China is gradually gaining the interest of the Western public. Although they have been producing excellent audiovisual productions for some time, especially in film and television, it has only been in the last few years that their cinema has started to be considered commercially viable outside their borders. A similar trend has occurred with their video games, which have only recently begun to take off among audiences outside of Asia.
The latest case of a game that has taken the world by storm and is starting to dominate the Western market is a game that couldn’t be more Chinese in everything it does. And its name is Where Winds Meet.
A game with a Chinese flavor, but a Western style
This open-world action RPG offers us something very different from what we are used to in this type of games: to live our own wuxia story. What is wuxia? They are the chivalric tales of wandering heroes who roam throughout China, resolving troubles wherever they find them, using martial arts and spectacular moves that defy the logic and physics of reality. Something that the game has captured perfectly.
Positioning ourselves in the period of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, which lasted from 907 to 960 and was a time of tremendous political and social instability for China, our duty will be to act as a gentleman throughout its vast world. Righting wrongs and ensuring we build a reputation as a martial artist across the country.
And it won’t be because we don’t have space to cover and things to do. With 20 squares of map and the ability to specialize in multiple martial arts, weapon uses, as well as numerous mystical arts, the game offers us many ways to create our own legend. And many people are already doing it.
Although the game was officially released on November 14 in Europe and the US, the game has been available on PC since December 27 in China. With three million downloads in the first four days of its release, Where Winds Meet became one of the most important games of this year from the very beginning.
Something that has only grown since its launch in the West. Appearing on PlayStation, Steam, and Epic, within 40 minutes of its release there were 500,000 players just counting Europe and the US, with more than two million during its first 24 hours. Reaching a peak of 190,000 simultaneous players on Steam, it has become the seventh best-selling game in Steam history, the fifth most played, and the second most viewed on its launch day.
The reasons are that the game, besides being visually stunning and offering us radical freedom and a style different from the typical action RPG, is that it is free-to-play. We don’t have to pay for anything to play, making its monetization extremely friendly for the standards of this type of game.
That’s why, if you love games like The Witcher 3 and are even a little intrigued by the wuxia aesthetic, you shouldn’t miss Where Winds Meet. Because few games are going to take the world by storm the way this one is, and besides, it won’t even cost you any money to see if the hype was justified or not.
