Hands On: Where Winds Meet PS5 Is Vast, Visionary, and on the Verge of Collapse

After approximately 20 hours of play, we’ve barely scratched the surface of Where Winds Meet.

We’d considered publishing a Review in Progress, but it quickly became evident that the scale of this game far exceeds the playtime we had available prior to release.

Furthermore, we have questions about the state of the build we were provided access to, and how it will be improved upon the game’s 14th November release. (But more on that later.)

If there’s one thing you need to know immediately about this free-to-play effort from Chinese juggernaut NetEase, however, it’s that its scale beggars belief. This is a 150-hour historical epic with both single player and MMO-style multiplayer features. And it doesn’t cost a dime.

Image: Push Square
While we’re still somewhat unclear about the monetisation here – the functionality was mostly disabled for our pre-release build – our understanding is that it’s largely related to cosmetics, Battle Passes, and content of that ilk.

There is gacha, we believe, but only for clothing and other personalisation content.

If we appear a bit wishy-washy, it’s because this game is so remarkably dense we’re truthfully yet to wrestle with all of it. And in the game’s pre-release environment, we’re still not 100% clear what will change when you download it and play it yourself.

That’s a crucial point because if any other outlets do decide to review the game today, you’re likely to see some scathing commentary about its technical shortcomings.

We encountered dozens of bugs during our time with the game, from incorrect button prompts to chunks of missing dialogue to mislabelled subtitles to unresponsive UIs to crashes.

Image: Push Square
We reported our findings to NetEase and were informed much of this will be fixed, while others remain a priority for the team. At the time of writing, we simply can’t comment on how much of it will be resolved when you download the game yourself.

But despite all of this, we can tell you there’s something potentially remarkable here, if creator Everstone Studios can overcome its ambition and pull everything together into a cohesive, polished whole.

So, what are some points of comparison? The game feels a bit like Ghost of Tsushima to us, with the sprawling plains of opening area Qinghe capturing the same sense of freedom as Sucker Punch’s epic.

But it also has the density of a modern Assassin’s Creed or even a Bethesda RPG, with an apparent 10,000 NPCs going about their business on the map, adding life to every settlement and camp that you stumble upon.

Image: Push Square
A later area, Kaifeng, makes way to a sprawling 10th century city – a thriving metropolis alive with sights, sounds, and stories.

You can choose to prioritise how you want to play Where Winds Meet: do you want the focus to be on single player or multiplayer? Do you want the game to guide you to points of interest or would you like to discover them for yourself? And how much help do you want in combat?

All of these options can be enabled/disabled at the start of your game, and toggled to taste later on. In the interest of time, we turned up the guidance and focused on single player, but we think it might be nice to enjoy this with as little guidance as possible.

The stakes in the story start out relatively light, with a Jade pendant you wore since childhood stolen away.

Image: Push Square
This opens up the plot to a steadily unravelling sequence of secrets, which pull deep from China’s Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. If you’re a fan of Wuxia-style stories or television shows, then you’ll be in your element here.

As we’ve alluded to already: this game is dense. Certain objects in the world can be scanned and added to your compendium for historical context; the UI is a dizzying network of modes, skill trees, unlockables, currencies, and gear.

The game does try to dole it out slowly, but even we found ourselves utterly overwhelmed by everything at our fingertips, and can confidently say we’d need at least another 30 to 50 hours play to understand everything.

Story quests are split between the main campaign and Fractured Tales, which are effectively side-quests that flesh out the world. Keeping track of everything can feel overwhelming, but again it all feeds into the idea you exist within a real place.

Image: Push Square
Combat, meanwhile, spans a multitude of different weapons – from swords and spears to more imaginative armaments like parasols and rope darts.

With award-winning Hong Kong film director Stephen Tung Wai signed up to help choreograph the combat, you can be certain it looks as stylish as a film.

The format subscribes more closely to something like Stellar Blade than Dark Souls, although you do have a stamina meter and can get staggered if you exhaust it.

Again, in the interests of time, we played on the easiest difficulty and so didn’t find things too challenging. But armed with weapons like the aforementioned parasol, we enjoyed how responsive it all felt, even if there’s admittedly a buggy underbelly to it all.

Skills can also be mapped to hot keys, so you can launch some devastating special moves every few seconds or so. We suspect these cooldowns may become a point of criticism for more action-focused players, as you can feel the shadow of an MMO here.

Image: Push Square
We didn’t get to test out the online multiplayer, largely because we concentrated our efforts on the single player quests we were more interested in. But FromSoftware’s influence looms as you will occasionally encounter notes from other players on the ground, hinting at secrets or giving you clues. (Or just outright trolling you in some cases.)

The cutscenes, while unlikely to ever win any cinematography awards, are remarkable and frequent for a free-to-play effort – although the English voice acting leaves a lot to be desired, and as mentioned previously, the subtitles don’t match in the version of the game we played. We’d recommend playing in Chinese, but you may lose context if the script isn’t fixed.

But the quests do a great job of showing the mundanity of 10th century Chinese life, and then mixing that with the spectacle of a wuxia action movie. It’s a quite intriguing contrast.

It’s just difficult to know, at this stage, how long it’s going to take to reach its full potential. The build we played just didn’t feel finished, with the bow-and-arrow trying to take advantage of the DualSense’s adaptive triggers, but barely working.

Image: Push Square
We’re cautious that there’s too much wrong here for it all to be fixed come 14th November, and that’s why we’re shying away from even a Review in Progress at this point

There’s so much to see and, indeed, so much that could theoretically go wrong we find ourselves in uncharted waters here.

But if we were to surmise what we’ve played so far: it’s bold, wildly ambitious, compelling beyond belief, and, well, just about functional.

For every glimpse of something remarkable here, there’s a crack. Can Everstone polish this up to where it needs to be? All we can say is we’re sure it’ll try…

Are you interested in trying Where Winds Meet yourself when it releases this week? Wrestle with the abundance of systems like you’re in the middle of Wuxia fantasy in the comments section below.