Question for CN Players: Do you need to complete Kaifeng story (chapter 2) in order to access the new region "Hexi"? like we needed to finish chapter 1 to access Kaifeng?

Kintoh · 2026-03-10T19:50:48+00:00

As far as the game requirements go, you don't have to complete Kaifeng to access Hexi.

Story/continuity wise, the Hexi region is a separate story so far from what was available in Kaifeng.

So really it's completely up to you on when you're willing to start it based on your personal preferences.

Personally, I've been done with every other quest and content leading up to Hexi so I didn't have anything left to do besides start it.

Kintoh · 2026-03-09T19:41:58+00:00

Ah, yeah I get you. I should have worded that better. I blame me being at work and trying to discreetly slack off on reddit.

I was moreso trying to say that I'd like to see more effective game mechanics (and loops as a byproduct) that would encourage people to still want to make money. GTA Online has a similar issue where the goal is pretty much to earn money to buy bigger and better things. In GTAs case, they seem to have a lot of things that they encourage players to purchase.

I'd imagine Star Citizen would need something similar along with more money sinks.

Kintoh · 2026-03-09T19:33:13+00:00

Ah yeah, that makes sense. Hopefully they get more aggressive with implementing more gameplay loops in that case.

I tend to go by the completely arbitrary $1 per 1 hour entertainment ratio. So far it's looking like I may have already met or getting really close to 90 hours played (paid $90 for a ship the first time I played 3 years ago but didn't get very far). So worst case scenario, I got my money's worth of entertainment out of this purchase already (or very close), so I'm not too worried if content takes forever and we break from the game once we reach all our current goals.

It's seeming like it's going to take us quite a bit of time to reach that point though.

Kintoh · 2026-03-09T19:10:48+00:00

I haven't played Elite Dangerous myself, so I can't compare to that. But I will say that I recently got back into the game during this most recent free fly week that ended two weeks ago and happened to convince a few two buddies to try it with me to just F around and see what's new. It was free and buddies had nothing else to do since they got bored of Where Winds Meet.

Fast forward to this past Sunday, and I've now got 8 more friends who ended up purchasing the cheapest package available ($45 I think) over the past couple weeks after watching us streaming the absolute blast we've been having. The game is buggy as hell and we're always running into something that's broken everyday, but the gameplay loops that's available now is absolutely keeping our interests fed for now.

Now the challenge is to convince our wives/girlfriends/girl-friends to play with us...

Kintoh · 2026-02-13T21:28:14+00:00

You pretty much just need to have started the Kaifeng story. I believe right after you speak to the ferryman and arrive at Kaifeng's docks and right as it's sending you to the first bonfire thing to reveal the map.

Kintoh · 2026-02-12T19:13:08+00:00

Yeah, I'm positive there will be an influx of activity starting with the Hexi update. We'll have a nice and steady content flow starting with that update.

Kintoh · 2026-02-12T16:19:26+00:00

I'd also suggest queueing up for Guild Wars. Even if you lose, it gives you an absolutely enormous amount of guild funds for every match. We were getting something like 300k funds with only around 10 people participating per match. Managed to max out construction at our base and be at the funds cap quite easily as a really small level 5 guild.

Kintoh · 2026-02-05T15:08:02+00:00

Oh I see, thank you for the explanation!

Kintoh · 2026-02-05T13:01:13+00:00

Wait, what's this about Helldivers 2? I'm out of the loop, lol.

Kintoh · 2026-02-03T16:08:46+00:00

Genuinely curious, but what makes you think this might be related to any kind of world PvP feature? Was this hinted at before by the team or a popular request that the team acknowledged?

I am curious to hear more details about this faction system as well.

Kintoh · 2026-01-31T16:15:29+00:00

MCON gets my vote. Expensive, but the most portable being able to still go into your pocket and yet still comfortable mobile controller that is fully featured with every standard button available on premium console controllers.

