Howling Tides has been released, and many players are diving in to play this open-world action game. But while many are busy increasing their alliance level or hunting down echoes, others are pushing the limits of the game to see if they can break anything. It turns out, they can. By adjusting your device’s clock, you can access five-star character tracks ahead of the scheduled release.
The Howling Tides character in question is Yinlin, a five-star character who is currently unavailable in the game through normal means. By changing the device date to a point in the future when Yinlin is active and playable, daring players can jump in and see her earlier, as shown in this bilibili video.
Thankfully, it doesn’t appear that you can use this technique to access other content, such as limited-time events or future daily quests, but the fact that something that seems to work client-side has left many wondering what further exploits are possible. For those who don’t know, client-side refers to things that the game decides on the player’s end, while server-side refers to the parts of the game that the developers handle from their servers, etc. It’s a very simplistic explanation, but for the purposes of this article, it’ll suffice!
Now, the Kuro Games team has promised to fix various bugs and technical issues that have cropped up since the game was released, so you have to imagine this is relatively high on their list of things that need to be fixed. Regardless, I personally wouldn’t try this myself if you’re worried about getting banned. It’s relatively easy to determine who tested this through the completion statistics for the Yinlin character track. It’s best to watch from a distance and giggle.
Whether this is a harbinger of future bugs and malice remains to be seen. For now, we can enjoy some early gameplay of the upcoming five-star characters and hope people don’t start destroying the in-game economy or anything like that. Or maybe you’d like that – overthrow the system and all that. To each his own.
