Where Winds Meet is a free-to-play open-world Wuxia (martial arts) RPG set in ancient China that has become wildly popular in the week since it launched—but if you have no idea what it actually is, you’d be forgiven.
Where Winds Meet is developed by Chinese-based Everstone Studio (its first game, actually) and published by NetEase (Marvel Rivals), so if you hadn’t heard of it until you began stumbling across weird tales of evil geese and expensive cosmetics, that might be because of Western biases. The game reached two million players within just 24 hours of its global release (it’s been playable in China since last December), and though that can be partially chalked up to the fact that it’s free to play, something is clearly clicking with players.
That something could be, well, anything. Where Winds Meet seems to have packed almost every successful video game element over the last decade under its hood, including a vast and varied open world, Sekiro-like parrying, flashy and fun combat, Soulslike bosses, an incredibly in-depth character creator, loot-filled dungeons, platforming, stealth gameplay, a fully fleshed-out single-player mode, and an online mode in which you can battle other players or band together to win minigames, of which there are enough “to rival WarioWare” (thanks, GamesRadar).
There’s also a major geese problem, as reported by PCGamer. An early quest tasks you with healing a goose. If you fail, it turns into a demon known as the Manaical Goose, gets a boss health bar, and begins chasing you around. Players are suggesting you yeet every goose you see into the water, because they can drown in Where Winds Meet.
PCGamer also points out that Where Winds Meet will also let you ride “five camels simultaneously,” as just one of the game’s myriad bonkers mounts. If five camels don’t interest you, perhaps you’ll be better served by riding a leopard or an icy buck or a giant cat, being carried by two men in an ornate litter, getting dragged by sled dogs, running super fast (a Kung Fu Hustle reference), or, of course, standing on geese.
If that wasn’t enough absurdity for you, Where Winds Meet also has a cosmetic that can cost you $42,000 to unlock if the gacha gods aren’t in your favor.
Perhaps helping Everstone Studios find the bandwidth to jam all of this stuff into its game are the AI chatbots it appears to have used for many of its NPCs, which, if true, certainly saved the studio time writing tons of dialogue. As RockPaperShotgun reported a few days ago, the results of plugging your in-game characters into an LLM (large language model) are varied: NPCs have planned a trip to Beijing, resisted the creepy advances of a Redditor, offered a recipe for a meal made of ketchup and potatoes (before admitting that there was no ketchup, nor even tomatoes, during the Song dynasty in China), and spewing facts about the Godot game engine.
Even with some dev space cleared up by using an AI chatbot for dialogue, Where Winds Meet has some inconsistencies beyond the anachronous rantings of its NPCs. A Redditor posted three days ago that the Black character they created looks white during gameplay; some replied that this is a known bug, while other players on Steam’s message boards are complaining that their custom characters look completely different in-game.
GamesRadar’s review says “crawling through broken glass would be less painful than navigating its UI” and that its inconsistent, clunky stealth is a pain. IGN felt that Where Winds Meet was “plagued by weird technical issues like voice lines running over one another, subtitles not matching the words coming from characters’ mouths, or voices going missing entirely.”
“Uneven” seems to be a popular descriptor for this game, including tonally. Where Winds Meet appears to be all over the place, which could be a boon if you’re into that. “What the fuck is Where Winds Meet even about?” wrote Clio Aite on Twitter, alongside a picture of four Shiba Inus sitting at a table together.
I’m not sure, and I don’t know if I’ll ever find out, but Where Winds Meet’s player count is nothing to be ignored. Does that mean all successful future games will have AI-generated content and a smorgasbord of gameplay elements that render it into some sort of gamer mush that can be pumped directly down our throats? I hope not.