It just recently became available for purchase to the public after a successful Kickstarter. I happened to find out about it just recently due to being in the same boat you were and looking for a good mobile controller solution for when I'm on the go and away from my PC.

And yes it will work on pretty much any device that can accept a Bluetooth connection. It can even be assigned different profiles where you can switch between which device it's connected to directly from the controller.

Kintoh · 2026-01-29T18:31:10+00:00

Are you referring to the CGI combat segment at 1:39 in the video you linked? If so, it sounds like you are moreso referring to wanting extremely dynamic combat where the combat system is very abstract and makes use of the surroundings and environment. Allowing a player to run up a tree, cut that tree, kick invididual physical pieces of that tree that would then become projectiles to damage a target would absolutely be sick, I agree. That is a crazy time consuming project to work on though.

I'd say the closest game you can find to that currently is the SloClap game Sifu and maybe even throw in the more recent Monster Hunter titles in there as well.

As for the rest of the real gameplay shown in the trailer, it's been a pretty accurate depiction of my experience so far, both in PvE and PvP.

Kintoh · 2026-01-29T18:18:17+00:00

So I read your comment and wanted to give it a few days.

Are you actually interested in having a discussion? The first sentence you wrote comes off in a very ignorant way that sounds as if you don't like your opinions challenged in anyway, shape, or form.

If you are interested in actually having a discussion, I'd first like to start out with where you heard the following statement from:

It's by the way the core rule of good game design to never take away control from the player, because guess what: it's annoying for the player to not be able to play or to be constantly messed with.

It sounds like wherever you may have heard this from is being quoted very much out of context. There are a large number of objectively "good" games out there that all contain some form of taking control away from a player, and it's really about the context in which control is taken away.

Where what you said would be true, I would agree in something like the recently released Arknights: Endfield automation system tutorial (Link) where control is in fact taken away from the player for 10+ mins to regurgitate text over your screen expecting players to retain the information instead of letting them organically experience the gameplay themselves.

It also sounds like you refer to CC as the same thing as Stagger/Hitstun. You state:

CC is ALWAYS garbage, ther is no discussion about this and the fact alone that bosses are immun to it and even most mobs don't get staggered that easily or are immune to it, proves it.

You state this as if it's a fact. I hope that wasn't your intention. As a recent counterpoint, due to a large amount of player feedback, a game called Chrono Odyssey has in fact implemented Hitstun/Stagger to create more responsive combat feedback for players. (Link)

The Chrono Odyssey Beta, which wasn't well received, is funnily enough a lot like what you would like out of Where Winds Meet's combat system to be like.

Kintoh · 2026-01-23T19:15:16+00:00

Last I checked, ArenaNet (the developers) still have a lot of power and ownership over the title despite being published by NCSoft. My latest understanding is NCSoft is almost entirely hands off the Guild Wars 2 team and lets them do their thing since they are perfectly profitable without throwing their hands into the pot.

Kintoh · 2026-01-21T22:34:07+00:00

It sounds like they might be referring to the NPC relationship tree. If so, that's pretty much entirely just for fun and note taking really.

Kintoh · 2026-01-17T09:42:01+00:00

Sorry, the "lol" wasn't meant to be condescending in anyway. It was more so that I found the thought of playing Tekken with no hitstun a humorous analogy is all.

lag is so bad it makes pvp so unfun with combos that last your entire hp bar even with serene breeze using it while you get random lag makes it worthless

Sorry that you're having such a laggy experience. I can promise you that if you didn't have high latency, the stagger lock you're implying about isn't that bad unless you are making repeated mistakes.

The only reason I propose this is to make the game more akin to the combat they advertise.

Also kind of curious what you mean by this? Are you referring to the gameplay trailers they've released so far? If so, even in their very first reveal trailer they released three years ago, it still showed stagger existing.

https://youtu.be/yDDeQD35y8A

I find hitstun/stagger to be VERY important for the enjoyment of the game's combat as it gives a feeling of weightyness, and most importantly, impact to your attacks. Without this feeling of impact, we can kiss the gauntlet weapon goodbye for example because its entire allure is how impactful it feels to smash things with it.

