At first, MeinMMO editor Karsten Scholz was skeptical whether Where Winds Meet could actually live up to its ambitious plans. By now, he has completed the main missions and most side quests and is thrilled – despite the existing weaknesses.
There are games that are simply too big and good to be true. They shouldn’t actually exist due to the current market conditions. Baldur’s Gate 3 was such a thing in 2023 (and only possible because Larian had paved the way for it with Divinity Original Sin 1 + 2 over the years).
In my opinion, Where Winds Meet is also such a gem. There has never been a genre mix that is so extensive and packed with systems, features, and details … and on top of that, it’s really good AND Free2Play, so it’s free to play on PC, PS5, and Mobile. What do you allow, Everstone?
It’s almost as if you were to release the extensive sequel to a worldwide hit that fans have longed for for years for under 20 euros … or Team Cherry (and Hollow Knight: Silksong)?
Back to Where Winds Meet: since the open-world role-playing game is incredibly large and complex, my experience report should be clearly structured and to the point. Therefore, my article is divided into the following sections:
- How does Where Winds Meet play in single-player mode?
- What can you do alongside and after the story content?
- What are the strengths of Where Winds Meet?
- What are the weaknesses of Where Winds Meet?
- What questions remain?
- What are the developers planning after the launch?
You can jump to the areas that interest you the most via the table of contents.
How does Where Winds Meet play in single-player mode?
Where Winds Meet reminds me of the setting and world design of Ghost of Tsushima or Ghost of Yōtei. However, you’re not playing a Japanese samurai revenge story in the style of Akira Kurosawa’s “The Seven Samurai,” but a Chinese Wuxia tale reminiscent of film classics like Crouching Tiger & Hidden Dragon or Hero.
You control your – created in the extensive editor – fighter from a third-person perspective through an open, beautiful world. You interact with residents, experience cinematic story segments, solve puzzles, try out mini-games, cook, hunt, fish, gather resources, find treasures … and of course, you also fight.
Fast-paced combat, but also for casual players
The combat system is action-packed and fast. By pressing a button, you switch between two weapons and have access to a range of combat maneuvers. You can complement these with mystical martial arts moves like a Tai Chi throw or a jumping attack inspired by frogs. Some of these skills are necessary to counter dangerous attacks or to unhorse riders.
The most important mechanic of combat is precisely parrying attacks. Unlike your block, a successful parry avoids all damage. Additionally, you efficiently reduce the opponent’s posture by parrying. If you manage to break the posture, you stun your opponent and can deal high damage. With perfect timing, your parry even unleashes a beautifully animated counter.
All of this reminds me of tough action RPGs like Sekiro from FromSoftware, yet it is also suitable for casual players thanks to multiple difficulty levels and aids.
If you wish, you can visually display possible parry windows as long as a certain combat resource is available, including a slow-motion effect, giving you enough time to press the right button. This helps immensely when you’re surrounded by multiple melee fighters while ranged archers are pestering you from a distance.
Complex character development
You have access to a variety of different weapons for combat, including several sword variants, spears, fans, and umbrellas. These provide you with access to exclusive skills, allowing you to take on the roles of tank, healer, ranged attacker, or offensive frontline soldier.
Each weapon can be leveled up. Just like your mythical arts, all equipment slots, and of course your character level. You also have access to the passive effects of so-called Inner Arts, of which you can activate 4 to refine your play style and, for example, strengthen healing or deal more damage to bosses with charged attacks.
On X, you can see some of the mystical arts in action:
Of course, there’s also a talent tree, as well as additional ways to gain enhancements for your fighting alter ego – for example, via the Arsenal (a collection of retired clothes) or a curiosities dealer where you can exchange insects and other finds for permanent upgrades.
Only those who thoroughly explore the world will eventually unlock all weapons, arts, and potential improvements. In addition, you must collect a variety of resources to upgrade even the most critical components of your build to the maximum. Fortunately, the game tells you in the nested menus exactly where to find what and what you need for what.
