As it approaches the day of its anniversary, Honkai: Star Rail is full steam ahead. Their update show live stream will be coming at the end of this week, preceded by the drip marketing of the new characters for the game’s version 2.3, which is coming out in roughly eight weeks as of now. Developers do this to generate hype for the characters and to make decisions on which characters to pull for incredibly difficult for free to play and low spender players. Along with this drip marketing the development team also released developer radio which is used to communicate upcoming news for patches down the road. The most recent of these revealed some exciting new endgame content for players to look forward to. 

The first of these is the Divergent Universe, another update to the Simulated Universe, it seems to be an optimized setting designed to streamline the process of completing weekly runs for rewards. The blessings of this rogue-like mode will seemingly adopt new combinations in the hopes of allowing for different strategic options for players to explore. This mode won’t completely replace the original Simulated Universe, but merely add an option that would give players another option for playing through the game mode.

The second new end game mode is much more intriguing: Apocalyptic Shadow. This mode will serve as a counterpart to the established Memory of Chaos and Pure Fiction. Apocalyptic Shadow will have players fighting against Boss enemies: either story bosses or the weekly bosses will remain to be seen. Like Memory of Chaos and Pure Fiction this will be on a rotational schedule. Each version of the mode will last six weeks, and one of the three modes will have a new version every two weeks. It will also have unique mechanics that change every version, most likely favoring one of the characters on rate up when the version releases. 

Many believe this mode might favor Hunt path (single target focused) damage dealers, to contrast Pure Fiction’s focus on Erudition (true aoe damage or five enemy), and Memory of Chaos’s preference for Destruction units (blast damage or three enemy). Others are not so sure, given most Destruction units being well suited to dealing with bosses already. Either way, part of the player base is quick to praise these changes while expressing frustration about Genshin Impact’s lack of new endgame content. However, Genshin Impact’s team has expressed that new end game content will not be added to the game. Whether this remains true remains to be seen, especially with Wuthering Waves creeping closer and closer to its official release, one that many fans of Genshin’s combat are looking forward to.