Wuthering Waves Launch Situation

withering waves has launched in fall and I want to talk about it so there has been some discussions regarding the launch state of the game some of it praising the combat War gameplay aspect of it and some discussing some topics that are not so in favor of the game's quality I had the pleasure of being one of the first million users to register as release window was a bit earlier than what was scheduled and from personal experience I thought the first couple hours were pretty good but I understand that's not everyone's experiences so in this video I'm going to go over my first impression some pros and cons regarding the state of the game my name is psyche let's get started so I want to get something out of the way first most of the points I bring up may not even be relevant in the near future as Cal games is doing some heavy damage control by bug fixes and compensations there's like a patch every other day so it's possible that as this video gets edited and released some of it may get fixed already okay let's break down the new player experience for the record I did not play during close beta testing though I heard through the Great Vine that there were quite a number of bugs present and that some were skeptical that all of them could be ironed out given launch day anyways you play as the Rover a mysterious figure that has descended upon the world they realize that they were meant to be someone quite influential but can't seem to remember why you start out in the region hang long meet the magistrate and find out why you've been summoned you meet your companions yyang and shisha and oh my God there is a skip Buton except why put one there if you're not going to let players skip everything because some story cut scenes can't be skipped so I would say the introduction to combat was pretty good there's quite an emphasis on dodging and swapping to the appropriate characters via the intro and outro skills the Dodge timing is generous but I think it has to be generous since this is a gacha game and needs to cater to a casual audience the first couple of Boss encounters actually do a good job of showcasing the smoothness of combat and the detailed character animations the only thing I would suggest adding is a visual or audible sound cue whenever you switch characters without an outro skill since currently the character just kind of Fades in silently I would say the combat is more similar to Tower fantasy than genin there's a unique attack after a Dodge aerial attacks that consume stamina and counter moments where enemy attack can be interrupted when there's a glowing ring there are rotations and attack chains that can change the flow of combat and even something called a forte circuit that when filled can unleash a powerful attack but it has to be filled through a unique requirement that's actually different for each character in terms of Mobility there is a double jump a grappling a way to run up vertical surfaces that consume more stamina and here's a nice touch when sprinting while not in combat your stamina doesn't drain Tyro fantasy does the same thing but hey it's there there's also Echoes that you can collect by defeating monsters in the Overworld where they give stat bonuses that essentially function as artifacts with sets that you can mix and match for boosts while also being able to equip one to use as an extra skill the higher your data Bank level the rarer of echo obtained at a glance the echosystem does do seem more grindy than genin's artifact system where you need five slots belonging to the same set to activate the bonus so no offset piece you also have to use a separate tuner currency to unlock the substats themselves we'll see how the community reacts to it overall in the coming weeks since a fascinating thing that A Game's launched is that no one is at the end game yet well at least not enough people so there's no Collective Community sentiment on how bad or how good the ecosystem truly is it will depend on how necessary it is to have built up sets to tackle endgame content if this really is as grindy as it seems right now I can see this is a major barrier that could cause players to quit if the challenge content is going to be in the same degree as genin's spiral Abyss then withering waves cannot have a worse system the endgame dungeon in this game will require three teams at Max and since teams consist of three members each you need to build nine different characters as oppos the Gins 8 it will take a while for anyone to get used to the game playay like which characters are good who to level first how to farm for the right materials and so on I know when I inevitably reach the end game and take a look back at this footage I would really question why I had trouble clearing World bosses I'm sure a lot of players struggled with genin's develon at first too but then came back to absolutely sweep him later on let's talk about the story yeah this is a problem so according to online sources the story has been changed somewhat where the characters were originally distrustful of the Rover except that was changed so that the Rover is revered as the SA avor From Another World now there's no way I can see what the old version looked like but I know some people will think the chosen one Trope is generic and overused I overall didn't really care for it as long as the character itself is good in terms of the flow I would say well not so good at first there's massive info dumps that you can't skip for whatever reason characters you meet that don't offer too much to the overall plot except for the sake of introducing new characters and jargon that most won't care too much to know you can have a lot of lore in the game but that kind of info should be on note were collectible somewhere in a game like this I think it's best to just give the player the basic premise then release them into the wild to do whatever now a trend I notice with the games I play is that it's fairly typical for a Goa game to have poor writing at the beginning but get good later on genjin story doesn't get good until sumeru fgo story