Genshin Impact - An Addicting Experience

Genshin Impact has made an impact

I've been playing Genshin Impact ever since its launch back in Sep 2020. It has accompanied me through my college days and I've surprisingly grown attached to it in some way. It has been and still is, a fun game.

A solid open world game with extraordinary art style

Genshin Impact is an open world anime-style action rpg game with limited co-op and a gacha monetary system for Android, iOS, Ps4&5 and Windows PC. The player starts off choosing one of the two playable characters, and embark on a journey through the seven nations of Teyvat in search of their lost sibling and the truth of the world.

The main gameplay of Genshin Impact is presented through storytelling, action and open-world exploration. There are tons of main and side quests available and they usually assist in letting players get to know certain characters, the lore of Teyvat and progressing the main story. Genshin Impact features a huge open-world map with little loading screens (except for certain dungeons called "domains"). The map is divided based on the nations of Teyvat, with each one having distinct geography, music and puzzle mechanics. Exploration is often done by taking down mobs and opening chests. The developers Mihoyo offered various puzzle mechanics to spice things up a bit. I noticed a significant increase of stories being directly tied to some parts of the map in recent patches. It seems like Mihoyo is trying to change something, and that's a topic for later.

Action is often intertwined in quests and exploration in which its system is worth mentioning. The game takes a unique elemental reaction system which is rarely seen in older games (Divinity: Original Sins 1&2 are the only ones that came into mind). Genshin Impact makes use of its diverse environment and weather system to make this a really fun experience. The game has 7 elements as of now (2023) - Pyro (fire), Hydro, Cryo (ice), Electro, Geo, Dendro (grass), Anemo (wind). Every element can do reactions with other elements - Pyro meets Hydro creates vaporize reaction, Dendro meets Hydro spawns dendro cores which symbolizes plant growth. Most of the reactions are easy to grasp since it relates to real life science.

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The combat is further complemented by the addition of character switching and their respective builds. Players initially starts with four basic characters by completing the first chapter of the main quest. They can further increase their character inventory by either completing challenges in events or gambling in the gacha (wish) system. Each character has a normal and charged attack, one skill, one ultimate and two passives, and each of them belongs to one of the seven elements, meanings at least one of their skills will deal the corresponding elemental damage. There are a few factors that affect the playable character's strengths: their level, their weapon and corresponding levels, their artifacts and respective rarity, stats and levels (a form of gear slots), and their skill level (1-10).

Players can have a team of four characters and they can freely switch between them in combat in addition to their respective builds. This allows a lot more strategic thinking into team comps and how they can complement each other. We have team comps that focuses on a niche elemental reaction such as the Nilou bloom team, and some other teams that are more general. What's great about this aspect is that most characters don't have a specific role/rule on how they should be played. Depending on the character's passives and skills, players can build them in totally different ways while making them work. An example is Kazuha - most people play him as an "elemental reaction amplifier" allowing his utility to support other members of the team to do higher damage; while I, built a crit Kazuha whom relies on his direct damage. How Mihoyo allows for different playstyles in a single character enhances my own playing experience, which my take on characters is just to play whom I enjoy and stress less on "meta" playstyles.

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A lot of side content

The main game aside, Genshin Impact has proved to have great side systems to keep the game alive. They perfectly demonstrate the game's heavy focus on the casual side of things.

The Serenitea Pot system was added in patch 1.5 as a casual housing system with which players can freely decorate the exterior and interior of a given land. Players have to first obtain furnishing blueprints by buying them or opening chests in the open world. They then need to collect ingredients such as the corresponding wood, fabric and dye to commence the producing process. Players can only make up to five furnishings at the same time, with each one having 8-12 hours of "make" time. There is a specific item to speed up the process but there's a ten pieces daily limit so players can only speed up 10 furnishings every day.

Apart from the building aspect, the system encourages players to utilize it by introducing furnishing sets in which completing and placing the set with the corresponding character rewards primogems for gacha.

