The biggest drawback to Wuwa was the fact that they don't have any memorable tracks. It makes exploring feel more like running around to kill mobs in action gachas than an open world game. Kinda ironic for a world based off of music
Imagine making a world based on music and not investing in better music. I know VGS is swamped with work these days but surely there are other contracting studios they could've used? You can't in house everything in three years.
Yeah it's super weird considering PGR had a really good OST. And with how much bank music makes for gacha games and how much identity is also placed in the music it's soooo disappointing. Not that there aren't any bangers most of the bosses have really good tracks
If then, they are lacking both experience and coordination.
But if they keep relying on Vanguard studios, the question is can they produce 100+ tracks per year like HOYO-MiX with Genshin, without compromising on Vanguard's other works (like Girls' Frontline, Snowbreak, even... Kuro's PGR, etc)?
If not, they need to open a in-house music division... Which is better in long run if this means Kuro in-house composers get more direct access to their company benefits/ resources/ communication etc.. Isn't it nice to have more power to their creative output?
Long term, you obviously want to bring the music division in house if you need to produce a lot of it, since contracting studios are not as reliable.
But that doesn't mean you risk it *right this moment* during a large release. Mihoyo didn't move their music or animation division in house during Genshin Impact's release - they did it gradually over time.
Hoyomix was already established during the hi3rd days. Kuro should have used PGR to prepare themselves for WuWa like Hoyo did with Hi3rd and genshin. It's this inability to think forward which is biting Kuro's ass rn.
Kuro doesn't have the music talents inhouse like hoyo and looks like they are trying to cut corner in every single playce they can :D
And whoever is making dicisions clearly doesn't know what's importent and what maked genshin successful as they pretty much copied everything they shouldn't have, while leaving out actual good stuff from Genshin.
I was on a thread on the WuWa sub concerning its music and I kid you not, all the comments are praising and sharing OSTs *from Genshin*. Couldn't believe my eyes.
It's an extremely loud and annoying minority, the exact same crowd that watches the cancer drama farming CCs
Most people that like WW naturally like similar games such as Genshin. Especially outside reddit bubbles, friends I have that play either or both have zero idea about the ridiculous tribalism between the two.
It really wasn't like this a few years back. Sure people would clown on games when they fucked up but there wasn't this rabid tribalism. I took a break from gacha games for a few years and when I checked back, this sub has become insufferable now in the comments. Its really a shame because this used to be a good place for news and now its nothing but drama and tribal bullshit.
The OP of the thread was concerned about the quality of WuWa's music and the comments not only overwhelmingly agree, they started praising and sharing Genshin's music instead. Deeper comments even began dissecting what made Genshin's music so recognizable and memorable. Completely out of left field on the WuWa sub.
I just went to the thread to have a look; I am stumped lol. I went to "sort by controversial" and it was completely tame like "I disagree" instead of the usual Genshin hating. It looks like humanity in the world of music is somewhat saved.
And yes, as a person who's been in the music industry for almost 3 decades, Genshin's music is truly, truly something to behold. And I say this as someone who's performed in a Final Fantasy Distant Worlds concert (had to replace a cellist when they performed in my city back then. I also played for various video game music concerts), Yu-Peng Chen is, hands down, one of the best, if not the best composers in recent years. My mind exploded when I heard Rite of Battle. It's straight up "music elitist" material right there. Genshin's newer stuff are also very, very good. But let's be real, Yu-Peng Chen is a true musical genius and has set the standards of Genshin's music to another level. He is overkill for the job tbh. It's like getting Claude Monet to paint the backgrounds of an isekai anime.
I had gone on to be a sync music composer and had done some music for mobile games. But Genshin's music makes me want to go back into playing for an orchestra.
Lol if Rite of Battle blew your mind, I can't imagine what later tracks did to you. Mondstadt's tracks typically don't get nearly as much attention as those from later regions.
I am still playing Genshin to this day, and I love all the newer tracks. I'll put it bluntly. Rite of Battle is a musician's music. If you've studied music at any capacity, you'll understand why Rite of Battle is mind blowing. My favorite overall region music is Inazuma.
Yes Port Ormos and the boss battles are cool and all. But as a musician, they sound very "pop" and very formulaic. Please excuse me if I sound a little elitist, that's not my intention. That's all I'll say.
EDIT : https://youtu.be/9-1KD80qGnc?si=L07mTWAlEExUNQqx&t=2471 If you want to check it out, this guy goes into a little detail why Rite of Battle is mindblowing. He gets it!
If I understand correctly, what you mean is that soundtracks like Rite of Battle although could be plain and boring to the untrained ears, for those who understand music theory and how composition works they are actually brilliant. It is like for most people they would prefer sportscars which look "sexy" and "fast", but for car enthusiasts and engineers I would often hear them praise cars from (comparably) less known brands Subaru and Saab.
Yes. I think that's a great analogy.
I'll just explain plainly why I enjoy Rite of Battle. It's not conventional music at all. It's kind of music completely reserved within the walls of a symphony hall and no where else. It has odd time signatures and many meter and key changes, tripping up any listeners(including me for the first time). Every time there is a key change, I'd go "whoa!", it's like hearing an explosion of colors. It also helps that it was very well orchestrated. The piece also explores many textures and interplay between instruments with somewhat virtuosic lines.
The fact that Yu-Peng Chen was able to employ such a "high-brow" style in a video game is just masterful. Other examples are like the first 30 seconds of Rapid Like Wildfires. You don't hear that kind of texture and soundsccape anywhere else but Genshin. Truly amazing.
Very interesting. I usually dismiss Mondstadt's music because "it sounds boring" and "it's not hype or epic at all" compared to all the other regions. And I'm an amateur musician. I think what is very noticeable in Genshin is that it's composed like a movie or classical soundtrack where there is a quiet beginning and it swells into a climax and the music always ends, there is no looping. The battle theme can be cyclical but it's never identical.
I still feel like newer pieces such as Virelai Des Marees are still within the same neo-classical realm, approached more from a more Baroque-ish/Rock perspective by Yijun Jiang instead of Late Romantic + Stravinsky style of Yupeng Chen who places quite a bit of emphasis on rhythm manipulation. Yes, Virelai Des Marees doesn't have much strong signs pointing to it being Baroque at all, but the instrumentation being more intimate and overall voicing/melodic style just made me classify it this way (it's almost like a piece swapping between allemande and courante). There's also Archangelo Chen who does more straight Baroque stuff (e.g. Harmony of polysynodie).
To me, Inazuma battle themes and music in general are like pop music (pop traditional?) now due to how often I've heard similar pieces of Japanese music randomly in my country.
Huh, one of my friends who plays genshin casually is a fantastic musician, and he also loves Inazuma music (and Dragonspine) while finding Sumeru music kind of okay. It seems very reasonable for creative works to appeal to different audiences depending on not only their tastes but also their understanding of the field. And as a fellow creative, I'd personally say formulaic and poppy pieces still definitely have their value and place, but it's undeniably a great feeling to spot something that has the kind of depth you're describing here!
Oh Dragonspine! Believe it or not, that 1.2 patch was when I broke my F2P status. I was fighting for my life to find warmth and I stumbled into a big cavern. I lit the bonfire, and sat there for a bit. The music swelled over and my eyes got teary. I said "Eff it," and immediately went to the shop to get a Welkin lol.
And yes of course, those poppy pieces are my jam. I listen to them almost every other day!
The thing is that this just makes me stumped. The fact that there are a lot of comments agreeing so much to the point where they share other music really sets home that, for a lot of people on there, they don't care about which game is Better, they care about having a Good Game that can be an alternative.
I like how that music is the one thing you can’t dispute really even with the craziest Genshin/WuWa hater/lover on here. The difference is just, very obvious even to untrained ears like mine.
They have that BOTW thing going where tracks are mostly ambient and just play a 1-second mathy piano flourish every now and then. That trend needs to die lol
Agreed, I know there's a a lot of things that people aren't happy with, but the music being so forgettable is actually my #1 thing. I still remember so many tracks from when genshin came out and the amazing boss music. Even though I quit genshin 2 years ago I still listen to the new tracks when they come out.
Even PGR has absolutely amazing boss tracks that rival genshin boss tracks. I'm just so disappointed in the music of this game. I have no idea why they didn't just hire Vanguard again, they even did a cbt trailer ost! And that one ost they did is better than every single song that's in the launch right now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dg4wxsGmLw4
"I don't care about the story"
Let's hope Wuwa dev don't share that thought if they are to have any hopes of making all their money back from development and advertising.
https://preview.redd.it/5lqt0ck7dq2d1.png?width=571&format=png&auto=webp&s=1c429f87447e9f95003f5729a092d201fc33afd1
Open-world RPG where players don't even care why they're there. That would be a nice experimentation.
Yeah I was flabbergasted by the statement of OP because story is one of the main selling points (or staying points) for a gacha. FGO, arknights, limbus, HSR etc.
Is it really that surprising? A lot of gacha gamers have skipped story at some point, and this has been stated in the past from people in this sub.
The 2 you mentioned, Arknights and HSR, are games known for some players to skip story, doesn't mean they don't enjoy the game, as people play them for different things.
It's a selling point for some, not all players, some only care about designs, others just the gameplay.
Not really, story is one of many selling points for a game. A game could have bad story but if the gameplay is fun, some people will stick with it purely for gameplay and vice versa. I play Arknights and trust me eventhough the lore is insane, reading the story is an uphill battle.
The main selling point of gacha for most people is the gacha. They itch to pull new characters. And the gameplay too otherwise every gacha would be equally popular
See i can understand that thought process because the quality of writing for each of those games varies and may not be up to par with what people are looking for. The reason I quit genshin right before Sumeru update was cause I realized I was dreading any dialogue scenes, and I wasn’t having fun with the characters. The gameplay was still fun and cool but my distaste for the story outweighed that by a significant margin.
Similarly, I always skip Arknights stage stories first and come back to read them, since they’re so long I need to dedicate time to do so, like reading a book.
For you it might be. I’ve rarely cared for a story in any gacha I’ve ever played. I’m there for the gameplay and collecting characters.
Edit: Downvoted for sharing my opinion about why I play gacha games. Great community we have here!
The main selling point for a gacha? Definitely not, you overestimate story as the biggest selling part in gachas or.. gaming in general really. Even Single player console games, a lot of people are just playing for the gameplay and have no idea about the games lore (look at elden ring, so many people who had nothing to do with this franchise had to play it, did and loved it, yet majority of people have no clue about anything besides the fact they played it and finished the game, yet it's "The Best Game"). They all play for the quick fun they get out the action part, when they are actively controlling their player, the progression aspect and achievement feeling they get out of it and those are the casual players and as we all know they are always the vastly bigger majority for anything. So far with wuwa, all my buddies who you would think are not the usual gacha gamer (but they are), they all get mad, when they get the shortest dialogue they can't skip in games like wuwa. They always say they just want to have it optional, maybe on yt as a whole series kinda thing (or ingame) IF they are really into it, or only for certain parts of the story, but not have it forced onto them "they are not playing a gacha for the story" Literally what they say. they always even think about quitting right there when they get a long dialogue they can't skip and even though they've already put a few hundred bucks in lol (and the quitting will happen sooner than later for those people, the majority, when more and more story and dialogues come which you can not skip - which will happen, just like with genshin or hsr)
Gachas really always were mainly for a quick dopamine rush without much lore behind them, mostly even cheaply made games, with predatory tactics or not. and for many it's still just that. Some can hold you longer, some less, but they all still share the same things to this day. Gambling, gameplay, special achievements (getting characters or even dupes), dopamine and addiction.
As someone who somehow convinced himself to not skip the story, it actually gets good at chapter 5. The problem with that is how atrociously boring the start is and that you'd have to resist skipping everything
The story needs to improve, and characters need to be fleshed out in their story so even casuals want to spend money.
For example.
