Wuthering Waves’ Echoes Are An Excellent Open World Incentive, And Genshin Impact Could Learn From Them

Wuthering Waves has been out for a couple of weeks now, and it offers an interesting alternative to the mighty Genshin Impact. The two games can and should learn from one another, and Echoes is perhaps the biggest lesson Genshin could learn.

What Are Wuthering Waves’ Echoes?

To kick things off, what even are Wuthering Waves’ Echoes? Echoes are, in essence, the equipment system in Wuthering Waves. They’re the souls of monsters you defeat, which you can then equip to not only allow you to use some aspect of them in combat but also grant stat bonuses and passive set bonuses as well. You can farm these not only from bosses but also from standard enemies as well.

It can be a little tedious to do so, because there’s a little bit of RNG involved in the process in terms of both the Echo dropping, and then also the stats it ends up with, but it’s an incredibly good reason to keep going out into the world and hunting down enemies, or farming bosses for something beyond just the materials you have to spend Waveplates on, which is WuWa’s stamina system.

That’s to say nothing of the effect they have on combat. Some Echoes can single-handedly take out a group of enemies with their skill, while others can provide sizeable buffs. Taking the souls of enemies is something we see in a few games, mostly the old Castlevania titles, and it’s always fun to do. The actual equipment side of this is the same in a lot of gacha games though, so how can Genshin Impact learn from this?

How Could Genshin Impact Learn from Wuthering Waves?

Genshin Impact’s version of this system is the Artifact system. Artifacts come in sets, give passive buffs, and have random stats too. While you can find some lower-level Artifacts in the open world and even some higher rarity options randomly from fights, you can’t obtain the highest tier of Artifact without spending your Resin, which is Genshin’s stamina system. You can only do this in domains, and because Resin is limited, only so many times per day.

That’s not really the thing that Genshin could learn from, though. It’s more about the motivation. When all’s said and done with the quests in Genshin Impact, there’s very little reason to go out and explore the world unless you’re a hardcore completionist. Even then, there’s a limit to what you can find. Wuthering Waves has no such limit, because it’s always worth going out to kill some monsters and grab some new Echoes. The fighting has meaning beyond just materials and the tiny amount of experience that killing monsters in gacha games gets you.

It’s not a perfect system, but it’s also worth noting that we’re less than a month into the life cycle of Wuthering Waves, while we’re several years into Genshin Impact. There’s plenty of time for WuWa to balance and adjust things as they go. Having both of these games out should mean they both keep rising to meet each other, and that’s just plain old exciting for anyone who’s playing both.

We just have to wait and see what Genshin Impact could implement to give fighting in the overworld more meaning.

Wuthering Waves is available now.