The new Gacha hotness Wuthering Waves is suffering from some devastating launch issues despite making a big splash on Twitch

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The new Gacha hotness Wuthering Waves is suffering from some devastating launch issues despite making a big splash on Twitch

Wuthering waves just crashed into a cliff that is public in the game, and the reaction is, well, a little mixed. In case you're not familiar, the game is a gacha in the original God Impact style of developer Kuro Games set in a post-apocalyptic world where you follow a cute boy/girl Rover journey of amnesia. 

It's generating considerable buzz: At the time of writing, Wuthering Waves currently has a whopping 91,000 viewers on Twitch, but not so great from a player's perspective.

There's a deluge of players taking excursions on the game's subreddit and complaining about a vast range of technical difficulties. . First, the performance of the game is not stellar. As for technical issues, many rovers have reported stuttering, even with fairly powerful hardware for the PC version of the game.

The bug has also popped up like bang-a-moles, such as an unsupported Npc with placeholder dialogue, a tail made of stretched polygons, and this accidental PSA for sunscreens (thanks, VG247). Don't forget to whisk before you get out of people this summer, or you might turn into a walking Zalgo too.

In another thread, the player points out two major problems with English dub. Game subtitles often run out of space and simply disappear into the ether mid-exposition dump - otherwise, players report that the game's audio lines are delivered flat or simply poorly recorded: "I'm constantly listening to pops (no pop filters?And breath, "one player," writes from Yangyang to the most obvious. It sounds like they're trying to do ASMR and failing."

But as other players have pointed out, this seems to be a matter of direction. Some of the game's voice actors have played notable roles in other titles and are doing well. Yang Yang's English voice actor, Rebecca Yeo, has appeared in Cyberpunk 2077, for example, while other characters have played roles in the dubbing of the Xenoblade series, but I hear it's pretty good. 

Other complaints about the story itself and the tinsel direction track, which is clearly very front-loaded with expositions that are grounds for migraines:"We have laments, Waveworn phenomena, Tasset Fields, Tasset Discords and TD Outbreaks, Retroact rain, Tassetite, Resonators, reverberation After just three hours of play time, Echo, Pangu Terminal, Sentinel, several vaccine candies and outbreaks from decades ago,"laments one player.

In a list of known issues sent to players, Kuro Games highlights issues such as character assets not loading, freezing up, lips not syncing to the voice line, and game startup issues. Some puzzled players have reported a mysterious message from Kuro Games congratulating them on their participation in "Closed beta 2."

That's not to say it's all bad. Much of Wuthering Waves' hype was based on DMC-style combat — from what I've seen - intact and still a positive draw. Still, a bad first impression can be fatal if you're being compared to Genshin Impact, a popular game that can start the Tiktok trend.  

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