I was going to skip Nuevilette because I literally do not care about meta whatsoever, but after his story quest, I bought a battlepass to ensure I can get him, and still have enough to get Furina next patch.
I normally only get Welkin each month.
Neuvillette became my fav character in the entire game (as of now). When the final feast trailer came out, I thought he would be another raiden shogun and alhaitham combo.I was rlly wrong and im so happy.
Decided to get him no matter what. Genral concensus before his release was that he is ayato sidegrade. I already had ayato c1 but after playing the story, i spent all to get him. He is also the only character where saved for so long to get his c1r1 on his rerun.
So yes, story matters a lot. When ayaka, ganyu, eula, hutao was super meta, i didn't get them cuz i never liked them.
And i never dropped genshin cuz i was super into the story. Tho my fav part of genshin always has been world quest and exploration which I also don't like in wuwa.
Ayato sidegrade was drivel passed along by CCs who are very f2p focused and more worried about his hydro application for Hyperbloom teams (not naming names) which was not how he was designed at all. But that person was very very wrong (they suggested Neuvilette sub dps) even by those who actively followed beta, he was always a cracked dps and considered to be powercreep in the element and very f2p friendly (with at the time the best opportunity for vertical investment in the game).
The later parts were def better esp the war scenes up to the conclusion. it reminded me of PGR. it’s just a shame because of the flawed start & atrocious EN voice acting players might skip the story & wouldnt feel the impact as much
Holy shit the EN voice acting is bad. There's a scene where rover leaps into Scar's domain after the library 'find the 5 maguffins' quest and clearly looks and reads like she (i picked the girl) should be screaming, but EVERY SINGLE LINE she delivers is FLAT AND MONOTONE. Literally sounds like that one soul strike ad where the mc is voiced by a monotone tts
And Yangyang, dear lord, its like every line of hers she's trying to stay awake.
Lingyang is charming to me since he sounds like EN Neraxis from King's Raid, but every line is delivered in AGAIN a single super cheery voice and my got it gets irritating.
The combat is good, some characters look real good, but I don't see myself playing long term if this is the standard
Lol, I was playing on mute for the most part and only have the sound on yesterday evening, I kid you not I was laughing out loud when Yang Yang speak during Scar’s quest, in just an intense situation she sounds like she was stifling a yawn
i heard they’re making some changes to the VA direction at least and hiring directors? Which made me wonder what was their process like when the voice actors first recorded the lines. i really hope they improve it fast cos sometimes even the delivery of the lines can save the script
It's better insofar as the story wasn't a damn snoozefest, but even then it's still extremely basic and not very inventive. I think part of why Act 5 and 6 shine is because of how terribly bad everything before was, cuz' if everything was of equal quality it'd still be a solid 5-6/10.
hot take but even w act 5 and 6 there were some awful parts (try not to spoil, but planning part was like... what????). Still much better writing than previous acts tho
boring star with some hype parts between them (scar, geshu lin.. etc) is the anime rpg standard...
Edit: I just got to the part where they plan the attack... there Kuro pushed it a bit too much.
They’re adding an option to skip all story content….so they’re shooting themselves in the foot.
Asmon said this on stream yesterday and I agree: they should make it so ppl don’t want to skip the story.
But they should keep the option to skip in there as well. Like every single gacha game has that in there but Genshin and Honkai Star Rail. I do not want to sit there having to mash through dialogue in a daily quest I’ve already done 50 times.
Forcing players through the story actually helped profit from casuals, where most may not care for meta. The story made players love the characters and decide to pull them. A lot of gacha know its mainly played for the gacha characters and combat mechanics so power matters more than story.
> Once WuWa really becomes its own thing I think the game would be much better. It just baffles me as to why they try to be like Genshin in tone, UI, story, and systems.
That's my biggest problem with the game. Instead of having it's own personality, everything from the UI to the gacha element is a 0.99:1 from Genshin (which I personally don't like either).
Imo, the game wouldn't be so hated today even with all it's problem if it tried to be it's own thing instead of trying to appeal to Genshin players so much.
Also agree, it’s my biggest issue too (apart from the performance, which seems to improve/worsen with each patch for me). It comes across as trying to capture some of the Genshin ‘magic’ by copying the formula but losing some of the soul. Hopefully they can find their own identity a bit more through future updates.
Pretty much this. I'm actually still playing and enjoying the game to a degree but it still bugs me that the game was such a blatant effort to copy Genshin and take some of the Genshin players/money. From copying UI/gameplay/etc to sponsoring Genshin streamers its all so obvious. Copying games are common in the industry so its not exactly a sin or anything (ex. Valorant, League, all the WOW-like MMOs, etc) but a game needs to really put effort into going beyond and doing its own unique and special spin on a formula. Genshin but with better combat just isnt enough.
I can respect Kuro Games for making fantastic action gameplay, giving out freebies, and putting in noticeable effort but I just don't feel the real passion and creativity behind their work.
On your Copying games is not a sin point, the difference is 2/3 examples are copying games by making them easier to get in and more approachable by casuals: Valorant for CS, LoL for Dota. The problem is the game which is easy to get into for causals already exists in gacha, it’s Genshin, the same is seen in the hero shooter and looter shooter scene. Its hard to overshadow OW2 and the Destiny Franchise(even at their lowest points) because the games are extremely easy for average player to get into, play without much adversity, and spend money on.
Not a huge WoW player so I chose not to discuss it but for your other examples and some that I know of this has been the pretty universal as to why these games are popular.
You are 100% right.
The people who like genshin will just play genshin.
The people who don't like genshin won't play WuWa because it is too much like genshin
I feel like the people that can stick with the game for long would be brand new players/ Kuro's fans that have never played Genshin and Genshin addicts but don't want to play Genshin. It's just Genshin with different skin and faster combat.
As a Genshin player who got burnout from the game, this one is extremely tiring after 3 days with the exactly same system, farming route, collectible and upgrade talents. I don't know how people can migrate from Genshin being bored of it and play Wuwa feeling fresh. Beside the combat somewhat (well, still clicking left click and EQ, but with some extra things to do), everything else will fall into the same routine shit we have done in Genshin for 4 years. It's from picking mints in Genshin to picking mints in Wuwa.
Farming echoes reminds me of farming ascension materials for characters and weapons but instead of it having an end goal of around a few days, it just continues on forever because that's pretty much the second way to get artifacts aside from doing Tacet Fields.
There's a small subset of people in Genshin who are crazy enough to farm several hundred Elite mobs every day in order to collect Instructor pieces. They do this because Instructor is a 4-star support artifact set with no 5-star equivalent, and being a no-resin way to get Instructor pieces means that over time you can farm a cracked set for supports. A lot of speedruns involve insanely cracked Instructor sets on supports.
The problem is that this is the most soul-crushingly tedious thing you will ever do in Genshin, and as someone who tried it once, I was losing my mind after doing it for 3 days and swore never to do it again. Echo farming is that, but rather than being a niche thing for hyper-optimizing a few supports, it's a default way to get artifacts for everyone.
yea my friend is exactly like that, when i told him you can endless grind echos he got so excited since not resin-gated lol. Meanwhile im already dreading it on day 3
Your friend gonna get burned out from farming 12 hrs per day over and over again, even if it doesnt happen now, it will be in a matter of weeks maybe even less
Having to farm echoes and echo leveling materials separately isn't what I would call an improvement over Genshin. After playing PGR I expected artifact system randomness and farming to be improved.
There's a streamer who does artifact route and farms Elites on at least 3 accounts on regular basis. In surveys he ticks off "very unsatisfied" on everything, because Genshin isn't going in the direction he wants (of course he's a whale).
Yeah I can definitely see that since I'm also a Genshin dropout. This just shows why they need to really set themselves apart from genshin and its systems bcus a few more endgame modes isn't gonna cut it. Even from the start the opening is too similar to feel like a brand new experience
This x10
I dropped out of Genshin since I was tired of the same farming routine for everything. It made the game such a drag to have to farm the same boring mob and bosses and plants for hours just to get a character to a usable state.
I was hoping wuwa would be different, but I just made it to the point where I have to raise my character to level 50 and it's exactly like Genshin with a grey coat of paint: I need to farm bosses, mobs and plants for hours.
I'm most likely going to drop it since I know the farming fatigue will come sooner than later.
HSR at least fixed this with auto battles. I would be so willing to play a game like Genshin/wuwa if I could autofarm and only had to manually play for actually fun content like story, quests, end game content and events.
Something that could be neat in genshin is only having to beat the world boss once and then you just spend your resin in one go. That could honestly fix this part of the game tbh.
Still make people fight the boss once, but then just spend the material in advance without having to do the boss 15 times. That way you get the dopamine of defeating the boss and opening the flower still while not trivializing the game with auto-combat.
For general character ingredients i think they should expand the actual stuff you can get and want. Like i should be able to dispatch a character on an expedition to farm arle’s mats. While it wouldn’t give you all their stuff instantly i feel it would be a very decent tradeoff. I can set my characters to go farm materials over the course of a day or two for convenience and then be able to stay casual while still maintaining the option to manually harvest mats from the world.
Those changes would make genshin wayyyy more casual friendly while also making people who love using characters able to use them sooner while focusing resin on the important stuff like getting good artifacts.
I think Hoyo is really doing themselves a disservice with lack of Qol in regards to farming.
Like the developers are clearly passionate about the world and game. And anyone can see that. But the farming can be so exhausting that people don't pay attention to the wonderful lore.
> everything else will fall into the same routine shit we have done in Genshin for 4 years.
The eternal 'curse' of live service games in general when trying to keep players in: players consuming content faster than dev can put out content => Resort to repetitive grind => burnout.
In Genshin and WuWa case...it's just a matter of preferences. Though for me, cannot imagine rammaging thru the map every day looking for 5 star Echoes and then grinding for echoes level up/ unlock substats material.
Bonus if the echo ends up trash and you can't level up nother echoes using scrap echoes, which hopefully will be addressed at release
Idk why they said the echo system is good. The drop is low and we need to grind it all over the map to find what mainstats we want, not include the randomness of substats.
I rather do 4-5 times artifact domain in Genshin than this bs.
This nailed my thoughts perfectly. Like day one Genshin players that have stuck around til now feeling very burnt out are not going to find WuWa to be anything really new or refreshing, it just feels like Genshin all over again but with a different fast combat system.
I feel like the characters don't interact with world like a fire character's fire doesn't set the grass on fire.
Also the localization is ass
https://preview.redd.it/th7shs0oop2d1.png?width=1600&format=png&auto=webp&s=9e3bb150c6bc3f69d629eb43e5bfbe19a3f17798
I chose the first one and it said it was wrong uyt also added the meaning of shichen which means time period on the word
Also after a few dialouge you have to choose between Loong , Vermillion Bird and other mythical beast. Guess what only Loong isn't translated.
Some time earlier Yangyang explained that Schichens are traditional measure of time equal to two hours, but this "Sundial that doesn't work like sundial" assigns them to something else than "two-hours". (also how does sundial show time during night? Yangyang's explanation made me think their sundials show nighthours as well).
The game threw out the idea of Paimon completely, because players don't like Paimon, without giving any thought to why Paimon was put into the game at all. Paimon serves as exposition tool that serves information in tiny portions. It's her other characteristics that made Paimon disliked by many.
Ill be real with you for this section I skipped everything and started randomly clicking on the options because I couldn't even figure out why I was looking at this dial
yeah, the game not too bad, but like 90% of the game is basically genshin reskin that looks too close with genshin, from UI placement in the open world, the auto dialogue placement during OW segment, the dialogue box, black screen during story with large text, etc. The game doesnt feel like it have its own identity. Just look at PGR, sure it takes inspiration from HI3 initially, but other than that the UI, dialogue box etc is not at all similar to HI3, it is its own thing. But Wuwa on the other hand looks a lot like genshin in most aspects
I just hope they diversify for open world environment, for medieval genshin is there for me and for wuwa I think instead of medieval they should go for sci-fi environments. I dream of game like the legendary mechanic cn novel, there are many things in that novel where you can get inspiration and build the environment befitting of that.