Lastly, a few words about the leveling phase, which changes to a new section every 5 to 10 level-ups. However, to reach this section, you must initiate a breakthrough, for which you must fulfill certain prerequisites – usually a specific character level and mastering designated combat exercises.
In the first week, progress is also tied to the days. On Day 1, you can play up to Level X, on Day 2 up to Level Y, on Day 3 up to Level Z, and so on. On the sixth day, this artificial “time-gating” then disappears.
The level of enemies in the open world always corresponds to your character level. Thus, with every successful breakthrough into the next leveling phase, not only does your maximum level increase, but your enemies also become stronger.
What can you do alongside and after the story content?
The world of Where Winds Meet is full of secrets, puzzles, mini-games, and combat challenges. Many of the content outside of the main missions can be experienced in single-player mode with up to 3 friends. However, friends really only appear in your world when you invite them.
Things look different when you switch to multiplayer mode, which you unlock during the leveling phase. This brings you into a persistent MMO version of the game world where you can meet countless other players and found guilds and tackle special multiplayer content with them. However, main missions and side quests cannot be played here.
Here’s a selection of things you can do in Where Winds Meet alone, with friends, guild members, or acquaintances:
- Dungeons, raids, outposts, and world bosses
- Participate in PvP Arena, a battle royale mode, or guild wars
- Join one of the sects and rise to become the sect leader.
- Make a blood oath with up to 9 other players to establish a blood brotherhood.
- Improve your relationship with a particular player, even leading up to marriage.
- Those who misbehave will increase their criminal reputation until a bounty is placed on them, and they may eventually even end up in prison.
- Pursue careers as a healer or scholar to master the corresponding mini-games where you heal the injured or win heated debates.
- You can increase your reputation with countless NPCs to receive useful rewards or start secret quests. Thanks to AI, you can even chat freely with many of the residents about anything and everything.
- There’s a building system where you can erect houses.
- Participate in group activities such as meditation exercises, card games, knowledge quizzes, or dancing.
There are separate reward systems for many of these activities. Additionally, there are in-game quests that familiarise you with the building system or healing NPCs, animals, or other players.
The developers state that one can easily spend 150 hours with the release version of the game. A player of the Chinese version has invested almost 1,000 hours since the launch and still has not completely finished the RPG. However, it should be added that the Chinese version has been live for a while and has more content than our launch version.
What are the strengths of Where Winds Meet?
Where Winds Meet manages to wonderfully bring together this incredible number of systems and content most of the time and offers a fascinating player experience that currently does not exist anywhere else.
Just exploring the beautiful game world and discovering something cool every few steps is a great joy. Especially since surprising things happen time and again. Sometimes you find yourself suddenly being beaten up by a family of geese, or you stumble upon an old dude sleeping on a donkey that’s sitting in a tree … only to introduce himself as a world boss who sleepily thinks you want to steal his supplies.
At a rather early point in the game, you receive the hint that it might be worth trying an air strike at broken floor tiles. Suddenly, you find yourself in an underground area that leads you for the next half-hour through traps strewn with enemies and treasures.
Moreover, the fast-paced combat system feels good and fun. A few inputs are enough to perform spectacularly staged martial arts maneuvers. All opponents bring their own strengths and weaknesses, which you should consider when using skills.
The highlight is the wonderfully staged boss fights that often span multiple, sometimes very different phases and can represent memorable milestones in the course of the main story. However, the story abruptly ends after Chapter 2, but Where Winds Meet offers such an incredible amount at launch that the Free2Play access is almost outrageously fair.
To emphasize this point again: Where Winds Meet was a lot of fun for us. The existing weaknesses, which will be discussed in the next section, could not change that. This is such a unique gaming experience (for free!) that every role-playing, open-world, Wuxia, or martial arts fan should take a look at it from our perspective.
What are the weaknesses of Where Winds Meet?
