Millions recoil as Zenless Zone Zero tells Wuthering Waves, Genshin Impact, and Honkai Star Rail to hold my beer, giving out free S-rank characters and weapons for its anniversary

A bunch of big free-to-play RPGs all celebrated their anniversaries fairly recently, and games like Wuthering Waves ended up embroiled in player outrage over rewards seen as meager. Gacha kingpins Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail are no strangers to the same controversy, and some disappointment lingers, but they've mostly gotten better about it through a combination of beleaguered player acceptance and improved goodies. So when Zenless Zone Zero rolled up with its first anniversary rewards, a lot of people were waiting to count, measure, and compare the goods. The result? ZZZ wins, folks.

HoYo revealed Zenless Zone Zero version 2.0 today, headlined by a new area called the Waifei Peninsula and carried by new characters Yixuan, Ju Fufu, and Pan Yinhu (who is, importantly, a big ol' panda man). It's poised to be a massive update that changes how the game looks and feels from day to day. The accompanying one-year anniversary rewards have become one of the biggest emerging talking points after the dev showcase.

This is still just HoYoverse, a multi-billion dollar company that also runs Genshin and Star Rail among other games, hacking off a chunk of its money throne and chucking it to the crowd, but ZZZ is pretty handily winning the anniversary loot weigh-in among this crowd. Here's what players will get in 2.0:

• A free standard S-Rank agent
• A free standard S-Rank weapon
• 1,600 Polychrome (enough for 10 gacha lootboxes)
• 20 Encrypted Master Tapes (redeemed for the same lootboxes)

Version 2.0 also includes Boopons for ZZZ's buddy robot companions, new outfits for the game's main characters, and surely a boatload of earnable resources tied to the new region, but those are sort of in their own category. Still, the up-front gifts ain't bad.

Version 2.0 Teaser "Where Clouds Embrace the Dawn" | Zenless Zone Zero - YouTube

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Standard characters and weapons pale in comparison to limited ones like Yixuan, but the standard Stunner Lycaon is still part of the best team in the game (thanks to Miyabi, the best character in the game), and standard weapons like Brimstone are actually pretty solid on several characters. With 30 limited pulls added on top, this is pretty darn good as gacha anniversary 'please keep or start playing' incentives go – and orders of magnitude better than the more spending-focused events seen in many games.

Zenless Zone Zero players have responded to the news with unsurprising glee and relief, broadly happy with their war chest (I'm taking Lycaon and Brimstone for myself) and glad their game has avoided any anniversary riots.

Many longtime players are even happier that the game is also buffing its first-ever, enduringly popular limited agent: the shark girl Ellen Joe, who's fallen behind modern units and is getting a well-deserved boost for free. It's not just a numerical buff, either; the "stronger" Ellen has new animations that look pretty slick.

Meanwhile, Infinity Nikki devs issue another 1,000-word apology as backlash continues after disastrous update blamed on "insufficient preparation," but the community doesn't seem to buy it.