So, I’ve been playing Wuthering Waves for
more than 70 hours now and I’ve basically experienced everything the game has to offer,
including endgame as well as the daily loop and so… I wanted to take the time to fully understand
this game because I’ve seen a lot of misinformation being spread about it and on top of that – you’ve
probably heard things about Wuthering Waves like it’s the next big gacha game but also
it’s a Genshin copy or even a Genshin Killer… well, let me actually tell you the truth what
this game is all about and what you can expect from it because in this video, I will cover
Wuthering Waves gameplay, endgame, difficulty and even some controversial topics. Keep in mind this video is based around the
2nd closed beta test, so if you’re watching this in the future – some of the things
I talk about might have changed. Now in a nutshell – this game has 4 major
themes: Exploration, combat, monster collecting and story. And starting with the open world – similar
to Genshin, you can explore the areas to collect resources, fight wandering mobs, solve various
puzzles and take on sidequests. I would say the biggest thing that stands
out about exploration in this game would be mobility – you don’t consume stamina when
running fast, only when dashing and you can also run up the walls of pretty much any surface,
even though it does feel janky sometimes so hopefully the developers will work on this,
however after climbing walls in Genshin for 3 years, it just hits different when you realize
you can scale terrain so fast in this game. And speaking of mobility – combat here feels
very energetic. And by this, I mean there’s a lot going
on. You get to build a team of 3 characters but
only 1 can be on the field and with the active character, you can use their skill and ultimate,
as well as normal attacks but in addition, each character has intro and outro ability,
basically what they will do when you switch in and switch out. So, for example, this uh… character has
big… outro skill, when she switches out, she will boost the switched in team mate’s
skill damage by 38%, which is pretty cool and if you switch into her, then she gains
special stacks which she can consume to gain a shield. And keep in mind there’s also passive abilities
each character possesses, like for example, Chixia, I probably butchered her name but
basically, her passive is this red bar which can be built up with attacks and if she holds
down her skill for long enough, after unloading tons of bullets, she can also follow up with
a big boom shot. But going back to why combat feels energetic
has to do with defensive mechanics. In this game, you can either dodge enemies
or if they reveal this special circle, you can use I believe any attack, as long as you
can time it right and this counts as a parry. So, you could use one of your character’s
ultimate to parry a boss or even when somebody switches in and does an attack, that could
also parry an attack. I would say the game is pretty generous when
it comes to dodging, it’s pretty easy to avoid attacks and you can also animation cancel
pretty much anything, so you can quickly react to incoming attacks. As for parries – well, if you played any
game that has it, you know timing will always depend on the enemy’s animation, so you
will often need to learn it enemy by enemy, although some of them are pretty easy to parry. Overall, there’s a ton of depth when it
comes to combat and best of all – I was playing with a pretty big latency, if this
was Genshin then it would be big enough to screw up my rotations, however here it seems
like combat at least is client side, so this means no matter how high the ping is, it won’t
affect combat gameplay. Now one major thing I left out from combat
would be the Echoes. I do have some concerns about them and will
talk about this later in the video but basically, it’s kinda like Pokemon – when you defeat
a monster, there’s a chance they will leave this hologram of itself, hence why it’s
called Echo and you can collect them and use them as artifacts, which will boost your character
stats. But, the first Echo you equip will also provide
a unique ability you can activate in combat – for example, there’s this one that transforms
my character and he jumps around like a maniac and freezes everyone, I can also turn into
this badass monster and sweep enemies with Fire damage or I can turn into this scary
Crownless boss, who can pursue its target. It’s fun, I am not gonna lie and I think
this is one of the best things about this game. Still, as I said, I have some concerns which
I’ll talk about a bit later. But yeah, last thing to overview would be
the story. I personally didn’t find it that engaging
at the beginning, basically you start out as either male or female main character and
surprise, surprise - you lost your memory and so a group of attractive anime women discover
you, it turns out you’re super important and you need to work towards recovering your
memory and helping out the first big major region. Again – nothing groundbreaking here but
after encountering the main villain group, namely Scar, things do become a lot more interesting
and by the end of the region’s story, I felt invested enough to want to learn more
about what comes next. However, you cannot skip the story, I know
a lot of people spread this misinformation before the beta started after reading the
developer notes but instead– you can only skip side quest stories, which is fine but
the main story and featured character stories cannot be skipped, although maybe this will
change when the game launches globally. Anyway, that’s the basic overview of the
game. Now let’s talk about the difficulty because
the first 10 hours or so, I felt like the game was pretty easy. Everyone was hyping up that this a real man’s
