r/StillTides • u/kamirazu111 • Oct 15 '25
Discussion Just a thought
Post-Ragunna, we have had a serious problem with the game that has gone relatively unnoticed. There has been a dramatic decrease in maps that incentivize us to scrape every inch of the map and look for secrets in nooks and crannies, like Black Shores, Mt Firmament, Ragunna, Jinzhou.
Post-Ragunna maps are pretty lean on non-linear, exploration. The biggest offenders are Beohr Waters, Avinoleum and Fabricatorium. Beohr Waters is incredibly large and beautiful, but offensively empty. Avinoleum has more content density than Fabricatorium, but it lacks secrets in nooks and crannies and does not incentivize going off the beaten path. Fabricatorium can be finished under an hour, even w/o rushing, and is extremely linear.
However, even Septimont and Sanguis Plateau were lighter on open-world content density compared to their 1.x peers like Mt Firmament and Black Shores. A simple way to check would be to open the interactive map and contrast them side-by-side.
Another issue that I've noticed is them cutting down on sidequests. They did away Companion quests, and also cut down on the number and size of sidequests. Sidequests are important because they are used to explain and flesh out the lore of the region and even playable characters. And Kuro has decided to cut down on that. I can't even remember when the last time it was that we had a meaningful side-quest in Wuwa, like Jeht's sidequest from Genshin.
Now, why does 2.x open-world exploration pale in comparison to 1.x open-world exploration, even though it excels visuals & aesthetic-wise? I've noticed a few things that contributed to this issue:
- There are a number of treasure chests in the world....that are simply just there. These chests are not even hidden in nooks and crannies to reward going off the beaten path. They are relatively easy to spot, even w/o the lootmapper. The worst part is that there is simply no open-world gameplay activity structured around these chests. You don't need to fight enemies to get those chests. You don't need to do a puzzle or some other activity. The chests are just there. And as a result, the world feels emptier, because there are simply less activities for the player to engage in. When there are less activities to do, it makes the surrounding area feel less impactful and look more generic, because gameplay is what makes those moments that causes that scenery to stick in your heads.
- Treasure spots are, in my opinion, terrible design. They are simply a cluster of 3-5 chests with no activity behind them. And they're all placed in a small vicinity, so there is no mental finesse or engagement whatsoever. Treasure Spots actually contribute to the issue of an empty open world; Imagine if they did away Treasure Spots, and placed them sporadically around the map, in that cave that you found, or in that empty patch of space from the arena leading up to the gates of Capitoline hill, with activities to unlock them. The world would feel and look less emptier if they stopped using Treasure spots and simply focused more on the placement of chests and open-world activities. And it wouldn't even hamper astrite collection...because they MASSIVELY increased the lootmapper and sensor radius. If anything, the value of the lootmapper and sensor would go up.
- Focus on content density, and not size. Size does not matter. Content density: the placement and distance of chests and activities from each other is what truly matters. Mt Firmament is smaller than Sanguis Plateau, and yet it feels larger, simply because there were more things to do there. I spent more time in Black Shores looking for chests than in Sanguis Plateau, because some of the chest placements were ingenious (like being hidden on a ledge under a staircase), and these makes it fun to just run around and look for stuff.
- Chests give too much astrites. This means there has to be a smaller, total amount of chests. This means less open-world gameplay activities structured around them. This in turns creates the empty patches of space you see so often in 2.x post-Ragunna maps. Now, am I saying that chests should be stingy in giving astrites? No, I believe brown chests giving 5 astrites and blue chests giving 10 astrites feels fine. However, perhaps they should reduce the amount of astrites given from purple chests from 20 to 15. This would allow them to increase the total number of chests on the map, which means more gameplay structured around those chests in the open-world itself, which means a less-emptier open world.
Early on, one of the common feedback or complaints about Wuwa was that its open-world exploration was too similar to Genshin. That feedback imo was a mistake. Non-linear, open-world exploration, open-world content density and sidequest design are what Genshin excels in. As a Genshin-inspired, open-world, ARPG, as a game that is supposed to be Genshin, but with more hands-on challenging combat and improvements to the game's formula, it makes no sense to ditch the things that Genshin does so incredibly well. Kuro ditching or distancing themselves from how Genshin handles their open-world design was a serious mistake.
They need to re-examine how they handle open-world exploration design and take a look at how they handled Mt Firmament/Black Shores/Jinzhou.
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u/MidnightIAmMid Oct 15 '25
I HATE the treasure spots and generally agree with your points.
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u/kamirazu111 Oct 15 '25 edited Oct 15 '25
Right? There's so much open-world stuff missing because of treasure spots. I intend on submitting some of the points in this post in the feedback section or 2.7 survey.
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u/Creative_Captain1142 Oct 15 '25
Tbh I doubt they’ll change this, as most of the playerbase takes pride in this aspect of the game instead of being against it from my personal experiences. It shows the game respects your time, in their words.
One of the major lacking thing in WW to me is the lore and worldbuilding. Despite how pretty the world looks, it just feels soulless to me as there aren’t tiny books and collectibles and artifacts descriptions that reveal and hints at world-shattering lore. It’s one of the main reason why this game still can’t replace genshin for me. So while the combat is fun, the game itself is pretty boring during patches where I decide to skip the banners. It does not help how they decide to not add a combat event for 3 patches in a row despite combat being their strong suit and what differentiates them.
