Summary

• Honkai: Star Rail's collaboration with Fate/stay night: UBW could fix Genshin Impact's blunders of the past.
• The new event was the final announcement in the Honkai: Star Rail 2.4 livestream.
• HoYoverse's collab with Fate holds a lot of promise but players should be cautious due to past mistakes.

The newly announced Honkai: Star Rail 2.4 livestream, though it has no connection to the patch – the event merely served as a stage.

During the special event, HoYoverse announced several of its planned contents for the period, including the return to the Xianzhou Luofu, the gameplay kits for Yunli, Jiaoqiu, and March 7th’s Hunt form, limited-time events, special quality-of-life updates, and more. There is a lot of content planned with the release of Honkai: Star Rail 2.4, but, despite that, a lot of attention is shifting toward the Fate/stay night collab. The future collaboration has a lot of potential, including the chance to retcon a mistake that HoYoverse made with Genshin Impact, and that it later tried to bury.

Honkai: Star Rail’s Fate Collab Could Finally See HoYoverse Make Meaningful Collab Characters

Genshin Impact Had A Collab With Horizon Forbidden West That Did Not Go Well

HoYoverse ventured into the world of collabs with the promising announcement that Aloy, from PlayStation’s Horizon series, would be added to Genshin Impact as a means of promoting the release of Horizon Forbidden West. The collab started to derail when the release of the PlayStation game by Guerrilla was delayed and news around Aloy’s release started disappearing. Even with Horizon’s release months away, HoYoverse released Aloy as a playable character in Genshin Impact. Aloy was received poorly among players of the community due to her incredibly disappointing gameplay kit and because obtaining Aloy was limited to PlayStation players.

Furthermore, Aloy’s Constellations are unexistent and unobtainable, with no prospect as to when they may arrive, if they are ever added at all.

Aloy’s release in Genshin Impact set a stain on HoYoverse’s reputation for collabs, which is why Honkai: Star Rail’s collab with Fate/stay night is equally exciting as it is terrifying. The recent announcement is exciting because the turn-based RPG now has the chance to correct the mistake made by its sister game and bring what is a great collaboration with the anime series. On the other hand, it does warrant caution, as the new collab could suffer the same fate as Genshin Impact’s collab with Horizon, resulting in lackluster characters that don’t live up to the expectations created around them.

What Honkai: Star Rail’s Collab With Fate Needs To Prosper

The Event Could Bring Forth Worthwhile Playable Characters & Even A Story Arc

This time around, it does not seem like HoYoverse’s collab is tied to an release that has the potential to be delayed. So far, a new Fate/stay night series has not been announced and there have not been rumors of it happening any time soon. It does seem that the collab could avoid one of the factors that impacted the Horizon event in the past. Of course, the biggest problem with the previous event is that Aloy was released, disappointed players, and then left aside as if the collab never happened in the first place.

Ultimately, Honkai: Star Rail’s Fate collab could avoid these problems by following some steps. The first is that, if the anime’s characters are adapted into the game, they are done so in a meaningful fashion. Simply adding a character from a popular series with a terrible gameplay kit is enough to ruin them, so characters like Archer or Saber need to have a positive impact on gameplay and be worth using in team comps. The next step is not limiting access to them through a specific platform. A large portion of the player base being left out would be disastrous.

For now, it is uncertain if the anime’s characters will become playable.

Additionally, the collab would be a lot more effective if the characters’s addition was not random, but explained through some sort of event, especially one with a narrative arc. Given the RPG’s space-venturing nature, the existence of the Fate universe within Honkai’s own universe could easily be explained, and that could very well lead to a Stellaron crisis that has the Astral Express meeting the characters from the anime. Of course, all of this is speculative since HoYoverse hasn’t revealed any details as to how it will occur.

Nevertheless, the prospect of the game’s collab with such a popular and rich anime series sounds extremely promising, even if it does make players worried given the company’s past attempts at in-game collabs. Hopefully, HoYoverse has learned its lesson with Genshin Impact, and the Honkai: Star Rail collab with Fate/stay night is a much more meaningful one.