#So I played a bit of Where Winds Meet

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civic bolt
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I didn't spoiler myself, so all I know so far is from the Steam page and from the parts I played.

Character Creation

  • Very eastern-like character appearance by default, but the character creator is so detailed that people managed to create John Wick, Spongebob, Gigachad, and more.
  • You can make pretty cool characters, with very unique looks.
  • There is an option to generate a character from your voice as well as your image. I won't use that, cause I don't like uploading this to their servers.
  • Characters can be shared with others, not sure how that works specifically, cause I didn't do that yet.
  • Right now, you can't easily delete your character, which is pretty annoying.
    • Main because you select a difficulty at the start and the higher difficulties aren't available if you didn't select them upfront.
    • Friend of mine selected "Legend", which is basically the 4th difficulty (e.g. Easy, Normal, Expert, Legend). I used Expert and I can't go to Legend anymore.
  • I read somewhere that multiple characters etc. comes "later", as the western release of the game is a few versions old.
  • Other than that, I didn't spent much time here, cause too many sliders.
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So I played a bit of Where Winds Meet

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What's the gameplay about?

As far as I can tell, it's a mixture of:

  • Open World Exploration
    • Optionally coop with up to 3 friends
  • Story-driven main quest
    • Not sure that works properly in coop, but that's fine
  • Blends into an actual MMO with PvP (Duels, Guild Wars) and PvE (Exploration, Dungeons, Raids) after the story
    • I'm not even sure I fully started the story yet, so can't say much about it
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How is the combat?

  • Feels like a mix of a Souls-like Game and an ARPG.
  • Souls-like aspects:
    • Heal refreshes on rest
    • Dodge, Block, Parry mechanics
    • Strong bosses with longer tells, non-blockable and non-parryable attacks
      • Gives Elden Ring vibes
  • APRG aspects:
    • Different attacks based on different Weapons (could slot this into Souls-like too, as Elden Ring does this too fwiw)
    • Different "over the top" abilities that can be learned and used
    • Faster combat (although that doesn't exclude Souls-like stuff of course)
    • Triple Jump and such stuff. Just feels a bit more arcady in this regard.
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How is the coop?

  • Joining it was easy enough.
  • Not sure you can do the main quest line in coop.
  • We did a puzzle area, where we had to find some clues and go through some secret area to later unlock and receive some treasure.
    • This was fun, even if it was easy. But it was also the first out of 8 puzzles in that area.
    • Took a bit to get going, because I couldn't interact with elements of the puzzle until we noticed that we have to actively start the scenario together.
    • Also not sure this syncs properly, cause I was still seeing the icon of the puzzle area as if I didn't actually finish it later when left the coop session.
  • Enemies teleport a bit and aren't animating properly when running.
    • But I can live with some bugs. Most Souls-like games have no proper multiplayer at all, so I take what I can get.
  • There is apparently a system in place that allows friends that play together to "grow closer".
    • I don't know what this in the end offers, but I like that some social elements are tied to playing with your friends.
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Anything else?

So far, this is mostly all I can share, cause I only played a little bit. There is, however, one more system that I found really cool and fun.

During exploration and in fights, you can get hurt in various ways. May it be getting poisoned, a bone broken or a concussion.
In most games you'd use a bandage or wait for the "debuff" to run out. In WWM, you can't ignore the ailment, otherwise it gets worse.

So how does one get rid of it? That's the "cool" part. For some of the simpler stuff you can go to an NPC doctor of sorts, that can fix the ailment and you are good to go. That does require you to travel there, though, and the NPC can't fix everything. For stuff that they can't fix, you need a player.

Players can focus on being "healers", which in this case is more like a doctor (there is also healing in combat for the dungeons and raids, but that's a different story). Whenever you have an ailment, you can ask a healer via a menu to help you. They will join your session and then sit down with you to perform a minigame.