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The fishing system was added in patch 2.1. It's rather straight forward - pass the mini game for fish, exchange enough of them for rewards. The gameplay isn't something revolutionary: the mini-game players encounter while catching a fish is a version of balancing bar mini-game which I've seen in Black Desert Online. There isn't much motivation going for this gamemode unless players want a 4 star polearm or they want completion. The fish they caught could be put into the Serenitea Pot's fish tanks but that's about it.

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The Genius Invocation TCG system was added in patch 3.4. It is a casual card game based on characters and known elemental reaction combat in the main game. Players have three character cards as their main team and thirty utility cards to form a deck, and they need to get the opposing side's three cards to 0 health to win the game. Each character card has their own health, skills, ultimate and passive, just like in the main game. What's fundamentally different is that it is now turn-based. That includes a lot of summoning skills, such as Xiangling's Guoba which could auto-target enemies and shoot flames. It was turned into an auto attack at the end of the turn.

Just like other turn-based card games out there, there's a certain resource management aspect in this one as well. Players need to roll a total of 8 elemental dices at the start of the turn. The elements are the same as the main game - the seven elements plus an omnielement which could be used with any other elements. The result determines how many skills you can use and what characters to use them on. Eg. Hydro dices can only be used by hydro characters. There are utility cards that boosts your rng in getting favourable dices, or straight up give you additional dices. Managing when to use them is mportant to winning the game.

This game mode has much potential for diverse team comps as well. I've seen how OP a Kaeya self-healing team could be, and the horrors of a Diluc burst team. The characters work similar to the main game - Mona always work like a nuke support, Oceanid has multiple summons, etc.

PVP matchmaking is a part of this game mode. Players could go for public matchmaking or invite their friends for a duel. It feels surprisingly casual even with the competitive aspect as there is no leaderboard or chat whatsoever. Everything stays at the level of self-motivation - players queue in matchmaking because they genuinely want to duel with others, not due to some other stress/motivation.

My own observations and experience

Despite the game's patch time and my own down time, I could say I'm pretty much a veteran player and I've experienced most aspects the game has to offer. The game has its fair share of goods and bad and sometimes the bad could lead to a controversy in the community. It's still a great game and the developers have put into much effort keeping it healthy and running.

The wow factors

• Excellent graphics and artwork
  
  The first thing that attracted me to the game is the stunning visuals. Genshin Impact takes the Japanese anime art style and blends it perfectly with 3D modelling, achieving an incredible art style. The landscape design of each nation reflects the corresponding element and its color - Liyue with geo element is presented with stone forests and mines that references real life Chinese scenery, Sumeru with dendro element has lush forests with diverse flora and fauna. It is fascinating how well-designed every corner of the map is. I was surprised that the same place could look quite different on different viewing angle.
  
  The artwork is also of extremely high quality. Illustrations for events, cutscenes and even namecards are detail-oriented and pleasant-looking. Their design team has done a great job creating assets unique to each nation with reference to different cultures. We can see Liyue with its unique clouds and 回 pattern, and Inazuma with its signature waves pattern.

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The pain points

Despite being great and nailing most of the gameplay, Genshin Impact has its pain points that could be improved further down the road. These are my personal thoughts on what they could have experimented on/solved:

General QoL issues

• Map pins
  
  One thing I always messed up when I was new to the game was clicking the world map itself, which automatically pins. I instinctively thought clicking the pin again undos it, but nothing was changed, until I saw the cross at the top right. That was a major pain point to me. I used the map intensively and found it annoying having to click in and out since I was supposed to drag. The fact that we have to click "confirm回" to complete the pin just makes it weird.
  
  In order to pin something, we have to 1) open the map 2) click on the location 3) select the icon 4) confirm 5) exit the map
  with the occasional chance of misclicking.
  
  Despite the argument that the design might suit veteran players more by speeding up the pinning process, I would definitely prefer a separate button where we have to click to enter pin mode. It would be nice to be able to save our last used pins and use them again instead of picking the icons all over. It might be good to take a step further and include a shortcut just like the gadgets but it appears smaller in the HUD. It pins the location the player is standing when the button is pressed.

• Inventory clunkiness
  
  The inventory design was effective back then when there weren't so many gadgets and quest items. With each patch adding more quests and with Mihoyo's increasing tendency to add gadgets in events and quests, the inventory now is looking rather messy.
  
