(back to essays)

originally written 7 september 2025.

genshin impact is an exploration game, with a combat system that can be quite complex to learn in-detail, and a story about a traveler who has crash-landed in a world grounded in simple fantasy.

it is also a gacha game. and for just about as long as i've been playing genshin, i have also been wondering how much harm that has been doing to genshin as a work of art— as an aesthetic experience.

i've been playing genshin for four years and some change now. i think by this point just about every single other friend in my cohort of year-one (if not outright day-one) players has either quit, gone on hiatus, or just burnt out on the game, mostly within this past year (the natlan patch cycle, if we want to name names), and this has made me very sad. obviously. but truth be told, i understand them. bc yes, natlan was the most sauceless region so far for a huge variety of reasons that i should seriously just compile for publishing by this point, but i think the most important one is that genshin just hasn't felt like genshin in a long time now.

like— okay. genshin, from launch through fontaine, used to be quite particular about a player's intended first experience of an area. with genshin being an open-world game, i'm not sure how many of my experiences hold up for new players today, but let me just run a quick list of what i believe to be the intended experience upon entering each nation:

1. mondstadt: paimon's introduction via tutorial. it's hand-holdy as a result, but i think we all at least got the same experience there.
2. liyue: going through stone gate and seeing wangshu inn off in the distance.
3. inazuma: quest-locked, so ofc getting off at ritou when the time comes.
4. sumeru: that little tunnel in the chasm to gandharva ville. though granted, i think this one might have the hardest experience to control, since you could also wander in via lumberpick valley lol
5. fontaine: cross the sea via waverider from the desert.

fontaine was the first region where we were granted an already-active tp point upon release of a new area to make it easier for new-or-returning players to get there quickly, and for what it's worth, i think this was the right thing to do (as i'd been having conversations all through sumeru abt how hoyo needed to start providing qol to newer players who'd struggle to rush to certain boss lairs) and that the way they executed this was the right way to do it. by keeping us in the sumeru desert, we were still given a sense of awe and anticipation seeing fontaine off in the distance, and we were also allowed to approach and experience the new region at our own pace, giving us a sense of exploration. i personally disapprove of the way hoyo proceeded to give us new tp waypoints for like every new subregion release after that point, esp now that it feels like foreshadowing for

6. natlan: teleport into this new land and be wowed by the difference

which was such a huge disappointment, especially as someone who purposefully forgoes the provided tp points to trek my way into new regions to experience the transition, that crossing of the border, to a new land (and symbolically, the new era). the fact that there's practically nothing btwn the sumeru desert and natlan was indescribably disappointing, and when i reached the intended tp point and looked around, all i could think about was how this sight would have been a much better "wow" experience.

but would that moment of "wow" have been worth trading away that little piece of exploration we could have otherwise had if the devs hadn't been so lazy?

let me restate this: genshin impact is an exploration game. i'm pretty sure the vast majority of our permanent primos are stored in the exploration, not to mention that this shit was called fucking "breath of the waifu" at launch. genshin being an open-world game is part of its core fucking premise!

…so why are we compromising on any aspect of its exploration?

i get that newer players might have trouble making a mad dash all the way across the map to get materials for their shiny new ororon or whatever, esp since it takes like at least an hour of real life time to cross the entire map on foot as a capable player, nevermind a new one who might be scared of lv. 30 mobs, which is why i mentioned earlier that i think fontaine's introductory tp point was warranted and well-executed. that is a necessary quality-of-life that i'm glad hoyo gave us, and so at first glance, the natlan starter tp point appears to be a qol gift in that same vein.

but it's not. bc all it really does is give the devs an excuse to leave some part of the world bare and empty while they pander to the part of the playerbase who can't accept that exploration is a core part of the game they're player. they're saying, "here, look at this pretty scenery. wasn't that easy? isn't it so easy to experience pretty things?" when what makes so many of the sights in early genshin, like jueyun karst, so memorable is the hard work it took to reach them. like yeah, the view in natlan here is pretty, but i don't want to return to this tp point over and over again just to watch the clouds go by or admire the sky change colors. why would i when it's kind of worthless to me?

this sort of thing goes hand-in-hand with the treatment of the quickstart button and of major world quests this past year, too.

like, the quickstart button started i think around the irodori festival in 2.6 so that people who hadn't been able to get through all the prerequisite character quests could receive the limited-time rewards, too, and i think that was a good move bc the quest burdens were kind of already piling up for new players in the 2.x patches (a moment of silence for all the baby players who rolled ayaka on her debut and had to speedrun all the archon quests to unlock the perpetual mechanical array). my feelings towards the addition of the quickstart button for the natlan archon quests at the release of 5.0 are a lot more mixed, though.

bc on one hand, yes, new players who get pulled into the game based on newer content will inevitably have like a hundred or more hours of game to play through before they can finally encounter that thing which caught their eye, and that has got to be discouraging for some people. there is no part of me which can really say, "people should just suck it up and catch up as best they can" bc playing genshin is not like catching up on one piece, where its length is daunting but the story is still all there waiting for you forever.

