Gacha games are time sinks by design, with the end goal of draining every cent from your pocketbook. Wuthering Waves is no different, as some of its systems are inherently time-gated in some way. It does, however, have some amazing quality-of-life features that catapult it above and beyond its contemporaries and cement it as one of the best I’ve played.
The Best Gacha Game Quality of Life Features in Wuthering Waves
Ultimately, all a quality-of-life upgrade in a gacha game needs to do is save time and remove annoyance. Wuthering Waves has plenty of them, but the five I’ll go over in this list are by far my favorites.
Wall Running and Parkour
Yes, Wuthering Waves borrows or even outright copies a lot of the exploration mechanics from Genshin Impact, but unlike the world’s most popular gacha, WuWa makes traversal much more fun. Rather than need to slowly climb every surface, hoping you won’t waste five minutes, in Wuthering Waves, you can straight up sprint along walls. It uses a bit more character stamina to do, but the time it saves is so worth it. I would pay actual money for Genshin to add a faster traversal system, but that’s probably never going to happen.
Wuthering Waves also has some additional parkour elements, including a double jump (always nice) and a grappling hook. And yes, again, the grapple is basically a less-useful Wirebug from Monster Hunter, but having it as an option to get up or over that otherwise impassable gap is such a comfy feature. That and it’s fun, which is all you can ask for in a traversal mechanic.
No Stamina Cost While Sprinting
If any game has a stamina bar, you know sprinting will use it up incredibly fast. Hell, Crysis had your super soldier dressed up in a cybernetic, nanomachine-laced set of power armor, and you still couldn’t sprint for more than a few seconds. Not so in Wuthering Waves. Here, so long as you aren’t in combat, you can sprint forever. Like wall running, it might seem a minor improvement, but being able to get places even half as fast as normal, without needing to pause every 15 seconds, is so nice.
Better still, there’s a fairly simple auto-vaulting mechanic where your character smoothly vaults over low obstacles like street barriers, small inclines, rocks, and the like. The system goes into effect much faster than in Genshin and isn’t only useful for finishing a climb. The ability to move through an environment with little interruption lets you get a bit more immersed in the experience, even if the only reason you’re running at all is the loot chest in the distance.
Automatically Picking Up Materials
Another major annoyance for me in a game like Genshin Impact is needing to not only open a loot chest but also spam the interact key a few additional times to pick up the items I want. Wuthering Waves takes a cue from Honkai: Star Rail‘s book and just gives you everything you’ve been rewarded. And that doesn’t just include world loot. Dropped enemy materials, mined ore, animal meat — all of it goes straight into your inventory without any additional input from you. If you’ve ever played a game where there was no option but to press a button or, God forbid, execute an animation to pick up everything in the world, you know how nice instant pickup can be.
No Needless Crafting Minigames
I’ll be honest: I can appreciate a game with tons of minigames. Our review of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth gushed about the ones in that game. But the crafting minigames in survival titles, and especially the cooking one in Genshin Impact, are just annoying. That’s especially true in a genre as grind-heavy as gacha, where you’ll spend literal days of your time killing the same mobs or activities for a 1% increase to a single stat. That Wuthering Waves crafting systems boil down to “collect items, take to crafting station, craft thing” is a godsend. I’d much rather spend my time grinding Echoes and world chests than pressing a button at the right time to fry an egg. Thanks very much.
Being Able to Farm Boss Echos Without Spending Waveplates
The other four quality-of-life changes make the exploration of Wuthering Waves a better experience. Echo farming, the game’s version of Relic/Artifact farming in Genshin and HSR, is infinitely more generous, because it costs effectively nothing. In other gachas, if you want stat-increasing gear, you need to spend resources to do so. In Wuthering Waves, the only resource you need to expend to farm Echoes is time. Yes, you need Waveplates (the game’s time-limited resource) to get Echo EXP items, but you can also get those from other sources, and you only need to spend them to upgrade potentially good Echoes, not everything you come across.
Those are my top five best quality-of-life improvements Wuthering Waves has over many of the other popular gacha games out right now. For more on the lastest open-world action RPG gacha, check out our Wuthering Waves guides hub, including a piece on how to unlock World Bosses.
Published: May 30, 2024 11:15 am