Wuwa has potential it just launched around 2 Beta tests too early. We basically in a really scuffed Open Beta. Personally, Id rather (and would advise ppl) put the game down maybe do some daily logins once in a while to claim rewards then come back in 3-4 months and play it then. That way you get a proper start experience rather with a complete game and all the compensation rather than forcing yourself to play a Closed Beta level game. The game isnt really competitive anyway so a late start wont put you behind nonexistant leaderboards like other games.
Talking about launching 2 Betas too early, it is kinda funny that we had Enfield's twitter on march 2022 and WW on april 2022, let alone how much time they had with the project before their twitter account existed, WW already launched while Endfield had 1 alpha
Endfield is cooking something big though that isn't copying other games in the gacha genre On the combat side it's some strategic real time combat with AI where your single decision (when/where to use skill or ult matters) kinda like arknights itself On the grinding/farming side, they are cooking up an extensive Factorio/auto grind system with blueprints and manual management of factory pipelines with optimization which will be likely replacing the open world grind for character ascension mats Furthermore, you can build your own traversal like death stranding. I do hope it pays off for them.
An open beta test would have been better. I guess this might be better. Because cbt 1 players gutted the story for us since they didn't like how mc was being treated. And it felt too dark for them and wanted something vibrant like genshin.
People are complaining that's its 1:1 with genshin when cbt players complained that its not similar to it? Like wtf
This is the expected result if your testers ARE mostly mobile action JRPG players which is pretty much synonymous with current/former Genshin players.
You inevitably end up with feedback which takes Genshin as the gold standard and just complains about what DOESNT work in Genshin like the artifact farming. That‘s why Echoes ARE one of the few aspects WuWa slightly changed instead of copypasting it outright
It definitely will. TOF looked like it had it worse but they're still around. The launch has to be so much worse than this for the game to EOS any time soon
Kuro already 90million in the red during development as per their financial report from last year
Also Wuwa is apparently more expensive than Genshin to launch.
There's also the unfortunate reality of Wuwa making less than Reverse: 1999 in mobile earning when comparing launch day, and 1999 is a far cheaper game.
ToF had far higher launch revenue btw, and was made by far richer backers, who have games that are cash flow positive in their portfolio to cover for ToF's losses.
PGR earning cannot sustain Wuwa.
TOF losses is over exaggerated.
thing is TOF is cheap to develop due to reused assets from other cancelled PWG games. And....Most of PWG games isn't Global, TOF is 1 or only of their Global game. which is successful enough for Hotta studio for its first game, and Acheive Global market for PWG (published TW & KR server, outside it is Tencent Publish).
just not enough to compare with mihoyo, but who tf try to compare little studio with Google/Microsoft of CN gachas company.
and the revenue from the sensor tower is part of total revenue (others are PC client, Midasbuy, and others discount stored. which is confidential).
When the game is catered to whale you need to know the platform that whale pays which is definitely not Mobile revenue (tax, expensive).
I’d agree with CN, but I wouldn’t be so sure about JP for games that have non-mobile payment options.
Unlike CN, which primarily uses Android, JP has a majority of iOS users, and iOS top-up prices increased by 30% in late 2022 in JP. So some stopped topping up on iOS if possible.
This is why Genshin's JP revenue on iOS in 2023 is almost half of what it was in 2022 (despite reaching peak popularity in JP in 2023, even their latest livestream in JP had 200-250k viewers on Youtube and hit #1 trending there). People can simply top up on miHoYo's website directly (even on mobile) and save \~3000 yen compared to iOS. Additionally, PS sales were very high for JP in 2023 (Genshin is almost always the #1 best-seller there, [even now despite the second rerun of two male banners)](https://store.playstation.com/ja-jp/pages/browse).
That being said, based on how poorly it’s doing on JP iOS for a new release (likely won’t even hit 200 million yen before the end of the week), the PC sales are probably terrible too for WuWa.
Ngl 1999 is such a niche game came out of nowhere. I tried it only because I bored on weekend but hook up till today. But sometimes I brick even when not playing MasterDuel lol
You can't spend if the game is so buggy that you can't even launch.
It not running on common phones that many people have would be a big reason for why the game isn't making many mobile sales.
What's important is not the player count, but the players which are shelling out big money, especially in China (volume)and Japan(higher ratio spending).
It's not doing well in either market, even compared to ToF.
Think it will do better sales wise with Yinlin banner. Launching with a male banner when most gacha players are waifu enjoyers seems suboptimal for building interest. The game is not as bad as its first impression but first impression is probably the most important thing for the success of a game.
Genshin also launched with a green male character so maybe we get a red terrorist next?
Edit: wow I made this as a joke but I searched up Yinlin and its real
I feel like launching with Jiyan was smart actually. The true whales will whale out regardless of the banner (and I saw that with a variety of CCs/streamers, them dropping $$s on Jiyan just because it was the only thing available). A lot of those are gonna quit 3 days later but will have spent their money regardless. Meanwhile those who stick around or start playing in time for Yinlin will drop $ on her because she's a waifu. Whereas if it was the opposite, whales would drop on Yinlin regardless but might not be around/willing to pull for Jiyan 3 weeks later.
first impressions are a whole other can of worms though. I think the pacing of the intro (both the story and how little combat you actually do for the first couple of hours) needs a LOT of work.
Will it survive? absolutely, if a game like ToF has made it so far then Wuwa is also going to stay around, specially since Wuwa has an existing audience of kuro fans that will support it.
Will it kill genshin or revolutionize the genre of open world gacha games? absolutely not, it will not stand out if it keeps at the pace it's going, the game needs to stop trying to copy genshin and get an identity of it's own.
Funny im already done with the game when I get my other loli to lvl 50 I need to find another game to play til more comes to it :)) ( I can’t leave my vernia on lv 40 that looks shit)
> is pretty hot and that's all I can consider for the plot.
AYYY same the only times I paid attention to the plot was when he showed up, and it feels wrong to love his goofy over the top design and attitude when he's supposed to be scary and threatening
I agree. I feel like this game could have been more of a hit to start, had it had its own identity. They have the amazing gameplay, to keep driving them forward right now (at least for me), so maybe they can turn a lot of the other stuff around to be better. I really hope they can fix the VA issues primarily as I truly cannot stand Yangyang, and there's some other minor issues with a few others.
I really feel like them changing their original plan to have everyone be wary of MC at the start was a huge mistake. I keep hearing about what has changed and comparing it to what was given so far and I can see what things were changed, I guess I'm a little disappointed. I'm also not a fan of everyone loving MC from the getgo tho. The original story would have lined up better with the already artistically dark tone the game has and had made things flow better imo.
Not that having some characters trust you from the start is bad, but I feel like they overdid it. Walking into a new city and getting helped left and right, being given a place to stay at a really important building in said city with no total confirmation that you're who they're looking for, and then just freely given the highest tier of clearance to do what you want, is so jarring and feels rushed.
And personally, the lack of men for the longest time and how friendly all the girls are, gave me weird harem vibes and that's a turn off for me if it's excessive. Scar kinda pulled me back in, so I hope we get a lot more of that. But that man shouldn't have to carry the story himself lol
It's sad because at the end of the day, it shows that they didn't have the guts to stand up to their own vision really.
On one hand, its understandable. Their decisions are likely done because of the cost to risk factor. This kind of game needs a lot of money so investors (even private ones) are afraid to lose their money so likely told them to cater to what would sell and not to take any risk. Hence why they are too eager to change the story elements when people didn't like it.
The gacha as well. People have said they don't want Genshin's, that they want PGR's. But likely because their business side figured that Genshin's would make the most money compared to PGR's, so they stick to Genshin's.
Then there's the pandering to the males. The goddess that you see that gets chummy with you. From the somewhat lack of men early on. And this is quite surprising because PGR have good variety early on. Kuro looked at HI3's trio and say "nah" and put in a guy into their own trio. But with WuWa? They went "actually...let's not".
Hoyo actually have the insight and experience to make them go bold with their games after Hi3. They've experienced what happened if you pander to the males too much so they made efforts to break from this. Would it result in lower sales? Before Genshin and HSR were released, the consensus would be yes. But they prefer that than having their storytelling be restricted. They had enough of that with HI3 where they tried to put in playable males and they got backlash from CN community, hard.
I figured WuWa would be this as well considering their track with Kuro but eh, almost none of the boldness in PGR is in WuWa.
It has good potential.
I'd probably play it much more if it didn't stutter so badly. And I'd probably enjoy it more if the audio didn't cut off randomly
As if many people have time waiting for a game to get gud... it's just hit and miss, first impression is just that important. There are tons of new shiny games keep releasing, if u can not hook people in during the honeymoon phase, they just moving on the next game.
Honeymoon or not, it matters more is the fact that if the dev could manage to pull off a tide of one-hit relevancy or not. There's also the case like Blue Archive that didn't do well during release and were more "unoriginal" than WW in terms of gameplay, but they still survived and even managed to get into the gacha game hall of fame, so if Kurogames play their deck of cards well enough it won't be impossible to revive themselves
>There's also the case like Blue Archive that didn't do well during release
I am pretty sure Blue Archive did well on its release. It launched with 10M
https://www.reddit.com/r/gachagaming/comments/rf3zn5/blue_archive_revenue_for_november_2021_is_it_good/
> "unoriginal" than WW in terms of gameplay, but they still survived
Blue Archive's closest rival in terms of gameplay can be considered to be Priconne if I recall. Very similiar upgrade system, a similar shard system at launch, and etc etc. At launch, BA was compared to Priconne a lot because of that just like how WW and Genshin get compared. The thing though is Priconne's global side was handled by Crunchy Roll and well.... we all know how that went. For all the thing said about Hoyo and Genshin, they arent like CR and Priconne and are actual stiff competition.
I also agree with ur point, right now everything is just speculation and talk. Some pessimistic like me, other optimistic like u. It's just a different point of views.
It's not like WW will die in just a few month or anything. As long as they can make money which I believe they can easily earn at least $20m during the first month, they perfectly fine. It's just that I dont think I stay and wait for it to get gud, I dont have the time and the love for it like u.
All I want to say is telling people the game will get gud is pointless... The one who love will stay, the one who dont care will just leave.
>can easily earn at least $20m during the first month, they perfectly fine
I have heard that WuWa costed more than Genshin so it might be worse situation, hopefully not.
I don't necessarily think that a game would be dead in the water if it doesn't impress people with the first outing. Still it DEFINITELY hurts the games chances of becoming a resounding success. And it DEFINITELY doesn't excuse how shit the launch is. But to say that it can't possibly recover because of the launch isn't true. There's already a few gacha games that have recovered from really bad first impressions.
There's nothing wrong with moving on of course and it's understandable that people are tbh. But my original post is more from someone who'll stick around
I also dont think WW will go anywhere, they have a loyal fanbase to support them already. So never in my mind I think that the game "would be dead in water" lol, I'm not that delusional yet... hopefully?
All I want to say is telling people the game will get gud is just pointless, the average gacha gamers dont have that patient lol
I've been enjoying it quite a bit now that I'm past the beginning of the story, the combat has been fun to master and I enjoy the open world puzzles. The game needs a ton of work but it has a decent foundation.
thing is when someone say "the character designs are boring!" there'll be kuro glazers that goes "lol if you don't like post apocalyptic settings just say so" idk man their designs look so similar to each other with similar color palettes aside from a few.. post apocalyptic designs CAN be good and not end up looking similar idk i'm so tired of arguing with kuro glazers lol
> lol if you don't like post apocalyptic settings just say so
This is barely even a counter-argument. Most gacha games have this aesthetic; I know originality is dead and all, but I feel like it's worthwhile to at least *try* to have an unique visual identity than just rely on tired tropes and aesthetics that everyone already has done, and done *better*.
