Games Dynamics

When the map was released, HoYoverse promised players that a new country map would be released every year. So far, players have experienced Mondstadt and Liyue at the 2020 release, Inazuma in 2021, Sumeru in 2022, Fontaine in 2023, and Natlan in 2024. Since six of the seven countries in the Teyvat continent have been explored in the game, it is natural for players to think that Snezhnaya will be the next country to explore. After all, Snezhnaya is the exploration area of ​​Act VI Archon Quests.

However, with the release of Snezhnaya delayed by a full year, this situation may be about to change.

Nod-Krai Region Confirmed As A New Exploration Area

Although it is normal to speculate that Snezhnaya is the destination of the next stop of the Traveler, according to current news, this will not be possible, at least not as fully open for exploration as in previous years.

At the end of Natlan’s story, the Traveler has the opportunity to talk to an important character who will ask them questions about the lore and the future during the conversation. This is a recurring theme in the game, although one of the answers provided by the NPC in Genshin Impact is that it is possible to just ignore Snezhnaya and delay the game map by one year.

When the NPC asks the Traveler about the next destination, the character talks about how they should go to Nod-Krai. This place has been mentioned by Liben before, but the conversation with the NPC at the end of Natlan’s story once again confirms that Nod-Krai is the next place for the Traveler to go.

This news surprised players because Snezhnaya was supposed to be on the new map in 2025. Although technically Nod-Krai is part of Snezhnaya, HoYoverse has always distinguished them and focused more on the former than the latter.

HoYoverse Has Always Been Interested In Distinguishing Nod-Krai From Snezhnaya

In the Marvelous Merchandise event in version 5.1, Liben teased Nod-Krai, describing it as a hub region that brings together people from all over Teyvat, thanks to the opportunities it provides to make money. Although part of Snezhnaya, it belongs to an autonomous region in the southern part of Cryo. Nod-Krai is considered a dangerous place due to the large amount of wealth around it.

At the end of Natlan’s story, the NPC also provided more information about the area. He pointed out that the people from Nod-Krai in the original god have a special power. This power is older than the known 7 elements, although the specific details of how it works are still unknown. Players can make better use of the value of Genesis Crystal in their hands and help them explore the new map.

The NPC said that Fatui Harbinger, a doctor who has been investigating the Ancient Moon’s Remnants, also has a base in Nod-Krai. At this point, the character said Nod-Krai is a “piece of history not far from Snezhnaya” Genshin Impact leaked a map trailer for version 6.0.

In fact, the developers are also committed to selling Nod-Krai as a separate new region. This news was leaked long before the end of the 5.3 version mission. According to the information provided by the leaker named HXG, Nod-Krai will be released in Genshin Impact 6.0, while Snezhnaya will be released in version 7.0. This post was marked as “suspicious” on Reddit.

Even if the game does not unlock Snezhnaya in 2025, players can still experience new areas, new story missions, and new characters. For now, players should still be cautious about the leaked news. It is also believed that after the latest version is released, players can continue to lead their respective characters in the game to show their skills and win more rewards.

Even if we leave aside its earliest fighting predecessor, Dynasty Warriors series has been around for nearly 25 years.

However, its development has not been smooth sailing, especially 2018 Dynasty Warriors 8, which suffered a huge drop in reputation due to various unreasonable factors, causing Omega Force team to not release any official works after the release of Dynasty Warriors 8 Empires in 2021.

It makes sense, after all, no matter how exciting the epic story is, it will inevitably make people tired after countless remakes. In addition, the overall gameplay of Dynasty Warriors has become fixed, and the open world innovation has suffered a Waterloo. This old series seems to be gradually fading from people’s sight.

Restart

However, to the delight of fans, the developers did not give up. At the beginning of 2025, the completely new Dynasty Warriors Origins made a shining debut. This game will be officially released to all players on January 17. Can this game, which is regarded as a “series restart”, successfully push the brand into a new development cycle?

Hero

The biggest difference between “Origin” and the past is that it abandons the game mode that focuses on controlling the famous generals of Three Kingdoms and uses the original hero Wuming. For most of the game time, players have to carry out activities and battles from the perspective of Wuming.

This is different from the custom character gameplay that has appeared before, because Wuming cannot make various image adjustments. He is an independent character with a complete background and story.

At the beginning of the announcement, this drastic change did cause controversy among the player community. Many people believed that the inability to play famous generals freely had lost the original characteristics of “Dynasty Warriors” to some extent.

The timeline of this game is planned from the beginning of Yellow Turban Rebellion to the end of Battle of Red Cliffs, and the content is concentrated on the first half of the history of Three Kingdoms that most people are familiar with. Although the story of Three Kingdoms could not be fully told, it left enough space to polish various levels of various sizes carefully, and some battles that were not included in previous works in the series appeared.

