To be fair, Wuthering Waves isn’t a giant… not yet – but the way the game has been making rounds within the Genshin and other gacha communities, you’d think it is the biggest villain or rather opponent of Hoyoverse games. In all honesty – Kuro games did a tremendous job with Wuthering Waves, and while copying Genshin in many of its systems, it has found its own identity through various gameplay elements – and we’re here to talk about these differences. Before you get heated about this debate – both games have their pros and cons. If you do want to get the most out of Genshin, you should always top up Genshin Impact accounts through the best store around.
The Main Differences Between Wuthering Waves and Genshin
While fairly similar – there are a couple of key places where these two games differ from one another.
- The Overall Quality (Writing, Voice Acting, UI, and Detail)
- The Combat
- The Movement
- The Artifact/Echo systems
- QoL (Quality of Life)
Let’s talk about what Genshin does better than Wuthering Waves first, beginning with the Overall Quality.
Overall Quality
Now, Hoyoverse are master of creating amazing worlds, characters, and presentations. Genshin Impact has so far had many unique events – each with its unique UI and elements. Not only that, but their character writing, design, and music – all these are out of this world.
Events
A perfect example of the difference in quality would be the events of both games.
The latest event in Genshin Impact, “Mutual Security Enhancing”, is where you place various enemy units on the field to attack or defend depending on the objective. It’s made with love, care, and a LOT of effort. It has its own UI elements, its own little descriptions and powers, and even new structures/objects that act as “Towers” would in a Tower Defense game. It is crazy how much effort is put into something that will be gone a couple of weeks later.
Comparatively, the first two events in Wuthering Waves just basically re-use already existing elements of the game to create their events, and only add a decently drawn preview image to represent what the event is about. The first event of Wuthering Waves – Overdash Club – uses already existing game mechanics such as jump pads, Hook nodes, and wall-running to create a “challenge” of getting from one place to another.
The second event, Alloy Smelt, uses an already existing arena to throw you some relatively interesting combat challenges with some unique twists, such as the first few being all about swapping characters and using their intro skills which clear out groups of enemies in an instant. While fun to play, you don’t really feel that sense of uniqueness and effort that you get out of Hoyoverse games like Genshin Impact.
Writing
Another place where Wuthering Waves fumbled hard. The localization team hasn’t done their job properly at all, and most of the writing feels like it was translated with AI. The overall story of the game is pretty good – great even – but it is dragged down by the awful translation. Whereas Genshin Impact’s writing is 10/10 easily. While not the most mature of stories, what Genshin Impact does with its writing it does it incredibly well.
While the EN Voice-Acting work is neither here nor there in Wuthering Waves, in Genshin Impact it’s been consistently stellar.
Combat
In our opinion, that was the only place where Genshin Impact is better than Wuthering Waves – and it is a relatively fixable solution as long as Kuro Games keeps up what they’re doing.
As far as everything surrounding combat goes, there’s just no competition.
Genshin Impact had a “revolutionary” elemental reaction-based combat system when it was first released. While it used to be fun, the game has gotten pretty stale in terms of combat for most teams as they are all based around an optimal rotation. I.E. – 1st Character uses Q, E, then swap, use Q, E on a different character, swap again, etc. Now, this isn’t true for ALL characters and teams, but most of them lack that certain “Uniqueness” and the game feels homogenized as far as combat and character-combat depth go. Of course, you can always buy a Genshin Impact account that has all the most interesting characters and teams!
However, Wuthering Waves is different. Each character has their own combat personality that is significantly different than the other characters.
You have Yuanwu who is a fistfighter who scales off of defense and who can consume his Thunder Pillar to enter a “Super Saiyan” state where he deals a ton more damage.
Then you have Chixia who can run and gun, slide, and has a sweet-spot mechanic where you have to press her normal attack at the right time to use an enhanced attack.
Then we have Danjin, which has a combo system akin to a Devil May Cry game where you can press NA, Skill, or 3x NA > 3x Skill to have vastly different animations and moves. She also uses her HP and when she hits with her skill (that doesn’t have a cooldown) enough times, she can use an enhanced charged attack that restores her HP and deals a lot of damage.