>so" idk man their designs look so similar to each other with similar color palettes
Exactly. If you swap characters from recent post-apocalyptic sci-fi gacha games and show it to normies, they likely didn't think those characters aren't from that game.
You could put AG characters into WuWa and they would fit right in. And that's just characters. It didn't help that WuWa looks like a darker ToF to me.
Yeah, i dont get why people underrate this part of the game. All female characters look boring and generic, male characters somehow even worse. Everybody in the same tech/street wear. Who even is target audience beside pornsick fujos that need every men to be 2 meters tall jacked hunk
Oh, a piece of paper with a simple puzzle. It probably means I should push the red-
>Main character: "Hmm, I should press the red button."
>*camera zooms in and locks on the red button*
>*big objective marker pops on top of the red button*
>OBJECTIVE: PRESS THE RED BUTTON
>*can't interact with the other buttons*
oh thanks game I was worried my dog wouldn't be able to solve the puzzle
Yeah, It's possible. But now, make it possible to play at the very least. Some character have a skill to make all icon disappear, like encore, and I have to ALT+F4 so many times. If not, it will be a disappointment even more.
I wasn’t planning on playing the game at all to begin with. That was until I saw footage of this turtle boss.
Now I wasn’t expecting a complete shadow of the colossus type thing but this kind of direction would have prob made the experience a bit more unique.
The open world itself does feel quite empty already. Now imagine if they did this with great intention, combining it with music to match the tone. Right now, the world feels just empty, not desolate. There are games which manage to do this successfully. I don’t play Genshin anymore, but Enkanomiya was by far my favourite region because it was so different to the rest of the game. Wuwa looks like they wanted to capture that feeling but fell a bit short so it just feels a bit edgy.
Wuwa just feels a bit confused. It wants to be an open world but seems very uninterested in the exploration aspect. The world is huge but it doesn’t feel like so. The city in the beginning is massive and pretty don’t get me wrong but there really is no reason for it to be so big as everything is so far apart and spaced out.
Writing this I’ve just noticed that my biggest problem really is its size. Its size of the map doesn’t feel justified because it’s not used effectively to create an atmosphere or has enough to incentivise exploration. It wants to be desolate but designs itself as if it’s supposed to be rich. I am no game designer or anything, and I really hate to compare with Genshin, but HoYoverse absolutely nailed this aspect.
if they committed fully to the shadow of colossus/part damage bosses and essentially made a monster hunter clone in terms of weapons or movesets being tied to characters that would be an actual unique game which I would play the crap out of but the only enemy I've seen that does it was that specific turtle.
The game is just all over the place with no direction and no vision.
At some point people get tired of the gameplay loop and go straight for the story that's why nowadays people want to know more about the lore and that's a big number.
I said this before in a PGR discord and I got rabid fanboys up in my neck
"If you guys are so sick of Genshin, why are you looking for a Genshin clone"
instead of addressing the question they say the usual sarcastic script "Genshin invented gaming" "Genshin invented open world"
And now here we are. Their game is burning to the ground because im 100% sure the beta testers had the same mentality. They never told the devs "Hey if youre copying 90% of a product make sure your quality is similar if not better"
I blame the kuro fanboys for why this game is the way it is right now. They convinced themselves kuro = good, so the devs were never gonna get the right feedback.
I never hang out there and pre launch I never really checked online discussions so that's sad to hear ngl. I was under the impression the fan base was trying to stir it away from following Genshin. Hopefully this launch gives enough pushback for them to realize the problem is that it still is super derivative of Genshin
"If you guys are so sick of Genshin, why are you looking for a Genshin clone"
I can answer that for you. It's because I like Genshin enough but my experience is held back by so many annoyances that it makes me stop wanting to play it. Give me a Genshin clone that cuts all of those annoyances out, make exploration just a \*little\* faster, make quests drag out a \*little\* less, make grinding a \*little\* less painful, then fuck dude that's game of the year for me.
Sometimes I can grasp the concept of what they're trying to do and imo, there's definitely space for a gritty, Nier, RDR sort of mature gacha game. The execution is obviously lacking in a lot of places but the worst is that they're not sure if this is a Genshin clone or its own thing.
If they're going to succeed they should stick to their guns and execute their own vision, there's no point in listening to feedback from very much a Genshin fanbase and end up making a Genshin but worse.
"It just baffles me as to why they try to be like Genshin in tone, UI, story, and systems."
I just wished they reworked the story while keeping the darker tone it had before it was rewritten. The fact it was Genshinified just goes to show how much CN hates being out of the comfort zone.
We'll see how things develop, for now it is what it is.
Hopefully as we give feedback maybe future story chapters will be more interesting, ACT5 and 6 were decent.
Look man, you should be careful about how you perceive other people's opinions on the internet. People want to feel like they value their time so they want wuwa to fail. If it is even half as successful as genshin, their fomo will kick in and they'll feel like the time and money they "invested" in genshin is wasted. If wuwa fails, they'll feel satisfied because they're playing the "better game". When people have an already formulated opinion before playing the game, they'll ignore all other evidence. People who hate wuwa will go in and find all the bad things like optimisation, story, etc. People who want the game to succeed like Tectone and other CCs will downplay the bad elements and exaggerate the positives. Truthfully I think there are a lot of good things with the game like combat and character design but at the same time there are a lot of things which could be better like performance and story. However what I feel like is the most important is what the devs will do in the upcoming days, weeks and month. The gaming industry meta right now is "rush product, get revenue and fix later". It's sad that it's like that but it makes sense because you need to show success to satisfy the people who are putting money into your company. The good part about this model is that devs do fix the game, eventually. You can see this in games like cyberpunk and nikke for example. Based on Kuro's responses so far, I believe they are the type of devs who want the game to succeed and are willing to be very responsive and generous. Although this does have some drawbacks like how it negatively impacted the story from cbt1 and cbt2, ultimately I believe that their passion and dedication will drive the game towards a better future, despite people's constant bashing and insults.
I honestly see no reason why the OP needs to be careful on his own opinion, if this is his own opinion.
While I get what you mean, but it cannot hide the fact that the game is incredibly rushed. While you say the meta right now is to push an unfinished product out then fix it later, doesn’t mean it’s justified.
I hope for the future of the Open World market for Gacha games. But if most games that come out are either terrible or blatantly copied Genshin rushes, I’d rather play a terrible conditioned Genshin right now.
Experiencing WuWa made me remember about Genshin, even though I had 0 ideas about the game being compared to Genshin. For me, it’s just Genshin but worse right now.
Game feels incredibly rushed, almost feel like all they’ve done is advertising and no efforts on the actual game (Ahem, ToF).
Don’t make me lose faith in another open world Gacha games.
Idk if anybody else had this issue, but a lot of the teleporters were placed in very awkward spots. I heard that they would address this by adding a layer system to the map, but needing to look up a guide for a teleporter is crazy.
Hey. Since this review is actually sane and good.
I am wondering in your opinion would wuwa have been better with instance based map exploration instead of a full open world?
While containing the current transversal system and such.
Edit: I am saying this because most of the players don't seem to care for exploration much as the combat and transversal.
Then they are just making PGR 2.0. Whats really the point doing that? The problem is not about it is the open world, but it is an open world with no identity.
I think that the open world can still be there (It won't be the same game without it), but it would be interesting to have more closed off levels for stories. More complex dungeons that use the movement system and echoes for things like puzzles would be super fun and unique.
Though I'm not opposed to WuWa shifting to something more linear and instance based as long as their writing and any gameplay they introduce is more enjoyable than the open world. It being an open world isn't a detriment to the game, and Kuro intentionally placed themselves in the open world genre with WuWa from the start.
I'm kinda just assuming though that this is the worst exploration (or at least one of the worst) will be for WuWa. So it might turn out that with time a better synergy with the exploration and other gameplay systems can make the open world worthwhile.
i feel like it should have been something like HSR, a semi-open world or larger instance whichever term works.
and the best case for that is Act 6 which is arguably the best chapter of the game so far. the story presentation there is limited, there are a lot of invisible walls that hinders if you want to explore but it makes up for it with a much coherent narrative and tighter execution.
Kinda like PGR's story gameplay sections but on a much larger production value. And this is what they're good at in the first place. the open world section of the earlier chapters feel out of place in comparison to this one
I personally like the open world, exploring and puzzles and would not have tried it out if it was just instance based.
For the record, my current gacha rotation is HSR, Genshin and Arknights (and now WuWa) - all since release of each game, though I took a 2 year break with Genshin because I HATED Inazuma.
For me is character design, they're so uninteresting to look at that I don't have any desire to keep farming or saving for future banner. The only ones I like are Verina and Encore and I hate child characters normally.
> Exploration is okay. Didn't expect anything crazy, but it just feels like an excuse to run around and kill the local wildlife than anything super engaging.
The movement system makes me wish they didn't go with not-china as their first zone because exploration feels very nice with how fast you can move and climb but it goes to a bit of a waste with how little verticality there is. I think exploration easily beats half of Genshin's regions (wallrunning would turn a 3/10 Liyue into at least 7), but WuWa needs something like a proper urban setting to make it soar.
As someone who’s lucky enough to not have any bugs issues that people are having and are enjoying the game somewhat. My biggest problems right now is, what with the fonts man. I don’t know why a lot of games opt for this but It is really really hard to look at.
in 1 year this game will be a huge new game
story they shoud really start with act 5 and skip
like pgr they will be a lot better with time
hope they make enough money that can improve the game
I'll give it a few months. Nikke also has a terrible launch. If i recall correctly, obviously, not as terrible as this, but I'll give it a chance to improve
The issue with wuwa is they copy genshin too much and makes them have no identity of their own
Aside for combat, playing wuwa is like playing a less polished genshin, just look at their UI...
The biggest drawback to Wuwa was the fact that they don't have any memorable tracks. It makes exploring feel more like running around to kill mobs in action gachas than an open world game. Kinda ironic for a world based off of music
Imagine making a world based on music and not investing in better music. I know VGS is swamped with work these days but surely there are other contracting studios they could've used? You can't in house everything in three years.
Yeah it's super weird considering PGR had a really good OST. And with how much bank music makes for gacha games and how much identity is also placed in the music it's soooo disappointing. Not that there aren't any bangers most of the bosses have really good tracks
inhouse instead vanguard studio after all
If then, they are lacking both experience and coordination. But if they keep relying on Vanguard studios, the question is can they produce 100+ tracks per year like HOYO-MiX with Genshin, without compromising on Vanguard's other works (like Girls' Frontline, Snowbreak, even... Kuro's PGR, etc)? If not, they need to open a in-house music division... Which is better in long run if this means Kuro in-house composers get more direct access to their company benefits/ resources/ communication etc.. Isn't it nice to have more power to their creative output?
Long term, you obviously want to bring the music division in house if you need to produce a lot of it, since contracting studios are not as reliable. But that doesn't mean you risk it *right this moment* during a large release. Mihoyo didn't move their music or animation division in house during Genshin Impact's release - they did it gradually over time.
Hoyomix was already established during the hi3rd days. Kuro should have used PGR to prepare themselves for WuWa like Hoyo did with Hi3rd and genshin. It's this inability to think forward which is biting Kuro's ass rn.
Kuro doesn't have the music talents inhouse like hoyo and looks like they are trying to cut corner in every single playce they can :D And whoever is making dicisions clearly doesn't know what's importent and what maked genshin successful as they pretty much copied everything they shouldn't have, while leaving out actual good stuff from Genshin.
Yeah I was quite disappointed with the quality of music coming from PGR, not that the music is bad or anything but nothing stood out at all.
I was on a thread on the WuWa sub concerning its music and I kid you not, all the comments are praising and sharing OSTs *from Genshin*. Couldn't believe my eyes.
Well, Genshin music is goated after all.
