Where Winds Meet is officially out, bringing players into an epic open-world action RPG in the heart of ancient China’s tenth century. It’s basically what an Assassin’s Creed would be like if it were a Chinese gacha game.
While everybody else is having fun exploring the game’s fantastical world, the game’s UI is so unintuitive that I'm beginning to lose patience with it.
I was part of the few who managed to play Where Winds Meet’s beta a few months ago. I’ve spent a couple of hours wandering through its gorgeous open world, slaying foes with my umbrella or wrestling with a bear. But, every now and then, the overwhelming number of menus has completely soured my experience. There are just too many tabs to navigate, and it breaks the pace of what I was doing.
Porting the same “mobile-like” UI to PC and consoles seems like a strange move. I half-expected NetEase and Everstone Studio to at least try to optimize its user interface when it officially released, but unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be the case. It’s still the same menu systems I was familiar with in the beta, and it’s still unnecessarily complicated.
While I’ve been enjoying the game’s Wuxia combat and its myriad of odd jobs and quests, having to navigate through the game’s abysmal UI breaks me out of the immersion. Moving inside menus and then inside submenus to other submenus feels like a joke, and not even muscle memory can help me with how silly it all is. It’s clearly a ‘mobile first’ game, and its console experience feels like an afterthought.
Playing on the PlayStation 5 seems like a bad idea for a game like this. Without a mouse, I’m forced to constantly move my analog sticks and the trigger buttons to navigate hundreds of buttons before finally getting what I want.
Not only that, the constant presence of the in-game chat overlay is taking me out of the grand Wuxia experience. This isn’t a true MMO, so I don’t need to see what everyone’s talking about at the moment. I just want my peace and quiet, exploring ancient China on my own. I don’t want to worry about obnoxious pop-ups and notifications pestering my open-world experience.
I guess this is just the price to pay for a free-to-play game. NetEase obviously has to appease the mobile market with Where Winds Meet, but they should at least consider that having to navigate multiple tab menus just to get one item is something a lot of people don’t enjoy.
Where Winds Meet is a janky and unpolished game, and I can’t help but feel frustrated by its overwhelming amount of things to press. Even Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed titles have much better player onboarding compared to whatever Everstone Studios has here.
But who am I to complain, really? This is a free-to-play game after all. But it’d be great if they took player feedback and added a variety of accessibility options in future updates.
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