Where winds meet holy shit

TLDR Summary. i m having so much fun playing WWM. i recommend everyone to give it a try.

Long read ahead.

i went in for the memes but damn. its real good.
i m a chinese dude but me and my friends typically have bad experiences with asian developed games as they tend to be ultra grindy and p2w. "its a chinese/korean" game usually comes with the connotation that the game is made intentionally grindy to sell solutions and is filled with p2w.

black myth wukong changed our perspective a little on "chinese games". where we saw a solid game from china.

WWM is a different beast but with some shared DNA.

its technically a single player MMO where you can play as a team but heavily incentivized to play solo first.

it has so many side quests that has you travelling around. and its full of chinese culture. as a chinese person who cant speak chinese and is out of touch from chinese culture. i find this game appreciating chinese culture a whole lot more.

theres a lot of old chinese folklore injected into the game that made me go eeeeeeeeeeeh this is actually an "insert x folklore" reference! if you're from south east asia, you would also know about legend of condor which is also ref'd.

theres a whole lot of love and many interesting sidequests. and its really NOT half assed. i expected to not care about the sidequests, i practically speed runned d4's sidequests.

then i realized one big take away is, the game is NOT seasonal. i'm appreciating the game for what it is and what it has to offer. this is similar to my experience in POE. GGG put so much effort into making seasonal npcs voice acted but i simply skip the dialogue. i got places to be and no time to waste.

but i went into WWM with the idea of just having fun. i really went in with the mindset of "i'll just give it a go, complete the main quest line and get back to POE". but nope. it went the opposite. i m going in HARD. i'm doing all the side quests, i m doing a lot of "meaningless" mini games such as fishing.

content aside. one thing that the game devs nailed on the head was LET PLAYERS HAVE FUN.

the game has an easy "story mode" where you get a lot of help from the game where you could spam the deflect button and you would probably deflect all deflectable attacks in the game. but you could tune it up to a sweaty soulslike mode where you have to actually git gud. some of the harder challenges over ride the difficulty setting so you actually have to git gud if you want to overcome the challenge, but usually these challenges are for bragging rights. they give you titles to show off and some in game rewards but nothing exclusive. which makes them feel optional.

if anyone's played sandbox games like GTA or RDD you know that we love trying to just climb up the hill/mountain rather than follow the proper path. the devs know this too and unlike those games this game is set in a setting where we're fantasy kungfu fighters so they just let us RUN UP WALLS and do parkour. i rarely found any invisible walls and usually those are at the edge of the map rather than an actual boundary. this makes me want to explore every crook and cranny the game has to offer.

i m level 55 now, and one annoying thing the game does is have level caps that require actual IRL time to bypass. the con is, well, you're stuck. but the pro is, you can still explore the world, an believe me, theres so much to explore. you still earn xp but it becomes stored xp which will accelerate your xp gain once you break the level cap.

the game is VERY skill based but if you have good gear or if you play in story mode, the game is reasonably "challenging enough" for the casual player. but if you're still struggling, you could party up with others and even form a typical "MMORPG" party.

bosses in this game. fucking epic. tian ying holy shit. the game makes me immersed and i really feel like i m a martial artist fighting others with mystical powers. the attacks come fast and are telegraphed. some require memorization but most of them can be reacted to with the caveat where you need to react in a splitsecond (LOL). unless of course you're on story mode where the game is VERY generous with the reaction times. and if you're on story mode, exploiting these generous reaction times can feel so satisfying as it still makes the game feel epic with you deflecting powerful attacks as well as multiple times in a row. and if you're all about skill, cranking up the difficulty lets you really test your actual skill. holy moly.

as for monetization, its mostly cosmetics BUT there are a lot of pay for conveniences. to me i m very harsh and pedantic when it comes to game classification.

