For many Western players, the recent rise of Chinese PC games has been defined by spectacle. Black Myth: Wukong. Where Winds Meet. Phantom Blade Zero. Wuchang: Fallen Feathers. Big swings, big worlds, and a growing sense that China’s developers are no longer orbiting the global games conversation from the outside.
But inside China, one of the most important games in that particular conversation has been there for years.
Ahead of last week’s The Scroll of Taiwu’s 1.0 English release, The Escapist spoke to Zheng Jie, aka Qiezi, the founder of ConchShip Games, about the long road to launch, the challenge of translating Wuxia for a global audience, and why his studio built an RPG where the player is not necessarily the centre of the universe.
The Scroll of Taiwu is not an easy game to summarise, which is both its problem and its entire appeal. On paper, it is an open-world sandbox RPG rooted in Wuxia tradition. In practice, it is something far stranger, denser, and more ambitious: part martial arts life sim, part roguelike, part generational drama, part village management game, part procedural storytelling engine, part cultural archive.
Qiezi describes it as “something like Crusader Kings and Baldur’s Gate meeting in the depths of Chinese folklore.” That is a useful starting point, but it still melts my mind a little.
In The Scroll of Taiwu, you are not simply a lone chosen warrior cutting a heroic path through ancient China. You are also a village chief, a student, a craftsperson, a fighter, a reader of classical texts, a participant in a living jianghu, and eventually, perhaps, someone else entirely. There is no fixed protagonist. Your role, your destiny, and even your legacy can be passed on to another character in the world.
That idea sits at the heart of Taiwu’s unusual appeal. The player is obviously key, but the world does not exist to flatter them.
“The player is not the centre of the universe,” Qiezi tells me. “They are one life within it, and the story that emerges from that humility is what keeps players returning for thousands of hours.”
Each run can contain between 5,000 and 10,000 NPCs, all procedurally generated with their own personalities, relationships, motivations, and timelines. They live, age, form bonds, make enemies, fall ill, and die. A sect leader may pass away while you are elsewhere. A rival may become family. A grudge may outlive the person who started it.
For Qiezi, that is the real promise of a living martial arts world. Not a map full of quest markers, but an ecology.
“In a traditional RPG, NPCs exist to serve the protagonist’s story,” he says. “They wait behind quest markers for the player to arrive. In a living jianghu, NPCs have their own goals, grudges, ambitions, and timelines.”
That means surrendering a certain kind of authorial control. Taiwu is not designed to deliver the same dramatic arc to every player. It is designed to create conditions where drama can happen.
“The job of a designer in this model is not to tell the player a story,” Qiezi says. “It is to build a world with enough internal logic that interesting stories can happen in it.”
That philosophy helps explain why The Scroll of Taiwu became such a cult phenomenon during Early Access in China, why it’s shipped over three million copies, and why its 1.0 English release is a huge deals. Western players are not merely getting a translation of a complex RPG. They are being invited into a design tradition and cultural fantasy that has often been flattened down when exported.
Wuxia, in film and literature, is often understood through movement: duels, rooftops, honour codes, impossible grace. Games, Qiezi argues, can express something different. They can make players feel the practice of Wuxia.
“In a novel, you read about a character spending years perfecting a technique, and you understand it intellectually,” he says. “In The Scroll of Taiwu, you actually spend the time.”
That time is mechanical as much as narrative. Players accumulate practice points, manage physical and mental states, cultivate techniques, and balance competing forms of growth. Taiwu’s martial arts system includes more than 700 skills rooted in Chinese martial arts and mythology, but the point is not simply breadth. It is the sense that mastery is something lived through, not unlocked.
The Chinese concept of cultivation, or xiulian, is central here: mastery as a lifelong process of refinement, discipline, and transformation. It is not just a skill tree. It is a worldview rendered as a system.
That approach extends to morality. Wuxia stories are often about honour, obligation, loyalty, betrayal, sects, teachers, students, and the messy spaces where personal bonds clash with wider codes. In Taiwu, those tensions are not only written. They emerge.