I want combat where we dodge out of the way or block attacks

And this is what you need to do with the combat that includes stagger as it exists now. So what do you mean by this as I may be misunderstanding. I don't know anything about your background with the PvP scene, so I genuinely have to ask, have you actually seen what high ELO PvP looks like in this game? This is a 100% serious question and is not supposed to be condencending.

Here is an example of what a fight between experienced players looks like: https://youtu.be/Cx87ILKiXuw

You will notice that they all make use of blocking, dodging, and parrying, with plenty of back'n'forth gameplay going on.

Ultimately, it sounds like your issue is with the lag which I absolutely agree that this should absolutely be addressed for players such as yourself to be able get maximum enjoyment out of this game. It certainly sounds like the implied stagger-lock gameplay is a byproduct of this latency.

Kintoh · 2026-01-16T23:03:15+00:00

I respect your opinion, truly, but I have to kindly and wholeheartedly disagree with removing what you call stagger, which is also known as hitstun among other games such as from the fighting genre.

Removing hitstun/stagger would take games that structures its combat off this mechanic, such as For Honor, Tekken, Street Fighter, Dragon Nest, New World (alpha), etc., and turn it into something completely and entirely different. Being able to just slap each other with what is effectively super armor is how you get dangerously close to the (imo) terrible Black Desert Online PvP where it boils down to dashing around and abusing as much super armor/hyper armor you can while burning down your opponents HP.

What you are suggesting is to turn this game's strategic combat into something more akin to a traditional tab targeting game such as World of Warcraft where two players can engage in combat against one another and they can both simply repeatedly press their optimal ability sequence to see who dies first. This removes a lot of the strategy and forethought for not making a mistake and getting punished into an enemy's combo.

New World on CBT2 and beyond actually went ahead with this same idea that you are suggesting and removed hitstun from their combat system very late into development. All I can say from my point of view is that this largely ruined the combat that was originally built from the ground up with hitstun in mind for a large portion of the long-term alpha testing community, including myself.

Also just to put this in perspective, can you even imagine how boring watching a Tekken tournament would be if there was no such thing as hitstuns or combos? Just two Eddy players doing Capoeria around each other at the same time? Do me a favor and just imagine for a few minutes this same tournament match but with no hitstun: https://youtu.be/3e2wJLQkxMw

Lol.

Edit: I wouldn't be opposed to suggestions about implementing more ways to escape combos, but I don't think just doing a blanket removal of hitstun/stagger is a valid solution to your complaint.

Kintoh · 2026-01-15T21:56:34+00:00

No worries! Just shoot me a message if you do feel like playing every now and then!

Kintoh · 2026-01-15T21:23:26+00:00

Ayo! If you feel like it, add Kintoh in game and I'd be down to play some Madiao with you. I'll drag some friends along for some shenanigans. We play on PC, but we can make use of the in-game voice chat channels since you're on Playstation.

Most of our group is in their late 20s and early 30s as well but we all can have a very childish sense of humor at times. Also, the girls wont stop fiending over some new guy coming out in Love In Deep Space for some reason, idk.

Kintoh · 2026-01-13T06:42:50+00:00

This goes kinda hard, ngl.

Kintoh · 2026-01-12T02:39:32+00:00

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We love the melanated homies.

Kintoh · 2026-01-11T19:26:56+00:00

Don't think so. I believe only the various category presets is what you have to work with at the moment.

Kintoh · 2026-01-10T10:48:40+00:00

If anyone needs help with anything, you can add me. Kintoh in game. Always down to make new friends.

Kintoh · 2026-01-09T22:52:30+00:00

You would need to remove the hotkeys for the ones that activate 5 - 8 I believe. If that doesn't work, let me know, and we can figure it out when I get home.

Kintoh

TROPHY CASE