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We are officially entering the next chapter of the post-Genshin Impact world we find ourselves in. After a huge boom in this space, gacha action RPGs are, at long last, ditching the gacha part so they can just be better games that aren't nailed to unavoidably predatory and anti-fun monetization practices. Duet Night Abyss is waving the flag, promising "all characters and weapons" will be "free to unlock" with none of the usual RNG or time-gating nonsense.
That's according to the latest updates from developer Pan Studio and publisher Hong Kong Spiral Rising Technology, who held a big global announcement stream on August 26.
"Every character is free," says producer DecaBear. Joined by two stream cohosts, operations member XD and environment artist Lichee (all of these nicknames are correct, I swear), DecaBear quickly adds, "weapons are free too!"
"We're completely removing all character and weapon banners," he clarifies. "From now on, every character and weapon can be earned completely through free gameplay – all the way until you've collected them all." The star rating system for characters and weapons has been removed, too. And instead of banners, you can now just buy characters directly through the in-game shop, or earn "fragments" that eventually unlock them by completing "character-specific" activities.
Gacha games, especially the Genshin-shaped ones that dominate today's industry, typically release new characters and weapons via rotating, time-limited banners where players chuck mountains of currency, free or paid, at frighteningly dismal drop rates often hovering under 1% in the hopes of acquiring the collectibles they want. This is typically called "pulling," and if it sounds like loot boxes in an even more hideous disguise, that's because it is. I compare gacha monetization to alcohol: it can be fun in moderation just like traditional gambling, but if abused it can absolutely ruin lives.
Many modern gacha games vie for competitiveness by increasing banner drop rates, lowering the "pity" counter that guarantees a chosen reward after a certain number of pulls, or doling out more free resources that players can use to pull on gacha banners. Duet Night Abyss is ditching banners entirely, and that's not all.
Another gacha mainstay, the "stamina" or energy resource system tied to the passing of real-world hours, which is expressly designed to limit how quickly players can progress by leashing their activity completion to the march of time, has gotten the axe too.
"And the second major update is... unlimited stamina!" DecaBear continues. "That's right. We've completely removed the stamina system. From now on, there'll be no stamina walls holding players back."
"In the last test," DecaBear says, "a lot of players complained about [stamina]. They said our gameplay – which is built around fast-paced grinding – kept getting blocked by stamina limits. And that felt pretty bad."
I've been playing Genshin Impact almost every day for nearly five years, I played Honkai: Star Rail for many months, and I've been pretty big into Zenless Zone Zero since update 1.4. I speak with some experience when I say that this sounds like someone reporting, hey, we asked the play testers if getting their hands shoved in a filing cabinet drawer impacted their experience, and they all said yes.
Of course stamina is limiting! It's a limiter!
"It felt like the game was forcing me to buy more," XD says of the game's old stamina system.
"Put simply: farm as much as you want, whenever you want," DecaBear reiterates.
The whole conversation is transparently artificial, but it's hilarious even in context. It feels like watching game designers discover fun in real time while tacitly admitting that the game design philosophy of the entire gacha industry is openly hostile and deleterious. The equivalent would be an EA executive rolling up tomorrow and saying, 'Folks, have you ever thought about how invasive microtransactions can be in FIFA?'
I like my few gacha games because I'm a collector at heart, drip-fed content works on my brain, and playing them feels like gardening for nerds. Put in a few minutes of work a day, sometimes a few hours when new stuff drops, and watch things build up, just with anime characters instead of plants. But they're only ever fun despite the gacha crap, not because of it. Duet Night Abyss is just saying the quiet part out loud.
It's important to note that there is a frankly catastrophic amount of room for the monkey's paw to curl here. No gacha crap sounds great on paper, but this game is going to want to make its money somehow, and there's a lot we still don't know about how Duet Night Abyss will be balanced and monetized.
How long does it take to earn characters and weapons for free? Can you pay to speed up that grind? You can, after all, still just buy a character outright, but with no RNG suffering. Because, technically speaking, you can also get all of the characters and weapons in Genshin or Zenless without spending a dime, it's just gonna suck harder than a Dyson in a shag carpet living room.
We also don't know how fun the game is, nevermind all this scaffolding. But as someone who's found real enjoyment in gacha games despite hating their FOMO design bible, it's certainly got my attention. Here's hoping the gameplay doesn't beef it at launch on PC and mobile on October 28.
