Wuthering Waves Players Are Using a Time-Honored Trick to Access Playable Characters Early

Wuthering Waves’ global launch is suffering from a number of technical issues that have forced developer Kuro Games to issue an apology and offer compensation, but this latest exploit left some players hoping it sticks around for as long as possible.

Wuthering Waves is an open-world Genshin Impact-style Gacha game from Chinese studio Kuro that launched globally in free-to-play form across PC and mobile this week.

As revealed in a number of gameplay clips posted to Chinese video-sharing website Bilibili, Wuthering Waves players soon worked out that by manually changing the date in their system time settings after logging into the game, they were able to access an upcoming playable character called Yinlin.

This appears to only unlock the trial for the character, set to be released officially as part of an event scheduled for mid-June, so the damage done to the live service should be limited. Still, the exploit has certainly caught the attention of Wuthering Waves’ burgeoning community, which is having a laugh about it all.

Tricking video games by changing the date has been a thing in video games for decades, of course, but in the case of a live-service, online open-world Gacha game like Wuthering Waves, players are now wondering what other exploits they might find by tinkering with time.

Players report this exploit is patched for the Chinese client, but may still be available in the western version. Kuro Games will of course want to stamp this out globally as soon as possible, given it undermines the gacha mechanics that underpin Wuthering Waves’ monetization.

The developer has plenty to be getting on with. The scale of the technical issues at launch was laid out in a post on the Wuthering Waves website. There was a login timeout issue, now said to be fixed, a problem with age authentication, which is under investigation, forced logins every time the game client is relaunched on PC, crash issues, glitches on certain Android devices, poor quality localization, and performance issues including lag, freezes, frame-rate drops, devices overheating, blurry graphics, and force quits. An emergency patch was issued to address the most urgent issues, but Kuro advised those still experiencing serious overheating or frequent crashes to lower the graphics settings “in the case of an overload for a smoother gaming experience.”

Similar to Genshin Impact, Wuthering Waves features a gacha mechanic for obtaining new characters and weapons — see our guide for more details on how to unlock pulling, plus our in-progress walkthrough to help you get started. To celebrate Wuthering Waves’ launch, Kuro Games is also issuing in-game rewards via promo codes.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].