  The gadgets inventory for example, has items that players regularly use - the teapot, portable waypoints, TCG deck, etc. While some others aren't as frequently used such as the kamera, instruments, Windblume festival balloon and so on. Not to mention exploration items which will be forgotten after the player has completed exploration of specific areas. The lack of filters further adds to the pain to go over all of them to find something players want.
  
  My suggestion is to categorize the different gadgets and merge some functions to existing systems.
  
  Take the kamera and the special kamera as an example. They are meant to give an alternate way to taking screenshots. The special kamera works the same way only with an additional filter. These two could be combined together so that players could select the special kamera within the kamera gadget (adding a scroll select bar), instead of going to inventory and changing it. This solves the problem of having to add one more kamera for certain events. It can just be added as another option in the kamera gadget view.
  
  Categories should work like how quests are classified - you have multiple collapsible sections on different types of gadgets: utilities (teapot, parametric transformer, portable waypoints, etc.), pets, instruments, exploration-related, etc. It would be evvn better if players can name their own categories.
  
  Another problematic tab is the quest items. The reason to its messiness is because everything quest/exploration-related are put there. We have items we get as a souvenir in main quest, story quests, books we collected in the open world, event items, items to complete puzzles... I didn't even bet an eye to this mess, because it's just too much to process.
  
  The Aranyaka log is a good start to a better organization. It would be better if we have books like the Aranyaka for main quests, or even a book on every travel adventure we did in a single area. The book could have multiple entries and each one highlights the items obtained (the item is stored in the book). That solves the problem of having multiple items of the same quest sitting in the inventory. The book, just like Aranyaka, could be a brief summary of what the traveler did and his/her thoughts. That could give more insight into the traveler's own lore.
  
  There are now more than 30 books exclusive in the quest item page which is a problem. The reason they are put there might be because they are important to the lore of Teyvat. A better way to do this is to add them to the archive once the player has opened them. Visual distinctions could be made to these materials from the normal ones.

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• Artifact presets
  
  One big part of the endgame for Genshin Impact is to progress your individual characters by "grinding" artifacts with desirable main- and sub-stats. With some character having multiple playstyles, they might need more than one set of artifacts for different scenarios. Such as EM Kazuha and Crit Kazuha, healer Kokomi and DPS Kokomi.
  
  We currently do not have an advanced system in terms of categorizing and putting artifacts into player-defined sets. This makes having to switch between sets utterly painful, as players have to scroll down hundreds of similar-looking icons with no way to differentiate them until they click and view the stats. I would recommend adding a separate tab from the artifact equiping menu in the character details screen. When accessing it in the character details, it should show the sets players previously have set for that character, such as both the EM and Crit sets for Kazuha, and they can have the option to add or delete sets. Players could also navigate and see sets available for other characters. This could be done through a sorting mechanic, whereas players are presented with a list of other sets and they can sort according to characters. I'm imagining something along the character archive after it was sorted. Players could further save the sort method to default so this layout doesn't reset.

Teapot game design‍

As much as how I like the Serenitea Pot system, I couldn't help but complain every time I was about to decorate mine. I think the current system does not fulfill its job of being a fun base-building minigame, and it doesn't fully address the needs of casual players who are interested in this system. It instead focuses on "wasting" players time by adding hurdles such as wood collecting, furniture creation limit, load limit, trust rank etc.

It is such a shame to see how Mihoyo decided to force the RPG levelling experience into this system with no other effort made to attract or retain players who like free-form building games. Most building games do combine with other genres such as resource management, moral choices, strategic planning, etc. There are games that focus mostly on the casual building aspect and these games ultimately rely on player's self-motivation - they set their own goals and they get a sense of achievement by completing those self-defined goals. There could be tutorials where players are given tasks to complete, but it still boils down to their own creativity at the end.

The Serenitea Pot faces the same situation. Its main activity is to create and place furnishings. There aren't any intense resource management or external competitive pressure from PvE or PvP. The system rewards players for building by the trust rank reward and the primogem rewards of placing furnishing sets but the endgame is still freeform building. Most of my friends expressed annoyance towards the levelling system, saying they only had to do it for the rewards. Most of them didn't return after completing the challenges. I think the amount of time spent to properly get started is demotivating to people who are not true lovers of building games. They lose patience and interest easily and hence the low population of dedicated teapot players in the game.

