Wuthering Waves Should Be Given The Benefit Of The Doubt For Its Early Issues

Wuthering Waves has seen mass success even before launch, with 30 million pre-registrations by players, driving up the player count worldwide. However, there are several issues with the game’s launch that I have personally faced, as I had pulled an all-nighter while waiting for the servers to go live at 6 am. 

It is very common for games that are of this magnitude to have a sudden influx of players flooding the servers, and I saw firsthand how the Discord server was blowing up an hour before release. Unexpectedly, Kuro opened the servers for Wuthering Waves an hour earlier, making all of us rush into Solaris earlier than expected, but it came with its own issues. 

“Gateway Connection Has Timed Out” Seems To Be The Norm

One of the main issues that were faced by several players, including a few of my friends was the infamous “Gateway Connection Has Timed Out” error that not only seems to be recurring, but it seems like it is impacting (pardon the pun) a ton of players. 

A common theme that runs with a newly released game, especially one in the Gacha genre is connection issues that are faced by a multitude of players. The main reason for that mostly ends up being that there is an influx of players that are attempting to log in to the game at the same time, putting a heavy load on the servers. Similar issues happened during the launch of Helldivers 2 where players were unable to play the game for days after launch. 

The issues were mainly faced within the first hour of the launch, with players complaining everywhere, not realizing just how common connection issues tend to be. 

However, fixing the issue was quite simple, as a change of WiFi addresses, switching to your own HotSpot, or even turning on the VPN ended up allowing players into the servers. 

High Ping Tends To Bring Down The Gaming Experience

As can be said with the release of a new title, server connection issues and high ping tend to get in the way of the experience. High ping can seriously turn off players from experiencing a new Gacha title, as enemies tend to spawn from one place to the other, while your Co-Op partner will randomly disappear without a reason. 

I, along with a couple of friends had decided to jump on SEA servers specifically to avoid any kind of lag or high ping, and we still ended up experiencing latency spikes, jumping from 120ms stable to 999ms. Alongside that, there was insane lag, and Wuthering would keep reconnecting even if the ping was low. 

However, as the days go on, players can definitely expect the servers to become more stable. One thing that I’m really looking forward to testing out in the next few days is the claim that “Ping will not affect solo gameplay” as can be said by a few Reddit players who tested it during CBT1 and CBT2. 

While the ping was stable enough for me a few hours after launch, I ended up testing out the claim. While the ping went high, I noticed that the enemies kept attacking as they were, and their attacks would be insanely smooth. Character switching cooldown was also something that was not affected by high ping, which I had feared would cause a higher cooldown time. All in all, the game felt responsive, even with high latency. 

Genshin Faced The Same Issues At Launch

If it’s any consolation, Genshin Impact which is one of the most popular games to this day faced the same issues when it first launched back in September 2020. One of the most common issues was that Genshin would simply refuse to launch on PC, and would require a whole load of troubleshooting to get it to work. Despite all of this, the game ended up gaining mass popularity and is still going strong. 

To this day, Genshin Impact keeps facing ping issues, especially a few months ago after the 4.2 update launched, where nearly all of the players including myself faced 400+ ping that would stay consistent until a patch update fixed it. Suffice to say, if a game like Genshin continues to face so many issues, Kuro Games deserves the benefit of the doubt. 

Wuthering Waves Keeps Crashing For Most Players 

While optimization issues are pretty common on day one, the game crashing is not one on anyone’s list of approved issues. 

For people that had up-to-date systems, both on mobile and PC, for mobile players, it wouldn’t matter if they had the latest processor, Wuthering Waves would keep crashing upon launching it for the first time. On PC however, most players faced a driver issue where they kept getting a notification to update their drivers, but the drivers did not require updating. 

The Epic Games Launcher would simply refuse to run Wuthering Waves in the first place, which not only became irritating to deal with but also prevented players from experiencing the first-hour launch hype that everyone else was experiencing (seems like Epic isn’t so epic after all).

Conclusion 

It seems as if the servers weren’t able to handle the sheer influx of players who were willing to try out Wuthering Waves. Though, with almost 30 million+ registrations in-way, it makes sense that there would be issues. 

Apart from that, minor issues such as assets not loading, textures not rendering properly until you got up close to them, the uninteresting lore, and the dialogue being too stretched are issues that shouldn’t be ignored by any means, but they don’t co-relate with connection issues. 

All that’s left is to wait and see how the game plays out, and if it can hold up the hype past its honeymoon phase.