Wuthering Waves: Should you play as male or female Rover?

Like many RPGs of its type, Wuthering Waves doesn't let you customise your main protagonist very much, but does offer you a choice as to their gender. When you start playing Wuthering Waves, you're asked to pick between male and female variants on the main player character, known as Rover.

Most games like WuWa don't let you change your character's gender once you've made your decision, so it's safest to assume that whichever you pick is permanent unless you want to go to the trouble of re-starting the game on another server. So, at the very least, it's important to be happy with your decision.

Should you play as male or female Rover in Wuthering Waves?

The good news is that the differences between the male and female variants on Rover in Wuthering Waves are purely cosmetic, meaning that you don't need to agonise too much over your choice: just go with whoever you like the look of best!

Unlike, say, Genshin Impact — which grants extremely minor speed differences to its male and female protagonists, as well as giving whichever one you don't pick a different role in the story — Wuthering Waves plays out identically regardless of the gender of your MC. Same story, same combat, same relationships with characters; literally the only variations are in the details of some animations and what the character looks like overall.

A lot of people have a preference for which gender they like to play as in games when given the option, which may or may not align with their real-world gender identity. Other factors might include which voice performance you prefer — in the English dub, female Rover is voiced by Jane Jackson of Arknights fame; while male Rover is Chase Brown, also of Arknights, although probably best known now for voicing Romeo in Lies of P — and how you feel about the infamous Chainmail Bikini trope in video games (for better or worse, WuWa falls hard into the "guys in street clothes, girls in lingerie" subcategory of RPGs).

There doesn't seem to be a canonical choice of Rover either per Kuro Games, since marketing for Wuthering Waves has been fairly evenly split between using the male and female protagonists. Which really goes to underscore the point that it simply doesn't matter all that much either way: so go with whoever you like best, for whatever reason.

Of course, Rover is only your starting character in Wuthering Waves; for the most part, you'll likely want to play with other party members you roll for along the way. For more on how that works, take a look at our in-depth explainer on Wuthering Waves' gacha and microtransactions.