What went wrong with Where Winds Meet

It's really hard to explain why I don't like Where Winds Meet.

It's actually a very polished product that's amazing in many ways:

• The detail and quality of the graphics is top tier. I've got an older PC running GTX 1070 and I can still put the settings on Ultra and get a smooth framerate with no stutters.
• The world is huge, detailed, populated, and there's literally something to do every 30 seconds you walk in any direction, even if it's killing Elk for equipment upgrade material.
• The main story critical event cutscenes are superb and better than any western movie I've seen in the theatres over the last 10 years.

But at the same time there are some really fundamental things which are done so poorly they are really substandard and I can't understand how they got past quality assurance. Here are some sample issues:

Basic controls/quality of life are missing

There is a TON of inventory items but sometimes you don't even how to find what you just picked up.

• For example, in the Kaifeng bathhouse, you can pick up "Bath Ingredients" from the table. But what are they? It's not in the Notifications where things normally show when you pick them up. Inventory has literally hundreds of items and no way to sort the more than half dozen category tabs by "most recent".

Another example: I finished massaging someone in the Kaifeng bathhouse, and I get a VERY BRIEF message flash on the screen (so brief I missed it the first time and did another massage to trigger it) that I should go to chat to collect a reward. But I check all my chat channels including Notifications and there is literally nothing related to this event.

• It turns out what needs to happen is the person you have massaged needs to open chat and send a tip. And then presumably there is something for the person who massaged them to get something. I only found this out when I lay down to wait for a massage.
• After I get a massage, my skin turned yellow and persisted after I bathed or went out of the bathhouse. There's no status on me that I can inspect. What now? Zero guidance. Or was it so quick that I missed the message?

This brings up a whole other topic of not having enough instructions for certain things.

Automatically starting quests you cannot complete

It seems to be in vogue currently for game to have "quests" you just stumble into and start automatically. Recently, SWTOR introduced a whole bunch of these "Dynamic Encounters" where getting close starts the event and you can stay to finish or not.

Where Winds Meet screws this up with automatically starting quests that you cannot complete, but don't know it.

They already have so many distractions in the game in every inch of the map and this is just another one.

Which might not be so bad since you can just ignore them and they'll reset eventually, but sometimes after doing all the quest steps, you find out at the end that you can't complete it and have no idea how.

For example, there is a quest to carefully tail a would-be pickpocket and when you finally catch him in the act, you are told to immobilize him using a skill you don't have and have no idea how to get. And honestly I didn't even know which menu to begin looking at to find the required skill: Is it an "Inner Way" ability? A "Mystic Skill"? One of the "Melodies of Peace" unlocks I can't even see unless I'm talking to the Oddity Exchange Merchant?

So not only have they probably interrupted you while you were on your way to do something for something that sometimes turns out to be not just a short diversion, but you can't even complete it, resulting in completely wasted time.

And to top it off you will get a failure message splashed across your screen.

Some really badly done minigames

The two main ones are music instrument playing / rhythm game and Gift of Gab.

Music Instrument Playing

• You have to use both hands on the keyboard to control 8 or sometimes more keys and the rate at which the notes come at you feels ludicrous, at least from the perspective of someone who hasn't played piano for example.

Gift of Gab

• This is a type of card game battler where you choose attack cards to play according to how much energy you have to spend.
• You are even told to inspect the various cards to decide what to do.
• However there really isn't any time to read the flavour text or even the cards you play because the enemy constantly attacks you. So just spam your cards and hope you win!
• And then once in a while you press either Q or E to do some kind of opportunity action. Again, lots of flavor text, no time to read it.

Really not sure who the playtesters were or how these systems got past alpha testing but QA should be fired especially if they were crowdsourced.

Too many menus and events with cryptic names

Some people actually don't know there IS a daily login "event", and it's time limited. Because it's under Events > Dawn to Dusk. and there are seven events and you have to remember to click it every day.

When it's a login event and it really should be the first thing that pops up when you log in, especially since it's a time limited event and you can miss the goodies there.

Then there's the "Lumina Guide - Qinhe", another "Event". Also time limited but you wouldn't know it unless you clicked on it and honestly with seven "Events" it's already quite overwhelming to players especially when four of them are "permanent" events with no time limit (then how is it an "Event"?)

Someone who just wants to get on with playing the game instead of spending a half hour scanning "Events" that have scattered tasks which derail them from the flow of the story and game would probably miss these time-limited "events".

Under "Recommended" in "Events" it should really actually make a recommendation (say, the time-limited events?) but it promotes an entirely separate "Event" to link your social media.

A lot of things should have been streamlined, a lot of overlap deleted, and the whole "Lumina Guide - Qinghe" really should be deleted entirely as it just pulls players in different directions when there's already an overwhelming amount of stuff to do.

But as a player you can't really ignore it because some of the rewards like "Mystic Skills Breakthrough Support Box" provide rare materials that can be hard to get elsewhere.

