I Paid Ten Dollars To Put A Chicken On A 3D Guy’s Head

As per often, I had a small handful of Things I Would Like To Do in the last couple posts. We’re over a week into the second month of the new year. Did I, at least do something ✨new✨ last month?

Sure. Ate food. Was good.

Also, I completely forgot about the entire goal and instead spent about half my January playing vibeo gaem.

Where Winds Meet is a free-to-play— wait wait let me finish it’s a free game where you run around fantasy ancient China doing open world things, like getting your shit wrecked by a surprisingly well-structured linear plot, doing 500 sidequests before ever touching the main goalposts, button-mashing through fights while being gradually taught to button-mash less mindlessly, and chasing butterflies. It’s pretty fun, it’s effectively a triple-A game with a pricetag of $0, and I wouldn’t have chucked ten bucks at it if it wasn’t.

“But a-flyleaf dot github dot com,” you may be thinking, “since when were you A Gamer™? And you spent money on it?? Also, how the hell is this free. There must be a catch.” All good and valid thoughts!

r/IAmNotAGamer

Real talk: I downloaded this to use as a glorified facemaker.

Look at— okay. Look at this shit. What the hell is a philtrum. That is a level of facial fine-tuning that I’d only expect in like, idk, an actual 3d mesh editor. It’s in-depth to the point of excess (I don’t notice a difference with about half of the teeny little angle tweaks), but I think it’s extremely cool as a feature that exists.

I made a main character’s face (you gotta actually Start a game before unlocking the menus for proper polygon play-dough), futzed around with a couple others, figured I might as well try to play the game since the lag was surprisingly not horrific, and ah welp there goes the month.

It would be very easy to gush about the different ways in which Game Good. It ate my free time for many days in a row for a reason, and I do feel like it’s rewarded that time investment well without relying on predatory pay-to-win nonsense. Progress is made not (just) in stat numbers going up (frankly I pay them very little attention), but in getting to explore a huge, huge fucking map with even more NPCs and sub-locations to discover—and that’s just in the first region! I’ve stalled the story, on purpose, in what’s effectively the prologue chapter! Gaem Free, what the hell!!

One of the articles I stumbled upon, in an on-and-off attempt to wrap my head around the weapons system, is titled “Where Winds Meet is Wasting Your Time.”

This isn’t a guide for “enjoying the scenery.” This is a guide for players who respect their own time.

Well. Sure. If you want to be Optimizer Extraordinaire, yeah, this is a good guide for it. You’ll be caught up for competitive online play soon enough, I guess, and get to wait for the level cap to rise like everyone else on that peak plateau. Wow.

You know, that’s not really my idea of fun, personally. All the more to y’all in the competitive number-crunching spheres. If I sound a bit dry here it’s as deliberate response to the framing of slow progression as “wasting your time,” which is clickbaity on top of being condescending—except!

Look, Where Winds Meet is a long haul. It’s designed to be a “forever game,” which is corporate-speak for “an endless grind.”

Objectively. This is a true statement.

You know that plot and story I’ve mentioned? It’s, uh. It’s not done yet. It’s not done in the Chinese servers, which are at least a full region ahead of global release, and (given the nature of the thing) probably will not be over for many, many years.

Cool…?

the inevitable catch

Theoretically. You could play the game’s storyline, entirely solo, zero interaction with the online features and monetization and everything, and just be patient and wait for chapters to release every few months. Lord knows the game has more than enough stuff to do to fill that interim time, assuming you’re not pouncing on the nearest guide to make Completionism Percentage Go Up. (Er, not a dig. I do that.)

Except for the part where you click the wrong thing and get an illness so severe the NPC doc can’t treat it, so it’s either find another player to treat you or deal with the debuffs indefinitely. Except for a mechanic wherein you can log in and just get killed instantly by some rando. Except for the “signposts” left by other players, scattered about the landscape wherever they’ve deemed fit, which you’ll see by default.

Except that the current Lunar New Year event is only playable online—which, sure, you can ignore it. But you are going to at least look at it, because you get event notices upon loading the game & it’s the only way to clear those “new!” symbols on your menu.

No, you don’t have to interact with the online features. The game isn’t pay-to-win, and (knock on wood) there have been developer statements vowing to never implement them. They make their money through the cosmetics gacha, surely other MMOs, and $40k USD boats. Maybe (and, [citation needed], but possibly still worth noting) also with wherever all their AI face and voice* and text and video data is going, too.

Here’s the thesis of this meandering not-so-little would-be-review-essay: I have mixed feelings about this game. I like what it offers, as a solo and very-occasionally-online experience. I am less enthused by the pseudo-MMO aspects, which it… doesn’t shove in your face, no, but they’re not not there and it’s hard to ignore those facets wholesale.

I don’t know. I don’t play masively multiplayer online role-playing games. For all I know, these aspects which give me pause are just bog standard MMO fare. I’m still wary about it, and I don’t love it.

Without consciously trying to, I hit the top tier of last season’s battle pass and figured, what the fuck, I got most of that by playing blithely along the story’s progression and probably won’t max it out again for a hot minute. I’d pay $10 flat for a game like this. I don’t hate the spotlight outfit. (I did not really pay attention to the interim boons. Chicken included.) It’s a one-off purchase. So, I chucked ten dollars at the premium battle pass, because I have $10 in disposable income, and… here’s the thing, it’s by no means a small indie project where the devs need increments of Ten Dollar to stay afloat. It’s a personal indulgence, sure, but it wasn’t something I wanted until it was presented to me.

Thus, here I am prattling hundreds of words about it on my barely-professional blog, in what could probably be a concise review with a thesis if I wanted to make it one. I don’t, though.

I like the game. Would I recommend it blithely without a few caveats? Not necessarily. But I don’t think I’ve wasted my time playing it, thinking about it, and now writing about it. Whether I’ve wasted your time, assuming you’ve read this far, is a value judgment only you get to make.

Chimken hat.