Where Winds Meet

A Chinese “Wu-xia” Souls-like with social features + a decent pvp system1 + mmo features. This is the game I have been waiting for and it appeared out of nowhere. Where Winds Meet is a breath of fresh air for the “MMO” genre as many studios don’t want to make an attempt at crafting an MMO title, as evident by the graveyard of in-development/never-released titles in the past couple of years.

The game just feels like the developers cared about it, which sadly does not seem to be the case for game development in the 21st centuries. Which is also why a lot of the game market has shifted and saw the rise of indie developers. Anyhow WWM is one of those games that restore your hope in the gaming industry just like how every Sakurai, Kojima, and Miyazaki release does for me. But in this case, from a non-Japanese game designer.

Souls-like

The fact that you can play a polished “souls-like” game for free is already a plus. The game has a smooth client-sided parry and dodge system that is the same yet eternally great throughout the genre. There is also the “assist” system where you can summon people for help when fighting world bosses or campaign bosses. Difficulty for the game can be adjusted from story, normal, hard, and legend mode for those looking for different experiences with the game.

The other important part for a souls-like to do well is making the bosses feel “larger than life” and WWM does that. Each boss has it’s own standalone cutscene alongside a story-line for the boss. They all have a unique moveset, attack patterns, and have a carefully crafted tempo to the fights. Even if you choose the easiest game-mode, you are always in threat of being chunked by a failed parry or dodge.

MMO Features

An interesting aspect that separates WWM from games like Elden Ring is that they built it to be an MMO alongside a single player experience. WWM supports MMO servers meaning you can have 100+ players connected to a world instance while other souls-like usually only allow a max 4 player co-op experience. This player limit enables all the common social interactions in an MMO like player-based minigames2, guilds, world pvp, interactive professions, sects, and so on.

Another aspect of WWM is that they offer instanced raids of 10+ players, with actual mechanic checks. So for one, having raids and a good matchmaking system is already kind of wild, but having raids containing knowledge and skill checks is golden. There just haven’t been a game I can think of in recent years where you couldn’t mindlessly overpower the raid through sheer force, besides some of the other popular titles like WoW, Maplestory, or PoE or Lost Ark. But, it is an absolute win for the 3D MMO genre.

The best part design-wise from Where Winds Meet is that you can progress your player level through various avenues in the games, as an MMO should be. You don’t have to just clear through a swath of story quests or farm hours in a zone for EXP or lot. You just play the game however you want to and you will be at the level-cap and just as progressed as any of other player with a similar amount of play-time in the game. Matter of fact, player strength isn’t just levels, more so player build and how well thought of your build is and if you have collected all the necessary pieces for it.

And I think this way of looking at player EXP and progression is a good thing for MMOs. Of course you can’t become the strongest in the game by doing RP tasks, but it allows “to each their own” to occur without greatly penalizing those who don’t want to just play for gear progression or big numbers. Although, in the case where these mix, like in raids, it leads to really funny scenarios where it is are uncarryable because of the skill gap3.

Everything Else

What makes WWM S-tier rather than A-tier and why I said: “the developers care about the game” is that the umbrella of everything else is so wide. You can play Mahjong, become a famous healer, roleplay sects, dungeons, PvP, wrestle, and so on. Legitmately each time I have booted up the game I have found some line of interesting content that I never seen before whether that is a separate story-line or a new event/game-mode I haven’t played before.

Where Winds Meet is 10/10 game.

Also I hit top 100 in their PvP battle royale gamemode + I forgot to mention their character creation is next-level4.


  1. As good as the netcode can be, while still being an MMO. ↩

  2. Where Winds Meet has the following Chinese minigames: ↩

  3. The first raid got released and matchmaking for it is horrendous because a lot of people don’t have raid builds and don’t know the mechanics. ↩

  4. It can generate your avatar from a picture of your or from your voice. They also allow sharing base character avatars in a social media-like fashion. ↩