Where Winds Meet Is a Huge RPG With Weird and Wild Ambitions | gamescom 2023

ign.com:

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