What Is Wuthering Waves?

WuWa. What is Wuthering Waves? Introduction Guide. Action RPG. Review and Intro for New Players.

Wuthering Waves is a Free-to-Play Action RPG available on PC or Mobile with optional Co-Op, a more realistic anime art style, fast and fluid combat, and an open world to explore. It is a Gacha game, which means that the primary method of monetizing the game is through characters that get released periodically and can be obtained by using currency you can farm in game or by using real money. Those who may be wondering whether they should get into the game will be asking questions such as:

Is it pay-to-win?
Is it worth my time?
What do you do in game?
How fun is it?
Does the story look good?
Is it too late to play?

All of these questions and more will be answered in the following introduction and review of Wuthering Waves.

Table of Contents

Monetization

For many players, labeling a game as “Pay-to-Win” is an immediate turn off, but many disagree at which point a game becomes pay-to-win. Depending on the definition, most MMORPGs could be considered pay-to-win. Wuthering Waves is very clearly pay-to-win. It is a free-to-play game, but you can use real money to buy characters, bypass time gates, and improve your character power levels to the point that would take free-to-play players several months to reach.

This sounds problematic, but only if you must be the best at the game without spending any money. It is entirely possible to enjoy and have meaningful progression while these systems exist as long as you understand these three notions:

This is mostly a single-player game, you don’t compete with other players
You don’t need to be on the cutting edge of progression to experience the content in the game, it is mostly casual and still fun
When pushing the limits of progression, skill is still an extremely important factor regardless of how much you spent

Creating a successful game certainly takes a lot of money, so it is understandable when game design caters toward sales. However, when these methods become predatory or hidden, it may lose trust in the developers and the industry.

Credit to Josh Strife Hayes for the video.

Kuro Games makes Wuthering Waves monetization very transparent. You are essentially gambling to get the characters and weapons you want, but you can see the chances to get them and there is a pity system that makes it more likely to get a drop from their Convene system the more you roll. While this is not ideal for the players, it certainly is one of the best ways to make money for the developers. As long as the game is still worth your time and that money is used by Kuro Games to make their product better, it could be acceptable.

Kuro Games is decently generous when it comes to giving free rewards for new players and limited events. They’ve even come out and apologized for some of their mistakes, made changes to the game to better the player experience, and gave everyone free rewards because of it. Kuro have also created events to reward players with some of the materials that players were asking for more of. Even though gambling and pay-to-win are very real aspects of the game, it still feels like the developers care about the players and want to provide a quality game experience.

Action Combat

In my opinion, the most important part of a game that you’ll be playing for hours every week is how fun the gameplay or combat is. In Wuthering Waves the combat is the highlight, whereas for other Gacha games the combat may be secondary to the story or progression systems. There are combos and fast-paced boss fights similar to the combat in the Devil May Cry series.

You play as one character at a time, but have a team of three characters that can swap in at any time and each has their own set of skills and playstyle that can synergize with other characters. Choosing who to play with is a major part of the experience, but all characters have smooth animations with great audio-visual feedback which creates a fun experience just to press your buttons.

There are also evade frames and parry mechanics, which rewards players for timing and knowledge rather than trading blows nonstop. This allows you to overcome challenges through skill and experience despite being lower level or using off-meta characters. There will still be situations where you just need to level your characters more before progressing, but knowledge and mechanics are still required. Wuthering Waves is interesting because the emphasis on skill-rewarded gameplay will appeal more to western audiences than other games in the genre.

Single Player MMO

Even though Wuthering Waves is a live-service game with the option to cooperate with other players by joining their worlds, it is mostly a single player experience. Players build their characters over time and have daily quests that promote activity in the game. Similarly, the design of MMOs is to keep players logging in so there are other players to play with.

After experiencing the initial magic of exploring and meeting other players in these multiplayer games, some may realize that they don’t want others around because it gets in the way of reaching their goals. Sometimes they have only a small amount of leisure time to play the game, or want to play the game their own way without the need to adapt to the expectations of others. They end up playing MMOs alone, but enjoy the fact that there are others playing alongside them.

Wuthering Waves can be thought of as a single player MMO experience, but your goals may change by that fact. You can’t show off your ability to play or your characters to other players. It can still be rewarding to reach those goals, but it might feel a bit lonely without other players running around. More activities that support the Co-Op feature such as instanced dungeons or open world bosses would be nice, but that also brings in the possibility for gate-keeping and disappointment. You might have have situations where a PC user who paid for max characters will be matched with a free-to-play player who may be playing on their phone, which sounds unfair to at least one of them no more how the content is designed.

That is where modern social media comes in. Nowadays players share their experience through external forums and video-hosting websites. This makes all of the interaction with other players entirely optional. The game can be completed solo without looking at any other third-party sources of information, or you can check social media like Reddit and YouTube, and subject yourself to the potential negatives and positives of those platforms.

Game Types

Wuthering Waves has an open world for you to experience with various activities to keep you entertained.

Story
Explore
Quests
Gather
Level
Capture Monsters
Tower of Adversity
Illusive Realm
Holograms

The main story quests are the best way to casually learn the mechanics of Wuthering Waves and unlock a few features. As you keep playing, you might notice side quests and chests that appear around the world. Opening these chests by defeating enemies, solving puzzles, or uncovering hidden locations will progress the completion of the map, and getting every map to 100% exploration is a decent goal to go for.

