Article by Serenety Graphics by Enzo Salvador
October 27, 2022
For two years, Genshin Impact has dominated the gaming platform not only for being arguably one of the “best” games of all time but also for being one of the most profitable games in the current market. Being one of the undisputed and uncrowned kings of the gaming market gave many developers a chance to take a leap of faith in taking that title away from them, and they all knew that it would never be an easy shot. Several titles took attempts on taking this gaming giant on, such as Legends of Neverland, and Ni No Kuni to no avail.
However, the closest game that has ever taken a head-on attempt to lock horns with Genshin Impact as a competitor was Tower of Fantasy. They not only took time and effort in displaying a great balance of contentment, fairness, and excellent gameplay for their audience to boot, but also made sure that their self-imposed title: “The Genshin Killer” was nothing to scoff at. This however wasn’t all too promising as the game’s self-imposed title is now poised to bite them back.
The game started in China a year prior to the global release, and was quite a success in its first few months, prompting the developers of the game to release Tower of Fantasy in the global market for more exposure and profit. But after a few more months passed, their rolling success soon plummeted into a deep pit of issues and bugs where many were left unsatisfied. Many players in the Chinese servers slowly but surely abandoned the game in favor of Genshin Impact due to the game not living up to their expectations anymore, but with a good reason.
While the soon-to-be global players didn’t understand this frustration and sudden shift in players in the Chinese community at first, each update of the game is slowly making players realize what they meant. Innumerable issues and bugs that were reported by the Chinese players were starting to show themselves in the Global servers as well, leaving its title of “The Genshin Killer” in question.
Tower of Fantasy’s many glaring flaws came about in the form of three major aspects: Security, Responsiveness, and Balancing. Starting off with security, Tower of Fantasy has long since neglected many inconspicuous hackers dominating the game state, leaving compensation after compensation without serious recompense, a tiring sight to see for many players. Exploiting not only many accounts from other players, but also boosting their personal accounts into unachievable levels to claim their place on the global leaderboards.
In addition to security problems, Tower of Fantasy’s gameplay, or more specifically, the responsiveness, became a notorious frustration many players have. Spanning from questionable hitboxes, randomness of certain terrain-traversing features, and sometimes even glitchy combat, only left bitter pills for the players to swallow, as many months and updates have passed with little to no update from the developers on this obvious flaw.
Furthermore, the implementation of balancing became rather questionable too in the eyes of many players, who by all means do not understand the need for developers to make their characters “balanced”. Some speculated that the changes were meant for the Global version to not powercreep (A game state where new power content becomes a MUST-HAVE for all players) as fast as its Chinese counterpart. While in practice it may be the best option for the global release, it is however not the best plan to implement in a state where all players do not get the most out of their gameplay when other issues are lurking about.
As players anticipate another contender for the gaming market (Wuthering Waves), Tower of Fantasy will continue to degrade as time goes on until the developers will acknowledge its flaws and create valuable solutions for each one. So long as the bricks continue to fall from the mighty tower that tried to take down Genshin Impact, its name will forever be etched in many player’s heads as the tower that tried to kill Genshin but failed to do so.
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