The world that Everstone Studios has introduced in Where Winds Meet is quite an entertaining one. It takes great advantage of its narrative presence to craft an experience that feels grounded, gritty, and tailored to fit a variety of playstyles.
Like a good open-world game should do, a sense of freedom underlines everything you do in the game, with both main and side activities feeding into a gameplay loop that uses wuxia to great effect and weaves it into its exploration and combat.
The game’s mechanics are built to facilitate getting around the world and being stylish, and perhaps a bit brutal if there are those in opposition. Crafting your own take on a very expansive world in the process becomes a result of clever design.
It’s an experience that could have you smiling fondly at the way it riffs on mechanics in the best experiences while putting its own flourishes on what it attempts to present to you. Allow us to elaborate.
Exploring a Fallen Dynasty
As a warrior looking to make your mark in a land that’s been victim to a lot of political and military turmoil, your role in your journey becomes all the more important, with the game making good use of RPG mechanics to keep you busy for hours on end.
But it’s in the way freedom is presented to you right off the bat that quickly showcases how Where Winds Meet is not afraid to pay homage to solid experiences that have come before it, while also signalling that it is unafraid to usher in touches of its own. As you dive into your playthrough, you’re asked to pick between different modes that control how much the game holds your hand.
It’s a perfect reminder of the choice between Exploration and Guided modes in Assassin’s Creed’s latest titles, but on a map this large, finding your targets with only a few clues to guide you could be problematic. However, Where Winds Meet has a few tricks up its sleeve on that front.
The Unreal Engine 5-powered visuals are a great immersive factor, while the sheer amount of activities you can uncover as you explore more of the map in Solo mode. They’re a great advantage for Everstone as they hold your attention long enough for the sense of discovery and freedom to sink in.
Loading up your inventory menu to take stock of a situation, you might quickly realize that the crafting systems, world map, and inventory menus are synced in a way that lets you find where you need to go for nearly any upgrade you need. Getting there might still require that you farm out a few levels before going over, but having the ability to track important personal objectives over the layer of story and side content calling for your attention is clever, because it fits into a variety of playstyles.
There are those who like to keep their gear updated as they take on increasingly harder challenges. There are also some of you who’d rather upgrade their stuff when they’re in the vicinity of a suitable vendor, or perhaps only when you need to. Either way, making crafting such an easily accessible and crucial part of success in the main campaign does a solid job of tying exploring the world into the game’s larger narrative.
It also gives you, the player, absolute control over your decisions with regard to your loadouts, and it can be quite advantageous to think about spreading upgrades out over different loadouts to try and specialize a couple of builds you can switch between. It’s the freedom of making an otherwise mundane task feel like a natural part of your journey.
But it also fits very well with another very enjoyable part of the experience.
Fighting With Form and Function
The game’s wuxia-based animations are certainly a sight to behold, and their integration into traversing the open world is quite innovative indeed. But do they lend themselves to combat, an equally important facet of the experience?
The answer is yes. It’s also a great showcase of how Where Winds Meet represents an intersection of mechanics from other great combat titles. Of course, the parry mechanic from Sekiro is quite an obvious one, considering how the timings feel quite close to that one. But where Sekiro relied on the risk-reward system that parrying brought to the table, Where Winds Meet melds challenge and appeal in equal measure.
Simply adjusting your playstyle to holding down blocks to mitigate the damage from an incoming attack by default while clicking on parry to attempt a deflect might feel like a subtle touch, but it does take some getting used to.
But once you do, you’re free to take even fights at your own pace, trading damage while having the room to further time your parries to specific attacks that could open your enemies up to some serious damage down the line. We’re certainly going to dive into the game’s harder difficulties once we have a few builds going and see if permadeath is going to stop us from reaching our destiny.
It’s also great that the combat difficulty you choose only extends to the single player mode, and multiplayer modes aren’t affected. That’s because it’s a level playing field where the best of Where Winds Meet is sure to show itself, thanks to the combat system bringing weapon variety and a lot of enemies to try them on.
Each weapon type in the game comes with distinct animations, lending it distinct trade-offs and advantages. It’s an expanded arsenal on offer in comparison to Ghost of Yotei, but the two games being relatively close to each other immediately brings Sucker Punch’s approach to accessing multiple weapons in a fight to mind.
But unlike Atsu, your character wields only two chosen weapons in the field, and we can already see why that could be another feather in Everstone’s cap. We’re already eyeing the early beginnings of several distinct builds, an assassin wielding the brutal speed and DPS potential of dual blades with the crown control abilities of a rope dart specialist is on the cards.
It’s a design choice that works well within both the game’s narrative and explorative frameworks, allowing Where Winds Meet to bring its almost overwhelming freedom into its combat as well, and allows it to round off an experience that seems designed to be an excellent RPG from the ground up.
Each weapon feels distinct enough from the others that it comes with a learning curve that requires knowledge of your own attack patterns and their timing, but that you also have a read on your enemies. It’s a combat experience that feels so involved, and every swipe of your blade is a direct extension of all your training to master it, and each injury is a lesson to be learned on your path to glory.
We’re particularly fond of the fact that refilling your healing flasks requires having enough of a consumable resource at hand. It’s a nice riff on Bloodborne’s vial system without being as restrictive as that one’s approach to healing. The fact that you could always try and net a few upgrades to your healing abilities before you even begin your journey is a nice plus.
But it does give the feeling that you live off the land, and the belief that you are shaping it for the better as you make your way through it. That sense of belonging, and the freedom that comes with a game that trusts you to find your own way while being willing to be at your side when it’s needed, has us feeling really good about Where Winds Meet.
The Beginning of A Beginning
It’s probably too early to tell if Where Winds Meet can capture the attention of increasingly discerning RPG players. But from our early impressions of the game, it’s something that brings special moments in its gameplay loop that could make it a mainstay of the online RPG world.
It’s a testament to the game’s design that many of those moments could even come along when you play solo. And let’s not forget the potential for this one to become a legendary PvP title that brings the best of its players to arenas that shine with Unreal Engine 5’s visual flair.
There are probably going to be several meta builds for you to check out and prioritize in the run-up to the game’s console release. They’re only going to make exploring this world even better, and be useful starting points for you to bring your own touches to your character as your confidence in your legend grows.
Where Winds Meet is a journey where you, your choices, and your weapon become one in a way that sticks and guides you along the long and winding road to glory with aplomb. And what’s more, it respects your agency as you do it. It’s shaping up to be a love letter to RPG fans that’s quite well-written and charming enough to earn more than a passing glance.
It’s time to continue our journey and see what our futures hold.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.
