Well, this is a bit strange. Highly anticipated Genshin Impact rival Wuthering Waves launched late last night, and after battling some random crashes and disconnects I was able to finally progress and make a friend in-game to chat with.
In the midst of chatting back and forth, I asked curiously: “Do you also play Genshin Impact?” However, to my surprise, my message “Contains prohibited word(s)”, and therefore was not sent.
Out of sight, out of mind
At first, I was convinced I had some sort of typo or one of those hidden bad words somewhere in my brief message. You know, the reason we can’t say assassin in most games. But after carefully typing out the message again, I got the same response: something in my message was a prohibited word.
Surely developer Kuro Game Studio wasn’t actually blocking us from saying Genshin Impact, right? Well, turns out they are. I tried sending just “Genshin Impact“, and received the prohibited word response. Curious, I quickly tried Genshin” and Impact, both of which went through without a problem. The message became clear: no talking about Genshin Impact in our Wuthering Waves.
Are these even competitors?
I’ve encountered these before in smaller random mobile games that block other popular game titles in the same genre from being talked about. At the end of the day, they don’t want players leaving to play those bigger-budget titles in the same genre. But to see it happening in Wuthering Waves, one of the most highly anticipated titles in the genre with over 30,000,000 (yes that’s a million) pre-registers, was not something I was expecting.
Curious, I started spamming other games in the genre to see if any more “contained prohibited words”. To my surprise, it let me type most of them without any issues. Tower of Fantasy, Honkai: Star Rail (in as many variations as I could think of), Nikke, Epic 7, were all sent just fine. Could it really just be blocking Genshin Impact only?
Nope. I randomly tried World of Warcraft and to my surprise, it is prohibited. Warcraft by itself is not, but the full MMORPG game name is not. I tried probably over 100 other game titles and really can’t figure out the determination in what they chose to block. Here are all the prohibited words I encountered:
- Genshin Impact
- World of Warcraft
- Lost Ark
- Mortal Kombat
- Stellar Blade
The first three I can sort of understand. I guess? Not really, but maybe? But Mortal Kombat and Stellar Blade? Why? I quickly googled to see if there were any search results for “Should I play Mortal Kombat or Wuthering Waves?” and while I didn’t find anything about that, I did find a ton of Wuthering Waves vs Genshin Impact comparisons and questions, which is to be expected. Mortal, Kombat and even Kombat are fine. Just not the combined Mortal Kombat.
It’s really quite random and has me perplexed enough that for the last hour or so I’ve been typing a flurry of random games, phrases, and even character names to see what else may be censored instead of actually progressing. I’ll update the above list if I find anything.