And the crazy part? These are only surface-level descriptions of 4-star characters in the game.
Add to that another ability that is reserved for Echo Skills (More on that later) and a perfect dodge/parry system as well as a grappling hook you can use mid-combat to dodge ground-based attacks, and you have one hell of a combat system.
Enemy Variety
Now, good combat mechanics wouldn’t mean much if you didn’t have enemies to use them against. Instead of fighting Hilichurls, Slimes, and Mitachurls in the early game, you get around 50 entirely different enemy types to fight against. And get this – they all evolve and become stronger and more aggressive with different moves for some of the tougher enemies as you increase your World Level.
The Movement
This is another place where Wuthering Waves is EASILY much better than Genshin Impact.
- You can run up walls
- Use a hook to propel yourself upward
- Use a mid-air dash/dodge as a double jump
- Turn into a Motorcycle-Riding Monster
- And last, but definitely not least – characters don’t consume stamina for sprinting outside of combat
When compared to Genshin Impact’s boring, stifling movement, it just feels like an entirely different game.
Artifact/Echo System
As of now, many people have certain issues with the Echo system of Wuthering Waves – mainly how little “Echo exp” you can get daily. We believe this isn’t a fair criticism because most people haven’t even reached Union level 40 yet which means that they can increase their world level, and thus rewards they can get from domains and other activities, up to three times.
As far as how good they are – The Echo system of Wuthering Waves actively incentivizes players to seek out and kill enemies on a regular basis. Especially ones like Bosses and tougher/elite enemies. This is because you have no penalty for farming these enemies until you finally get that mainstay and set piece that you want. Not only that, but the Echo system is unique in that each enemy has a unique ability that your character can use if they equip them as their main Echo, bringing a lot more depth to character-building.
The artifact system of Genshin Impact is pretty straightforward and grows progressively more boring as they have not yet done anything to change, improve, or innovate it in any way, shape, or form.
QoL – Quality of Life
And finally, Quality of Life. This is one of the more important categories because these games are considered “Live-Service” games and people spend a lot of time on them. Having conveniences and quality of life as best as it can be is truly a game changer, and again – Wuthering Waves is a lot better than Genshin Impact in this category.
- Skip Button – You can skip most of the story content (90%) and Kuro Games is working on adding the function to skip EVERYTHING that you want. This is simply a show of respect for the players’ time as there are a lot of people who don’t care about Wuthering Waves or Genshin Impact’s storylines, and yet one of those games forces you to watch everything before they let you actually play their game.
- No stamina consumption while dashing outside of combat – This is absolutely massive and allows for a better, more fun experience while exploring the world as you aren’t constricted to constantly swapping and making a team that will let you explore faster (Example: Kaeya, Kazuha, Xianyun, Wanderer)
- No need to pick every little material up – Opening chests and killing enemies, then having to loot their remains is fun the first few hours of the game – then it just becomes an annoying chore and a way to ruin your controller or your “F” button on the keyboard. Wuthering Waves simply picks up everything the moment you open up a chest or kill an enemy.
- Early Loot Radar – Before a recent patch (4.6), Genshin Impact had a fairly annoying system for searching for chests on the map. Namely, you would use your loot radar which would emit a faint glow towards the chest you need to find. It also had a long cooldown which usually forced you to wait a little while before you could try and find a new chest. In Wuthering Waves, you get the chest among the first rewards for exploration and it has no cooldown whatsoever. It shows most of the chest in an area, and the only caveat is that you can only place 3 at any one time. When you place a new one, the oldest one will be removed.
Conclusion
While Wuthering Waves and Genshin Impact are both open-world action RPG Gacha games with a lot of similarities, Kuro Games made sure that their product stood out in a few ways, and they fixed a lot of the issues that Genshin still has. At the same time, they can’t really compete with the level of quality and polish Hoyoverse puts into their games.
If we piqued your interest in Wuthering Waves, consider using Wuthering Waves Top Up services for the best experience