That minigame is basically like a fight from a deckbuilder, like Slay the Spire. The ailment will be above the damaged player on the right, has health, indicates what it will do next turn, etc. So far we saw it "attack", "buff", "shield" and even "summon". The healer has 20 minutes or 10 turns to beat the ailment by reducing its health to 0. Every turn, the healer has 3 energy and a cycling hand of cards to choose from, where cards cost different amounts of energy and can damage the ailment, buff/shield the healer, etc.

At the same time, the player that is being healed gets asked questions about how they feel. Answering those correctly (not yet sure how one figures that out), grants the healer some additional powerful cards.

It's not super deep, but I find the idea pretty cool and we enjoyed trying to heal each other.

shell stratus
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Eastern Games are much better than western games imo

open badger
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btw. that game seems to make use of all cores, and load seems pretty balanced, which is rare to see...

civic bolt
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Ah, haven't even looked at that.

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Reading about the Engine they used, that makes sense though.

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A major focus of Messiah Engine is efficiently taking advantage of multiple processors.[9] Besides general rendering, physics, and UI threads, Messiah Engine attempts to break down jobs even further into "execution slices," with a queue to manage task dependencies.[9] To support multiple platforms, Messiah Engine uses a hardware abstraction layer composed of three layers: algorithm, translation, and device driver.[9]

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In <random game made with the engine>, players will marvel over 1,200 draw calls and over 700,000 polygons drawing in one frame with 60fps on an 11” iPad Pro.

shell stratus
shell stratus
civic bolt
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Maybe that's what I've been doing wrong. I don't own multiple pig farms.

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Or maybe that's what they call their eastern MMORPGs...

open badger
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doesn't help the microstutters when running into new areas, wonder if that's a Proton issue or happens on Windows, too

civic bolt
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Don't think I had those. But I'm also playing at the limit of my PC I think. Putting everything to Ultra it runs on 75 FPS (refresh rate of the screens), but I do fall below that sometimes. Would blame my PC though.

open badger
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🤔 i only have 30% gpu usage tho, so i feel like this might be either CPU/IO bottleneck or proton translation layer

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the AI integration is pretty good tho 😄

civic bolt
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Maybe it literally just loads too much stuff at once, causing a hitch.

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The AI integration is poor comedy, tbh. I battled with that guy that's rhyming the whole time. Didn't manage to get him as a friend yet.

open badger
civic bolt
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Ha, yeah. To be fair, that's a perfectly valid way of using those AIs and integrating them into a game.

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Have you got into contact with that healing minigame yet?

open badger
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nope

civic bolt
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Did you manage to get damaged? :D Or rather, injured (top left of your screen, redish icons)

open badger
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got him tho 😄

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open badger
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killed 3 warriors... got defeated by 2 geese 😄

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civic bolt
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I only met one goose so far that i had to yeet into the lake.

open badger
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wait, was that the one fighting the bear? (didn't catch that i had to yeet it to the lake with the skill)

civic bolt
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Na, there was one between the first and the second area. Where you also find that music mini game.

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Where these little "bridges" are. Across the water there was a goose. If you yeet that into the water you can loot its treasure. I got a pet goose from that that follows me

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I feel like based on google one was supposed to use Meridian Touch on it. Pretty sure I used the bear fighting style on it and just yeeted it into the water. That's what the player note's suggested.

open badger
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alright, you got me at pet goose, got to find that thing again 😄

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the game is just too inviting to just run around and explore instead of following the quest "path"

civic bolt
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Yeah, I did read the pet goose doesn't stay forever, but can be reaquired. Not sure though.
I know there is a goose somewhere where you can train the healing mechanic in the game.

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I also found a few peeps who got beaten the crap out of by some geese

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Seems like you aren't alone

shell stratus
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how a geese killed u mister Cedric. Thats so silly sir

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U must be weak in the game or this geesse has God mode activiated

civic bolt
open badger
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yet

shell stratus
open badger
shell stratus
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Shoot, the legendary geese

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Nervous Cedric noises

civic bolt
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That thing got yeeted into the lake by me.

shell stratus
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hold up.. Is cedric saying he managd to yeet the OP geese?