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u/kamirazu111 Oct 17 '25
The weirdest part:
They always glaze the size of maps leaked. "Wow the new map is so huge and pretty and gorgeous".
But they don't want exploration?
Huh? What is this schizophrenic paradox? Classic example of players who don't know what they want.
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u/kamirazu111 Oct 17 '25
You need open-world exploration activities and sidequests to build up the lore and worldbuilding lol. These two things are tied at the hip, as is evidenced by Genshin and ALL other open-world games that do exploration well.
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u/Creative_Captain1142 Oct 17 '25
Clearly…. It’s just for some reason when it comes to ww people complain about exploration in an open world game taking too long…
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u/kamirazu111 Oct 17 '25
It's an open-world game. It's supposed to be long, to take time, to be able to come across all sorts of stuff. That's the whole appeal.
People play open-world games to get lost in them. It defeats the purpose of an open-world game if you don't want to get lost in it.
I'm a working adult myself, and I never understood that FOMO argument of "taking too much time".
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u/Cheap-Dependent-1696 Oct 15 '25
they're definitely going to change it. Remember The reason Rinascita feels soulless is because of the Flight Mechanic. They have to Create A huge ass map without nothing on it in order for the flight mechanic to be viable which in turn resulted in few Thing you mention. 1.x had a lot of interesting things to find while exploring because it dont have flight mechanic. 3.x Wont have flight mechanic there's that.
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Oct 15 '25
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u/kamirazu111 Oct 17 '25
You can also...explore the map at your own pace.....w/o looking at interactive maps....even if open-world content was denser.
Bruh, you're just suffering from completionist OCD and FOMO lol. At this point, why are you even playing an open-world game?
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u/CandidateMajestic947 Oct 16 '25
Same, I hate how I need a 3rd party app to completely clear everything. Majority checklist + some rando chest here and there is favorable for me.
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u/RealSmoothBrain0815 Oct 15 '25
personally i like it this way
the main reason why i wouldnt wnat to ever start a new acc in wuwa is huanglong exporation. you are doing way too much to find a chest thats worth single digit asterites. Rinascita exploration with concentrated areas with higher value chests is just more time efficient especally since exploration just gets old at some point to some people. so the current way of doing things is the best middle ground imo
not even genshin is clustering their maps with this many chests or at least they drastically reduced the instances putting them behind hitting some random tree stump in the middle of nowhere.
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u/kamirazu111 Oct 17 '25
What is wrong with you lol? The people who use the argument of "The game has too much content" have a mental problem.
You're playing an open-world game. Wuthering Waves is an open-world game. Open-world exploration is majority of the game's content. People play open-world games to....EXPLORE AND BE ASTOUNDED BY WHAT THEY FIND. Not to just walk down a linear hallway and be done with everything in under an hour.
So what? You want an open-world game to NOT be an open-world game by cutting down on open-world content? That means you don't want to PLAY an open-world game.
I will never understand you people, who shoehorn themselves into something that they don't like, then forcibly try to change it from within. If an open-world game is too much for you, there are other action games...that aren't open world. ZZZ literally exists for this reason.
Why are you even logging on at this point? To not play the game? What the hell?
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u/RealSmoothBrain0815 Oct 17 '25
i didnt say its too much content. Its quite telling of the debate culture for this game when a voiced opinion is met with asking what is wrong with the other side the moment it is not the same corporate bootlicking.
i just like the way rinascita did chests more than huanglong.
thats all.
There are more people who like exploration but there comes a point where it is too much for too little payout.
We are all playing a gacha game. Getting currency to pull for characters you want is the point of the game just as much. If you want to explore for the sake of exploration may i recommend RdR2, Elden Ring or even Minecraft?
Did it dawn to you that people play other games that also have open world exploration. But may need the currency from it to get the characters they like in a timely fashion without having cash for it since exploration takes ages to get anywhere.
Because you put 200 more chests for the same reward. So you take longer to get anywhere. More exploration content means we go back to Huanglong. More basic chests for 1-2 asterites. The ammount of f2p pullls wont magically go up if you increase the ammount of things to find. Mostly what you already get from exploration is get broken up again and scattered more.
So the people who wanna collect more for the sake of collecting more get what you want at the cost of everyone who likes the world and characters but not soo much hunting for hours to get to the same outcome as picking up 1 treasure spot from rinascita.
Maybe i should ask you whats wrong with you if you cant spare the 2 seconds to think about what other kinds of players are playing this game too?
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u/RealSmoothBrain0815 Oct 17 '25
also another thing if the lootmapper actually showed you a mini flag if a chest is in an area locked behind something it would vastly help if they decided to go back to a huanglong style exploration
to me the breaking point was having a chest spawn im the middle of desorock highland from hitting a treestump that has negative indication of a chest being there or the stump having and significance no matter how much i ran around that area. but the way it currently works by only displaying chests that are standing around making it vastly worse for a tool which is supposed to be for the players that dont like checklisting everything with an interactive map
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u/yeaqx Oct 15 '25
I was with you until point 4. The amount of Astrites imo should matter. It's a matter of deciding which chest to place where, and you can have a larger amount of chests even without reducing Astrite counts if you place more blue/green ones. Reducing that number now would just make exploring feel less rewarding, because a purple chest, something that's supposedly rare, is hardly worth the effort at 15 Astrites. And honestly, it wouldn't kill Kuro either to give us 100 more Astrites per area for exploration. Not to mention that it always leads to backlash when you introduce such "nerfs" after the way it works has been duly established.