While doing the main activities of questing and exploring, you’ll get rewards that you can use to level up your characters. As you level up, the world will also get stronger with you to keep things engaging. Also you will unlock new challenges.

One of the ways you improve your characters is through the Echo system, which is essentially by defeating monsters, equipping their Echo, and leveling that up for more stats. It has elements of Pokémon in it because most enemies have an Echo you can collect. There is plenty of randomness in the stats you can get, but this system also allows you to customize your characters to play the role you want them to in combat. This leads to dynamic Echo hunts where you can track a specific type of monster because you need the type of Echo it provides for your character.

Vertical Progression is one of the main pillars of Wuthering Waves, and most activities will progress you toward the same goal: becoming stronger. Customizing your character to do what you want it to do, and then optimizing that as far as it can go provides plenty of content. Players who want to push their limits like this will also be interested in the numerous challenges the game has.

One of the end-game modes is the Tower of Adversity which is a series of encounters that you must beat to move on to the next. There is a limit to how much you can use each character, so it promotes leveling up multiple teams of characters to be able to progress. This is not something newer players will be interested in at first because they will be short on resources, but it provides long term goals for the future.

The Illusive Realm is a roguelike game mode that offers a different twist on the combat of Wuthering Waves. You choose a character and progress through levels that become harder as you go, but you become stronger at the same time by choosing between different upgrades that can entirely change the way your character is played. Your gear is not as important for this mode, but it still has decently engaging combat, so it may appeal to players who want more interaction but have not invested much in the game yet.

Holograms are instanced versions of the open world bosses in the game. You can scale up the difficulty which requires you to deal more damage and to learn more mechanics to be able to survive and kill the boss within the time limit. These are generally optional, but because the combat is so fun and the skill ceiling is so high, many players flock to the holograms to experience the true potential of the action combat in Wuthering Waves.

Story

Unfortunately, the story is one of the weaker points of Wuthering Waves at the moment. The setting takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where the remaining population has to fight against an invasion of monsters called Tacet Discords. There’s also another theme that is apparent in the title “Wuthering Waves” of sound waves. The main characters are called “Resonators”, and the threat they are facing comes from a “discord” in the harmony.

While I like the more mature and realistic art direction, the danger lacks imminence at the start of the game. There is more of a lighthearted slice-of-life anime feeling for the first few acts of the story. However, it does pick up the pace a little bit later on.

More interesting than the main story are the different biomes you can traverse and climb around. One of my favorites zones in the game is the Port City of Guixu, which shows the remains of a city destroyed, presumably, by the Tacet Discords. It has a unique design with broken skyscrapers at the center of the city which leads you to wonder what really happened here. There is also a quest line here which contributes some interesting lore to the area.

So far there is very limited story, but there will be more zones and story to experience in future patches. Hopefully Kuro Games will keep improving the story in the future by reworking some of the early acts and making the conflicts present much earlier. Even though the story isn’t a large portion of play time, it is an important representation of the game that players remember, and later content will certainly need to be built upon it.

Another important aspect of any game is voice acting. All of the main story quests and character story lines are voice acted. While the story isn’t the best, all of the playable character voices are unique and engaging even in the English version. This is of course because the playable characters are the main selling point of the game, in terms of entertainment and monetization. Each character has their own story and reasons for fighting off the incoming threat, and you can learn more about them by playing them to unlock snippets of information about prized possessions or past events.

Is It Too Late to Play Wuthering Waves?

Even though Gacha games are heavily reliant on the Feeling of Missing Out (FoMO) to motivate players to spend money or keep logging in, sometimes players take this too far. Rather than trying the game to see if they enjoy it enough to invest their time, some players will avoid the game entirely for a few reasons:

Other players are ahead of them
A limited time offer is no longer available to them or they can’t get everything they want
The game has already peaked and will only get worse from then on

Some of these beliefs are wrong or are rooted in unfair expectations.

1. First of all, there is no competition between players, so being at the cutting edge of progression is not necessary. The world scales up with you, so you can still explore the world without rushing your leveling process. In fact, rushing to be at the front will make you enjoy the game less because you’ll be out of content faster.

2. Missing out on some events or characters that were released in the past can make them harder to get in the future, but not impossible. The reality is that regardless of when you start playing, you’ll need to exercise some self control to accept that there are some things that you won’t get. But keep in mind that Kuro wants new characters to be enticing for players to roll for, so they may make them more powerful or more interesting over time. New and veteran players will probably want to get the newest characters rather than old characters anyway, so it is never too late to start.

3. Wuthering Waves just came out and it has plenty of issues with the game such as typos, bugs, poor system design, and lack of end-game, but as long as you still enjoy the game it is worth it to play. Daily time-gates suggest that you are meant to play the game casually or as your secondary game because you cannot infinitely grind it. You either have to pay money to keep progressing, or you can just log off and wait until tomorrow or a new patch brings more content. The game has plenty of time to get better and is showing signs of improvement already. As more patches come out, it will definitely get better.