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Honkai Star Rail came out just over a year ago. HoYoVerse has now moved onto its next project, Zenless Zone Zero, and its proximity to its sibling’s launch is showing, especially since the day one build of the game is riddled with bugs and performance issues for some, while others are saying it’s the best mobile launch they’ve ever experienced.
Zenless Zone Zero is an aRPG with HoYo’s typical gacha twist. It looks good and combat plays pretty well, but only if you’re able to get it going without the typical performance issues you will see when a game launches.
There’s plenty of issues, ranging from laggy UIs, to device compatibility issues. These are all the things that you come to expect with mobile games, and though it’s hard to excuse, it’s also pretty easy to explain. What’s really shocking is the lack of optimisation on PC, but again, it’s exactly what Honkai saw.
This is typically because HoYo’s games are mobile first, with PC ports secondary. This will usually lead to stunted performance on platforms that should typically thrive, and it’s all because of the bottleneck of designing for lesser devices.
The UI seems to be a major bottleneck for those on mobile devices. Some report they can’t “change the date” for their birthday, others are suggesting that there’s input lag between 1-5 seconds whenever they interact with UI elements, and others are saying that the game simply crashes whenever they try and do anything.
One of the most prevalent issues regards to a Unity issue that crashes the game, and you can solve this by forcing DirectX12 at runtime.
Other issues have related to not being able to download the game, though this can be solved through using a VPN. Another prevalent issue regards to being stuck on compiling shaders, though we haven’t quite figured out a solution for this one yet.
Conversely, some have said that ZZZ is incredibly “well polished,” with an incredibly well-rounded UI, accessibility features, and gameplay mechanics.
