Where Winds Meet has the potential to be the next big thing. After a very successful launch in mainland China, the free-to-play action RPG is set to be unleashed on the rest of the world later this year, bringing with it fast-paced action gameplay, rich wuxia – a culture-wide genre of media focused on martial arts and spiritualism – theming, and plenty of Chinese imagery from top to bottom.
Typically, when games make the jump from China over to the rest of the world, a number of changes are made to adapt to the global market. We saw this in Persona 5: The Phantom X recently, which saw both minor and major changes to its monetization, progression, and more.
In the depths of the extensive NetEase development campus, between long sessions of early gameplay, I had the chance to sit down with Where Winds Meet lead designer Chris Lyu and global lead designer Soul to talk about the game and its journey to the west. According to them, Where Winds Meet won’t see any major changes between its Chinese release and its upcoming global release — its core content is the same no matter where you play it.
“In terms of content, there are no major changes to the global version,” Soul tells me through a translator. “The core content is pretty much the same as the Chinese version. Of course, we knew that in the future, we would face different regions of players, so in terms of the campaigns and localization, we definitely did a lot of regionalization depending on the different groups.”
Lyu says that there were a few necessary changes to the game’s terminology, too, as they were steeped in “very blurry of complex Chinese notions” that players overseas wouldn’t necessarily understand. Where possible, these notions were kept intact and explained further, or shifted towards analogous notions and references that could be more easily understood, but some were just so reliant on the Chinese identity that they needed to be changed entirely.
One thing that won’t see major changes is the game’s monetization, which is largely free-to-play with the only microtransactions being for cosmetic items. Lyu stresses that there will never be any pay-to-win elements – Where Winds Meet features PVP as well as co-op and solo play – and that the team’s main focus was on creating something fun first that anyone around the world could enjoy.
“I personally think that the perception of a fun game and, in terms of what people want from a game, is actually pretty similar among all regions in the world,” Lyu says. “People just want very fun games, enjoyable games. We never wanted to make a pay-to-win game, and we don’t have any pay-to-win items in the marketplace. We don’t sell stats, we don’t sell power levels. What we sell is basically just cosmetics. For example, the costumes and the visual effects of different abilities, it never affects the power level. That’s pretty acceptable among players in China … and I think this will also be accepted by the rest of the world.”
No specific release date has been announced for Where Winds Meet yet, but Lyu and Soul are thinking long-term for the global release of the game. It’s a game that’s firmly focused on wuxia culture, something that people outside of China might not have had a lot of exposure to in the past, and it’s important to the team that players have time to soak in the new culture. The game is supposed to act as both an introduction to the genre and a celebration, and the plan is to keep players immersed in it, forever digging deeper into something they may not have seen before.
“We really hope that the global players can enjoy this kind of wuxia culture and we wanted to do a lot of things to really introduce people, to become more familiar with the wuxia open world and fall in love with it,” Lyu says. “We also plan to keep on updating and including new content and regions in the game, so that we can really let players experience the story inside this kind of wuxia cultural context so people can create a lot of bonds and interactions with NPCs and other players.”
Where Winds Meet is set to be released globally on PS5 and PC later this year.
Disclosure: NetEase paid for me to travel and stay in China for the purposes of playing Where Winds Meet and interviewing its developers.