If there’s one thing we’re not short of in the year of our lord 2023, it’s open-world RPGs. You can’t move for the little blighters. It takes a lot, then, for a new title to step into that crowded arena and make us sit up and take notice. But Where Winds Meet might have just stolen Gamescom for me.
Where Winds Meet is a hugely new ambitious open-world RPG developed by Chinese studio Everstone Games. The game takes place in Ancient China, and blends its historical setting with dashes of the mythological here and there, most notably via your custom character and their huge range of moves and abilities. It’s a game that, in my 20-odd minutes with it, managed to give off Elden Ring, Assassin’s Creed, Ghost Of Tsushima, and even a hint of The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom. In other words, it has the DNA of a serious banger.
Take a look at Where Winds Meet in action below.
My demo began with a quick walk through the game’s combat, where the Souls-like inspirations are most evident. Your character can block, dodge, parry, and combine light and heavy attacks with special moves. It’s fast, demanding, and slick as all hell. Nailing the timing on a parry before following up with a bloody execution is endlessly satisfying. I’ll also say, as someone who had to play with a keyboard and mouse who has never played an action game with a keyboard and mouse, I picked up the flow of combat very quickly. That’s a testament to the game’s design, rather than a weird flex re my own ability, to be clear.
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After the combat basics I was shown a character creation screen that might just be the most outrageously in-depth I’ve ever seen. You can customise pretty much every part of your character’s features right down to the most minute details, and if I’d had more time to screw around with it I’m sure I could’ve spent all day in there. Alas, it was time to drop into the game’s open-world, which is outrageously gorgeous.
We talk a lot about how Ghost Of Tsushima was one of last generation’s prettiest games, but Where Winds Meet somehow manages to make Sucker Punch’s PlayStation gem look like a dirty brown poo stain. Everstone has created a world alive with colour and vivid detail, one of rolling green hills and fields of flowers for miles. At the moment Where Winds Meet is only confirmed for PC, but I’d love to see it push PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S to their limits.
I didn’t get an awful lot of time to explore, sadly, but Where Winds Meet looks set to take its open-world design from the likes of Breath Of The Wild and Elden Ring: much more focus on simply letting the player wander from point to point, rather than hammering us with endless objectives and markers. There’s also a touch of Ghost Of Tsushima, as I followed a butterfly through a field to some treasure before being ambushed by an enemy. Did the butterfly set me up? I simply can’t say at this point.
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The way you move through the world is also a joy. While we sit here waiting for a Superman game, Everstone has just dropped the ultimate superhero sim on us. Our character can dash through the world at incredible speeds, running over water and automatically leaping over obstacles. They can also “wind walk”, an incredible feature Everstone showed me at the very end of the demo. Similar to Tears Of The Kingdom, our character can leap from high up in the sky and quite literally fly through the air before gliding down to a nearby point of interest. The level of verticality is mind-boggling, and I can’t wait to see how it factors into exploring the world.
One of my main takeaways from my brief time with Where Winds Meet was that it has a really fun sense of humour baked into its gameplay and world design. One special move allowed me to leap onto a goat and charge into enemies, and given how many moves and abilities there are I don’t doubt there’ll be plenty more that are just as - if not more - silly. At another point in the demo I ran into an NPC and my character simply leap-frogged over their head and carried on sprinting. It’s little touches like this that further serve to set Where Winds Meet apart from the rabble.
If I have one concern it’s that Where Winds Meet could try to be too many things to too many people. Everstone has never made a game on this scale before, and they’re already talking about it being more than a huge, gorgeous open-world adventure. There’s talk of fishing, being able to build houses via a crafting system, and generally going off and playing the game in completely different ways (if you’d rather sack off being a hero and become a merchant, you totally can apparently). That’s before we even get to the tons of combat skills and various other RPG elements. Bigger isn’t always better, but if Everstone really can deliver everything it wants to then Where Winds Meet could just set a new high watermark for open world adventure games. You’ll definitely want to keep an eye on this one.
Featured Image Credit: NetEaseTopics: PC