I got curious about Where Winds Meet after seeing people talk about it and decided to give it a try.

Even during installation, it was obvious I was late to the party—both of my kids already knew the game. I went with the 60GB “speed” version instead of the 100GB+ option, mostly because my machine is modest: an i3-10100 with integrated graphics. I honestly wasn’t sure it could run the game at all.

The installer also warned that putting the game on a mechanical hard drive could cause stuttering and slow loading. That was a problem, because the HDD still had some free space while my SSD was nearly full, and the SSD is only 256GB total. In the end, I watched the download go at 40.75MB/s, with an estimated completion time of about 28 minutes.

The download screen itself looked nice: a forest scene with leaves swirling everywhere. It had the kind of atmosphere that made me think you’d almost want eye protection before drawing a sword and jumping into a duel.

Once the installation finished, the game dropped me straight into a practice and familiarization section. I followed the on-screen keyboard prompts and tested a few moves, but it was already evening and I still had to help my kids with schoolwork, so I quit out before doing much more.

The next morning I came back to it. Thinking back on the horseback sequence from the night before, it had definitely felt choppy, so I checked the system requirements. The standard specs are high, and even the settings aimed at smoother performance are not exactly light. A dedicated GPU around a GTX 1060 level and a CPU like the 4570K seem to be the baseline for a decent experience.

I also looked up a few integrated graphics tests. There are videos of a 680M running the game at the lowest settings and looking fairly smooth. I saw tests on a ThinkBook 14+ 2023 Ryzen model with the 680M, and another on an i7-1165G7 with Intel Xe graphics at minimum quality. That Xe setup is still noticeably stronger than mine, and even there the horseback archery section hovered around 20 FPS. That made me think my own system was probably dropping into single digits in the worst spots, with everyday gameplay maybe sitting somewhere around 15 to 25 FPS.

At first I didn’t even have any frame rate monitoring software installed. I tried FRAPS 2016, but it wouldn’t hook into the game. After that I installed GamePP from Tuba tools to test again.

The result matched what I had suspected. In grassy areas, the frame rate was often down in the single digits. If I stood still and looked at one fixed spot, it could climb to around 25 FPS, but it still felt quite laggy and definitely hurt the overall experience. And this was already the lighter 60GB version of the game.

Some of the combat animations reminded me of the old iPhone 4 era, back when Unreal Engine demos often showed flashy one-on-one fighting scenes. There was also a bit of that God of War QTE feel to it, mixed with the sensation of a music game where you watch the screen carefully and trigger buttons at the right moment.

Character creation was more interesting than I expected. The game lets you shape a face through text descriptions, and it also offers image-based face generation by uploading a photo. I tried the photo option several times, using a few of my own pictures, but none of them worked. At first I thought maybe the image had to go through some kind of review process.

In the end I just picked one of the presets—a bearded man who actually looked a bit like me, though definitely more handsome.

While waiting around, I checked how the image-based face generation worked for other people. From what I found, the results generally aren’t very good. No matter what picture gets uploaded, the generated faces tend to look broadly similar. I even saw comparisons where people uploaded photos of celebrities like Guo Degang, and the output still came out looking almost the same.

After that came another fight with the black-clad opponent. When he snatched the jade token, the game asked me to define my name—the token serves as the place where you enter it. I chose Aisiweisi.

From there, the opening questline began properly: the chest at the starting point, picking up weapons such as a spear, crossing the broken bridge with jumps and forward movement, tracking down the person who shot the white bird, and dealing with a few minor enemies along the way.

I also ran into the so-called “Peking Opera War God,” which looked like content meant for around level 30. After losing that fight, the game still offered a trial mode afterward.

Overall, I think the game itself is good. The main problem is my hardware. On this machine it actually runs worse than GTA V, which says a lot. I may check my GTA V frame rate another day just to compare them directly.