“A character can be your sworn brother in one playthrough and your mortal enemy in the next, based on choices you made hours earlier,” Qiezi says. “That kind of emergent moral complexity – where loyalty, betrayal, and the obligations between master and student are not written but played – is unique to the medium.”
How to make a game feel human and not like a spreadsheet
The danger, of course, is that this kind of simulation can become cold. Once NPCs are made of systems, the player can start to see the gears. Qiezi says this was one of the hardest problems in the entire project: how to make age, illness, death, relationships, and consequence feel human rather than spreadsheet-like.
“The trap is that if you simulate everything with equal visibility, the player feels like an accountant,” he says. “The magic is when the player forgets they are looking at a system at all, and simply feels like they are living in a world where things matter.”
The solution was not to remove systems, but to hide the wrong parts. Taiwu does not need to show the player every affection value or relationship calculation. It needs an NPC to bring medicine when you are hurt. It needs someone to refuse to speak because you insulted their teacher. The numbers matter less than the moment they create.
That distinction has shaped the 1.0 release. The Scroll of Taiwu has a reputation for being vast, intimidating, and sometimes overwhelming. Qiezi is not running from that. Instead, 1.0 attempts to make the game easier to understand without making it smaller.
The new Taiwupedia is the clearest example. It is a knowledge system designed to map how the game’s many layers connect: cultivation, relationships, martial arts schools, traditions, mechanics, and cultural concepts. It does not simplify Taiwu so much as give players a route through it.
“We drew a clear line between unnecessary friction and meaningful complexity,” Qiezi says. “Unnecessary friction is when the game is hard to understand because the interface is poor, or because the tutorial assumes knowledge the player does not yet have. That is what we fixed in 1.0.”
What he refused to simplify is the core fantasy itself. The jianghu does not pause for the player. Choices ripple through years or decades of in-game time. Succession matters. Mortality matters. Even immortality, he notes, does not free you from managing legacy, because the world continues to move around you.
“These are not ‘difficulty’ in the conventional sense,” Qiezi says. “They are what the game is. Remove them, and it is no longer The Scroll of Taiwu.”
That belief runs against a lot of modern design wisdom, where accessibility is sometimes treated as a synonym for smoothing everything down. Qiezi sees it differently. Accessibility, in Taiwu’s case, means removing barriers to understanding, not removing the thing that demands understanding.
“There is a misconception that accessibility means simplicity,” he says. “It does not. Accessibility means removing the barriers that prevent people from engaging with complexity, not removing the complexity itself.”
It is a timely argument. Baldur’s Gate 3, Elden Ring, Factorio, and Dwarf Fortress have all shown there is a global appetite for games that ask for patience and reward commitment. Taiwu belongs in that broader conversation, but it is also culturally specific in ways that make its English release especially challenging.
Four times the word count of Disco Elysium
The game contains nearly 4.5 million Chinese characters of in-game text, which Qiezi says is more than four times the word count of Disco Elysium. Translating that is not simply a question of volume. It is a question of texture.
“The deeper challenge was cultural translation rather than linguistic translation,” he says.
Taiwu’s systems, terms, sect names, combat stances, cultivation ideas, and mythological references are rooted in Chinese martial arts tradition, classical literature, folk customs, and philosophy. Many concepts have no neat Western equivalent. Translate them too literally, and they become opaque. Over-explain them, and the world loses its mystery.
Qiezi says the English localization went through multiple rounds of revision, including feedback from native English speakers unfamiliar with Wuxia. The goal was not to make Taiwu feel Western, but to make its difference legible.
“Some cultural texture is, by its nature, untranslatable into a single English equivalent,” he says. “That is not a failure of translation — it is an invitation to encounter a worldview genuinely different from one’s own.”
That idea of specificity may also explain Taiwu’s influence. According to Qiezi, the game began not as a commercial venture, but as a personal story he felt compelled to tell. Before Taiwu, he was trained as an architect and had spent years making small projects in RPG Maker, gradually gathering a small community of early players. Those followers became the foundation for ConchShip Studio.
The creative goal was never to make a game that merely looked Chinese. It was to build one where Chinese history, mythology, martial arts, crafts, and cultural ideas were embedded in the structure itself.
