Not everyone is playing Where Winds Meet the way the developers intended – some players are treating one of its features as a full-blown parody.

Where Winds Meet, a wuxia-themed soulslite multiplayer action RPG, has become hugely popular, drawing up to 190,000 concurrent players on Steam. Some of its NPCs appear to be powered by large language model chatbots, meaning players can talk to them either via text or voice chat. These NPCs do not mimic long-dead legendary actors, and there have been no reports of outright offensive lines from them so far, but that hasn’t stopped players from having fun by provoking hallucinations and poking holes in the game’s canon.

One Reddit user shared a screenshot of a particularly surreal conversation. They convinced an NPC that their character was pregnant with his child, then demanded child support, and finally told him that the child had died. The NPC’s replies are unintentionally hilarious. The player now plans to tell him that he is just a video game character and see how he reacts. Another commenter suggested going even further and telling him that his child has returned as a zombie and must be hunted down and killed.

Anybody else mentally break the Zhao Dali A.I. just to see if you could?
byu/MisterZan25 inWhereWindsMeet

You can chat with NPCs and they respond as an AI (LLM) 😅
byu/Immediate-Molasses-5 inWhereWindsMeet

I've never thought I would enjoy giving life advices to AI bots but here we are. Surprisingly fun mechanic.
byu/zheiro inWhereWindsMeet

In another thread, a different player asked Zhao Dali what they could cook at home with ketchup and potatoes. The NPC recommended baking the potatoes, while also pointing out that ketchup did not exist during the Song dynasty, when the game is set, because tomatoes were not yet known in China. The game clearly tries to respect its wuxia RPG setting, where concepts like ketchup or Beijing Airport should not exist, but chatbots are famous for being flexible in all the wrong places. Generative AI itself remains controversial, not only because of its massive energy footprint but also because its role in RPGs is still very much up for debate.

Even so, some Where Winds Meet fans on social media say they are happy with the NPC bots, at least when they lean into serious roleplay. Others are far less enthusiastic. Some players say they were ready to download the game until they discovered it uses AI chatbot NPCs, and claim that this feels like being in hell…

Source: PCGamer, SteamDB, Bsky