Originally uploaded to Bilibili.tv
Back in May, Kuro Games released Wuthering Waves. The game was heavily flawed with a poorly paced story riddled with an esoteric vocabulary and odd acting choices. On top of that the game suffered from terrible lag and buggy gameplay that made it even less enjoyable. Many early players opted to skip the story where possible and focus only on the gameplay which was the main selling point for the game. This lasted for several patches until v1.3 where Kuro finally addressed the bug and lag problem at least.
In July, miHoYo released Zenless Zone Zero. The game was incredible, fast-paced, snappy with a fun story and an assortment of colorful characters. It was very easy to get into and the combat system was more exciting than even it's own previous games. And the videos miHoYo's come up with to market the new characters are amazing! Burnice is now everybody's best girl. They even quickly realized that nobody liked the tv maze side of the game and by the very next patch that game mode was relegated to optional parts of the game. However just like Wuwa the game suffers from a lag problem and by v1.3 where Kuro had fixed theirs, this problem got much worse for Zenless as you'll notice from this video compared to my earlier videos.
Lag might have just been the final straw that killed Wuwa but by solving it in v1.3 Kuro did actually make the game a little more appealing again. Solving it still hasn't made me want to go back to it though. Conversely lag was just a minor issue for Zenless because everything else was and still is very good. But especially in a game like Zenless that's mainly focused on the responsive and fast-paced combat, lag just means you don't get that experience. When the game stalls in between attacks it's very hard to know when to react to enemies. And now there are bugs that are new to v1.3 and that means the screen could look like a big splotch of red or blue and that makes it near impossible to know what is even happening. In fact not knowing what's happening is how bad Wuwa's lag problem got and made me realize that the combat system is pointless in that game. Just button mash. If your team has at least 1 limited banner character and 2 5-star characters you can pretty much close your eyes and still make it out of any battle just fine. But that's another issue that lag brings up in Zenless. This game requires you to know exactly what you're doing. Failing to respond to attacks can get you defeated by even the weakest enemies. So unlike Wuwa not being able to see what's happening directly impacts your performance.
So hopefully miHoYo figures that out. I really hope my v1.4 videos won't look anything like this one. It is the big Chapter 4 with the highly anticipated release of Hoshimi Miyabi. If any of that patch ends up splotched with random colors or flashes or frozen screens, that would just be very disappointing. Fingers crossed that doesn't happen guys!
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