The main issue I see here is that Mihoyo is not addressing the needs of people who truly love this type of casual building experience. The RPG-like levelling and unlocking content structure could only work when players think the hassle is ultimately worth it. Mihoyo didn't try to establish an ecosystem which is immersive enough. PvE content is narrowly explored - characters in the teapot stand still awkwardly. Their dialogues do not change. They don't interact with the environment and furnishings. The current state of the characters does not make them a living-breathing person. That is probably why the furnishing set rewards feel so forced, because characters only stand still repeating dialogues doesn't look natural.

Making the environment and interactions dynamic would better address the concern. Make NPCs sit, eat, browse, read, etc. Make random events where it triggers a scenario when certain furnishings are placed - Ayaka requesting to eat ramen with players, Sayu wants to nap in a bush, etc. Make the furnishing sets meaningful by letting players add more decorations aside from the basic layout based on the character's preferences. Offer more layouts with landscape to let players experiment with floating platforms and other interesting items. Allow players to invite other NPC characters such as the adepti cast to the teapot.

The aforementioned can only be realized when the load limit is further optimized. I always feel frustrated because I easily hit the cap when I was only getting started. The fact that the load is not introduced as resource management makes building tedious. Players have no idea how to estimate and manage their project scale until they watch some YouTube tutorial which is against the design of this game mode. The ideal is to remove the limit which might prove difficult in the technical aspect. It remains a huge hurdle that Mihoyo has to solve.

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The other prerequisite to improving NPC interactions is adding more variety of furnishings and higher degree of customization. The freedom of the building spirit comes from the variety of options. Serenitea Pot is similar to ACNH in this sense - both doesn't have a crazy high amount of freedom compared to the Sims or Minecraft where players can create almost anything. Both have pre-designed layouts and objects that cannot be manipulated. What ACNH did was to include important furnishings that are needed to represent a style, which the teapot system lacks in. I've seen a lot of good teapot designs having to manipulate bugs such as clipping, floating, sinking to make new furnishings. It speaks for itself. The first thing Mihoyo could try is to make furnishing sets separable. Sets such as the Liyue table and chairs combo could be separated to allow more freedom. Furnishing should come with customization options such as carpet color select, lighting color, sofa decor presets, wall texture select, and more.

This could open up a lot of possibilities such as a renovation game mode in which players could visit adepti's teapots and help them clean, fix, and ultimately create their new homes.

Another need of pure-casual building game players is a certain amount of light socializing. They want to visit friend's or even random people's teapot and do some fun activities together. I personally think this aligns well with Genshin Impact's direction. Unfortunately, the system is underdeveloped resulting in a rather clunky experience. Players can only request entrance into their friend's teapot, which sucks since they can only have a max of 60 friends. There is no other way to get to know other teapot players in game. There is a layout replication function but there is no way to discover designs unless players search on social media. The teapot communities are also not centralized - some are on HoyoLab, some on YouTube, Twitter, other CN platforms, etc. Asia server suffers the most as people share in their own language.

I would suggest Mihoyo developing a central social hub in the Serenitea Pot. First by adding a tab in the player profile in which they can show off their teapot layout - collapsible rows/columns on realm layouts, each containing screenshots of different sections with player-defined descriptions. Players can request teapot visit directly through the page. Replica ID is shown as well, and when the button is pushed. The system saves the replica ID and teleports players to their teapot directly. The challanges screen in the teapot can be changed to a social hub screen with the homepage being a list of random people with their teapot designs. The second tab could be players friend list, and the third can be the challenges.

Activities that players can do in the teapot could tie to the interaction mentioned above. Mihoyo can enhance the role-playing experience by adding a bunch of mini-games. The current ones are a good start. I suggest having more that are directly tied to existing furnishing instead of making a new one, such as having an advanced cooking challenge on food carts, fruit-catching mini game for fruit booths, balancing mini-game on freights, guess-the-genshin-ost game on the phonograph, fish-catching challenges, and so on. Other activities could be to have a comment board for other players to leave a warm message and display them through fireworks.