doesn't get good until Camelot snow break story doesn't get good until after chapter 11 it's not unusual for a gacha to start off slow where uninteresting and get better later since well this is is a fixable problem given the life service nature of them it just depends on how competent Coral games' writers are not to mention that the story once you get past all the blowed dialogue in Acts 4 and 5 are pretty good especially when this guy with the giant bulge shows up I've completed all the main story acts so far and I can indeed say it does get better later what I did notice immediately were the character animations the models don't look like clay dolls they turn their heads raise their eyebrows and display expressive emotions with such fine detail like the subtle shimmering of the pupils and some of these scenes clearly were designed with meticulous planning playing off the lighting effects and the environmental backdrops in terms of animation and texture quality I think when it doesn't bug out it genuinely looks pretty impressive I don't think anyone would argue that the gam playay plays poorly when it flows well in addition to having a lock on feature you can pull off some pretty impressive moves it's fastpac and input heavy and I believe sets itself apart from the competition once I got to explore the Overworld again I was surprised by the quality it's hard to stomach that at the end of the day these games are free to download it's just that the standards for them have already been defined by an existing property that we have something to compare to withering waves focuses on a darker side of World building side quests led me to some new locals and rewards the puzzles feel personal and unique and the scenery and music again pretty impressive I know that the optimization leaves something to be desired while I personally found some areas that stuttered a little bit and I know performance has not been consistent with everyone across all platforms now I don't want to defend Coral games here because if a fully released game in 1.0 underperforms in terms of optimization that should be called out it's clear that c gam still has some ways to go in this regard so for the record I don't think they deserve any defenses when it comes to releasing an unpolished and unoptimized product as of currently genin absolutely is still the winner here I very rarely have stutters or performance issues while Roaming In tavat whereas here I can get the occasional dip here and there I saw some discussions saying that withering waves is genin but worse and I got to say I very much disagree with the sentiment first unlike Tower of fantasy withering waves never adverti itself as the genin killer or competing with genin it's undeniable that there are many similar elements such as the UI and overall Aesthetics but there are also some elements that fundamentally change itself from genin's system let's start with the gotcha withering wave's five-star rate is 0.8% which is slightly higher than genin's 0.6 this may not seem like a significant Improvement but when the rates are in the lower decimal digits every bit of increase helps technically you can argue that withering waves SSR rate is 33% better for every three five stars you get in genin you get four in withering waves something you'd see very often in gacha games is that usually the game will give you a free SSR in the beginner Banner as a sort of a sweetener GHIN is one of the few that doesn't do this you get a free Noel but you don't actually get a free fivar in the mileage shop you can actually buy two additional copies of the standard SSRS and The Limited rate up one ginin doesn't have this I've reviewed quite a number of gacha games on this channel and something I've begun to see is more ways to limit break a character without pulling duplicates from the gacha and I am all for it here this means if you wanted to you can skip pulling on a rerun Banner but still be able to obtain any limit breaks or sequences as they're known in this game which is a pretty sizable change in addition for the weapon Banner there is no epitomized path if you pull on the limited weapon Banner when you pull a five-star it is guaranteed to be the rate of weapon meaning the absolute worst case scenario is only 80 PS as opposed to genin's 240 pretty big difference wouldn't you say on top of that you can buy seven of each of the limited standard and the limited weapon pole tokens from the shop monthly W genin gives five of each for the standard and The Limited character banners I know this make it seem like I'm biased towards withering waves gotcha system but I do think that genin's pull rates are still Fair there's a reason why it's used as the Cornerstone of gacha design by other developers now let's talk about the open world design for a game in version 1.0 the map is actually pretty large I managed to Traverse to the four corners of it and there's quite a number of interesting locals to explore I know some believe that genin's open world design is better paced but here's what I think if you're going to compare withering waves 1.0 world map then it should be fair to compare it to genin's 1.0 map which only contained the areas for monat and liya and dragon spine wasn't a thing yet I think based on C games's previous game punishing great Raven since withering waves is their first major project with designing a 3D open world game and just as mihoyo were able to improve on the design over the course of 3 years it's only fair to compare it to when genin was at its first steps too so I generally play genjin for the exploration elements I enjoy going around the regions and taking in the scenery and the rewards there's actually quite a number of side quests built up in my catalog same goes for the character stories and the hangout events I normally don't play the game for these since I can't be sure if it's actually good or mediocre and filled with bloated dialogue even withering waves when I got set loose to explore the world I've never actually realized how smooth it was to have a skip button because I can just do this and go