Here's another example of something that should have been streamlined: The "Season" menu, which has two main parts: "A Warrior's Journey" (which looks like yet another "Event" where you just do things/play the game) and "Battle Pass Update" which just takes you to the Battle Pass, which has its own menu item.

There's the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid, that really a lot of eastern games need to stick to. 

Inadequate instructions

There are many instances where the instructions are simply not enough. We'll go through just a couple of examples.

For example, under Events > Lumina Guide - Qinghe > Chronicle of Shadows there are tasks like such as "Go to Blissful Retreat". If you click on the navigation arrow, it points to a "Wandering Seal" which is basically a photography landmark where you can click to take a photo.

What it doesn't tell you is you need to not just go there, click the landmark and take a photo, but you have to upload that photo with a special one-time action that pastes the picture in the Guide.

And that one-time action in the photography menu is "Submit" which is a round button that shows up after you take a photo, has the icon of a calligraphy brush, and no tooltip telling you anything useful at all.

When you press Submit it gives you a cryptic warning that you will get Exploration Points for the Lumina Guide and "this action cannot be changed". What action cannot be changed? Getting Exploration Points? Is that supposed to be a bad thing? Turns out it's the photo that cannot be changed because the Submit button will disappear after this.

Another example: When you finally find where the non-combat events are (Wandering Paths > Casual Co-op), under "Leisure" there is a "Mirage Boat" event twice every Sunday.

There is even an NPC there that supposedly hands out boarding passes.

But it's early days since launch and if you show up for the event, there will be nothing because apparently someone actually has to build a boat first (?)

And building a boat isn't quite so straightforward either:

• Nothing in the event links you to how to build a Mirage Boat.
• You have to find the "Painted Boat Multiplayer Event" on the map (near the Mirage Boat event),
• Discover you need 170 Mirage Torn Page currency to get started
• Which is in turn purchased from the Draw Shop with Harmonic Core currency
• Which you either get by pulling on the gacha as one of the grand prizes
• Or you can buy it with 5 units of Sound Jade currency, which is also in the Draw Shop for... 1 Harmonic Core.

Did I mention there are way too many currencies?

Too many systems and currencies

For example there's Jade Fish currency for the Season which is important because you need it to buy various things in the Season shop that are fundamentally important, such as for upgrading your gear.

But the amounts you can earn are capped by type of activity, so you have to see how to spread things out. This theoretically forces you to be more rounded in your engagement with the game but is it really necessary to have a separate Season currency?

The various systems and currencies feel like a way to ensure players engage with many systems in the game, but the net effect is really just overwhelming the player with too much information and pulling them in too many directions when this is an open world game that is meant to give a sense of freedom to CHOOSE what you want to do and when you do it.

Instead of all the systems and events and time-limited tasks, I feel games should eliminate all FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) through time-limited tasks and trust the wealth of enjoyable content to keep players engaged naturally instead of pushing them with piles of "Events" and having them metagaming the various systems to figure out what they "cannot" do anymore because there aren't anymore rewards in that direction.

There's really no need to rush anyone to do all the content. Some people want to go vertical and delve into one thing deeply, others want to just spread their time out and do whatever they fancy, and neither should be pressured unduly, especially when there's a wealth of content of so many types.

For example, in Duet Night Abyss, you can run dungeons an unlimited number of times for whatever drops you need. And there just aren't convoluted systems controlling what game modes you should be doing. Unlike Where Winds Meet, you don't have to think "have I run out of rewards for this type of currency in this game mode?" or "which modes must I do each day or I will miss out on something or other?"

(Of course DNA has daily activities for daily rewards but there are so many options there you are likely to get all the daily rewards without feeling railroaded.)

And what happens when the weekly limit for a currency is reached? Should I stop playing because I'll not be getting rewards? I might as well play next week when my effort won't be "wasted". And what if those rewards came from tasks that are one-time only?

Instead of encouraging me to play, I feel these systems try to monopolize my time and therefore has the opposite effect on me: I DON'T want to play because I don't want to let a game play/control me. I'd rather go with something simpler, with clearer choices while still having enjoyable game modes and control of my own time.

Some live service games have gone the cozy route but most are still monopolizing player time presumably because they need to snatch players away from other games and grab market share. The very systems they use to do this make the game an unenjoyable experience.

That said, some newer games like Duet Night Abyss have considerably relaxed the FOMO aspect of live service games, and I hope to see the industry move more in that direction.

The Story

Early on the story seems very promising -- intriguing and well-told with dramatic cutscenes.

But then it gets loaded with more and more side trips especially once you reach Kaifeng. Frequently we're off on some tangent, despite having a 7-day time limit to an investigation.

The locations become increasingly implausible such as epic waterways and caverns and ruins under the city.

And then there are "just because" boss fights with characters that just seem to hang out there, like the hulk with the bird somewhere underneath Kaifeng.

The plot is literally lost now and along with it, the player.