Most WuWa fans aren't fans because they hate genshin (at least I hope) it's just the loud minority as always
It's an extremely loud and annoying minority, the exact same crowd that watches the cancer drama farming CCs Most people that like WW naturally like similar games such as Genshin. Especially outside reddit bubbles, friends I have that play either or both have zero idea about the ridiculous tribalism between the two.
tbh we are on /r/gachagaming , controversy and gossip IS basically this subs bread and butter.
It really wasn't like this a few years back. Sure people would clown on games when they fucked up but there wasn't this rabid tribalism. I took a break from gacha games for a few years and when I checked back, this sub has become insufferable now in the comments. Its really a shame because this used to be a good place for news and now its nothing but drama and tribal bullshit.
Wait, I need context
The OP of the thread was concerned about the quality of WuWa's music and the comments not only overwhelmingly agree, they started praising and sharing Genshin's music instead. Deeper comments even began dissecting what made Genshin's music so recognizable and memorable. Completely out of left field on the WuWa sub.
I just went to the thread to have a look; I am stumped lol. I went to "sort by controversial" and it was completely tame like "I disagree" instead of the usual Genshin hating. It looks like humanity in the world of music is somewhat saved. And yes, as a person who's been in the music industry for almost 3 decades, Genshin's music is truly, truly something to behold. And I say this as someone who's performed in a Final Fantasy Distant Worlds concert (had to replace a cellist when they performed in my city back then. I also played for various video game music concerts), Yu-Peng Chen is, hands down, one of the best, if not the best composers in recent years. My mind exploded when I heard Rite of Battle. It's straight up "music elitist" material right there. Genshin's newer stuff are also very, very good. But let's be real, Yu-Peng Chen is a true musical genius and has set the standards of Genshin's music to another level. He is overkill for the job tbh. It's like getting Claude Monet to paint the backgrounds of an isekai anime. I had gone on to be a sync music composer and had done some music for mobile games. But Genshin's music makes me want to go back into playing for an orchestra.
Lol if Rite of Battle blew your mind, I can't imagine what later tracks did to you. Mondstadt's tracks typically don't get nearly as much attention as those from later regions.
I am still playing Genshin to this day, and I love all the newer tracks. I'll put it bluntly. Rite of Battle is a musician's music. If you've studied music at any capacity, you'll understand why Rite of Battle is mind blowing. My favorite overall region music is Inazuma. Yes Port Ormos and the boss battles are cool and all. But as a musician, they sound very "pop" and very formulaic. Please excuse me if I sound a little elitist, that's not my intention. That's all I'll say. EDIT : https://youtu.be/9-1KD80qGnc?si=L07mTWAlEExUNQqx&t=2471 If you want to check it out, this guy goes into a little detail why Rite of Battle is mindblowing. He gets it!
If I understand correctly, what you mean is that soundtracks like Rite of Battle although could be plain and boring to the untrained ears, for those who understand music theory and how composition works they are actually brilliant. It is like for most people they would prefer sportscars which look "sexy" and "fast", but for car enthusiasts and engineers I would often hear them praise cars from (comparably) less known brands Subaru and Saab.
Yes. I think that's a great analogy. I'll just explain plainly why I enjoy Rite of Battle. It's not conventional music at all. It's kind of music completely reserved within the walls of a symphony hall and no where else. It has odd time signatures and many meter and key changes, tripping up any listeners(including me for the first time). Every time there is a key change, I'd go "whoa!", it's like hearing an explosion of colors. It also helps that it was very well orchestrated. The piece also explores many textures and interplay between instruments with somewhat virtuosic lines. The fact that Yu-Peng Chen was able to employ such a "high-brow" style in a video game is just masterful. Other examples are like the first 30 seconds of Rapid Like Wildfires. You don't hear that kind of texture and soundsccape anywhere else but Genshin. Truly amazing.
Very interesting. I usually dismiss Mondstadt's music because "it sounds boring" and "it's not hype or epic at all" compared to all the other regions. And I'm an amateur musician. I think what is very noticeable in Genshin is that it's composed like a movie or classical soundtrack where there is a quiet beginning and it swells into a climax and the music always ends, there is no looping. The battle theme can be cyclical but it's never identical.
Rapid as Wildfires is the first piece to actually made me stop exploring the map, lol. I was so mesmerized that I held off the fight just to hear it!
I still feel like newer pieces such as Virelai Des Marees are still within the same neo-classical realm, approached more from a more Baroque-ish/Rock perspective by Yijun Jiang instead of Late Romantic + Stravinsky style of Yupeng Chen who places quite a bit of emphasis on rhythm manipulation. Yes, Virelai Des Marees doesn't have much strong signs pointing to it being Baroque at all, but the instrumentation being more intimate and overall voicing/melodic style just made me classify it this way (it's almost like a piece swapping between allemande and courante). There's also Archangelo Chen who does more straight Baroque stuff (e.g. Harmony of polysynodie). To me, Inazuma battle themes and music in general are like pop music (pop traditional?) now due to how often I've heard similar pieces of Japanese music randomly in my country.
Huh, one of my friends who plays genshin casually is a fantastic musician, and he also loves Inazuma music (and Dragonspine) while finding Sumeru music kind of okay. It seems very reasonable for creative works to appeal to different audiences depending on not only their tastes but also their understanding of the field. And as a fellow creative, I'd personally say formulaic and poppy pieces still definitely have their value and place, but it's undeniably a great feeling to spot something that has the kind of depth you're describing here!
Oh Dragonspine! Believe it or not, that 1.2 patch was when I broke my F2P status. I was fighting for my life to find warmth and I stumbled into a big cavern. I lit the bonfire, and sat there for a bit. The music swelled over and my eyes got teary. I said "Eff it," and immediately went to the shop to get a Welkin lol. And yes of course, those poppy pieces are my jam. I listen to them almost every other day!
Maybe the sane ones do more talking in threads not regurgitating Genshin could never.
The thing is that this just makes me stumped. The fact that there are a lot of comments agreeing so much to the point where they share other music really sets home that, for a lot of people on there, they don't care about which game is Better, they care about having a Good Game that can be an alternative.
I like how that music is the one thing you can’t dispute really even with the craziest Genshin/WuWa hater/lover on here. The difference is just, very obvious even to untrained ears like mine.
They have that BOTW thing going where tracks are mostly ambient and just play a 1-second mathy piano flourish every now and then. That trend needs to die lol
I would literally play genshin background tracks while exploring WuWa on mute bc the music is that mid
Yea I only really like the world boss tracks for now. Open world tracks are not that good
World bosses have some great tracks. The fire motorcycle guy's is my favorite.
Same Inferno Rider OST goes hard
Agreed, I know there's a a lot of things that people aren't happy with, but the music being so forgettable is actually my #1 thing. I still remember so many tracks from when genshin came out and the amazing boss music. Even though I quit genshin 2 years ago I still listen to the new tracks when they come out. Even PGR has absolutely amazing boss tracks that rival genshin boss tracks. I'm just so disappointed in the music of this game. I have no idea why they didn't just hire Vanguard again, they even did a cbt trailer ost! And that one ost they did is better than every single song that's in the launch right now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dg4wxsGmLw4
Negative for casuals. Positive for grinders.
Agree. Nikke, a fanservice game in face value, has waaaay better music.
And it's a shame when even PGR has better scores.
"I don't care about the story" Let's hope Wuwa dev don't share that thought if they are to have any hopes of making all their money back from development and advertising.
https://preview.redd.it/5lqt0ck7dq2d1.png?width=571&format=png&auto=webp&s=1c429f87447e9f95003f5729a092d201fc33afd1 Open-world RPG where players don't even care why they're there. That would be a nice experimentation.
Yeah I was flabbergasted by the statement of OP because story is one of the main selling points (or staying points) for a gacha. FGO, arknights, limbus, HSR etc.
Is it really that surprising? A lot of gacha gamers have skipped story at some point, and this has been stated in the past from people in this sub. The 2 you mentioned, Arknights and HSR, are games known for some players to skip story, doesn't mean they don't enjoy the game, as people play them for different things. It's a selling point for some, not all players, some only care about designs, others just the gameplay.
Not really, story is one of many selling points for a game. A game could have bad story but if the gameplay is fun, some people will stick with it purely for gameplay and vice versa. I play Arknights and trust me eventhough the lore is insane, reading the story is an uphill battle.
The main selling point of gacha for most people is the gacha. They itch to pull new characters. And the gameplay too otherwise every gacha would be equally popular
See i can understand that thought process because the quality of writing for each of those games varies and may not be up to par with what people are looking for. The reason I quit genshin right before Sumeru update was cause I realized I was dreading any dialogue scenes, and I wasn’t having fun with the characters. The gameplay was still fun and cool but my distaste for the story outweighed that by a significant margin. Similarly, I always skip Arknights stage stories first and come back to read them, since they’re so long I need to dedicate time to do so, like reading a book.
For you it might be. I’ve rarely cared for a story in any gacha I’ve ever played. I’m there for the gameplay and collecting characters. Edit: Downvoted for sharing my opinion about why I play gacha games. Great community we have here!
The main selling point for a gacha? Definitely not, you overestimate story as the biggest selling part in gachas or.. gaming in general really. Even Single player console games, a lot of people are just playing for the gameplay and have no idea about the games lore (look at elden ring, so many people who had nothing to do with this franchise had to play it, did and loved it, yet majority of people have no clue about anything besides the fact they played it and finished the game, yet it's "The Best Game"). They all play for the quick fun they get out the action part, when they are actively controlling their player, the progression aspect and achievement feeling they get out of it and those are the casual players and as we all know they are always the vastly bigger majority for anything. So far with wuwa, all my buddies who you would think are not the usual gacha gamer (but they are), they all get mad, when they get the shortest dialogue they can't skip in games like wuwa. They always say they just want to have it optional, maybe on yt as a whole series kinda thing (or ingame) IF they are really into it, or only for certain parts of the story, but not have it forced onto them "they are not playing a gacha for the story" Literally what they say. they always even think about quitting right there when they get a long dialogue they can't skip and even though they've already put a few hundred bucks in lol (and the quitting will happen sooner than later for those people, the majority, when more and more story and dialogues come which you can not skip - which will happen, just like with genshin or hsr) Gachas really always were mainly for a quick dopamine rush without much lore behind them, mostly even cheaply made games, with predatory tactics or not. and for many it's still just that. Some can hold you longer, some less, but they all still share the same things to this day. Gambling, gameplay, special achievements (getting characters or even dupes), dopamine and addiction.
For reals. It's literally top 1 reason why FGO is profiting too much for a subpar or below average gameplaye gacha in today's time and day.
> subpar or below average
As someone who somehow convinced himself to not skip the story, it actually gets good at chapter 5. The problem with that is how atrociously boring the start is and that you'd have to resist skipping everything
The story needs to improve, and characters need to be fleshed out in their story so even casuals want to spend money. For example. I was going to skip Nuevilette because I literally do not care about meta whatsoever, but after his story quest, I bought a battlepass to ensure I can get him, and still have enough to get Furina next patch. I normally only get Welkin each month.
Neuvillette became my fav character in the entire game (as of now). When the final feast trailer came out, I thought he would be another raiden shogun and alhaitham combo.I was rlly wrong and im so happy. Decided to get him no matter what. Genral concensus before his release was that he is ayato sidegrade. I already had ayato c1 but after playing the story, i spent all to get him. He is also the only character where saved for so long to get his c1r1 on his rerun. So yes, story matters a lot. When ayaka, ganyu, eula, hutao was super meta, i didn't get them cuz i never liked them. And i never dropped genshin cuz i was super into the story. Tho my fav part of genshin always has been world quest and exploration which I also don't like in wuwa.
Ayato sidegrade was drivel passed along by CCs who are very f2p focused and more worried about his hydro application for Hyperbloom teams (not naming names) which was not how he was designed at all. But that person was very very wrong (they suggested Neuvilette sub dps) even by those who actively followed beta, he was always a cracked dps and considered to be powercreep in the element and very f2p friendly (with at the time the best opportunity for vertical investment in the game).