straight back to exploring I really don't understand the argument against having a skip button in a game like this it gives players more Choice it respects the player's time and if you want to engage in the story you are free to do so this is something that's always irked me with genin even if you force me to sit through the dialogue I'm just spamming left click while watching a YouTube video on the side cuz guess what I wasn't going to read it anyways the music once again I don't get this argument that gin's music is better now look I'm no expert in music composition or music theory but who are you to judge what is and isn't good quality music now I mainly listen to EDM or techno tracks from Rhythm games so osts like from the Yakuza series of games are right up my alley and throughout the years I play genin I think the music is beautifully composed and some of the boss tracks are pretty fire I don't think a gacha game needs to have a good OST to be considered a good game I care if the music fits the theme or the environment which I believe is the case in withering waves I don't think the music in this game is that spectacular too but I don't think it needs to be music is one of the most subjective things ever personally I can't stand hip-hop music but if you enjoy it I'm not going to think poorly of you if you prefer genin's music over withering waves that's fine and I totally understand but if you don't have extensive music knowledge implying that the music is objectively better is pretty moronic in my opinion I want to State these things because there are genuinely a lot of players having fun with the game right now the subreddit for withering waves has already exceeded 100,000 making it on par with nik's subreddit which took 2 years to grow to this scale the thing is that if the game is functioning properly there's no reason for someone to post anything online the majority of discussions occur when there is an issue brought up where when players are dissatisfied about something what I'm trying to say with all this is that despite how much people Doom posts about this game whether you like it or not withering waves will perform very well financially in the coming months I know there's going to be a lot of people that are for or against withering waves exceeding so here's what I think despite all the discussions online something I think everyone should know is that the majority of players at least in Western countries don't follow any news or media outside the game itself they don't follow the Game's Twitter news sites Reddit or YouTube content creators they don't care about the discourse surrounding the game's optimization or story pacing a quote This Thread of tweets made by Josh drife Hae when gaming news especially negative news comes out and you wonder why the game is selling well we're still being enjoyed despite all the stuff you think people should know or care about it is an unfortunate but true fact that most people simply do not care if the game play is fun people will buy it and play it the majority won't give a single thought to the politics ethics moral or immoral design choices even the developers personal history in the land of popular gaming gameplay alone is King if the game runs and plays well people will continue to play it if not they will simply move on to something else the people that are engaging with these online discussion forums including you watching this video right now represents a miniscule percentage of the overall player base we'll see how this plays out in the long term but I predict that the game will perform very well in the first couple months creu games will easily be able to make back the amount of funds spent on marketing and development the only thing is how well they can retain players through consistent 6-e content updates if we take a look at their track record with punishing Gray Raven they have a good history of player feedback and overall generosity with iname goodies here's hoping they can manage the game well here too it's to a lot of people's personal beliefs that kurl games wanted to capitalize on the downtimes between genin's Natan region Zena Zone zero and azer prilia leading to a rush launch where a lot of players were not satisfied with the performance that being said I also wouldn't say it's a completely disastrous launch and I really don't understand the superiority complex some people have with genin even if you have zero plans to play withering waves and don't care a single bit about it this game succeeding will actually benefit you competition is good for consumers it drives better service and products mihoyo just might treat players better when there is actual competition if we take a look at the withering waves player numbers on online forums Coral games will easily be able to make back the costs in the first couple months it just depends on how well they can Seer the ship from here on when punishing great Raven launched it too had numerous issues that were fixed over the course of time afterwards eventually reaching a state that most players were happy with I'd like to believe they can do the same here too but just to a wider scale I think eventually withering waves will stabilize and do well in terms of Revenue it's not going to reach genin's numbers so I don't even think it's going to come close but I think it is enough to kick The Hornet's Nest a little bit withering waves is like a small tumor to genin mihoyo knows that it's there and that the systems are slightly better and it just might be enough to push them to give a bit more player appreciation anyways that is my first impression of withering waves personally I bought the $5 welin and the battle pass I'll be sticking with the game for a bit further to see where it goes from here and hey maybe down the line you can expect an atrocious Scotch review on it thank you for tuning in and as always have fun out there [Music]

Channel: Pseychie

Views: 52,890

Keywords: gacha, gacha game, gacha review, wuthering waves

Id: PG9fOcNObio

Length: 16min 27sec (987 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 01 2024