The launch of Genshin Impact in 2020 fundamentally changed the world of free-to-play gaming, ushering in an era of free open-world RPGs with AAA production values. While this success prompted a proliferation of high-quality experiences, the genre continued to be defined by the gacha mechanics that often introduce a certain clunkiness to the experience by tying progression and key characters to monetization. For old-school players like me, this was a major issue that prevents them from getting into this type of game. I'd rather pay for a full experience than have the story told piecemeal or rely on luck for a cool moveset or character.
This is why I didn't feel very excited about Where Winds Meet. When I first saw the game developed by Everstone Studio, I was thoroughly impressed by its setting, but knowing it was yet another free-to-play open-world game almost completely turned me off. While I could definitely appreciate the level of quality the developer was aiming for, the grinding and gacha mechanics that I had expected to be a big part of the experience made me dismiss it almost entirely.
After spending around 35 hours with an early access version of the global release, however, I am more than happy to have been proven wrong. While the story is still being served piecemeal, I thoroughly enjoyed everything else Where Winds Meet has to offer, thanks to a very fair monetization and a huge wealth of content even at launch that makes the game enjoyable even for an old school sort of player like me with an almost complete aversion to the free-to-play model that is so popular nowadays.
The one thing that impresses the most about Where Winds Meet is its wide appeal. The game really has a little something for every type of player: a single-player story-driven mode, a co-op mode which allows friends to complete story quests and engage in different combat-focused activities together, and sandbox MMO elements which lets players immerse themselves into this beautiful world set in 10th-century China, and live their virtual life any way they see fit.
Having never played an MMO in my life, except a brief foray into the legendary Ultima Online during the early 2000s, I'll leave it to more competent others to evaluate this aspect of the game, which, even to my slightly uninformed eyes, looks impressive enough. With numerous features and interaction possibilities, I anticipate that this part of the Where Winds Meet experience will eventually become the most popular among a specific crowd.
If you're a player like me, however, looking to immerse yourself in an involving story rather than living a fantasy life, Where Winds Meet still has a lot to offer, and at a general level of quality one would expect to find in premium games from more established studios.
The main story of Where Winds Meet is set in 10th-century China during the tumultuous Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. This era, which followed the fall of the mighty Tang Dynasty, was marked by extreme turmoil, characterized by the political fragmentation of the land and constant strife among the kingdoms, ultimately leading to the establishment of the Song Dynasty.
Amidst this constant turmoil, where justice and order are often replaced by the laws of the sword, acts the unnamed young warrior players can create at the start of the adventure, a warrior with a mysterious past, which seems to be connected to the political forces that are trying to shape the land. Seeking out their origins, however, won't be the only thing that will force this young traveler on a life-changing journey.
The pull of the jianghu, the world outside their small hometown of Heaven's Pier, is strong, as is their willingness to become a martial arts hero whose deeds can be immortalized by story and song, in proper Wuxia tradition. How this will happen, however, remains to be seen, as the world is more complex than it seemed from their hometown, and many situations will arise where their convictions and ideals will be put to the test.
Featuring a complex setting with a lot of interwoven elements, the Where Winds Meet story is one of the best features of the game, even in its current incomplete form, with only two story chapters available. While it doesn't attempt to surpass its Wuxia and cultivation story inspirations, with the main character becoming stronger through various physical and spiritual ordeals, it's narrated well, featuring self-contained stories that still maintain a connection with one another, much like an anime show. Aside from simple dialogue sequences, whose quality honestly leaves a little to be desired at times due to a stiff english localization and uneven voice acting, the story is also told with some of the best cutscenes seen in video games, where the animation work is a true standout.
The side content, which the game is abundant in, is just as important, further developing the lore and the world in ways that only a few open-world games have managed to do. In this regard, Where Winds Meet reminded me a lot of my favorite open-world RPG of all time, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which is something that no game other than Cyberpunk 2077 managed to do since its launch in 2015. The fact that all of this can be enjoyed for free, without any forced monetization or paywalls, makes it even more impressive. Hopefully, this level of quality will be maintained for future story chapters as well.