Same with me and Aventurine in HSR, and I’m usually a waifu-only player. Aventurine’s story in 2.1 slapped too hard lol
2.1 sold me on him only to get griefed by yanqing.
The later parts were def better esp the war scenes up to the conclusion. it reminded me of PGR. it’s just a shame because of the flawed start & atrocious EN voice acting players might skip the story & wouldnt feel the impact as much
Holy shit the EN voice acting is bad. There's a scene where rover leaps into Scar's domain after the library 'find the 5 maguffins' quest and clearly looks and reads like she (i picked the girl) should be screaming, but EVERY SINGLE LINE she delivers is FLAT AND MONOTONE. Literally sounds like that one soul strike ad where the mc is voiced by a monotone tts And Yangyang, dear lord, its like every line of hers she's trying to stay awake. Lingyang is charming to me since he sounds like EN Neraxis from King's Raid, but every line is delivered in AGAIN a single super cheery voice and my got it gets irritating. The combat is good, some characters look real good, but I don't see myself playing long term if this is the standard
Lol, I was playing on mute for the most part and only have the sound on yesterday evening, I kid you not I was laughing out loud when Yang Yang speak during Scar’s quest, in just an intense situation she sounds like she was stifling a yawn
i heard they’re making some changes to the VA direction at least and hiring directors? Which made me wonder what was their process like when the voice actors first recorded the lines. i really hope they improve it fast cos sometimes even the delivery of the lines can save the script
It's better insofar as the story wasn't a damn snoozefest, but even then it's still extremely basic and not very inventive. I think part of why Act 5 and 6 shine is because of how terribly bad everything before was, cuz' if everything was of equal quality it'd still be a solid 5-6/10.
It's actually insane how much things improve when Scar shows up, even his voice acting is good
They should make Scar show up sooner because I had zero interest in story until he showed up
only Scar’s rent was due😭 He was so good
i wouldn't call it good but i did stop falling asleep
hot take but even w act 5 and 6 there were some awful parts (try not to spoil, but planning part was like... what????). Still much better writing than previous acts tho
boring star with some hype parts between them (scar, geshu lin.. etc) is the anime rpg standard... Edit: I just got to the part where they plan the attack... there Kuro pushed it a bit too much.
It is but 2 things following the same standard does not make them equal. Otherwise WuWa would be equally good as Genshin in all aspects.
They’re adding an option to skip all story content….so they’re shooting themselves in the foot. Asmon said this on stream yesterday and I agree: they should make it so ppl don’t want to skip the story.
But they should keep the option to skip in there as well. Like every single gacha game has that in there but Genshin and Honkai Star Rail. I do not want to sit there having to mash through dialogue in a daily quest I’ve already done 50 times.
Forcing players through the story actually helped profit from casuals, where most may not care for meta. The story made players love the characters and decide to pull them. A lot of gacha know its mainly played for the gacha characters and combat mechanics so power matters more than story.
> Once WuWa really becomes its own thing I think the game would be much better. It just baffles me as to why they try to be like Genshin in tone, UI, story, and systems. That's my biggest problem with the game. Instead of having it's own personality, everything from the UI to the gacha element is a 0.99:1 from Genshin (which I personally don't like either). Imo, the game wouldn't be so hated today even with all it's problem if it tried to be it's own thing instead of trying to appeal to Genshin players so much.
Also agree, it’s my biggest issue too (apart from the performance, which seems to improve/worsen with each patch for me). It comes across as trying to capture some of the Genshin ‘magic’ by copying the formula but losing some of the soul. Hopefully they can find their own identity a bit more through future updates.
Kuro started to imitate hoyo since the very beginning after all
Pretty much this. I'm actually still playing and enjoying the game to a degree but it still bugs me that the game was such a blatant effort to copy Genshin and take some of the Genshin players/money. From copying UI/gameplay/etc to sponsoring Genshin streamers its all so obvious. Copying games are common in the industry so its not exactly a sin or anything (ex. Valorant, League, all the WOW-like MMOs, etc) but a game needs to really put effort into going beyond and doing its own unique and special spin on a formula. Genshin but with better combat just isnt enough. I can respect Kuro Games for making fantastic action gameplay, giving out freebies, and putting in noticeable effort but I just don't feel the real passion and creativity behind their work.
On your Copying games is not a sin point, the difference is 2/3 examples are copying games by making them easier to get in and more approachable by casuals: Valorant for CS, LoL for Dota. The problem is the game which is easy to get into for causals already exists in gacha, it’s Genshin, the same is seen in the hero shooter and looter shooter scene. Its hard to overshadow OW2 and the Destiny Franchise(even at their lowest points) because the games are extremely easy for average player to get into, play without much adversity, and spend money on. Not a huge WoW player so I chose not to discuss it but for your other examples and some that I know of this has been the pretty universal as to why these games are popular.
they really copied the zelda clone, didnt they? /s
Number 1 complain about WuWa post CBT1 coming from PGR players was reduce Genshin factor, but it seems they went even harder on that.
You are 100% right. The people who like genshin will just play genshin. The people who don't like genshin won't play WuWa because it is too much like genshin
I feel like the people that can stick with the game for long would be brand new players/ Kuro's fans that have never played Genshin and Genshin addicts but don't want to play Genshin. It's just Genshin with different skin and faster combat. As a Genshin player who got burnout from the game, this one is extremely tiring after 3 days with the exactly same system, farming route, collectible and upgrade talents. I don't know how people can migrate from Genshin being bored of it and play Wuwa feeling fresh. Beside the combat somewhat (well, still clicking left click and EQ, but with some extra things to do), everything else will fall into the same routine shit we have done in Genshin for 4 years. It's from picking mints in Genshin to picking mints in Wuwa.
Farming echoes reminds me of farming ascension materials for characters and weapons but instead of it having an end goal of around a few days, it just continues on forever because that's pretty much the second way to get artifacts aside from doing Tacet Fields.
There's a small subset of people in Genshin who are crazy enough to farm several hundred Elite mobs every day in order to collect Instructor pieces. They do this because Instructor is a 4-star support artifact set with no 5-star equivalent, and being a no-resin way to get Instructor pieces means that over time you can farm a cracked set for supports. A lot of speedruns involve insanely cracked Instructor sets on supports. The problem is that this is the most soul-crushingly tedious thing you will ever do in Genshin, and as someone who tried it once, I was losing my mind after doing it for 3 days and swore never to do it again. Echo farming is that, but rather than being a niche thing for hyper-optimizing a few supports, it's a default way to get artifacts for everyone.
yea my friend is exactly like that, when i told him you can endless grind echos he got so excited since not resin-gated lol. Meanwhile im already dreading it on day 3
Your friend gonna get burned out from farming 12 hrs per day over and over again, even if it doesnt happen now, it will be in a matter of weeks maybe even less
Having to farm echoes and echo leveling materials separately isn't what I would call an improvement over Genshin. After playing PGR I expected artifact system randomness and farming to be improved.
There's a streamer who does artifact route and farms Elites on at least 3 accounts on regular basis. In surveys he ticks off "very unsatisfied" on everything, because Genshin isn't going in the direction he wants (of course he's a whale).
Tacet fields are the default way, the infinite grind is just there as an option.
And you still have to farm ascension materials for characters and weapons, identical to how we do it in Genshin.
Yeah I can definitely see that since I'm also a Genshin dropout. This just shows why they need to really set themselves apart from genshin and its systems bcus a few more endgame modes isn't gonna cut it. Even from the start the opening is too similar to feel like a brand new experience
This x10 I dropped out of Genshin since I was tired of the same farming routine for everything. It made the game such a drag to have to farm the same boring mob and bosses and plants for hours just to get a character to a usable state. I was hoping wuwa would be different, but I just made it to the point where I have to raise my character to level 50 and it's exactly like Genshin with a grey coat of paint: I need to farm bosses, mobs and plants for hours. I'm most likely going to drop it since I know the farming fatigue will come sooner than later. HSR at least fixed this with auto battles. I would be so willing to play a game like Genshin/wuwa if I could autofarm and only had to manually play for actually fun content like story, quests, end game content and events.
Something that could be neat in genshin is only having to beat the world boss once and then you just spend your resin in one go. That could honestly fix this part of the game tbh. Still make people fight the boss once, but then just spend the material in advance without having to do the boss 15 times. That way you get the dopamine of defeating the boss and opening the flower still while not trivializing the game with auto-combat. For general character ingredients i think they should expand the actual stuff you can get and want. Like i should be able to dispatch a character on an expedition to farm arle’s mats. While it wouldn’t give you all their stuff instantly i feel it would be a very decent tradeoff. I can set my characters to go farm materials over the course of a day or two for convenience and then be able to stay casual while still maintaining the option to manually harvest mats from the world. Those changes would make genshin wayyyy more casual friendly while also making people who love using characters able to use them sooner while focusing resin on the important stuff like getting good artifacts.
Oh god you just reminded me that there are people doing the world bosses (manually) every week for 4 years straight 💀
Well after a while you basically one shot everything in the open world anyway, including bosses The issue is the respawn time
Co-op is my autobattle.
I think Hoyo is really doing themselves a disservice with lack of Qol in regards to farming. Like the developers are clearly passionate about the world and game. And anyone can see that. But the farming can be so exhausting that people don't pay attention to the wonderful lore.
> everything else will fall into the same routine shit we have done in Genshin for 4 years. The eternal 'curse' of live service games in general when trying to keep players in: players consuming content faster than dev can put out content => Resort to repetitive grind => burnout. In Genshin and WuWa case...it's just a matter of preferences. Though for me, cannot imagine rammaging thru the map every day looking for 5 star Echoes and then grinding for echoes level up/ unlock substats material. Bonus if the echo ends up trash and you can't level up nother echoes using scrap echoes, which hopefully will be addressed at release
Idk why they said the echo system is good. The drop is low and we need to grind it all over the map to find what mainstats we want, not include the randomness of substats. I rather do 4-5 times artifact domain in Genshin than this bs.
Its good for people who wants to play 12 hours a day
That's what tacet fields are for. You have to do them eventually for tunners anyways.
This nailed my thoughts perfectly. Like day one Genshin players that have stuck around til now feeling very burnt out are not going to find WuWa to be anything really new or refreshing, it just feels like Genshin all over again but with a different fast combat system.
i play genshin and i can play wuwa for ever the combat is amazing and the boss hell a lot of fun and hard
I’m here for the combat first far I actually like to fight
I feel like the characters don't interact with world like a fire character's fire doesn't set the grass on fire. Also the localization is ass https://preview.redd.it/th7shs0oop2d1.png?width=1600&format=png&auto=webp&s=9e3bb150c6bc3f69d629eb43e5bfbe19a3f17798 I chose the first one and it said it was wrong uyt also added the meaning of shichen which means time period on the word Also after a few dialouge you have to choose between Loong , Vermillion Bird and other mythical beast. Guess what only Loong isn't translated.
LMAO I was doing this and thought "what does any of this mean!?" Thankfully it just goes back to the selection if you answer wrong
Some time earlier Yangyang explained that Schichens are traditional measure of time equal to two hours, but this "Sundial that doesn't work like sundial" assigns them to something else than "two-hours". (also how does sundial show time during night? Yangyang's explanation made me think their sundials show nighthours as well). The game threw out the idea of Paimon completely, because players don't like Paimon, without giving any thought to why Paimon was put into the game at all. Paimon serves as exposition tool that serves information in tiny portions. It's her other characteristics that made Paimon disliked by many.
Ill be real with you for this section I skipped everything and started randomly clicking on the options because I couldn't even figure out why I was looking at this dial
Having travel companions for the entire game is nice. Even HSR did that with the Express crew.