“The game was never meant to merely entertain,” Qiezi says, “but to serve as a living cultural tapestry that players could inhabit.”
That specificity has become part of its legacy. Qiezi says Taiwu inspired numerous Chinese independent games and teams, and helped feed a growing confidence in culturally rooted PC games from China. But he is careful about the lesson he draws from that.
“The lesson is not that it succeeded because it was ‘representative’ of anything,” he says. “It succeeded because it was specific – obsessed with a very particular vision of what a Wuxia game could be.”
His advice to other indie developers is blunt: “Do not try to represent your culture. Just make something that could only have come from you.”
That vision, however, came at a cost. The Scroll of Taiwu spent roughly eight years in development and around seven years in Early Access. During that time, Qiezi learned the danger of listening too much, too broadly, and too literally.
Early Access no substitute for vision
“Early Access is not a substitute for a design vision,” he says. “It is a magnifying glass, not a compass.”
In the early years, the team tried to build everything players asked for. The scope ballooned. Systems became harder to navigate. Eventually, Qiezi realised ConchShip was at risk of making “a game by committee,” and a game by committee, as he puts it, “is nobody’s game.”
The turnaround came when the team returned to a single question: what should every player feel? The answer was “living inside a Wuxia novel.” Every system had to serve that. If it did not, it had to go.
There were also deeper production problems. The codebase became so tangled that adding content risked breaking existing systems. ConchShip eventually made the painful decision to rebuild the engine mid-development, delaying the project but making 1.0 possible.
The crisis changed the studio. It introduced engineering discipline: code reviews, testing pipelines, better architecture, and processes that were less glamorous than new features but more important to survival.
Qiezi’s architectural background also shaped the way the team worked. ConchShip even used CAD tools for game design communication, an unconventional approach that reflects his background in spatial planning and systematic design. The studio’s process may not look standard from the outside, but for Taiwu, it became coherent.
The experience changed Qiezi’s understanding of direction itself.
“I used to believe my job was to protect the creative vision at all costs,” he says. “I learned that you cannot protect the vision unless you also protect the team’s ability to do their best work.”
That meant pausing feature work to repair foundations. It meant investing in new processes. It meant learning patience. An apt skill considering the subject matter.
“A great game must also be a well-built game,” Qiezi says. “I am a different developer now, more patient, more willing to say ‘not yet,’ more aware that craft matters as much as vision.”
Now, with 1.0 and the English release, The Scroll of Taiwu faces a new test. Can a game this dense, this culturally specific, and this uninterested in making the player the sole centre of meaning connect with a wider global audience?
Qiezi believes the appetite is there. He points to players who have spent thousands of hours inside Taiwu already, chasing stories no one else will ever see in quite the same form.
“I would rather make a game that a smaller number of people absolutely love than one that a larger number of people kind of like,” he says. “The market for depth is real, and I believe it is only going to grow.”
For Western players, Taiwu may not be instantly comfortable. That is part of the point. It asks you to learn names, systems, cultural assumptions, martial philosophies, and a relationship to time that differs from many modern RPGs. It asks you to accept that your character is important, but not singular. That your story may be inherited. That the world was moving before you arrived and will continue after you are gone.
Qiezi hopes players leave with more than appreciation for a complex RPG. He wants them to feel they have lived inside a world shaped by Chinese culture, not toured it as scenery.
“The game was built on the belief that even the smallest human actions can achieve feats that shape the world,” he says.
That may be the cleanest way to understand The Scroll of Taiwu. It is vast, yes. Complicated, certainly. But beneath the martial arts, the simulation, the procedural NPCs, the village management, the succession systems, and the millions of characters of text, it is a game about consequence.
For a global audience still discovering what Chinese indie games can be, Taiwu offers something valuable precisely because it refuses to sand itself into familiarity. It is not trying to be a universal RPG with Chinese dressing. It is trying to be itself, completely.
And after eight years of development, that might be its strongest argument.
The post Exclusive interview: The Scroll of Taiwu is what happens when an RPG stops holding your hand appeared first on The Escapist.
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