It’s always an amazing feeling when a game brings you to moments that have you staring slack-jawed at your screen at a vista that’s so beautiful your hand automatically goes to your capture button. We’ve had quite a few of those this year, but Where Winds Meet is the one that has our attention.
But that very scrutiny has exposed a few weaknesses in the armor of an otherwise solid experience that does very well for a free-to-play experience. Look closely enough, and you see a few visual and graphical glitches that should not have been there in the global release. That’s especially true on consoles, with the game’s engine unable to keep up with its grand ambitions in busy locations.
But is what we have still worth playing, complete with its little imperfections? Join us as we take a look at this wuxia-based spectacle from a graphical perspective and comment on how it’s managed to fare when it’s under pressure to perform.
It’s worth knowing that Where Winds Meet runs on NetEase’s proprietary Messiah Engine, aimed at bringing the game to PC, consoles, and mobile phones. That’s quite ambitious, and playing on higher-end systems shows off an outstanding level of beauty to the game. Its cities are dense and full of life, while the draw distances on open plains are nothing short of insane. Combat flows smoothly and does well to present the spectacle that it is designed to make you a part of.
There’s a lot of attention to detail in the way things are presented on the visual front in Where Winds Meet. It begins with your character and any NPCs who are a part of your immediate gameplay loop, with ornate details on armor and clothing being quite prominent. Your cape or cloak sways gently in the breeze, as does your hair. It’s all quite well-implemented, a sentiment that carries over to the world at large.
Saturated colors, dramatic silhouettes, and a sense of heightened reality are great vehicles for its wuxia aesthetic. They lend a very natural sort of beauty to Qinghe’s countryside, its rolling fields, rivers, and mountains all there for you to see as you leap to the skies with a martial art that lets you travel vast distances.
Volumetric lighting and atmospheric haze do well to sustain the effects of a dynamic day/night and weather system, making each scenario suitably darker or brighter. It means more realistic – and beautiful – sunsets, snow, rain, clouds, and other such effects that transform the landscape they are meant to affect in ways that make every inch of the game’s massive world very immersive and visually pleasing.
Indoors, the light from candles, lanterns, or your own Wuxia abilities glistens off your armor, or from moisture on the walls, while shadows shift according to your movements so realistically that it’s almost hard to believe that this is a game that’s free to play. That feeling continues to be an undercurrent even as we continue playing today, especially when you enter a settlement or city, Kaifeng being a great example.
In Kaifeng, the bustling crowds and grand architecture of it all give the impression of a city that you might not fully get to see, despite the freedom you have to explore every nook and cranny of it. It’s a sense of grandeur achieved through presenting the scale of it all as cleverly as possible to the player.
The object density is frankly ridiculous, with an abundance of signs, banners, lanterns, stalls, and the like to make the streets look lived in. The city feels like a living metropolis thanks to an NPC count that the developers were quite proud of in the run-up to the game’s global release. It truly feels alive in a way that even AAA games could be hard-pressed to emulate.
Of course, you’re going to be getting into a lot of fights as you make your way around the world, and once again, the visuals prop up everything on offer very well. The wuxia animations are an absolute treat, while sword trails, shockwaves, elemental effects, and important visual cues are presented with such clarity that it almost feels like the game is rooting for you in every battle.
Get surrounded, and your battle against multiple enemies can feel like every move was choreographed as part of a cinematic set-piece. Boss fights come with particle effects that feel like they could belong in a CG-animated film instead of a video game, provided the frame rate manages to keep up.
And that brings us to the downside of a game that looks and plays as well as Where Winds Meet does. But how can a game that looks this good come with graphical issues and still feel as good as it does? It’s time to find out.
Simply put, Where Winds Meet pushes the bulk of its graphical prowess to what’s right in front of you. That works very well when you’re under its spell, your sense of wonder pushing you to keep exploring and taking on enemies in order to progress the story and get your character’s build going. But look beyond the excellent details and character models, and you’re going to see a few inconsistencies.
For instance, certain props and background NPCs suffer a distinct lack of the details that adorn your character and any companions, making them look last-gen if you were to position them next to your player. That carries over to a few areas, both indoors and outdoors, where there are textures that are of a noticeably lower quality than some of the game’s best locations.
In a game that’s as grand as this one, these inconsistencies are quite an annoyance. They detract from the experience once you begin noticing them, as does the occasionally aggressive LOD streaming system that doesn’t seem to be able to handle the responsibilities of working across platforms quite well. But that’s a common side effect, after all.
On the base PS5, texture pop-in and geometry loading issues have cropped up, once again taking away from the beauty of it all. It does carry over even to cutscenes, if you were thinking that these issues are relegated to traversal and could potentially slip right past you as you move forward with your adventure.
Facial animations can look stiff, and there are a few lip-syncing issues that can affect the overall quality of your experience. There’s also a stark contrast between the kinetic, fast-flowing combat and cutscenes, which can look rather stiff in comparison, thanks to how characters prefer to stay in place for important conversations, making them rigid instead of freely moving around to convey more emotion or less of it.
Yes, they do quite a good job for a free-to-play title, but for a game with such outstanding graphical quality, these issues stand out even more. And let’s not forget a UI that’s almost constantly trying to tell you something with popups that frankly ruin the excellent art direction. Those windows and menus really need to be less obtrusive.
A few bugs are also a part of the experience, although they’re likely to be patched out. NPCs can suddenly vanish or perhaps not load in at all, while clipping issues, animation glitches, and the occasional weird bit of physics on cloth are all there for eagle-eyed gamers to spot. But it’s Kaifeng that brings all of these issues to a head.
On PC, players are experiencing massive drops in frame rates even on higher-end setups, courtesy of the Messiah Engine’s cross-platform functionality getting aggressive with its LOD and asset streaming, while runtime shader compilation in DX12 can also cause a lot of stuttering. Memory usage in the city is also an issue, with massive spikes forcing page-file swapping and even hard traversal freezes.
Things aren’t better on the PS5, with Kaifeng and certain boss fights bringing the same issues to the fore. There are also invisible walls and fences, along with characters climbing in the air in places where a building should have been. Even the PS5 Pro can’t keep up, with a lot of complaints about similar issues coming up.
While Everstone is doing all it can to patch things out and make the game as perfect as it can be, the fact that they exist is a testimony to Where Winds Meet’s raw ambition and the minor blips that it has caused along the way.
Despite its problems, there isn’t quite anything like Where Winds Meet as far as wuxia-based open worlds are concerned. It does a brilliant job of bringing your experience to life and is certainly a visual benchmark when things are going well. But its engine and optimizations could definitely use some work to ensure that its ambitions are realized.
If future patches manage to smooth things out in Kaifeng and the rest of the world, this is a game that could rise to become one of the most impressive visual presentations of a massive open world, and a beacon for similar experiences in the future. The fact that it’s a free-to-play title then becomes icing on the cake.
