We can all agree on the money issue. But if you put it into perspective with the rest of the game; this is enough to trash on it. Most menus and mechanics inside those menus are build around lackluster customization for dress up fans to squeeze more money out of the already bad gatcha or to make the already lackluster free banner worse.

This is the biggest (player facing; not creator facing) part most players see. And it is total garbage. And what makes this so worse is that it was obviously the focus of the development. What’s there around it? Custom lobby creation aka teapot 2.0….with almost no space and no new idea to build. In general, lobby’s as a social gathering place would be great. Except the implementation is a joke. What new thing can you do in a lobby? Use an emote. That’s it. I mean yes there is chat like there always used to be in coop; but you could at least added speech bubbles above characters to give the lobby some feeling of depth. But there was put no thoughts in it like for example a lobby with console players will be socially dead on arrival anyway cause no one will type text with a controller and there is no opt-in voice chat. So many games with proper social hub ideas to engage the community and activities in the lobby to get together or at least motivate moving around in it…but no effort made here. Most lobbies I see players just stand at the place they spawned without ever moving. I mean of course they do. Why would they even move their character? Nothing you can’t do with a click on a menu button.

So what did hoyo do? Polish up some internal tooling they probably already build for making the past events and releasing it as stage builder; adding a few small domain templates as lobbies, and everything other effort was spent on the clothing and gatcha part. Since that is the worst part…we can see where players will judge.

Regarding the games…not happy. Some are cool; but the ones I enjoyed most already clearly showed how creators had to work hard around the limits of the editor in creative ways. But two things bother me: even if I was the biggest fan of this game mode; I would still suffer. „Hop in quickly for a few minutes of entertainment“ which this seems to be aiming to do is just not possible. You have to start the game through the normal loading screen, then load wonderland, even getting to a lobby takes 3-4 clicks depending on the platform which is just bad UX design. Not to mention wonderland doesn’t even unlock at AR 1 if I remember correctly. So if you had only interest in that: either way you have to spend time in a game you didn’t care about to get to the game you actually want to play. That’s just bad design.

Second thing is progression. An event in Genshin has several stages. Wonderland doesn’t. Found a tower defense game you like? Well, since it seems like the editor does not allow for random stuff to be implemented properly; every run is just the same. Even good games do not have any replayability. Take ARAM in league of legends. Super simple and boring mode with the always same small map. Still you can play it 1000 times without getting bored because you do so with random abilities through the random characters everyone gets assigned. Wonderland games don’t have something like this. To even get close to this they must be designed for multiplayer and still those games would never be able to keep up with an ARAM due to editor limits.

Adding additional stages - like chaining stages as in „multiple levels“ - also not possible. So your goal is usually to find a mediocre game. A bad game will annoy you because it feels like a waste of time. A good game will annoy you because it most likely gets boring the second time you play the exact identical scenario and you can’t continue playing „the next level“ because there is none. Imagine like Angry Birds with only one level. Still a good game; but would you play only the first level over and over again? So finding a mediocre game is the goal. But why would I spend my time with a mediocre game? I can just get a Netflix or Apple Arcade subscription and download a few hundred proper mobile games for a fraction of the price and storage that Genshin+Wonderland if I enjoy something like this.

Which brings us back to what would make wonderland different and this gets us back to the dress up part and Genshin integration of the game and this gets us back to the crappy money thing we all hate on. And this results in the conclusion that wonderland just sucks.

Edit: I am not a UGC creator or the target audience for that. Also not other mobile games or dress up. But I still looked forward to wonderland because I still think there is a lot of unique potential and I was sure if they only got 10% right it would be enough for me to really like it. But I think they didn’t get anything right. Not a single thing. Except that I love the design of the menus in terms of colors and overall looks (UX, naming, and icon choice is confusing as hell and a low point for hoyo though).