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Replayability issue

What I've noticed with the open world and co-op mode in Genshin Impact is that there is little purpose for replayability. After a player has 100% the exploration of a given area, there is a high chance they won't step foot on it except for future events. This has made certain parts of the map such as the chasm and Enkanomiya a deserted no man's land after it was released. The patch 2.5 Three Realms Gateway Offering event was Mihoyo's attempt at giving value to an old map. It was successful, but only within the event time. No one ever touched Enkanomiya after that. This is a challenge that Mihoyo has to face sooner or later since these no man's land take up player's disk space - as of patch 3.5, the game is almost 70GB on PC. This number is expected to increase significantly with newer regions and mechanics. That is a waste when most of the map is one-time only.

Now is a good time to discuss about player's motivations. In my opinion, most players explore the map either for completion or for primogems. The community also seems to accept that some events take place in the open world - such as the parkour event taking place in major cities. A significant portion of the player base play the game for its characters and combat. We could combine completion, player-generated content, characters and combat to create mini-events in the open world that are lore accurate and has impact to individual player's worlds.

We could have open-world events involving playable characters while offering difficulty. Opposing factions such as the hilichurls and the abyss, though always getting beaten by the playable character, are posing actual threats to cities lore-wise. We could have events such as Mondstadt under attack - the Knights of Favonius could be planning for a counter-attack and needs the player's help with operations. Players were able to fight alongside the other characters and speak with them after the battle. The enemies should be more difficult than player's current world level so to give a scale of realism (one shotting mobs aren't fun...) Interactions such as helping to reinforce the city walls, and evacuating villagers could be added as well.

Other character-related events could be solving problems of the adventurer's guild with members such as Noelle by entering randomly-generated domains, gliding challenges by Amber, Lisa's Q&A Genshin lore quiz, Jean's "solving everyone's problems" management game, helping Klee escape confinement stealth game, helping Ningguang strike a deal with merchants, Baizhu and Qiqi's prescription-packing game, so on... Replayability is achieved by randomising the content, such as having multiple gliding tracks, multiple knight's patrol route and road blocks, etc.

By completing these events, the book mentioned above in the inventory organization section would be updated. It would have a journal-like layout recording the experiences the players have with playable characters.

Events which took place in the open world previously could be added as a permanent gameplay to encourage co-op - such as the Windblume balloon shooting challenge, the Diluc's bartending minigame, the parkour challenge, etc. Players could customize some such as expanding the area for parkour, setting a tight time limit, adding items that buffs/debuffs, adding teleporting functions, and so on.

Events lacks difficulty

Genshin Impact is mainly targeted at casual players which attracted a lot of first-time or less-experienced gamers. Its events are always focused on being accessible and easy to complete for all. While this is a good approach to the player base, there are always constant complaints that some parts of the puzzle/event are too hard/easy. This partially has to do with the huge demographics of players - with some lacking gaming experience and game sense, some with more experience but only play one genre of games, and some with even more experience on all games. I personally prefer events and challenges to have harsher requirements.

One thing preventing Mihoyo to implement harder challenges is the consideration of flexibility. Some parts of the community complained about open world puzzles being too easy and straight forward. Mihoyo then tried to implement harder puzzles in Inazuma and 2.8 GAA and was met with opposition. The problem was that they were necessary prerequisites to completing exploration/quests hence getting primogems.

My suggestion is to separate difficult events with rewards that are appealing such as primogems and crowns. A nice first step was Hidden Strife event which has a super hard level. We can make it so that players on each challenge level, can choose between two options - the easier or the harder. The rewards given will still be the same. If the player couldn't handle the harder level, they can always switch back and complete the easy one.

We can also motivate players to complete hard challenges by doing co-op by offering them exclusive rewards that don't affect account progression such as namecards and furnishings.

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To Sum it Up

Genshin Impact is a great casual game with exceptional graphics and music. The story could be questionable sometimes, but improvement is observed in the recent patches. It has a potential of being one of the best Games as a service given that Mihoyo continues to uphold quality and addresses voices in the community.