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Our favorite gacha game is giving out a free five-star

The leaks were real, we are getting a free Wuthering Waves character in the game’s next update - and it's electro-user Xiangli Yao.

Wuthering Waves free five star - Xiangli Yao's portrait in a giant purple gift box

It looks like Kuro took a leaf from the Honkai Star Rail playbook and decided to give us a free Wuthering Waves five-star as part of the game’s next update, as well as making some tweaks and adding bits and bobs to improve performance and usability.

After receiving his drip marketing a few weeks ago, we got confirmation that Wuthering Waves Xiangli Yao is a five-star, electro character. While he may be a limited resonator with his own banner, we also get a free copy of him during the second half of the 1.2 patch.

This might be part of the Moon-Chasing Festival in the update, or another event yet to get details. We’re not sure if it’s a case of just logging in and grabbing him from your inbox or whether there’ll be hoops to jump through. Kuro is revealing more soon.

Since its release, Wuthering Waves has been very generous for a gacha game. Not only do you get four-star characters Yangyang, Chixia, Baizhi, Sanhua, and Yuanwu for free, but you also get a guaranteed five-star in your first 50 pulls – this sounds like a lot, but there’s so much free currency that it goes down very quickly. You can also then set a course for a chosen five-star from the standard pool, guaranteed within 80 wishes, and there’s no 50/50 on the weapon banner. It seems that developers just can’t help but spoil us with more freebies, and you know what? I’m here for it.

A while ago, I actually wrote a feature about free characters in games (and the lack thereof in Genshin Impact), and now there’s even more fuelling the fire of fans wondering if we’ll ever get to pick a standard banner character in Genshin, or whether a limited character would be a free character.

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It’s also good that we’re getting a representation of male characters in a gacha game, as recently released Zenless Zone Zero seems terrified of giving us any other men outside of Zenless Zone Zero’s Anton – all other males are animals or a robot. Come on, us husbando enjoyers need something too!

Other than the announcement of a new tall man appearing in our inboxes for free, there are some other key changes coming to the game in the 1.2 update. You’ll be able to change how the lock-on works, so instead of pointing your character in the right direction, you can move the camera automatically.

In better news still, you can now save up waveplates for use at a later time if they overflow. You can hold up to 480 waveplate crystals on top of the 240 daily cap, so if you fancy grinding for some materials, you’ve got plenty to chew through. Other changes are coming, and you can see the whole post right here.

Wondering who else is coming up in Kuro’s game? Check out the Wuthering Waves banner and all the information on the next Wuthering Waves update here, along with which Wuthering Waves events you can take part in.