is really good for the exploration of the open world). But when I tried talking to it, it just repeated the same line to me. This is even worse when you need to make friends for area completion and get rewards for exploration. This broken and poor implementation of AI actually harms your completion rates. You need exploration to get various currencies, exploration experience, free cosmetic rewards, area movement skills, and more. A dodgy chatbot not responding to you properly is a pretty big no-no and will actively harm your horizontal progression systems. I think I only managed to make one friend from it in the entire 30+ hours I spent on the review servers, and ignored that system until I presume the translations and features worked better. This should be a simple dialogue check and move on while the chatbot is this broken.

All of these technical issues are enough to really start grinding your gears. It’s quite a hard-hitting, immersion-breaking and otherwise aggravating time figuring out what things actually mean in game or getting things to work. It’s certainly enough to give you the “I quit” moment and it is because of these features not working or being a hard time to work around. It’s a shame, because it’s by far one of the best premium open world ARPGs I’ve personally played, especially from the east, and the technical limitations really make it hard to engage with deep systems, amazing world building and graphics, and gameplay loops.

As for the review itself. It’s a shame I can’t elevate it to 70. If it were measured on gameplay alone, I could easily give this an 80 ballpark score. But, Fengbo decides the review winds must move in this direction for now.