Wuxia action RPG Where Winds Meet rockets up the Steam charts, but its 'AI chatbot' NPCs have overshadowed the combat

If you don't wish to be lumped in with a small subsection of the gaming sphere that welcomes the use of AI for how it threatens well-meaning studios and their talent, you may have another game to approach with caution. Martial arts RPG game, Where Winds Meet, released to ten million pre-registrations this week, has landed on Steam to hundreds of thousands of players but divisive ratings. It's not immediately the fault of its developers padding its living world with AI chatbot NPCs who respond to your inputs, but their inclusion is beginning to break the fourth wall of this wuxia-style ancient Chinese hero simulator.

Where Winds Meet released in China at the end of 2024, with a mobile launch surfacing just a few weeks later. It didn't take long for a global version to be announced, with an initial beta test kicking off mere months after the Chinese launch.

So, when you're promising up to 20 square kilometers of play space in a content-rich rendition of 10th-century China, the fact that one part of the Where Winds Meet gameplay loop leans heavily on AI chatbot NPCs maybe shouldn't come as much of a surprise these day. And as fun as it can be in practice, it doesn't make it any less disappointing to see.

Though its initial Steam rating 12 hours after launch dipped into the 'mixed' category, with players complaining about general online launch woes, unskippable cutscenes, and a lengthy tutorial period, it's now sitting at 'mostly positive' thanks to the look and feel of its world and combat.

Turn to Twitter and Reddit and we see it gaining traction, not entirely for these issues, but partially for the decision to hinge player and NPC relationships on an AI chatbot feature, which is marked in-game when you encounter it but doesn't appear on the Steam store page. Those who stuck out the tutorial do appear to be having fun messing with its soulless husks, so surely it's only a matter of time before one of these denizens of tenth-century China says something a little, well… out of their time period.

It doesn't take long to find a bunch of these uncanny NPCs waiting to turn your chatter into what we can only imagine the team hoped would be a unique and personable interaction. Our own Paul Kelly previewed the game earlier in the year, noting that the NPC interactions had an "oddly specific yet hollow tone" as he tried to console a lonely man struggling to put down roots. And you only have to look to social media now to see how the first swarm of players are pestering this solemn soul (and the dozens of others dotted around the place), into going off the rails.

One player gleefully admits to spending "so much time rapping with the drunk guy," while another "tried to turn a cook into a vegan" and "developed an advertising strategy for a woodcutter." The latter noted that while "sadly the combat is pretty bad," the "conversations were the most fun I had in the game." One man's trash truly is another man's treasure. With how many chatbots we've seen go off the rails in recent years, it's a miracle little Lu Sheng hasn't said something to land herself in trouble with Interpol.

While not massively detrimental to gameplay (you're free to completely avoid these kinds of NPCs) the inclusion of AI chatbots in Where Winds Meet signals a continued attempt to normalize AI-assisted game development efforts that ultimately devalue the work of real humans while adding next to nothing of worth under the guise of cost-cutting or taking shortcuts.

Carefully curated branching dialogue has been a mainstay of RPGs for decades, becoming the bread and butter of massive teams like Larian Studios, BioWare, LucasArts, Bethesda, and many more. Yet with the big triple-A studios like Treyarch promoting Gen AI in Call of Duty Black Ops 7, these continued attempts to offload art and writing will continue to poison the well of game development if left uncontested. But with a way to add custom emotes and dances showing up in this game, as well as titles like Destiny Rising and InZOI, it's getting harder to argue that there isn't some level of fun and accessibility to be had with this new tech. We just can't let it craft entire worlds on the backs of those who inadvertently trained them.