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what sort of cheats u bought this time 😉

civic bolt
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Finally found some more time to play yesterday. I do feel like they aren't necessarily doing that well explaining some of the Minigames. Like the Scholar Profession ones. You can run into highlevel NPCs that you lose against without the game really giving you a tutorial. Only got clearer after I followed the side quest for it.
Also beat the first world boss with a friend in coop. Game has a bit of a desync problem, where the boss teleports a bit around and sometimes attacks each of us individually on our screen instead of having some authoritive state. Don't know if the coop sessions are hosted by the player whose world one is in or if it's a dedicated server of sorts. Would be shit if that's the base standard of multiplayer boss fights once I reach the dungeons and raids.

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Also reached a story boss that I still have to beat today. Will get to that later. Fun fight although I think I skipped a dialogue somewhere, cause I don't quite understand why I am where I am atm.

shell stratus
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or ucan jump to final boss directly if you want

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means progression is locked or unlocked and u can do whatever u want

civic bolt
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I'm not sure. There is definitely a set of Story bosses that you only reach by following the main quest. But there are also overworld bosses you can try and beat whenever you reach them. Not sure they are all killable though. Then dungeon and raids only unlock later I think, when one is through the main quest stuff. I also saw that I could queue for some single boss coop battles, but haven't done that yet.

Game still suffers from it's absolute dog shit UX.

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Too many menus with too many submenus that one can't remember.

shell stratus
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seems complicated game tbh

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many menus and stuff etc

open badger
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yea, also Cedric not sure if you noticed, but there are like 20 submenus where you can claim rewards for completing stuff

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and some reviews said that the english translation gets worse at some point 🙁

civic bolt
civic bolt
shell stratus
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so bad UI desgin.. Cedric

open badger
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lmao, when you kill an friendly NPC you get a bounty on your head, which other players will happily try to claim, if they succeed you end up in prison

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civic bolt
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And other's can throw stuff at you :D

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I alread participated in one of those the other day.

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I assume you already beat your inner demon in the main story? You are probably quite far ahead of me, cause I didn't have much time to play.

open badger
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yea, lvl 53

civic bolt
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:D I should really not have shown it to you haha

dense sail
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Am I too late to join the convo and bring my take of this game 😄
I think this game was great until i reached to the big city.
Bad sides: Too long npc dialogues without voice, its very hard to get into the story and main story is kinda meh.
Good sides: Combat is great and I pulled the fire cape in my 17th pull Hyped

civic bolt
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Na, not too late. I haven't really played it anymore, however. Had no time.

dense sail
civic bolt
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For the past couple years, I've been playing several such games with a friend together.
We usually also finish the games, more or less equally fast.
Lies of P is kinda on hold, because he didn't enjoy the movement/combat.
I will probably have to pick it up on my own again at some point.

dense sail
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On release lies of p didn't have difficulty options and dodging was very weak; if your friend is a classic souls-like enjoyer, then its only natural that he didn't like it. There are many other players who felt the same but they made dodging a viable option and brought difficulty options (which is good for casual players cuz the parry window was like 8 frames on release and in hardest difficulty now).

open badger
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yea i felt the same about the story, it started good but then it went into nothingness...

i've played this for an hour and it seems kinda fun, too. (UE game btw)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3513350/Wuthering_Waves/

Steam
Wuthering Waves

Wuthering Waves is a story-rich open-world action RPG with a high degree of freedom. You wake from your slumber as Rover, joined by a vibrant cast of Resonators on a journey to reclaim your lost memories and change the world.

We're working to resolve Wuthering Waves' compatibility with STEAM DECK and will share updates in the community. Thank…

dense sail
open badger
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it's somewhere in between