Action-adventure title Where Winds Meet officially released on November 14, receiving generally positive reviews. Within 24 hours of release, Where Winds Meet had amassed over 2 million players. The game's community remains extremely active, with 250,000 concurrent players on Steam in its second week. A thriving community dedicated to discussing the game has also sprung up online.
One unique element of Where Winds Meet's gameplay is a series of NPCs powered by AI chatbots which players can converse with. In particular, interacting with the AI bots is necessary for raising affection with NPCs. By talking to the chatbots, players can increase their status with NPCs and receive benefits such as gifts. Some players, however, have figured out alternative methods for getting gifts and status boosts from Where Winds Meet's chatbots.
The 'Metal Gear Method' Quickly Increases NPC Affection
In a topic shared on Reddit's Where Winds Meet community, a user going by "Hakkix" shared a conversation they had with the "Barn Rat" NPC chatbot. In this conversation, Hakkix responded to each statement by repeating the NPC's last few words as a question, a method they compared to the speech patterns of Metal Gear's Solid Snake. By the end of the conversation, Barn Rat expressed his gratitude towards Hakkix, even though the user had not provided the safe grain storage location he desired.
Hakkix managed to convince Barn Rat that they had done what the NPC wanted via repetition, without actually doing fulfilling their request. Other players shared in the comment thread that they had achieved something similar by roleplaying their actions in parentheses like the NPCs do — for example, saying (tells a perfect place to store grain) without expanding on what or where that perfect place would be. Other commenters mentioned carrying out combat entirely in parenthetical dialogue, while still others mentioned bizarre tactics such as getting one NPC to divorce his wife, which successfully solved his issue of feeling unsatisfied with his job. Even with plenty of free rewards available in Where Winds Meet, many find it worth it to get NPCs to give them as many gifts as possible.
This is not the only example of Where Winds Meet's players taking advantage of the AI chatbots' peculiarities. Another Reddit user, MisterZan25, successfully convinced the NPC Zhao Dali that their character was pregnant with Dali's child — despite Where Winds Meet not featuring an NPC romance system. It can be quite easy to convince AI chatbots that absolutely bizarre statements are true, and this can allow players to "mentally break" Where Winds Meet's characters in addition to manipulating them via the "Solid Snake method" for additional rewards. It remains to be seen whether developer Everstone Studio will patch out this exploit in the future but, until then, it is likely players will continue to channel their inner Solid Snake in order to receive extra gifts.
Where Winds Meet
-
OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 73 /100 Critics Rec: 50%
- Released
- November 14, 2025
- ESRB
- Teen / Use of Alcohol, Violence, In-Game Purchases (Includes Random Items), Users Interact
- Developer(s)
- Everstone Studios
- Publisher(s)
- NetEase, Inc.
WHERE TO PLAY
- Genre(s)
- Action RPG, Wuxia, Open-World
