Where Winds Meet, the wuxia-themed soulslite multiplayer ARPG, is more than a little popular with around 190,000 concurrent players on Steam as I write this. It's also got more than a little of everybody's favorite novel-but-ruinous technology, as some of its NPCs appear to be powered by LLM chatbots. That means you can converse with them via written response or with your microphone, and just stop me if you've heard this one before.
Granted, I haven't seen anything so bad as Fortnite's Darth Vader fiasco just yet. These NPCs don't involve any legendary dead actors, and I've yet to see them utter a slur. Still, players are having their fun inducing hallucinations and making a mockery of the game's canon.
This Reddit thread from user MisterZan25 titled "Anybody else mentally break the Zhao Dali AI just to see if you could?" features a screenshot of their surreal conversation: "I made him think that my character was pregnant with his child, then I demanded child support, and then I told him that our child passed away. And, his responses are kind of hilarious. I think my next step is telling him that he is just a character in a video game, and watching him freak out about that." The top comment from Reddit user -Drayth- replied, "Nah. Tell him his child came back as a zombie and that he must hunt down and kill it."
The contortions of reality only get more exaggerated from there. In another thread, user Immediate-Molasses-5 asks Zhao Dali what they can cook at home with ketchup and potatoes. The NPC suggests deep frying the potatoes, though concedes that "ketchup wasn't available during the Song dynasty. Tomatoes weren't known in China back then." You know, the era during which this conversation is meant to take place.
The game does its best to remember that this is a Wuxia RPG and things like ketchup and the Beijing airport don't exist yet, but chatbots have a history of pliability in all the wrong places. Generative AI writ large has also proven controversial for its outsized energy demands and dubious place in the RPG space.
Still, some Where Winds Meet fans on social media seem pleased with the NPC bots, at least in threads where there's an attempt at earnest roleplay. Others are not so keen. As Bluesky user rynegaia posted Saturday: "I was gonna download Where Winds Meet until I found out about the AI chatbot NPCs We are in hell."