but on the other hand, there's a part of me which mourns the loss of context these new players will have by just jumping straight from the end of liyue to natlan, as well as the muddling of the experience that will come from hopping between points in the story. for what it's worth, this is coming from someone who first read the percy jackson series in 4-2-1-5-3 order bc that's how the library availability came about, but as i've gotten older and developed a stronger sense of artistic vision, i've become more and more particular abt how the presentation of smth affects its existence in people's minds.

the first set of options presented to us informs our expectations of a thing moving forward, and while i don't think quickstarting natlan is thaaaaat big a deal in the long run, there's this other thing that happens the moment you step foot in the nation: the start of the little buddy questline, which immediately teleports you to some new domain area to exposition dump abt this little guy.

now. this isn't the first time genshin teleports the player somewhere to kickstart a major regional questline; i believe that award goes to the fish adeptus quest in chenyu vale (so during the fontaine patch cycle). but i can find it in myself to forgive that quest bc first of all, that fish is an adeptus, and she felt very apologetic about the whole thing to me, like, "ah… sorry… i will spit you back out but keep your eyes peeled for me…" whereas getting transported to the little buddy domain made me feel like i was getting pLUCKEd out of the land via one of those comically long fishing hooks and zipping me away.

it's something i've noticed for a while now, that whereas in areas like mond and esp. liyue, we as the players are mostly left to our own devices to figure out the story or puzzle around an area on our own (like dragonspine or that circle of pillars by the pyro regisvine), whereas in newer regions, we're often handed long world quests which discuss lore more explicitly. the way this is handled i think kind of varies from nation to nation— with inzuma, it felt like the major island quest would end up doing about 85% of the exploration for you, but i think the aranara quest in sumeru was handled really well (even if i'm still finding random aranara in my 100% exploration To This Day), and i looooved the way the narzissenkreuz quests all intertwined— and as someone who had more experienced players guide me through much of mond and liyue exploration, i do think that having these kinds of guiding quests make for good game design, essentially preying on natural human curiosity to lure us here and there and learn about the world.

which is why i find the way the game whisks us away to trigger certain major world quests to just be odd, bc it releases us from our sense of curiosity, and, by extension, our desire to properly explore. the best guess i could have for this change would be that the devs received a bunch of feedback from players complaining that finding and triggering certain world quests is too burdensome and difficult, and so they made newer long world quests straight-up impossible to miss.

and ofc, all this is not to mention how i feel abt genshin turning away from event quests having "prerequisites" towards "recommended quests" instead. bc to me, it's like, okay. well we already had a perfectly good quickstart button for people who couldn't get the prereqs done in time; all this seems to be doing to me is remove the button that says, "hi. this bit of story builds on other things that we've said before. you can skip ahead, but you might not understand everything." and, if i want to be uncharitable, it implies that we don't have to care about understanding what's happening before us, and so the story the writers told us about so far doesn't matter.

(this is why i'm so staunchly against the implementation of a "skip" button in genshin, which is a complaint i've seen pop up with greater and greater frequency as of late. it used to be that the only people i heard asking for a skip button were the likes of fucking tectone, so what changed?)

i get that these are changes made "to accommodate certain parts of the playerbase" (unspoken: who don't even care about the story or exploration as anything more than means to get primos), to "improve their quality of life."

but… remember how when you're playing the mondstadt archon quests, you are expected to just kind of futz around and do a bit of exploring, because the next part of the story unlocks at a certain ar level, and the only real way to reach that in a timely fashion is to open chests and explore the world? early on, the game intertwines its story with the world you are meant to be experiencing through the wonders of discovery and exploration, which at this point leads me to ask:

when the game lays the foundation of its identity in storytelling and exploration, why are we sanding away the parts of the game which shape those experiences?

you can call these "quality-of-life" additions all you want, but what aspect of the game-at-its-core is this enriching? and if it's not enriching the core gameplay experience, we need to take a moment to consider what "qualities" they are actually adding to the "life" within the game.

i don't know if i've mentioned this before here, but genshin is not my first gacha game (technically, that was bandori), nor is it the only one i play regularly. granted, that's probably not a huge surprise to my imagined audience of "people who read genshin impact fanfiction enough to get curious enough abt a genshin impact fanfiction author to check out their personal website as linked in their author's notes" bc there are other hoyo games (and wuwa) which have snarfled up parts of genshin's playerbase since their release, but the thing is… i don't play those other gacha games, the hoyos and the hoyo-likes: my other regular gacha, while i take breaks from time-to-time, is arknights.