game, with real stakes – bosses will mess you up. Well, the reality is – open world and a
lot of the content is quite easy and if you are having trouble, you can just beat it with
better gear. Obviously, this will exist in a gacha game,
more importantly a mobile game if you decide to play it on your phone but if you watched
my latest Zenless Zone Zero review video, I also said the game is very easy at the beginning,
however in Wuthering Waves, you will be punished if you do not pay attention to what the enemy
or the boss is doing. Now the first real difficulty spike shows
up in these Tactical Hologram challenges – basically it’s a beefed-up boss and even the first
challenge forced me to utilize everything I’ve learned about the game but what’s
even cooler - all 4 of these bosses have 6 difficulty stages and while I was busy editing
this video, some content creators like Rexlent clawed their way to 4th difficulty boss Mephis
who in addition to doing his regular moves, will now also summon a copy of itself and
onwards from Difficulty 5, their attack stat will keep increasing over time. So yeah, you will need to dodge and make perfect
parries to beat these bosses, although obviously at some point you will be able to just out-gear
the stages, however I do wonder how difficult the last stage is going to be. But to make it short – open world gameplay
is pretty chill, it’s not difficult and this includes all the world mobs and bosses
but there are special challenges you can go to and those will be a great way to test your
skills. Just remember – nobody in this closed beta
test have reached maximum level yet, so we don’t have access to best gear, which means
while the current endgame feels like it can provide challenging content, nobody can say
for sure how this will look like once everyone actually reaches maximum level and obtains
good gear in the future, when the game launches. But seeing how some content creators who are
outgeared by the bosses are already pushing far into some of these challenges, it’s
good to see that the game rewards skillful play. Speaking of which – let’s talk about endgame. Basically, once you have no more quests and
you’re done exploring, the daily grind loop so far is pretty simple. Aside from the limited events that I am sure
this game will have in the future, there’s a list of daily tasks you will want to do
and just like in Genshin, you’ll get those disappointing 60 Primogems and some spare
resources after doing all the tasks, although they don’t take as much time, so that’s
a plus I guess but aside from that – there’s Tower of Adversity which is like Spiral Abyss
– you fight a bunch of enemies in ongoing stages, there’s a beginner version and then
a more advanced version and then afterwards there’s another rotating version called
Hazard Zone, right now it says it will refresh after 97 days but I think that’s probably
just for closed beta test, I think it will rotate sooner when game launches. But I do want to point out that in here, each
character you use in these stages will have set amount of uses and the more you keep fighting
with them, the more they become exhausted until eventually you will need to replace
them with somebody else – basically the game forces you to play several teams instead. And just like with Hologram challenges, Tower
of Adversity will most likely be another place where it will test your skills & knowledge
of the game. There’s also this challenge called Depths
of Illusive Realm and it’s sort of a rogue-like mode, where you pick up upgrades along the
way and try to win with the best temporary build. What’s interesting about it is that it puts
heavy emphasis on upgrading your active Echo, so it will even gain some new moves that you
wouldn’t normally be able to use and that’s pretty cool to me. I am not sure if this is an event or a permanent
mode because it does have a shop timer and some characters are unusable, so who knows
but there’s multiple different ways you need to beat it in order to gain all the rewards. And then of course, we have the gacha gaming
stamina system. Here it’s called Waveplate and the maximum
cap is 240 while 1 point refreshes every 6 minutes so compared to Genshin, it’s kinda
better, however some of the materials you will want to obtain with Waveplates cost more
than compared to Genshin, although I haven’t done the math but it feels a bit better than
playing with 160 Resin in Genshin. Anyway, you can consume waveplates to farm
for character abilities and weapon ascension materials or you can go for those generic
stages to obtain some EXP for echoes, characters, weapons or just straight up farm some money,
then there’s of course world bosses which you’ll want to farm to ascend your character’s
maximum level and then there’s these things called Tacet fields, which I’ll talk about
in a moment but in a nutshell, it will help improve your echoes. And of course, there’s a weekly boss you
can do once to obtain their rare material to unlock stronger character abilities. I mean – look, it’s more or less just
what you would expect from a stamina system in a gacha game and this one right here is
almost identical to Genshin’s, which is fine, at least to me, because this means you
will spend less time trying to figure out where to spend Waveplates. But the last endgame activity that everyone
will be occupied with until the heat death of our universe is going to be farming for
the best Echoes. You see, on a surface level, you would think
that this pseudo artifact system is a lot better than Genshin’s and that’s the narrative
I’ve seen going around on social media but the truth is – it’s about as bad as Genshin’s
artifact system. Let me elaborate. First of all – you can easily farm for echoes
in the open world. Each time you defeat an enemy, there’s a
chance they will drop their Echo. Now when regular enemies are killed, they
