With Where Winds Meet, we can expect a particularly ambitious role-playing game on November 14, 2025, which aims to bring a lot of sake dreams under a bamboo hat. The developers also have a new take on the MMORPG genre.
The new role-playing game Where Winds Meet is hard to grasp. It aims to appeal to solo players, co-op buddies, and MMORPG fans alike… and offers an unusually wide range of modes, options, and content.
For example, you can first dive solo or with friends into the cinematically staged story campaign, which at its best moments recalls Wuxia classics like Tiger & Dragon or House of the Flying Daggers.
Meanwhile, or afterwards, various multiplayer contents await you, such as PvP arenas, a battle royale mode, dungeon and raid challenges, minigames, or events. You can also explore a modified version of the game world in a special multiplayer mode, where you will encounter numerous other players.
Where Winds Meet is so packed with features and content that we have broken down in a separate article how much MMO is actually in the role-playing game. How much fun all this is, I can only reveal to you with the lifting of the embargo.
First, I want to talk about the basic structure of Where Winds Meet, which could set a standard. But I want to start by looking at the MMORPG genre of recent years.
On Destiny and The Division …
In my article The Great Drought of MMORPGs and the Flight into More Lucrative Genres, I have already explained: After countless failed attempts, many developers and publishers have turned away from the expensive and risky genre of online role-playing games – especially in the West.
Many sought their salvation in other genres in order to implement alternative service strategies with lower investments. Titles like League of Legends (2009), World of Tanks (2010), DOTA 2 (2013), or Hearthstone (2014) paved the way for hits like Fortnite, PUBG, Warframe, or Path of Exile.
Partially, the executives also took large budgets into their hands to create ambitious MMO hybrids, such as a Destiny, The Division, or Anthem. These games (and their successors) rely on limited social hubs instead of a coherent, persistent world where hundreds or even thousands of characters roam around.
At the same time, they offer a lot of what players expect from MMORPGs: PvE challenges for groups, PvP content, guilds, loot progression, and chats. All of this is there, but compared to many online role-playing games, it somehow feels… shrunk. As if someone had put the content through the washing machine at too high a temperature for too long.
This fits well into the current daily routine of many players – admittedly. Smaller groups are found more quickly, especially when one knows that the desired content is completed in half an hour at the latest. Sounds familiar? Of course. For years now, many modern MMORPGs have also relied on such a comparatively flexible offer for small time windows.
… follows Where Winds Meet
What stands out is that developers are increasingly avoiding the MMO term in online role-playing games as if it were the plague. As if Lord Voldemort himself were the creator of the genre that one does not speak of in public.
This was suddenly the case with New World, which became an online action RPG with the Aeternum remake and console version. Online action RPG… so do the developers of XL Games prefer to call their current project ArcheAge Chronicles, which is set to be released next year.
More on the MMO content of ArcheAge Chronicles:
In the open-world RPG Crimson Desert, it seems that they have completely distanced themselves from the originally communicated MMO elements. And even on the Steam product page of Where Winds Meet, the term MMO is not mentioned at all, although the developers are certainly less shy in the game itself and even offer MMORPG options – for quest tracking and controls.
Moreover, the MMO DNA is clearly visible in the Wuxia RPG from Everstone Studio – with the multiplayer mode, guilds, and various group activities. However, it is a rethought variant of MMO. An option that one can use but does not have to, and which is clearly separated from the campaign and quests. The more important pillars of the game are clearly the single-player and co-op experiences.
The Future of MMORPGs?
In China, Where Winds Meet has been breaking through with its concept since December 2024. More than 15 million players are diving into the many contents of the free-to-play role-playing game. If this success is confirmed globally, this concept will likely spread to other developers and publishers – that’s how the market has worked for many years.
Normally, I’m open to additional options that can make the player experience accessible to a larger audience. In this case, however, I hope that Where Winds Meet does not show how most online role-playing games of the future might look.
This is simply because the multiplayer mode lacks substance without opponents and quests. It’s like a big, empty social hub where you can meet many other players, but apart from certain activities like joint yoga sessions or group therapies, there’s hardly anything to do.
The really important contents like dungeons and raids will likely be accessed by most players through the corresponding menu and group search. In the end, that’s just too little MMO experience in the open world for me.
I hope that Where Winds Meet remains an exotic outlier and that studios continue to emerge that develop real MMORPGs – even if the genre is currently struggling heavily. What do you think? Here and there, however, we can fortunately still report on bright spots, especially when looking at Pantheon: The future of a new PvE MMORPG on Steam is secured, receiving multi-million funding
