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. Where Winds Meet is a breath of fresh air for the “MMO” genre. Many studios don’t want to even attempt make an MMO title anymore—as evident by the graveyard of unreleased titles.
You can tell the developers cared about the game. A care you don’t usually see for triple-A titles. Which is why a lot of the market has shifted towards indie titles. Anyhow, WWM is one of those hope restoring games similar to every Sakurai, Kojima, and Miyazaki release.
Souls-like
Being able to play a polished “souls-like” game for free is insane. The game has a smooth client-sided parry and dodge system. There is the “assist” system where you can summon people for help when fighting world bosses. Difficulty for the game can be adjusted from story, normal, hard, and legend mode.
The bosses feel “larger than life” . Each boss has it’s own standalone cutscene alongside a story-line for the boss. They all have a unique moveset, attack patterns, and a carefully crafted tempo. Even if you choose the easiest game-mode, you are always in threat of being chunked by a failed parry or dodge.
MMO Features
What separates WWM from games like Elden Ring is their built-in MMO experience alongside single player. WWM supports MMO servers meaning you can have 100+ players connected to a world instance. This high player limit enables all the typical social interactions in an MMO like minigames, guilds, world pvp, interactive professions, sects, and so on.
Another MMO aspect of WWM is their offering of instanced raids for 10+ players.Having raids and a good matchmaking system is kind of wild. Plus, having raids containing knowledge and skill checks is golden. There haven’t been a game I can think of in recent years where you couldn’t mindlessly overpower the raid.
The best part design-wise from Where Winds Meet is how you can progress your player level through various avenues in the games, as an MMO should be. You don’t have to clear through a swath of story quests or farm hours in a zone for EXP or lot. You play the game however you want to and you will be as the same as any other player with a similar amount of play-time in the game. Matter of fact, player strength isn’t only 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 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 gap[^3].
Everything Else
What makes WWM S-tier rather than A-tier and why I said: “the developers care about the game” is because the umbrella of everything else is so wide. You can play Mahjong, become a traveling healer, roleplay sects, dungeons, PvP, wrestle, and more. Legitimately each time I have booted up the game I have found some line of interesting content which I never seen before.
Where Winds Meet is 10/10 game.
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As good as the netcode can be, while still being an MMO. ↩