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The Wuthering Waves release date has been officially announced, and fans are hoping that this game will dominate Genshin Impact. Hoyoverse's open-world RPG has faced lots of backlash over the years, and the recent Chinese New Year fiasco related to the rewards landed the studio in hot waters. Although it's all in the past now, many in the gacha community wish for Wuthering Waves to succeed so that HoYoverse loses the monopoly with Genshin Impact.
Genshin Impact is a great game. However, the development teams have made quite a few fumbles that have left the fans raging and wanting competition so that HoYoverse can finally start improving the game. Wuthering Waves can bring in that competition, and it may have the potential to take away Genshin Impact's player base.
Today, we will explore some of the major reasons why Wuthering Waves can kill Genshin Impact, or provide a strong wave (no pun intended) to see some major changes to HoYoverse's open-world title.
Note: This article is subjective and reflects the writer's views.
How Wuthering Waves has the potential to beat HoYoverse's Genshin Impact
1) Combat
Combat can be a subjective topic. Although Genshin's battle system is interesting, especially because of the elemental reactions, it can still get stale at times. As someone who has played the game since its launch, the only time I got invested in Genshin Impact's combat was when Sumeru and Dendro were released.
On the other hand, Wuthering Waves relies more on your skills and abilities to learn enemy patterns, similar to what you can expect from a Soulslike title. Just like its predecessor Punishing Gray Raven, its combat is fast-paced and relies on your usage of swapping in characters or echoes and activating their skills. Perfectly timing your parry will also stagger bigger enemies, opening a chance for you to unleash your full force.
While nothing is wrong in wanting a relaxing experience, some people do love hardcore combat more. It is clear that Kuro Games is ready to deliver them the experience that they weren't getting from Genshin Impact.
2) Listening to community feedback
Over the years, HoYoverse's Genshin Impact development team hasn't implemented community feedback to the level needed. The title is lacking, and it fails to implement basic quality-of-life changes compared to most other gacha games. This became a heated discussion when Honkai Star Rail was released with the ability to dispatch expeditions with only one click, forcing the developers to implement the same in Genshin.
Kuro has a track record of taking community feedback seriously and implementing major changes to Punishing Gray Raven depending on it. The developers even worked hard and reworked Wuthering Waves from scratch after receiving not-so-favorable reviews over the first Close Beta Test. Even with the latest CBT 2.0, Kuro Games has announced that it is ironing out all the problems listed by the community before Wuthering Waves' eventual release.
Given how live-service development works, and how much Kuro wants its upcoming open-world game to succeed, it will make no sense if it suddenly stops taking community feedback and leaves fans hanging.
3) Open-world exploration
Genshin Impact was able to pull in the crowd because of its vast open world, and not many gacha games dared to attempt it because of how costly a live-service title of such magnitude can be. Tower of Fantasy did try to introduce competition with its open world, yes. However, it failed to do so compared to the amount of exploration depth that Genshin Impact provides.
However, tying in with our last point of community feedback, HoYoverse failed to improve and provide basic features to the open-world exploration of Genshin Impact. The movement is slow, the stamina bar takes eons to fill up but depletes very fast, and climbing on buildings can be frustrating because you get stuck on the edges.
The lack of stamina was annoying for many players, especially during the Sumeru part given how vast the area was. Although the developers improved this aspect by introducing mechanisms such as the grapple points in Sumeru and the Adeptal energy system in Chenyu Vale, the exploration can still feel lackluster.
Wuthering Waves, on the other hand, has shown extremely well-done open-world exploration systems. Your character will slide down from cliffs instead of falling flat and dying like they do in Genshin. The best part is you will have access to a grappling hook that you can use freely. Another great feature that Wuthering Waves has in its pocket is that your character can vault on the roofs and will not get stuck on the edges.
4) Better gacha mechanics
We have learned a lot about Wuthering Waves, especially from the second Closed Beta Test. The gacha mechanics, i.e., the paid part of the game that can be used to summon characters and weapons, are a lot similar to Genshin Impact, except with a few major tweaks.
The first major change is the fact that the Weapon Banner has a 100 percent drop rate over Genshin's 75:25 ratio. The Standard Character and Weapon Banners are also two different entities. This is unlike HoYoverse's open-world game, and the best part is you can select which 5-star weapon you want.
You can also buy two copies of a Wuthering Waves character's armband, which is the constellation equivalent from the shop. But, you will need at least one copy of the character if you want to use it.
Given how free-to-play friendly Punishing Gray Raven is, it will be highly unlikely that Kuro Games will revert these features to implement a stingier system. Given how gacha titles work, yes, Wuthering Waves will be stingy as the developers do need to make money. But the aforementioned system already makes it a better experience than HoYoverse's Genshin Impact.
5) Endgame
The desire for more endgame content, like many other features requested by Genshin Impact enthusiasts, went unanswered by HoYoverse. The only endgame currently present is a tower-like mode called Spiral Abyss that rotates every two weeks.
Wuthering Waves CBT 2.0 gave us glimpses of two endgame modes: One is a rogue-like combat mode similar to Star Rail's Simulated Universe, and the other is a tower-like mode akin to Spiral Abyss. Both are expected to be included with the title's full launch.
Exploration in a live-service game is limited as the developers cannot provide fresh content every day. So having modes that can test skills is essential if the studio wants to retain its player base and stop people from leaving it. Wuthering Waves having two endgame modes has shown us that a team that listens to the community will always provide something that can keep fans hooked to the game.
Wuthering Waves may just be the competition we need to see improvements and community-requested features being implemented more often in Genshin Impact. Sometimes we need a David who can take down Goliath and bring a change.
Although Genshin Impact will not suffer immediately, if Kuro Games can provide a better experience with Wuthering Waves, HoYoverse might see a fall in the revenue it makes with its open-world RPG.