will only respawn after the server’s daily reset, however you can easily hop into Co-Op
and join any other player’s world to farm for Echoes together – you can even defeat
enemies on the other side of the map and your friend can come and check out if any Echoes
dropped for them. There’s even this nifty browse feature where
you can apply to join other player public worlds, so technically, you can keep on farming
for Echoes for as long as you like. And what’s even better and I’ve tested
this myself – I was able to keep farming the same bosses over and over in my own world,
I didn’t spend Waveplates to claim their rewards, just waited a couple of minutes and
they would just respawn and by doing this, I was able to fish for Critical Rate main
stat by repeating this boss. So, imagine if you could farm 5-star artifacts
in Genshin without spending Resin – there’s gotta be a catch, right? Well, there is. You see, when you obtain the Echo, its substats
will be locked or should I say hidden and the only way to reveal them is by using this
innocent looking resource called Tuner. So now let’s say you spent all this time
running around and farming for that desired main stat on your Echo - now it’s time to
actually reveal the substats. Well, it’s going to be a pretty mixed experience
because there’s a total of 13 different possible substats you could potentially roll
into and I am not even sure if that’s all of them. As you can imagine, you’ll be only interested
in few of them but in order to find out if this Echo is good or not, you will need to
spend this Tuner resource. And so far, I was able to get some of it by
doing quests or some other activities but of course if you want to gain it consistently,
you will most likely need to go and do these Tacet fields I briefly mentioned previously,
which will cost 60 Waveplates and boy oh boy do they feel unsatisfying because while it
offers additional rewards like set specific Echoes, which means they can belong to a set
that boosts Elemental, Physical Damage, etc., only 2 of them drop… at least with this current world difficulty
and you also get some Echo experience points but the focus here is to farm for Tuners,
so in a nutshell, you spend the Waveplates, in order to actually roll for the substats
on your Echoes. And if that’s not enough – you cannot
use level 1 Echoes to level up other echoes – you must invest into them this EXP material,
which of course can also be farmed with Waveplates or you can obtain some of it from world exploration
but that’s finite and spending Waveplates on this stage here to obtain Echo EXP will
be the main way to level up the echoes. So, what I am trying to say here is that yes
– it doesn’t cost Waveplates for you to go around the world or in co-op to farm a
bunch of Echoes but if you want to level them up or roll for their substats – you will
eventually need to spend Waveplates to do this. And don’t get me started on the layers of
randomization. While bosses can belong to only 1 set, when
you farm for regular mobs, they will be randomly assigned one of the set bonuses. So that’s layer 1. Then we have the main-stat where you will
want to obtain something that’s relevant like Crit Rate or ATK%, so that’s layer
2. Then if you’re smart and farmed up a bunch
of the same Echoes with the main stat you’re looking for, one by one you will spend a single
Tuner to roll for the first substat – the ones that rolled a bad substat, you’ll feed
it as EXP to other Echoes but those who have rolled the first good substat, you will then
repeat this 4 more times because in total, there can be 5 substats rolled on an Echo,
so that’s layer 3. Finally, the last layer are the substats themselves
– each substat has a range of values, so for example, if both Echoes roll ATK%, one
of them might have it higher than the other and that’s the final layer 4. And remember – you have to spend Tuners
and EXP materials to play this lottery and unless Kuro Games decides to shower us with
never-ending supply of these items – you will need to spend Waveplates in order to
do this. So no, in the end, I don’t think Wuthering
Waves has a better F2P experience in terms of leveling your Echoes compared to Genshin
artifacts because both of them will devour your Waveplates / Resin with zero remorse
when you keep rolling onto that flat DEF and flat HP substat. However, at least now, I do find the Echoes
enjoyable to collect, there’s a total of 57 different Echoes you can obtain, I know
the game says here it’s 228 but it counts every rarity of Echo, however there’s also
shiny versions of Echoes you can obtain, they are super rare drops but to my knowledge it’s
only an alternate look, there are no other benefits. And to be honest – at least right now, you
can easily play the game by using Echoes with mediocre substats, you definitely don’t
need to go through all this trouble but later on, this will most likely matter a lot more. And in open world, honestly you can just run
around with whatever and still clear everything effortlessly. Besides the hardest part of trying to obtain
that perfect Echo is going to be the one you’re actively using, since you care about their
ability, while others will just act as set pieces, so you can literally just equip a
bunch of random Echoes who belong to the same set and you’re Gucci. Now as long as we’re on the topic of lottery
– let’s talk about the gacha system. There’s a total of 5 banners and first there’s
a beginner banner which gives a discount for 8 of these Convenes to do 10 pulls and after
50 pulls you’re guaranteed a 5-star and then afterwards this banner disappears, which
is not surprising. Then there’s the featured character banner
and right now I can pull for Jiyan, who looks super cool, although people online have been
memeing that this guy is alternate universe Xiao, I dunno, go figure. Anyway, hard pity is at 80 pulls and Kuro