Of course, in addition to the hero Wuming, “Origin” did not forget to portray other generals.

Generals

Old players familiar with “Dynasty Warriors” know that whether it is “Dynasty Warriors” or “Samurai Warriors”, many of the famous characters depicted in it are mixed with Omega Force’s own creative settings and used from generation to generation.

This design logic will give people a refreshing feeling at first. But as time goes by, the original innovation has become an inherent impression that restricts the role’s space.

Considering that there are fewer and fewer high-profile generals and celebrities who have not yet joined the series, it is difficult for subsequent works to attract attention by adding new people. How to break through the bottleneck has become a problem that the development team must solve now.

Faced with the grim situation, the answer given by the developers is “reshaping”.

The great virtuous teacher Zhang Jue changed his state of “crazy demon” and became a leader of Taiping Dao with the ideal of saving the world and even a little tragic.

Although the evil Dong Zhuo was still a fat man, he had sufficient business strategies and ruthless means, and he was truly called the beast of the late Han Dynasty.

Yuan Shao, who was generally underestimated because of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, is no longer a negative image, and there are many performances that match his identity and demeanor.

After all, the comprehensive qualities of the princes and warlords who can leave their names in history books are much better than ordinary people. The adjustments made by Dynasty Warriors Origin to respect the historical atmosphere are very worthy of recognition.

Even for characters who have not made too many adjustments in character, the game has given young images that are in line with the development period of the plot, such as Cao Cao and Zhang Fei.

While breaking the image of Dynasty Warriors, the screenwriter also integrated the story lines related to Wuming, intertwined with the behaviors of many generals, and vividly performed a drama of the late Han Dynasty.

However, for some events, “Origin” uses a lazy pure text description without any performance cutscenes, which sometimes makes people feel that the jumps and turns between the plots are a bit stiff.

Combat

As traditional, the hero’s attack module will change according to the weapon used. Although the total number of types is less than before, the combat methods of each weapon are visible to the naked eye, and the gameplay is quite different.

In addition to the inherent attack modules of the weapon, the system provides an additional skill system called “Battle Arts”. Players can equip up to four Battle Arts at the same time, some of which are pure output skills, and some have displacement or defense effects.

Battle Arts require Bravery resources to activate, which are displayed as orange balls above the life bar, and can be accumulated by killing enemies or accurately dodging. In theory, the more powerful Battle Arts consume more Bravery. Battle Arts can be obtained by upgrading and adding points, and can also be bought in the store. There is also a chance to learn by encountering mysterious NPCs during exploration.

Battle Arts system has made up for the shortcomings of the weapon’s own modules, and can be combined with light and heavy attacks to play a variety of imaginative combos. The free allocation feature also fully mobilizes the player’s enthusiasm for matching moves, and choosing a combination that suits their style can be said to be a very successful factor.

As a new beginning, Dynasty Warriors Origins performed very well. It changed all the unreasonable aspects of the previous work, and at the same time broke the framework that bound it. It showed a very high level in terms of gameplay and plot fluency, but at the same time it did not lose the charm of the original work. It is better to say that this work shows more of the original feeling of Dynasty Warriors than its previous two works.

The latest news about Honkai: Star Rail indicates that two characters from Fate/Stay Night may appear in the game. Earlier, HoYoverse revealed to the outside world that this RPG will have a large-scale cooperative event in Unlimited Blade Works part of this series.

Fans have therefore made many speculations about the activities that may be included in the collaboration, but HoYoverse has not given a clear answer. Until the recent news came out, it was hinted that Honkai: Star Rail will bring new content with the collaboration of Fate/Stay Night.

HoYoverse Has Experienced Many Crossover Activities

HoYoverse has many games, and almost every game has experienced a lot of crossovers. Each collaboration is basically a joint promotion with some big brands, selling game-related products and some in-game props.

Earlier, Genshin Impact cooperated with McDonald’s launching meals with special game packaging. The characters in the game will be displayed on the packaging of the meals, as well as some in-game gift codes. Honkai: Star Rail also announced this year that it will collaborate with KFC, but these activities will only appear in Chinese KFC stores.

The latest collaboration of Honkai: Star Rail is an in-game collaboration, which will allow all players to experience the specific content of the collaboration.

Possible Characters In This Collaboration Of Honkai: Star Rail

The collaboration between Honkai: Star Rail and Fate/Stay Night is expected to arrive sometime in the third quarter of 2025.