The sheer number of options, systems, currencies, and mechanics, as well as the developers’ great ambition to dance at several weddings, come at a cost. As a beginner, one can easily feel overwhelmed. For many hours, one constantly learns new things. Additionally, it can take time before finding the best settings for oneself. You need to get into Where Winds Meet.
The extremely nested menus unfortunately make this more difficult. You need to click through them constantly because you have unlocked a reward for something somewhere. I often caught myself during my search through the interface asking the question: Where was that again? Unfortunately, Where Winds Meet behaves very typically for a Free2Play Asian MMO in this regard.
Speaking of which: Genre fans who hope that Where Winds Meet offers a full-fledged MMORPG experience may be disappointed. The optional multiplayer mode is an exciting addition with potential, but you cannot play the most important quest content in it. Even normal enemies disappear from the world when you switch to multiplayer mode.
You can find out more about multiplayer and MMO content here:
A few words about bugs and localization
Although Where Winds Meet was released in China months ago, our review version caused quite a few issues. The developers had already warned us about the still unfinished localized German texts. This should improve significantly by the launch version.
The fact that I couldn’t complete a quest for an enemy that took no damage for one evening or that inputs over the controller or mouse and keyboard were sometimes not recognized or only recognized with a delay was annoying. Fortunately, the latter mainly relates to menu navigation. In combat, I had no problems with the controls.
What I noticed is that the number of bugs and annoying little issues increased with playing time. However, Where Winds Meet was never unplayable. The previously mentioned immune enemy, for example, could be easily defeated the next day. Additionally, it is currently unclear which problems the developers can fix for the release version on November 14.
Our tech expert Benedikt Schlotmann has mainly played Where Winds Meet on the console. Here’s his assessment:
The action RPG runs very smoothly on the standard PS5. The loading times are very short and are lower than on my gaming PC. The controls on the PS5 feel intuitive and can be completely remapped if desired. The world is beautiful, and the combat feels dynamic on the console, sometimes even better than on PC with mouse and keyboard.
However, the version is still not perfect. I’ve noticed textures loading in during cutscenes, and much more annoyingly, there are problems with the DualSense: sometimes buttons and inputs are suddenly not recognized, meaning I couldn’t heal or switch weapons. In a boss fight, this is deadly.
This controller problem also affects the PC version and is not an isolated incident according to colleagues. As long as I can’t be sure that the PS5 version runs flawlessly at release, I cannot recommend it without hesitation.
What I have not tested on the console: the multiplayer mode. I played solo the entire time on PS5. On PC, I experienced strong delays in multiplayer with a colleague, where button presses arrived seconds late.
What questions remain?
In our early access version, we could only take a limited or no detailed look at two areas:
- The multiplayer mode was present but only a few other players were around. We could play group challenges like dungeons with NPCs, but for example, we haven’t seen a PvP instance from the inside or participated in a mass meditation.
- All monetization content was disabled. It is thus unclear what impact the in-game shop, battle pass, or cosmetic gacha system will have on the gaming experience.
In an earlier beta, the monetization was activated, and we also know how the model looks in the Chinese version. There, a large part of the paid content revolves around cosmetic items. However, you can also invest money in certain resources to make the farming grind a bit easier.
Ultimately, the final launch will show how the model for the West looks in detail and how the multiplayer content works when countless interested parties storm the servers and the automated group search.
What are the developers planning after the launch?
Where Winds Meet is set to be supported long-term with a seasonal model. It is clear that the first season is called Blade Out and runs from November 14, 2025, to February 5, 2026. Each season should bring new content such as game modes or time-limited events. A challenging hardcore difficulty level is also planned.
Furthermore, the developers want to gradually expand the main story with new chapters. A player of the Chinese version recently stated that there are now 4 large regions there (compared to 2 in the launch version in the West) and he has spent almost 1,000 hours on the currently available PvE content.
For those who have become curious and want to try Where Winds Meet starting on November 14, 2025, on PC, PlayStation 5, or mobile, our overview contains everything important about the ambitious open-world role-playing game from Everstone: Where Winds Meet – All the info on release, preload, price, and gameplay