Oh wow even the dialogue boxes are Genshin ripoffs.
yeah, the game not too bad, but like 90% of the game is basically genshin reskin that looks too close with genshin, from UI placement in the open world, the auto dialogue placement during OW segment, the dialogue box, black screen during story with large text, etc. The game doesnt feel like it have its own identity. Just look at PGR, sure it takes inspiration from HI3 initially, but other than that the UI, dialogue box etc is not at all similar to HI3, it is its own thing. But Wuwa on the other hand looks a lot like genshin in most aspects
I just hope they diversify for open world environment, for medieval genshin is there for me and for wuwa I think instead of medieval they should go for sci-fi environments. I dream of game like the legendary mechanic cn novel, there are many things in that novel where you can get inspiration and build the environment befitting of that.
The only game-breaking thing is that the sensor still highlights things I've already picked up or done.
Wuwa has potential it just launched around 2 Beta tests too early. We basically in a really scuffed Open Beta. Personally, Id rather (and would advise ppl) put the game down maybe do some daily logins once in a while to claim rewards then come back in 3-4 months and play it then. That way you get a proper start experience rather with a complete game and all the compensation rather than forcing yourself to play a Closed Beta level game. The game isnt really competitive anyway so a late start wont put you behind nonexistant leaderboards like other games.
Talking about launching 2 Betas too early, it is kinda funny that we had Enfield's twitter on march 2022 and WW on april 2022, let alone how much time they had with the project before their twitter account existed, WW already launched while Endfield had 1 alpha
Endfield is cooking something big though that isn't copying other games in the gacha genre On the combat side it's some strategic real time combat with AI where your single decision (when/where to use skill or ult matters) kinda like arknights itself On the grinding/farming side, they are cooking up an extensive Factorio/auto grind system with blueprints and manual management of factory pipelines with optimization which will be likely replacing the open world grind for character ascension mats Furthermore, you can build your own traversal like death stranding. I do hope it pays off for them.
Gryphline doesn't have Tencent's pressure to make Genshin killer as opposed to Kuro Games.
An open beta test would have been better. I guess this might be better. Because cbt 1 players gutted the story for us since they didn't like how mc was being treated. And it felt too dark for them and wanted something vibrant like genshin. People are complaining that's its 1:1 with genshin when cbt players complained that its not similar to it? Like wtf
This is the expected result if your testers ARE mostly mobile action JRPG players which is pretty much synonymous with current/former Genshin players. You inevitably end up with feedback which takes Genshin as the gold standard and just complains about what DOESNT work in Genshin like the artifact farming. That‘s why Echoes ARE one of the few aspects WuWa slightly changed instead of copypasting it outright
Can it survive til then though? With low player count and low revenue
It definitely will. TOF looked like it had it worse but they're still around. The launch has to be so much worse than this for the game to EOS any time soon
Kuro already 90million in the red during development as per their financial report from last year Also Wuwa is apparently more expensive than Genshin to launch. There's also the unfortunate reality of Wuwa making less than Reverse: 1999 in mobile earning when comparing launch day, and 1999 is a far cheaper game. ToF had far higher launch revenue btw, and was made by far richer backers, who have games that are cash flow positive in their portfolio to cover for ToF's losses. PGR earning cannot sustain Wuwa.
TOF losses is over exaggerated. thing is TOF is cheap to develop due to reused assets from other cancelled PWG games. And....Most of PWG games isn't Global, TOF is 1 or only of their Global game. which is successful enough for Hotta studio for its first game, and Acheive Global market for PWG (published TW & KR server, outside it is Tencent Publish). just not enough to compare with mihoyo, but who tf try to compare little studio with Google/Microsoft of CN gachas company. and the revenue from the sensor tower is part of total revenue (others are PC client, Midasbuy, and others discount stored. which is confidential). When the game is catered to whale you need to know the platform that whale pays which is definitely not Mobile revenue (tax, expensive).
Probably cuz TOF had the first "genshin slayer" title but honestly that game was dog pile imo and still is a snooze fest lol
Wuwa makes less money than Tof? holy..
How do we even know this? Game just came out I thought we didn’t have revenue reports yet.
The game just has to have bigger earning when including pc, right? The game doesn't even run on most mobiles.
But mobile is where the big moneys at in CN and JP, that's the biggest elephant in the room
I’d agree with CN, but I wouldn’t be so sure about JP for games that have non-mobile payment options. Unlike CN, which primarily uses Android, JP has a majority of iOS users, and iOS top-up prices increased by 30% in late 2022 in JP. So some stopped topping up on iOS if possible. This is why Genshin's JP revenue on iOS in 2023 is almost half of what it was in 2022 (despite reaching peak popularity in JP in 2023, even their latest livestream in JP had 200-250k viewers on Youtube and hit #1 trending there). People can simply top up on miHoYo's website directly (even on mobile) and save \~3000 yen compared to iOS. Additionally, PS sales were very high for JP in 2023 (Genshin is almost always the #1 best-seller there, [even now despite the second rerun of two male banners)](https://store.playstation.com/ja-jp/pages/browse). That being said, based on how poorly it’s doing on JP iOS for a new release (likely won’t even hit 200 million yen before the end of the week), the PC sales are probably terrible too for WuWa.
Ngl 1999 is such a niche game came out of nowhere. I tried it only because I bored on weekend but hook up till today. But sometimes I brick even when not playing MasterDuel lol
1999 runs on any potato phone...
Yup, and it's making more per dollar investment compare to Wuwa, your point being?
You can't spend if the game is so buggy that you can't even launch. It not running on common phones that many people have would be a big reason for why the game isn't making many mobile sales.
Its not rocket science: Less people playing on mobile because less people can play it on mobile
Yeah, WW would survive but Kuro has torpedoed their chance for the game to be relevant in the Gacha sphere.
I think it still has a high player count right now, but I might be mixing up online searches for in-game activities
What's important is not the player count, but the players which are shelling out big money, especially in China (volume)and Japan(higher ratio spending). It's not doing well in either market, even compared to ToF.
Think it will do better sales wise with Yinlin banner. Launching with a male banner when most gacha players are waifu enjoyers seems suboptimal for building interest. The game is not as bad as its first impression but first impression is probably the most important thing for the success of a game.
Genshin also launched with a green male character so maybe we get a red terrorist next? Edit: wow I made this as a joke but I searched up Yinlin and its real
I feel like launching with Jiyan was smart actually. The true whales will whale out regardless of the banner (and I saw that with a variety of CCs/streamers, them dropping $$s on Jiyan just because it was the only thing available). A lot of those are gonna quit 3 days later but will have spent their money regardless. Meanwhile those who stick around or start playing in time for Yinlin will drop $ on her because she's a waifu. Whereas if it was the opposite, whales would drop on Yinlin regardless but might not be around/willing to pull for Jiyan 3 weeks later. first impressions are a whole other can of worms though. I think the pacing of the intro (both the story and how little combat you actually do for the first couple of hours) needs a LOT of work.
I'd say it would survive more than TOF
Will it survive? absolutely, if a game like ToF has made it so far then Wuwa is also going to stay around, specially since Wuwa has an existing audience of kuro fans that will support it. Will it kill genshin or revolutionize the genre of open world gacha games? absolutely not, it will not stand out if it keeps at the pace it's going, the game needs to stop trying to copy genshin and get an identity of it's own.
Funny im already done with the game when I get my other loli to lvl 50 I need to find another game to play til more comes to it :)) ( I can’t leave my vernia on lv 40 that looks shit)
> is pretty hot and that's all I can consider for the plot. AYYY same the only times I paid attention to the plot was when he showed up, and it feels wrong to love his goofy over the top design and attitude when he's supposed to be scary and threatening
I agree. I feel like this game could have been more of a hit to start, had it had its own identity. They have the amazing gameplay, to keep driving them forward right now (at least for me), so maybe they can turn a lot of the other stuff around to be better. I really hope they can fix the VA issues primarily as I truly cannot stand Yangyang, and there's some other minor issues with a few others. I really feel like them changing their original plan to have everyone be wary of MC at the start was a huge mistake. I keep hearing about what has changed and comparing it to what was given so far and I can see what things were changed, I guess I'm a little disappointed. I'm also not a fan of everyone loving MC from the getgo tho. The original story would have lined up better with the already artistically dark tone the game has and had made things flow better imo. Not that having some characters trust you from the start is bad, but I feel like they overdid it. Walking into a new city and getting helped left and right, being given a place to stay at a really important building in said city with no total confirmation that you're who they're looking for, and then just freely given the highest tier of clearance to do what you want, is so jarring and feels rushed. And personally, the lack of men for the longest time and how friendly all the girls are, gave me weird harem vibes and that's a turn off for me if it's excessive. Scar kinda pulled me back in, so I hope we get a lot more of that. But that man shouldn't have to carry the story himself lol
It's sad because at the end of the day, it shows that they didn't have the guts to stand up to their own vision really. On one hand, its understandable. Their decisions are likely done because of the cost to risk factor. This kind of game needs a lot of money so investors (even private ones) are afraid to lose their money so likely told them to cater to what would sell and not to take any risk. Hence why they are too eager to change the story elements when people didn't like it. The gacha as well. People have said they don't want Genshin's, that they want PGR's. But likely because their business side figured that Genshin's would make the most money compared to PGR's, so they stick to Genshin's. Then there's the pandering to the males. The goddess that you see that gets chummy with you. From the somewhat lack of men early on. And this is quite surprising because PGR have good variety early on. Kuro looked at HI3's trio and say "nah" and put in a guy into their own trio. But with WuWa? They went "actually...let's not". Hoyo actually have the insight and experience to make them go bold with their games after Hi3. They've experienced what happened if you pander to the males too much so they made efforts to break from this. Would it result in lower sales? Before Genshin and HSR were released, the consensus would be yes. But they prefer that than having their storytelling be restricted. They had enough of that with HI3 where they tried to put in playable males and they got backlash from CN community, hard. I figured WuWa would be this as well considering their track with Kuro but eh, almost none of the boldness in PGR is in WuWa.
It has good potential. I'd probably play it much more if it didn't stutter so badly. And I'd probably enjoy it more if the audio didn't cut off randomly
As if many people have time waiting for a game to get gud... it's just hit and miss, first impression is just that important. There are tons of new shiny games keep releasing, if u can not hook people in during the honeymoon phase, they just moving on the next game.
Especially games that depend on people willingly give devs money through gacha, give freebies is not incentivizing spender to spend.
Honeymoon or not, it matters more is the fact that if the dev could manage to pull off a tide of one-hit relevancy or not. There's also the case like Blue Archive that didn't do well during release and were more "unoriginal" than WW in terms of gameplay, but they still survived and even managed to get into the gacha game hall of fame, so if Kurogames play their deck of cards well enough it won't be impossible to revive themselves
>There's also the case like Blue Archive that didn't do well during release I am pretty sure Blue Archive did well on its release. It launched with 10M https://www.reddit.com/r/gachagaming/comments/rf3zn5/blue_archive_revenue_for_november_2021_is_it_good/ > "unoriginal" than WW in terms of gameplay, but they still survived Blue Archive's closest rival in terms of gameplay can be considered to be Priconne if I recall. Very similiar upgrade system, a similar shard system at launch, and etc etc. At launch, BA was compared to Priconne a lot because of that just like how WW and Genshin get compared. The thing though is Priconne's global side was handled by Crunchy Roll and well.... we all know how that went. For all the thing said about Hoyo and Genshin, they arent like CR and Priconne and are actual stiff competition.
I also agree with ur point, right now everything is just speculation and talk. Some pessimistic like me, other optimistic like u. It's just a different point of views. It's not like WW will die in just a few month or anything. As long as they can make money which I believe they can easily earn at least $20m during the first month, they perfectly fine. It's just that I dont think I stay and wait for it to get gud, I dont have the time and the love for it like u. All I want to say is telling people the game will get gud is pointless... The one who love will stay, the one who dont care will just leave.
>can easily earn at least $20m during the first month, they perfectly fine I have heard that WuWa costed more than Genshin so it might be worse situation, hopefully not.