While the setting, story, and worldbuilding are among the things the game does best, Where Winds Meet also handles gameplay rather well. Although none of its features are innovative in any capacity, they are well-crafted to provide a great open-world experience that has something to offer for all kinds of players.
At a glance, the game is not any different from most of the modern open-world action RPGs around. After a short intense intro with a brief combat tutorial and creating a custom character with a solid character creator featuring tons of options, including some relatively advanced ones, such as the ability to recreate your face by providing your photos, you are thrown into the first of the two regions that are available at launch, which can be explored fully right from the get-go. While following the first few story quests would be advisable, as they essentially work as tutorials for some of the game's central mechanics, you are free to go wherever you wish as soon as the game proper begins.
Taking a page from the Zelda: Breath of the Wild book, open-world exploration and traversal in Where Winds Meet are really solid. Anything that can be seen in the distance can be fully explored, and it often includes something worthwhile, whether it's additional resources, new gear, side stories, or new techniques such as Mystic Artes. These, in particular, are extremely interesting and varied, and can be used in combat as well as for traversal, allowing players to reach previously unreachable areas or speed up travel. With the presence of a stamina bar that dictates how long your character can climb hills and mountains, learning these abilities is extremely important to explore every nook and cranny of the available maps. And even if they weren't this crucial, they would have seen a lot of use nonetheless. Running on water or soaring through the sky is something that any Wuxia fan would have wanted to do.
And if the two available maps weren't expansive enough, Where Winds Meet also offers one of the most immersive cities seen in open-world games with the city of Kaifeng. Not only is the size of this city considerable, but every building can be entered and explored for items, gear, and more. With different districts offering a lot of other side content, the density of the city of Kaifeng is truly impressive and unsurpassed by the vast majority of modern open-world games.
The varied content offered is one of the areas where Where Winds Meet truly excels. As opposed to too many modern open-world RPGs, where the additional content on the map is rarely worthwhile, the game developed by Everstone Studio is packed with meaningful content at every single turn. Every discovery on the map, even the smallest, is accompanied by either an interesting side story or a bit of lore that helps define the game's world, or a dungeon with a unique gimmick upon which puzzles are based. Even when side content involves playing a minigame, the small amount of story attached to it makes it meaningful and memorable.
Although Where Winds Meet follows an established formula, it doesn't mean that it does not have some standout open-world mechanics. One of these is NPC interactions. Not only is it possible to establish lasting relationships with a lot of characters, which bring different benefits, including the ability to summon them in fights against mighty bosses, ala Souls series, but it is also possible to interact with them directly via a chatbot. In the Early Access version I tested, I wasn't able to get them to do anything other than repeat a few lines, but still, this is a great feature to have that could have some amazing developments in the future.
Besides exploring the game's gorgeous world, players will do quite a bit of fighting in Where Winds Meet. Much like traversal is inspired by Zelda: Breath of the Wild in terms of freedom, the game's combat takes more than a few pages from the FromSoftware and Team NINJA's books with a tweaked stamina-based system, light and heavy attacks, additional skills for all seven weapon types, whose attacks and abilities change depending on the stance attached to a specific weapon, making them better suited for playing certain roles like tank or healer, and an emphasis on switching between two equipped weapon on the fly to extend combos. With excellent responsiveness and animation, fighting is both fun and engaging.
Where Winds Meet combat also has a little bit of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Wo-Long: Fallen Dynasty woven into it with the Deflection mechanics. In this regard, the game is closer to the Team NINJA-developed title, as the parry window is somewhat forgiving. As depleting an enemy's Qi is essentially the goal in most fights, the developers added a Deflection Assist feature that helps players get the timing down, which can be tricky, especially against bosses, who tend to use intricate, long combos that cannot be interrupted. While advanced players will hardly need this feature, its addition is excellent and shows the developer's focus in providing enjoyment for all players, regardless of their skill level.
