It's possible I've seen too much but this doesn't look egregious to me. The second outfit only a step or two away from what Mihoyo is doing with Star Rail (Acheron or Black Swan). The first one, yea, probably closer to a Hentai cartoon than a game
Those are some outfits that go for the more niche fetishes, but it's not too far from the mainstream.
Some others like the new
... I think it's a lot
less shocking than Shenhe actually, it's nothing too weird for a modern fiction game.
Excuse me what the actual fuck. You're exaggerating here right?
Not at all.
Not going to post those skins though. And even less the animation for the second (and I won't search for it either
but I
think it was Hanako in BA).
It's true that live services do try to monopolize your time and keep you playing with FOMO and all, but these energy based games are on another level I feel. Like if I don't play Call of Duty for two seasons I'll miss out on whatever cosmetics and events that were made available during that time, but I can still jump in and play my next match without a disadvantage. If you don't play Genshin or something for 2 months and you don't use up your resin, you will be at the exact place you were 2 months ago. You needed to be using your resin to farm for artifacts that you need to deal with harder content. You will be behind on your gacha economy, I realize after typing this that it's not really the same to compare a single player game with a multiplayer game but the point I'm making is that your required progression in these games needs you to be playing daily, using your resin and doing the chores for the primogems. Blah I hope this makes sense.
Gachas are much closer to MMOs in general, where you really, really want to play all the time. And if you miss "seasons" in them, it's not even that you are only behind on economy, everything you have is worthless trash and you need to catch up or literally can't play anything... a lot of bad ideas come from there sadly...
Yeah it's obvious Star Rail is getting better and faster QOL features and I understand that it might be frustrating for Genshin players but it's no reason for collective animosity between communities. Making these changes in Genshin is probably much harder. When they announced they're increasing daily resin from 160 to 200, people asked why not 240 like Star Rail. Now aside from the fact that I think Genshin resin re-generates faster than Star Rail, it's important to understand that they don't just cut and replace 160 with 240 in the code and call it a day. There's likely millions of lines of code and god knows what dependencies on these systems that need to be handled. And I do believe that they should put in the engineering effort to do it, but it does explain why the newer code base is probably easier to modify than the one that's been running in production for 5 years.
A lot of things comes from disgruntled Genshin fans, one of them like you said, is stamina: it's actually slower in Genshin (8 minutes instead of 6), so numbers are a bit different, but next patch the limit will be 200, which is exactly 24h (and a convenient 5 condensed resins)... that's the kind of weird little war that really amounts to nothing, even if Genshin could really benefit from an overflow stamina mechanic.
The bigger deal was endgame content, since long before release, HSR was touted as a real endgame unlike Genshin from people that want to be more hardcore than hardcore in casual games.
And HSR released with... Memory of Chaos, which is Spiral Abyss, but even more time constrained.
And Simulated Universe which was a pretty poor version of rogue-lites modes of that type, which was largely very easy, but forced you to... autobattle it AFK every week, on top of needing to grind it for relics. Calling that endgame was pretty questionnable, but still to this day, you can see it flare up in conversation, about how HSR is so much better at it than Genshin for some reason.
Well, now there's the Imaginarium Theatre mode coming, we'll see where it goes...
That's a shame. I played for a few minutes today and just skipped the dialogs as fast as I could. And it occurs to me that if you tell yourself you're only playing for the story and then you skip the story as well, what are you doing? You're going through the motions at that point. I kind of do want to play the game because I don't it's bad and you can obviously see so much work goes into making a game like this and they did most of it quite well.
Do you get enough tickets by the end of the story to pull Yinlin? Maybe that could be a reason to keep going. Not a good sign if you're looking for reasons to play a game though...
Personally, I stopped Wuthering Waves because I didn't particularly enjoy the combat, despite liking the smoother exploration compared to Genshin (even if the world is not that great and performance quite poor).
But the story... I can't say I
cared that much, because it didn't feel very well written (and it gets worse in many aspects later on) and more importantly the translation and voice direction were just terrible.
When you get voice lines like "You're just like Civilization Simulation Sand Table Tethys has told us..." you zone out preeetty fast.