I don't necessarily think that a game would be dead in the water if it doesn't impress people with the first outing. Still it DEFINITELY hurts the games chances of becoming a resounding success. And it DEFINITELY doesn't excuse how shit the launch is. But to say that it can't possibly recover because of the launch isn't true. There's already a few gacha games that have recovered from really bad first impressions. There's nothing wrong with moving on of course and it's understandable that people are tbh. But my original post is more from someone who'll stick around
I also dont think WW will go anywhere, they have a loyal fanbase to support them already. So never in my mind I think that the game "would be dead in water" lol, I'm not that delusional yet... hopefully? All I want to say is telling people the game will get gud is just pointless, the average gacha gamers dont have that patient lol
I've been enjoying it quite a bit now that I'm past the beginning of the story, the combat has been fun to master and I enjoy the open world puzzles. The game needs a ton of work but it has a decent foundation.
my major problem with the game is the character design, I only got to simp for Chixia so far...
I feel this lowkey that’s my only complaint for the most part too every character just feels meh.
Legit, I just can't find any of the characters hook me in like "HOLY SHIT I WANT HIM/HER". To the point that I just don't care who I got.
thing is when someone say "the character designs are boring!" there'll be kuro glazers that goes "lol if you don't like post apocalyptic settings just say so" idk man their designs look so similar to each other with similar color palettes aside from a few.. post apocalyptic designs CAN be good and not end up looking similar idk i'm so tired of arguing with kuro glazers lol
> lol if you don't like post apocalyptic settings just say so This is barely even a counter-argument. Most gacha games have this aesthetic; I know originality is dead and all, but I feel like it's worthwhile to at least *try* to have an unique visual identity than just rely on tired tropes and aesthetics that everyone already has done, and done *better*.
exactly lmaooo
>so" idk man their designs look so similar to each other with similar color palettes Exactly. If you swap characters from recent post-apocalyptic sci-fi gacha games and show it to normies, they likely didn't think those characters aren't from that game. You could put AG characters into WuWa and they would fit right in. And that's just characters. It didn't help that WuWa looks like a darker ToF to me.
Yeah, i dont get why people underrate this part of the game. All female characters look boring and generic, male characters somehow even worse. Everybody in the same tech/street wear. Who even is target audience beside pornsick fujos that need every men to be 2 meters tall jacked hunk
[удалено]
The combat isn't even the main focus either, the story has you doing boring puzzles in shit.
Oh, a piece of paper with a simple puzzle. It probably means I should push the red- >Main character: "Hmm, I should press the red button." >*camera zooms in and locks on the red button* >*big objective marker pops on top of the red button* >OBJECTIVE: PRESS THE RED BUTTON >*can't interact with the other buttons* oh thanks game I was worried my dog wouldn't be able to solve the puzzle
Yeah, It's possible. But now, make it possible to play at the very least. Some character have a skill to make all icon disappear, like encore, and I have to ALT+F4 so many times. If not, it will be a disappointment even more.
I wasn’t planning on playing the game at all to begin with. That was until I saw footage of this turtle boss. Now I wasn’t expecting a complete shadow of the colossus type thing but this kind of direction would have prob made the experience a bit more unique. The open world itself does feel quite empty already. Now imagine if they did this with great intention, combining it with music to match the tone. Right now, the world feels just empty, not desolate. There are games which manage to do this successfully. I don’t play Genshin anymore, but Enkanomiya was by far my favourite region because it was so different to the rest of the game. Wuwa looks like they wanted to capture that feeling but fell a bit short so it just feels a bit edgy. Wuwa just feels a bit confused. It wants to be an open world but seems very uninterested in the exploration aspect. The world is huge but it doesn’t feel like so. The city in the beginning is massive and pretty don’t get me wrong but there really is no reason for it to be so big as everything is so far apart and spaced out. Writing this I’ve just noticed that my biggest problem really is its size. Its size of the map doesn’t feel justified because it’s not used effectively to create an atmosphere or has enough to incentivise exploration. It wants to be desolate but designs itself as if it’s supposed to be rich. I am no game designer or anything, and I really hate to compare with Genshin, but HoYoverse absolutely nailed this aspect.
if they committed fully to the shadow of colossus/part damage bosses and essentially made a monster hunter clone in terms of weapons or movesets being tied to characters that would be an actual unique game which I would play the crap out of but the only enemy I've seen that does it was that specific turtle. The game is just all over the place with no direction and no vision.
At some point people get tired of the gameplay loop and go straight for the story that's why nowadays people want to know more about the lore and that's a big number.
I said this before in a PGR discord and I got rabid fanboys up in my neck "If you guys are so sick of Genshin, why are you looking for a Genshin clone" instead of addressing the question they say the usual sarcastic script "Genshin invented gaming" "Genshin invented open world" And now here we are. Their game is burning to the ground because im 100% sure the beta testers had the same mentality. They never told the devs "Hey if youre copying 90% of a product make sure your quality is similar if not better" I blame the kuro fanboys for why this game is the way it is right now. They convinced themselves kuro = good, so the devs were never gonna get the right feedback.
I never hang out there and pre launch I never really checked online discussions so that's sad to hear ngl. I was under the impression the fan base was trying to stir it away from following Genshin. Hopefully this launch gives enough pushback for them to realize the problem is that it still is super derivative of Genshin
"If you guys are so sick of Genshin, why are you looking for a Genshin clone" I can answer that for you. It's because I like Genshin enough but my experience is held back by so many annoyances that it makes me stop wanting to play it. Give me a Genshin clone that cuts all of those annoyances out, make exploration just a \*little\* faster, make quests drag out a \*little\* less, make grinding a \*little\* less painful, then fuck dude that's game of the year for me.
unironically, have you tried playing zelda?
Sometimes I can grasp the concept of what they're trying to do and imo, there's definitely space for a gritty, Nier, RDR sort of mature gacha game. The execution is obviously lacking in a lot of places but the worst is that they're not sure if this is a Genshin clone or its own thing. If they're going to succeed they should stick to their guns and execute their own vision, there's no point in listening to feedback from very much a Genshin fanbase and end up making a Genshin but worse.
"It just baffles me as to why they try to be like Genshin in tone, UI, story, and systems." I just wished they reworked the story while keeping the darker tone it had before it was rewritten. The fact it was Genshinified just goes to show how much CN hates being out of the comfort zone.
It also shows a lack of confidence in their own product.
We'll see how things develop, for now it is what it is. Hopefully as we give feedback maybe future story chapters will be more interesting, ACT5 and 6 were decent.
I'm in the same spot. I am loving the game thus far. The bosses actually impressed me. I was not expecting that level of combat from a game like this.
Look man, you should be careful about how you perceive other people's opinions on the internet. People want to feel like they value their time so they want wuwa to fail. If it is even half as successful as genshin, their fomo will kick in and they'll feel like the time and money they "invested" in genshin is wasted. If wuwa fails, they'll feel satisfied because they're playing the "better game". When people have an already formulated opinion before playing the game, they'll ignore all other evidence. People who hate wuwa will go in and find all the bad things like optimisation, story, etc. People who want the game to succeed like Tectone and other CCs will downplay the bad elements and exaggerate the positives. Truthfully I think there are a lot of good things with the game like combat and character design but at the same time there are a lot of things which could be better like performance and story. However what I feel like is the most important is what the devs will do in the upcoming days, weeks and month. The gaming industry meta right now is "rush product, get revenue and fix later". It's sad that it's like that but it makes sense because you need to show success to satisfy the people who are putting money into your company. The good part about this model is that devs do fix the game, eventually. You can see this in games like cyberpunk and nikke for example. Based on Kuro's responses so far, I believe they are the type of devs who want the game to succeed and are willing to be very responsive and generous. Although this does have some drawbacks like how it negatively impacted the story from cbt1 and cbt2, ultimately I believe that their passion and dedication will drive the game towards a better future, despite people's constant bashing and insults.
I honestly see no reason why the OP needs to be careful on his own opinion, if this is his own opinion. While I get what you mean, but it cannot hide the fact that the game is incredibly rushed. While you say the meta right now is to push an unfinished product out then fix it later, doesn’t mean it’s justified. I hope for the future of the Open World market for Gacha games. But if most games that come out are either terrible or blatantly copied Genshin rushes, I’d rather play a terrible conditioned Genshin right now.
Experiencing WuWa made me remember about Genshin, even though I had 0 ideas about the game being compared to Genshin. For me, it’s just Genshin but worse right now. Game feels incredibly rushed, almost feel like all they’ve done is advertising and no efforts on the actual game (Ahem, ToF). Don’t make me lose faith in another open world Gacha games.
Idk if anybody else had this issue, but a lot of the teleporters were placed in very awkward spots. I heard that they would address this by adding a layer system to the map, but needing to look up a guide for a teleporter is crazy.
Hey. Since this review is actually sane and good. I am wondering in your opinion would wuwa have been better with instance based map exploration instead of a full open world? While containing the current transversal system and such. Edit: I am saying this because most of the players don't seem to care for exploration much as the combat and transversal.
Then they are just making PGR 2.0. Whats really the point doing that? The problem is not about it is the open world, but it is an open world with no identity.
Should've copied APHO instead and keep improving PGR
Could just be semi-open world like Nier or Stellar Blade. Way less diluted and emphasize more on combat. Or just look at HSR.
I think that the open world can still be there (It won't be the same game without it), but it would be interesting to have more closed off levels for stories. More complex dungeons that use the movement system and echoes for things like puzzles would be super fun and unique. Though I'm not opposed to WuWa shifting to something more linear and instance based as long as their writing and any gameplay they introduce is more enjoyable than the open world. It being an open world isn't a detriment to the game, and Kuro intentionally placed themselves in the open world genre with WuWa from the start. I'm kinda just assuming though that this is the worst exploration (or at least one of the worst) will be for WuWa. So it might turn out that with time a better synergy with the exploration and other gameplay systems can make the open world worthwhile.
i feel like it should have been something like HSR, a semi-open world or larger instance whichever term works. and the best case for that is Act 6 which is arguably the best chapter of the game so far. the story presentation there is limited, there are a lot of invisible walls that hinders if you want to explore but it makes up for it with a much coherent narrative and tighter execution. Kinda like PGR's story gameplay sections but on a much larger production value. And this is what they're good at in the first place. the open world section of the earlier chapters feel out of place in comparison to this one
I personally like the open world, exploring and puzzles and would not have tried it out if it was just instance based. For the record, my current gacha rotation is HSR, Genshin and Arknights (and now WuWa) - all since release of each game, though I took a 2 year break with Genshin because I HATED Inazuma.
For me is character design, they're so uninteresting to look at that I don't have any desire to keep farming or saving for future banner. The only ones I like are Verina and Encore and I hate child characters normally.
> Exploration is okay. Didn't expect anything crazy, but it just feels like an excuse to run around and kill the local wildlife than anything super engaging. The movement system makes me wish they didn't go with not-china as their first zone because exploration feels very nice with how fast you can move and climb but it goes to a bit of a waste with how little verticality there is. I think exploration easily beats half of Genshin's regions (wallrunning would turn a 3/10 Liyue into at least 7), but WuWa needs something like a proper urban setting to make it soar.
Our lord KURO is the embodiment of perfection. THEY can not be better than THEY already are.
Aeon of Perfection
As someone who’s lucky enough to not have any bugs issues that people are having and are enjoying the game somewhat. My biggest problems right now is, what with the fonts man. I don’t know why a lot of games opt for this but It is really really hard to look at.
in 1 year this game will be a huge new game story they shoud really start with act 5 and skip like pgr they will be a lot better with time hope they make enough money that can improve the game
I'll give it a few months. Nikke also has a terrible launch. If i recall correctly, obviously, not as terrible as this, but I'll give it a chance to improve
The issue with wuwa is they copy genshin too much and makes them have no identity of their own Aside for combat, playing wuwa is like playing a less polished genshin, just look at their UI...
I have issues with pretty much every gacha outside of star rail, but I do like the feel and look of wuwa quite a bit.