Although it makes a great first impression and does justice to its inspirations, combat in Where Winds Meet eventually starts to show some issues, especially when fighting against bosses. Despite their generally good design, they sometimes feel a little unfair due to the disjointed hitboxes of some of their attacks and the Deflection timings that aren't always natural. A dozen hours or so in, even fighting mobs starts to feel a little unsatisfying, as enemies rarely react to your regular attacks, which, as a result, detracts from the experience. This doesn't diminish what's honestly a pretty good combat system for an open-world RPG that tries to do so many things at once, but still, it's an issue that most players will inevitably notice once the honeymoon phase ends.
While the impact of the free-to-play model is not really felt in exploration, traversal, and combat, it is evident in character progression. While the gear system, reminiscent of ARPGs like the Diablo series, is generally fair, allowing players to acquire a significant amount of gear with minimal effort, obtaining the absolute best gear requires extensive grinding. To be fair, the rarest and most powerful gear is hardly needed for the story content, but if you're planning on fighting world bosses and engaging other players in PvP, it is very much needed. The game's balance is obviously going to change significantly in the future, but based on the Chinese version, specific meta builds are already being used by the strongest players, builds that require considerable effort to assemble.
The character enhancement systems in Where Winds Meet are similarly impacted by the free-to-play model. Every single aspect of the character, from a sort of gear mastery that makes equipped items more effective to every weapon's skill, Mystic Artes, and the passive Internal Arts skills can be updated with in-game money and items. This system is honestly overwhelming at first, and its excessive fragmentation feels unnatural for someone who doesn't play free-to-play RPGs.
Thankfully, the game does a solid job making this character progression a little easier for those not used to this sort of mechanics. Not only does it feature a some kind of recommended enhancement menu, which indicates which aspects of the character need attention and upgrade, but it is also possible to learn on the fly where every single item required for crafting or upgrading can be found. This is a great feature that more games should implement as it makes grinding way more bearable.
This type of character progression is almost mandatory for a game like Where Winds Meet, which limits monetization to cosmetics, encouraging players to engage with the multiplayer features. These features include drop-in, drop-out co-op, raids, posting bounties for certain enemies for other players to get, and a PvP arena whose progress is tied to one of the Talent Trees. Additionally, it is also possible to rematch story bosses, whose increased power over their story appearance makes them more suited for multiplayer. The implementation of these features is almost seamless, and with the ability to build structures into one's world to further customize it, venturing into other players' worlds is well worth it, even just to see how some have taken advantage of this feature.
Powered by NetEase's Messiah Engine, Where Winds Meet boasts impressive visuals, featuring detailed environments and character models, as well as a solid lighting system with real-time sunlight that accurately represents the light of different times of day. However, the quality is not consistent.
Paired with an impressive physics system that makes some of the environmental elements react to what characters are doing, such as blades of grass and bodies of water, are uneven animations, ranging from great combat animations and cutscene choreography to the stiffest of animations during simple dialogue sequences, with almost non-existent lip synching to boot. These visual issues, however, are nothing compared to the clunkiness of the menu system, whose usability leaves a lot to be desired. Some of these issues will reportedly be addressed in the launch build, but I still think it is important to highlight them, in case the planned fixes are not sufficient to address them.
Much like graphics quality, performance is mostly on point, thanks to a decent selection of graphics options and support for NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS as well as DLSS Frame Generation. On my system (i7-13700F, RTX 4080, 32 GB RAM) at 4K resolution and the settings in the screenshots above, the game ran at an average of 93 FPS, 44 1% low in a benchmark session conducted in the city of Kaifeng, which is the most demanding area in the game, mostly due to the high number of NPCs on screen. With Frame Generation enabled, the game had little trouble sticking close to the 120 FPS cap I set due to my monitor's refresh rate, and with limited stuttering issues, the experience has been very smooth. However, I did experience some drops below 60 FPS in some demanding areas and during combat.
Although it's too early to understand if Where Winds Meet can become a massive phenomenon like other popular free-to-play open world RPGs, the potential is definitely there. The content on display at launch is generally excellent, and if the studio can continue updating every aspect of their game while maintaining this level of quality and fair monetization, Where Winds Meet can become the game that even those who cannot stand the free-to-play model can thoroughly enjoy with no trouble.
Tested on PC. Early access provided by the publisher.
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