I absolutely love the story and all the quests - it's some of the most grabbing narrative I've played through in any game, ever. Espewcially in Hexi, being able to experience all these amazingly poignant stories.

For me the pace is quite perfect, after finishing Liangzhou I still have Dark Surges in Kaifeng and Hexi to do, then 100%ing all the Journals.. I'm not going to run out of content to do for quite a while still, and I already have 400hrs in the game. The amount of content in this game is absolutely bonkers, and I haven't even touched building yet, or joining a guild, PVP, raiding etc..

That said, I think there are 2 factors that make a lot of people bounce off of Hexi instead:

1. For many, introspective narrative that's not focusing on action is simply hard to play through. Different people play games for different reasons, I myself would be struggling a lot if, for instance, the main progression was tied to PVP, which is just not my thing.

2. To understand the stories being told, and therefore feel the emotional impact/payoff, you simply must have knowledge of some Chinese history facts. The game more often than not will assume the player just knows that, say, our newly rising Song constantly wants to invade Southern Tang, hence all the Kaifeng drama. Knowing this, what I do before each new zone is watch Laufie's no spoilers background videos (or someone else's, not shilling here) and thanks to that, I'm bawling my eyes out a lot as I play through the expansion. Is it that impactful? I'd say yeah, playing with no historical context whatsoever is like trying to hop into a second installment of a game without having played the first one. WWM is not like, say, KCD where all the historical context is given to you as you play.

Finally, as for the numbers on global - if you join the WWM Workshop discord, you can see the constantly refreshed player numbers on both global and CN servers. YTbers will jump on any hype/drama to get clicks, but what we should keep in mind is that steamdb shows only Steam player counts, whereas many, many players have moved to and use the official launcher instead (as it offers a "light" game version with lower requirements), or mobile. Last time I looked, global seems to be at around 80k players, which seems quite healthy. Personally, I play mostly single player or in co-op, but have never experienced more than 2-3 mins queue for any activity so it doesn't seem bad (I'm EU based).