My definition of p2w:
Can a player get an advantage over another player by buying an something from the official game shops, using real life money?
if yes then its p2w.

to me stash tabs in poe are p2w as you save infinite time and effort over players who do not buy the premium tabs.

but despite being pedantic on the classification, i would say pay for convenience can be an acceptable form of p2w. almost no one complains about stash tabs being p2w in poe. and most people are to the point that they misclassify stash tabs as NOT p2w. i view stash tabs as acceptable p2w.

as for WWM its in a similar situation where certain conveniences are indeed P2W. but i would say theyre "acceptable" p2w similar to POE.

closing.

one thing i really appreciate about the game is letting players have fun and playing how they want to play within reason.

one highly debated point in poe forums is xp penalty. some want it removed, some want it retained and some want it to be made harsher.

i used to be one of the retainers. but i have long since changed my stance. Hardcore mode exists. if your idea of making players play better is by giving them a penalty. hardcore mode exists. casuals just want to have fun.

WWM gave me that. want to cheese a boss? sure! use story mode! dont want to walk a long winded path to reach an objective? you're the boss, go wall run up the mountain if you prefer it that way!

death penalty? item gets hit with some durability loss. but its mostly negligible as you could just pay to have em repaired. you lose something but it doesnt make you feel salty.

POE has many areas where the game can be made more fun. trade for an instance. it took the game a literal decade before players were given async trade.

a lot of players tend to talk about getting good at the game. the reality is, the baseline of being good at poe is just getting good gear and just "moving out of damage" areas. you need a high baseline of good gear to get there.

in WWM players rarely have access to speed enhancements. playing on harder difficulties require actual real skill. much more than what poe has to offer.

its a different genre for sure. but one major take away that i have is POE really needs to be more fun.

the meme "no fun allowed" exists for a reason.

i've been semi dedicated to this league but after getting hooked on WWM. i no longer care for the league. i care for playing a more fun game. and to all the people who would defend the xp penalty and how POE is not that kind of game. maybe you guys are right. and the proper solution for people who dont like the xp penalty is to just play other games. and that is exactly what i m doing.

I'd rather play PoE2.

sorry exsea, I didn't read the wall of text :D

Its great if u like the game and have fun playing.
I couldn't get into it. I tried for 2-3 hours, but I just can't get over the menus and meaningless currencies. Exploration felt bad to me, because the reward was always some sort of currency that I didn't know what to do with.
Also the fighting system, at least in the beginning, was basically parry until their resolve is broken, attack once, repeat. It just didn't feel very impactful.

To me it looks like a mid game. Lots of stuff to do, but everything is just "good enough" and that's not worth my time.

thats perfectly fine. after all everyone has their own personal opinions that may differ from one another! cheers!

Tried it - absolute trash - clearly designed with mobile in mind.

The game is 'only' mildly p2w right now - yes - but if you think that's not gonna change in the near future[Removed by Support]

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arandan#3174 wrote:

Tried it - absolute trash - clearly designed with mobile in mind.

The game is 'only' mildly p2w right now - yes - but if you think that's not gonna change in the near future, [Removed by Support]

to say its trash is fine. you're entitled to your opinion and i m not gonna try defending it since you've already made your judgement.

as for p2w. it already has pay for convenience the same level as poe's premium stash tabs which is also pay for convenience. i consider pay for convenience as p2w but on an acceptable level.

as for is it going to change in the future. if poe can survive on a similar business model, what makes you think wwm cannot?

if we check steam charts, wwm is doing pretty good and even better than poe in comparison.

and funny that you mention of "in the future". wwm global is actually "suffering" from lagging behind from the asian servers. wwm china has been online for more or less a year now and the community is still going strong and if theres any p2w there, we would have known about it now.

also, dont forget there are plenty of whales that over spend in the game. theres an in game boat that players can earn by spending 40k USD. thats really crazy and i've actually been on a few of these player own boats.

[Removed by Support]

edit: support removed the entire last sentence so i ll rephrase it.

being biased, its too easy to throw assumptions. if you look at existing information and with a more mature and objective mindset, free of bias. you can make a more better educated assumption.