Games sadly have decided to implement the same 50/50 Genshin has, so yeah… that’s
a bit of a bummer, however it’s 80 pulls compared to Genshin’s 90, although I haven’t
seen anyone confirm what is the soft pity yet, hopefully it’s lower. And as you can see, there are also 3 featured
4-stars, so the gacha here is very similar compared to Genshin’s. Now on the other hand – when it comes to
the featured weapon banner – it’s also guaranteed after 80 pulls BUT you are 100%
guaranteed to receive the featured weapon – it’s that simple. I like this a lot but at the same time I want
to remain cautious about this because if the game throws a bunch of stat gated content
at you or if the featured 5-star character’s potential is limited without their signature
weapon, it could turn into this whole mess where you must pull for the 5-star weapon,
so while I am happy this banner is A LOT more better than Genshin’s I will need to see
for myself how optional these 5-star weapons are going to be. And then, another big surprise - there are
two standard banners – one for the characters and the other for weapons. So, you can decide where you want to spend
your standard summon currency – you can still potentially obtain 4-star weapons from
character banner but the 5-star is going to be a character no matter what. On the flipside, if you go for the standard
weapon banner, you can even select before you summon which 5-star you want to obtain
100%, so that’s another cool idea. Again, I won’t hype this up too much because
I already saw a lot of content creators hyping up Echoes system like it’s some sort F2P
haven when in reality you will still need to spend tons of stamina, so while I commend
Kuro games for doing this and I am well aware they have something very similar implemented
in their other game Punishing Gray Raven, where you can also obtain guaranteed weapons
like that, it’s best to just see how mandatory these weapons are going to be when the game
actually launches. Overall – it’s a gacha game, never expect
the game to have fair pull rates because at the end of the day, it’s a business model
that capitalizes on gambling aspect, so don’t spend if this heavily affects your financial
situation. By the way, I shared a lot of this info on
my Twitter account, so if you wanna stay up to date with my thoughts about Wuthering Waves,
make sure to follow me by using the link in the description below the video. Now you probably noticed me referencing Genshin
all the time – well first of all, a lot of you watch my Genshin videos, so that’s
one of the reasons but I won’t lie – Wuthering Waves has implemented a lot of the same things
Genshin has. From the monetization, to character and account
leveling, to even character story quests – you know how Genshin always has these character
quests where the developers emotionally manipulate you into pulling for that character because
they platonically are so interested in you and share heartfelt moments, well – it’s
the same here. Both Jiyan and Lingyang story quests did this
exact same thing – they had emotional stories and they were super friendly towards the main
character. However, a lot of effort was put into these
stories – there were animated cutscenes like the one here and with Jiyan there was
this super cool upside down city landscape you would only be able to witness by doing
his quest – so yeah, homework was copied but it was done with the same high quality
as Genshin would do. And look – at the end of the day, I personally
have no personal stake in either games – if Wuthering Waves copies Genshin, that’s fine
to me. I mean it’s not like Genshin is the pioneer
of this genre, we’ve got a whole backlog of Ubisoft games that keep reusing the same
open world formula over and over again with Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry games and there’s
also Breath of the Wild, which Genshin definitely copied some aspects of. I mean I don’t know if you’ve ever heard
this expression but ultimately – creativity is a remix. I’ll even throw in one of those cringy quotes
you would read on Facebook by Mark Twain. I mean I’ll admit, the open world experience
in Wuthering Waves does feel a bit samey after playing Genshin since the start but that more
has to do with how developers approach open world exploration in general. But the fact that there’s higher mobility,
you can wall run, you can collect Echoes, the combat system is complex and you can react
to enemies with parries are some of the things that Wuthering Waves offers compared to Genshin. So what I am trying to say here is that if
you like Genshin’s gameplay but want to try something similar – hey, Wuthering Waves
can offer that. Overall, I would say my experience with this
game so far has been pretty good. Obviously, there’s still a lot of things
that need to be addressed – like I didn’t want to be subjective about art here but my
god does the UI look ugly here and so do the damage numbers. Movement also feels sometimes a bit janky,
especially jumping feels like it has no weight. And for example, Lingyang’s mid-air combat
feels so bad to me, like it often misses enemies and it’s hard to use him, so I hope the
developers refine his playstyle. But all in all – I think Wuthering Waves
has a lot of potential and I personally don’t care if it’s a Genshin Killer – I just
want to see another open world gacha game that can compete with Genshin, so that the
developers from Genshin start to realize the market doesn’t belong to them anymore. Remember - competition always breeds innovation
and excellence, or else we end up with the 3 wishes fiasco. Anyway, thanks for watching the video, hope
you enjoyed this review I guess and I would appreciate if you could press the like button
and subscribe to my channel. Thanks again and see you very soon.
