Duet Night Abyss Developers Just Announced Their Gacha Game Won't Actually Have Any Gacha Mechanics

Can you imagine a world with no gacha? One game has dared to dream. Duet Night Abyss developers, Pan Studio, have just announced that its highly-anticipated upcoming gacha game will in fact include no gacha mechanics whatsoever. All characters and weapons will be free to unlock in Duet Night Abyss, and all optional purchases in-game will be cosmetic only.

This feels like a pretty wild turn of events for a game that, until a developer stream just a few hours ago, was billed as a full-on gacha game. We're not complaining, of course.

All Gacha Mechanics Are Being Removed, As Announced In The Global Launch Livestream

All Weapons And Characters Available By Just Playing The Game

The developer livestream was a massive change for Duet Night Abyss. Not only can you unlock all the weapons and characters in the game by grinding, but all other gacha staples - like stamina and time-gating resources - have also been removed. It seems like the game has been totally reworked to fully remove every shred of gacha from the game.

Duet Night Abyss has been compared to Warframe as players have followed its development journey, and this transition from a gacha game to, well, just a game, feels like Pan Studio is really going to lean into some of the same concepts found in Warframe. Fundamentally, you can grind for characters, but also speed up your unlocks by purchasing premium currency boosts.

The key difference is that, as far as we know so far, Duet Night Abyss has no premium currency player marketplace. In Warframe, you can grind for premium currency by exchanging items in the marketplace. It will be interesting to see whether DNA can sustain this model without the inclusion of a player-driven marketplace.

Regardless of how successful DNA might be, gacha fans have been left a little confused but overall quite happy about the announcement. With the upcoming gacha giants of Neverness To Everness and Arknights: Endfield supposedly around the corner, as well as the ongoing success of Wuthering Waves, it's possible that Pan Studio deemed it quite difficult to compete with some of the most popular games in the genre.

I don't think we can expect to see a massive shift in how gacha games work moving forwards, but this last-minute transition could be an excellent bit of PR for Duet Night Abyss, and could, if the game is popular enough, trigger some substantial changes to gacha in the future.