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NetEase has never advertised Where Winds Meet as an MMO, but it does seem to have an awful lot of MMO elements. The marketing on the game has mainly brandished its wuxia action-combat freeform open world (and optional 4-player co-op). However, even leaving aside the co-op, there is actually a much more expansive MMO-like "Online Mode".After looking at all the features in the global betas as well as the existing Chinese client of Where Winds Meet (released in December 2024), it seems like an MMO if all of its MMO staples were compartmentalized into separate modes.Where Winds Meet simultaneously is and isn't an MMOThere's some traditional MMO game modes here (Image via NetEase || YouTube @DrvisageNguyen)First and foremost, Where Winds Meet's 150-hour campaign only takes place in the lone wanderer mode. This is all of your open-world activities, side-quests, main campaign, and chasing its random bits and bobs collectathon.The campaign bosses, side-quests, and so on can also be experienced in a co-op session with up to three more friends. However, it's more aligned with the single-player host in this mode, because with most bosses, the game progress is only granted to the host, where the co-op attendants get an exclusive currency for their efforts.Co-op and MMO mode (of sorts) are differentWhen asking whether Where Winds Meet is an MMO, this is a crucial point that many players may confuse due the game's reticent marketing: the co-op mode is not the Online Mode. The co-op mode in a sense works like co-op in Elden Ring or other Soulsborne games: you get invited as muscles for hire to the host's world, and there's a lot of gameplay limitations when you're here.Meanwhile, the Online Mode is a completely different thing of its own. You can think of the solo/co-op mode as more of a private server that belongs to you. Meanwhile, the Online Mode is a persistent server in a MMO environment where you can interact with dozens of other players in the same world concurrently.We don't know how many dozens though, as we don't know how many concurrent users a shard/session in Where Winds Meet will support in its global release. It's similar to the MMO extent of Once Human (for example), another NetEase game.However, Once Human is more of a "MMO" than Where Winds Meet, even if the latter may have more social elements in its Online Mode. This is because you can't actually play any campaign quests or nearly any side-content in Where Winds Meet's dedicated "MMO-mode".Instead, the MMO mode (even if it's not called an MMO mode by the game) has some traditional MMO activities as compartmentalized game modes. This includes:PvP modes (Arena), including 1v1s, 2v2s, 5v5s, and even large-scale 30v30 GvGs (at least based on the Chinese client)A PvPvE Battle-Royale Extraction mode where you start with zero gear10-player PvE Raids, which like any MMO raid, uses a soft tank-healer-DPS class split logicBosses also present a more scaled-down non-endgame version of these raids, where you can do a 5-player party with dedicated tanks and healers (and proper boss aggro mechancis as such a split would imply)While there aren't open world enemy mobs, there's combat trials you can do for multi-enemy PvE combat in the Online Mode, with its own dedicated seasonal leaderboardsPvP Bounties, where you take contracts to kill other players (explained in more detail below)The Bounties are a particularly important MMO-social aspect of Where Winds Meet. Depending on whether a player has killed another player, or has committed a crime, you can be a bounty-hunter by taking a contract to kill them. Yet again exactly like invasions in Soulsborne games, the contract can be completed by invading the bounty target's solo world too.Also Read: Where Winds Meet redeem codesWhy won't Where Winds Meet call its online version "MMO Mode"?There are also other cases where online and solo modes interact, and one that I can cite from my experience is the disease system. You can get diseases, and they have several stages of progression. To cure them, you can take the services of another player with experise in healing (one of many life skills in this game), who will actually come to your world and play a mini-game to purge your malady.These examples of social elements altogether certainly make Where Winds Meet a midway point between a live-service ARPG and a straight-up MMORPG.So then why am I still not calling Where Winds Meet an MMO? The one big caveat where I would deduct points from the for-MMO argument is open-world sandboxing.Basically everything other than resource-gathering in the wilds is cut from the open world in the Online Mode, and the PvE/PvP game modes exclusive to that is accesible through menu interactions. Despite some big potentials this prevents the Online Mode from what could potentially be a downscaled MMO experience, not even in the same way that Once Human can be thought of as a pseudo-MMO.Stay tuned for more Where Winds Meet news and guides on Sportskeeda.