Ubatcha, a leaker known for leaking HoYoverse game information, shared the possible characters that may appear in this collaboration. According to HellGirl’s information, this collaboration with Fate/Stay Night will feature two characters, Servants Archer and Saber.

Another leaker with more reliable information, Sakura Haven, hinted at the possible paths of two characters in her sharing. One of them will be Nihility and the other will be Hunt.

Referring to the previous activities of Honkai: Star Rail releasing new characters, players often spend all their Stellar Jades to get new characters, and even then they cannot get all the characters. This collaboration may also happen to new players or players who have not accumulated enough Stellar Jades. At that time, players can choose to Top Up Oneiric Shards to get the desired characters.

The Introduction Of New Characters Is Not The First Attempt By HoYoverse

HoYoverse introduced new characters in other games in the early years. But most of the new characters introduced are characters in HoYoverse games.

In Honkai Impact 3rd, numerous characters from HoYoverse games were introduced, such as Fischl and Keqing from Genshin Impact and Sparkle from Star Rail. There are even characters from non-HoYoverse games in Genshin Impact. She is Aloy, the protagonist of Horizon: Zero Dawn. This decision allows Aloy, who does not belong to this game, to enter the big world of Genshin Impact to explore new content with players.

This collaboration of Honkai: Star Rail will be launched after the fourth explorable world that has been promoted for a long time recently. The new world, Amphoreus, will debut in the game later this month, and HoYoverse has already shown off several new characters and locations related to the new world.

HoYoverse also held a special show to showcase the arrival of the new world, during which YOASOBI’s lead singer, Ikura performed the new theme song for Honkai: Star Rail.

With the new world coming soon and related events and predicted crossovers to follow, 2025 looks like another significant year for Honkai: Star Rail.

As we all know, it has been a few weeks since the early access version of Path of Exile 2 was launched. Although the game graphics and gameplay have been slightly improved in this update, it has kept its popularity high.

Compared with the previous one, the texture of POE 2 has been greatly improved. According to players who have experienced it, even in the high-end content, the smoothness of the game cycle will not decrease, but become smoother.

In addition to the above-mentioned updates on the game smoothness and other mechanisms, POE 2 also launched new game content such as new classes and Ascendancies.

The addition of these new elements has given POE 2 more room for development, and it has also continued to consolidate its position as one of the most popular games in the role-playing game circle.

However, according to some players, one of the new features is really not an improvement, and it can even be regarded as a regression compared to modern ARPGs.

Since Diablo 4 is essentially an open world game, although players in Diablo 4 mostly explore the game within the dungeon. However, many players often compare POE 2 and Diablo 4 because they have many similarities and are both inspired by some classic Diablo series games.

However, one of the most different functions in these two games is the Identify Items function. The bonus loot picked up by players when they win in Diablo 4 will be automatically identified, while in POE 2, players can only manually use Scrolls of Wisdom to distinguish Path Of Exile 2 Items, or rely on Identify Items function of NPCs.

Is The New Identify Items Function Easy To Use?

As mentioned above, players can rely on Hooded One in POE 2 or Doryani in the endgame to help you identify the loot, saving the trouble of players using Scrolls of Wisdom to identify. At least from this point of view, the appearance of this function is an improvement over the original version.

Because players who have played the game know that identifying items by yourself is very time-consuming, and this also requires players to have Scrolls of Wisdom to a certain extent. The developers also considered that if players can’t find NPCs to help identify, players can also exchange Scrolls of Wisdom with vendors for 25 POE 2 Gold.

Despite this, players still questioned the Identify Items function. Why can’t you simply discard the identified items? For ARPGs, players need to manage their loot inventory very carefully to make it clearer what type of items to collect later. In POE 2, the dropped items only tell players the basic type and rarity of the items, unlike Diablo 4, which automatically identifies items for players to determine whether they need the items.

In the endgame of POE 2, the loot dropped is very messy, especially the rare equipment, and it is very unrealistic and troublesome for players to manually identify equipment and run back and forth between Hideouts.

Game Requires Automatic Identify Items Feature

If players pick up POE 2 Exalted Orb and gold while exploring in POE 2, or pick up Waystones or even high-level items in endgame activities, then before the players can complete the game, they can only use the portal to let NPCs help identify these items, or carry a large number of Scrolls of Wisdom to identify the loot at any time.

Obviously, neither of these two methods is the most convenient and reasonable for players. Whether it is NPCs or Scrolls of Wisdom to identify items, players need to perform additional steps to get the same result, which is undoubtedly a waste of time and slows down the progress for players.

Therefore, players generally hope to see a game function similar to Diablo 4 in POE 2 that automatically identifies items, so as to simplify these complicated processes and help players advance the game progress faster.