We last saw When Winds Meet exactly a year ago. Back then, its expansive debut trailer had us believing it could be Chinese developer Everstone Studio’s answer to Ghost of Tsushima; a sword-swinging martial arts odyssey through 10th century China. A year later, I’ve found that comparison is somewhat true. But Where Winds Meet is much, much bigger than that. Its open world appears to be a cocktail of modern Zelda and The Witcher, and it’s all powered by an RPG system with a frankly baffling array of stats, abilities, and skills. Where Winds Meet appears to be more ambitious than just an open world swashbuckler, but I’m not entirely sure yet if that’s a wholly good thing.
At gamescom 2023 I was able to play around 45 minutes of Where Winds Meet. For almost any game, that’s barely a taste. But for this muti-faceted RPG, it’s a drop in the ocean. After a quick combat tutorial and the most detailed character creation screen I’ve ever seen (you can tweak anything from the angle of your cheekbones to the size of your nasal columella) I was thrown into an open world that seems to value the kind of freedom that Tears of the Kingdom thrives on.
Without any direction, my journey took me to enemy camps that tested my skill with a blade. A few minutes later, I was arranging sculptures to match the answer to a riddle puzzle. Later, I soared high through the air using a series of acrobatic dashes. I landed among a village of human statues where a very strange man demanded I turn him into stone. And before the demo was done, I accepted a bounty contract to hunt down a runaway goose. Where Winds Meet is certainly varied in its scope.
That scope is more clear when you investigate its RPG systems. The game is invisibly split into two layers – combat and adventure – and there are active skills relating to each. Combat focuses on your character’s martial arts prowess, and ranges from the familiar to the buckwild (you can call in a goat and have it charge into enemies). Adventure skills, meanwhile, bolster your ability to interact with NPCs and the wider world. For example, one quest taught me a thieving technique with which I could telekinetically pull items into my inventory.
All these abilities are presumably linked to your aptitude stats, which are rolled during character creation akin to the likes of Dungeons & Dragons. But these stats are unlike anything I’ve seen in any RPG before. Among them are ‘Eloquence’, ‘Sight’, ‘Imagination’, and ‘Erudition’. They suggest a wildly different roleplaying journey than pretty much anything I’ve seen before, but nothing during my hands on reflected this. Perhaps they link to the job system that Everstone Studio described last year, in which you can seemingly become anything from a thief to a doctor. Again, a short demo was nowhere near enough time to see this side of the game in action. And so I can only hope that Where Winds Meet is built to sufficiently support an eloquence build – whatever that could mean – as much as it is a classic swordsman.
Should Where Wind Meet turn out to be more traditional than its unusual stats suggest, then I can at least say that its combat is pretty fun. It’s made up of the usual swordplay staples – strikes, blocks, parries, dodges, and takedowns – but the rhythm is fluid and the pace well-judged. While there is a stamina wheel to keep an eye on, the system isn’t as punishing as that seen in the Soulslike genre. That also goes for the damage enemies deal and the parry windows, too. I fought just one boss in the demo – an ogre-sized man with a long, sweeping staff – and found the fight a fun, swashbuckling spar rather than a test of my endurance.
The fight fundamentals are good, then, but I’m interested to see how combat evolves as you unlock more and more abilities. The martial arts side of the design means there’s scope for both flashy animations and fun combos, but it’s the goofier side of Where Winds Meet that interests me the most. The menu revealed that one attack involves pulling out a megaphone and essentially screaming damage numbers at an enemy, and I look forward to chaining that with more regular attacks like the multi-hit Praying Mantis ability.
I’m also interested to see more of the game’s cinematic side, too. While the open world exploration certainly tips its head to the likes of modern Zelda, it also carries the slightly soulless vibe than many MMOs fall foul of. It largely felt like pockets of game design rather than a truly cohesive land. The prologue, though, felt much more engaging; a thunderous horse ride in which you fire flaming arrows at passing snipers and deflect incoming attacks with slick QTEs, all while a baby(!?) is strapped to your chest. I hope there’s more of that to come, and that Everstone Studio finds a way to blend that with everything else it’s planning.
It’s that everything else that concerns me, though. There’s the base of a fascinating open-world RPG here, but every menu I opened suggested that Where Winds Meet is much bigger and much wilder than I expected. There’s a huge amount of choice here, both in skills and stats, and I worry that it may be over-scoped, especially considering this is Everstone Studio’s first significant game. But I also welcome that ambition; if the studio can pull off a freeform open world game in which you can be an architect, a bodyguard, a doctor, or all manner of other professions, and make the experience feel satisfying for all options, then this could truly be something special. But 45 minutes at gamescom was not the demo that could prove that. Let’s hope our next hands-on reveals how all those ideas come together.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Features Editor.
