What are Echoes in Wuthering Waves?
Echoes in Wuthering Waves let you wield your enemies' own power against them!
In the realm of action-gacha-RPGs, Wuthering Waves will have to do something special to make its own mark in a crowded landscape. However, when a huge open-world, massive roster of characters and energetic hack-and-slash battles are all considered the norm in the genre, what can Kuro Game do to meet that already high bar?
Wuthering Waves’ solution is its Echoes system, which lets players and their team of Resonators wield the unique powers of the different monsters they defeat, adding an extra dimension to Wuthering Waves' combat, its builds, gear sets, and possibly even traversal.
But what kind of Echoes powers will the Rover and their Resonators be using? Kuro Game has already revealed that there will be many different kinds of Echoes and that they will have all kinds of offensive and defensive utility - so they’re not just special moves. Echoes will also be elementally alligned, so you'll have ice-type Echoes and fire-type Echoes, and so on.
Alongside signature attacks, which I’m sure there will be plenty of, Kuro Game has also said that there will also be Echoes tied to healing and movement.
In episode 4 of Kuro Game’s Dev Talk series, we see offensive Echoes such as a spear-like lunge, but also an energy shield used to parry an enemy’s attacks, a deployable turret that pulses out healing waves and a dash that shrouds the player in rocky armor and increases their speed.
So, as well as in the initial 1.0 release, it looks like Echoes will be Wuthering Waves’ biggest avenue for expansion going forward, with new areas and updates sure to bring new monsters with new abilities - which would make a nice change from the wholly character-focused competitors on the market.
But that’s not all. In Wuthering Waves, you can switch between a team of three characters, all with their own equipped Echoes and gear. As one character battles, something called “Concerto Energy” will build up over time in your unused characters. Once this meter is full, you can switch to another character to trigger a special Concerto Effect.
Collecting Echoes seems to be as simple as defeating specific monsters in the world of Wuthering Waves, which could be easier said than done. Kuro Game has said that unlike passive enemies in many games, monsters in Wuthering Waves actively hunt humans and Resonators. So you might not have to search out all of the toughest enemies - they could come to you!
Echoes can be collected from both regular mobs and bosses and come in rarities up to 4-star and 5-star (which you can snag some of early as pre-registration rewards), and the strength and rarity of the monster matters. Your Rover and Resonators have an overall budget of 10 points to spend on equipping Echoes, with more powerful effects eating up more of that precious budget.
This means the system has a lot of potential for not just min-maxing within a meta, but adds a collect-a-thon element to the game as well, as you track down the perfect monster to fill the last slot in your build.
We’ll be able to see the full roster of Echoes and the powers they grant - and hopefully a whole lot more - in the run-up to Wuthering Waves’ release on iOS, Android and PC via Kuro Game’s official site and the Epic Games Store, but not Steam, on May 23rd.