mostly i say this bc it grants context to what i'm about to say, which will otherwise sound like a tangent:

a few months ago, i was chatting with nat, who was reminded of her beef with hoyoverse gacha hegemony as a day-one arknights player and sent me a video featuring a guy lamenting the state of the arknights: endfield beta test community as a result of it being full of hoyofolk. about a month after that conversation, a sequel video was released, which we also both watched, and i think youtuber toboruo's thesis, that many of these endfield beta testers want endfield to be something it fundamentally is not, to the point where some ask for the game's very identity to be stripped away in service of matching its perceived "sibling­rivals" of genshin, hsr, zzz, and wuwa, is relevant to our discussion here.

bc arknights is not an action game the way hoyoverse and hoyo-likes are; it's a strategy game, one which you can very much treat like a puzzle if you please. but the majority of endfield testers this guy saw viewed "3d anime rpg gacha" as a genre in itself, and believed that action-oriented combat is a necessarily defining part of that genre. as such, they framed their feedback and requests as "we want these qol upgrades for when we're doing xyz things."

but to implement those requests would redirect the game away from its roots in strategy, thereby compromising the thing which would meaningfully differentiate arknights: endfield from other gacha games. and it's baffling to look at, until you start to take a glance around the broader culture surrounding gacha and realize that there is this flavor of gacha player who will participate in certain— if not all— aspects of the game they're playing strictly for the material rewards it provides, not the joy of having played it. they want the game's provisions without the responsibility of actually playing it, typically bc they only care to gacha.

genshin launched a thousand genshin-likes. but the thing is, i don't think genshin was intended to launch all its copycats; they just happened to strike something that resonated w/the mainstream, and people piled in bc it was the only one of its kind at the time. now that there are games out there which can compete w/genshin, people are leaving for them, which i think is fine!

but i think the reemergence of one of the grosser parts of gacha culture, the need for some people to demand that each game "respect" their time by cutting out the parts they think are a drag against their hyper-optimization of The Grind™ when they can't even bother to respect any of their seventeen separate gacha games for what they want to be, is bleeding back into genshin as a result. now, i'm not saying that monopolies are good, but at least when genshin was the only one on the market, aside from being stingy as fuck, it had more power to let the game be what the devs wanted it to be.

now that there is a legitimate risk of losing players to competitors, genshin seems to want to change to fit the ideas people get from the genshin-likes, and i just don't think that's good for it. i think that genshin, in its early days, was a phenomenon, rather than a success (if you didn't watch it, toboruo touched on this in the sequel video, albeit while using psy and gangnam style's role in creating the modern kpop industry as an analogy), but the devs or the higher-ups or maybe even dawei himself didn't want to view it that way. from the perspective of a creative who wants to believe that their creation's popularity was success, i get why the genshin devs would want to continue appealing to a broader and broader audience to recapture what they used to have at the start.

but i don't think it justifies streamlining away the very core of your game.

streamline the chores, the repetitive menial tasks we have to do anyway as a part of the core gameplay loop, the way they began bundling together enemy drops of the same kind or gave us the "collect and dispatch all again" button w/the expeditions! give us those goddamn artifact loadouts, bitch!!

i'm sorry that some people don't like the idea of "prerequisite quests" to get to the parts of the game they're interested in (the gacha currency rewards).

i'm sorry that we can't just stay in the beginning of a story forever! i get that the middle where things start coming together and building on previous concepts (that you had to be paying attn to!!) is where shit gets tricky, but when it comes to conveying information to others (and yes, telling a story is a type of information transmittance) it's seriously for the better in the long run to draw a line in the sand and say, "you gotta finish these other things first." otherwise, we'll waste too much time retreading old ground and explaining it all again when we could be exploring these ideas more deeply instead.

and i mean, "how dare you tell me this is an open world where i can do anything i want in whatever order i wish, and then have the audacity to tell me i need to play the first installment of a character's quest to witness what happens next!" but fuck, man! when it comes to telling a story and experiencing a sense of permanent change and progression, that "fuck around and do whatever until it all comes together" becomes unviable after a certain scale. you don't feel the world changing if nothing builds on what happened before.

genshin impact is an exploration game, with a combat system that can be quite complex to learn in-detail, and a story about a traveler who has crash-landed in a world grounded in simple fantasy.

i know i only really talked abt the exploration as it relates to genshin's sense of identity in this essay, but that's more bc it's easiest to talk abt in the context of the game's shifting ideas of what "life" in genshin looks like as a player. maybe some other day, i'll talk abt how changes in the other aspects i mentioned have contributed to a sense of loss regarding "the genshin i and my friends knew and loved" for so long.

but for now, i just want to talk abt that second arknights endfield video i linked again. bc in it, toboruo said, "i don't want arknights endfield to be played by a bunch of people who don't like playing arknights endfield."

and watching genshin start to sand away some of the very bones of its self in the name of those very people's "qol", all i can think of is the same.

i don't want genshin impact to be played by a bunch of people who don't like playing genshin impact.

it's all i can do to hope that the devs stop courting them.

(back to essays)