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originally commented 3 june 2025.

ANYWAY the quest binding idea was actually to take most of the quests as archived verbatim on the wiki, arrange them into an order that makes logical sense as a linear progression, and then bind them as volumes. it would've mixed up archon, character, event, and world quests (if they were lore-relevant enough), so i made a spreadsheet listing out all the quests on the wiki with columns for information like minimum AR, release patch, prerequisite quests, start/end locations, characters involved (and then another tab to organize world quests into categories of "game mechanic", "item", "major lore", "minor lore", and "npc favor" so that i could better know which ones were worth including in a "main timeline" of sorts).

i kind of overcomplicated it for myself, since the i tend to view event quests as both connected to and floating separately around permanent quests. "connected to" in the sense that yeah some of them are obviously prerequisites or sequels to permanent quest stuff (like character quests), but also floating around in the sense that there's just some permanent quest content that quite clearly kind of floats around in time, without any direct markers or connections to other permanent quests.

like, the archon quests obviously form the backbone of the timeline, that much is clear. but then in the first year of the game, we still had the devs giving us character quests as prerequisites for continuing the AQ line, which in a sense gives them a definitive placement in the timeline, like amberlisakaeya. but there are other "filler" characters, like eula, who were released with a quest that was its own thing and didn't build into anything else for a long time and could therefore plausibly happen whenever. i know that flexibility exists bc genshin is a video game, and part of video game storytelling is having the flexibility to make sense even when events are executed in different orders due to the nature of player agency, but it can make placing limited events on a timeline kind of Weird, at least to me in how i've been overcomplicating things.

like, if you try to take into consideration a sort of like… logistical sense for the traveler's journey, you can sometimes encounter little rough spots. for example, teleport points are never directly acknowledged in quest dialogue or transcripts, so you can kind of just assume they're strictly a gameplay feature when trying to adapt the story for a non-video game context. therefore, it makes most sense to assume that the traveler generally doesn't jump back and forth long distances if they can help it, in order to optimize their time and energy on their search for their sibling. therefore, quests should be at least kind of aggregated together based on location, and if possible, quests which start off in one nation and end in another should be prioritized as transitions btwn said nations.

see: mona quest, which starts in liyue and ends in mond, pretty much following the trail from the harbor down to mond city. it's also tied to the extremely lore-relevant limited 1.1 event unreconciled stars and requires players to be AR38 to play, providing an implicit point in the timeline relative to the aqs, as those were more clearly progress locked behind ar levels at the time. i don't think they lowered the ar requirements for mona quest during 1.1, so i don't think it was a hard prereq to unreconciled stars, but like, it obviously makes the most sense to place it directly after her quest, as it takes you from liyue (which had its third aq unlocked at ar35, so implicitly finishing before mona quest) to mond, where unreconciled stars (featuring mona and fischl!) begins and ends.

but then weirdly enough, venti quest has a minimum ar level of 36, implying it takes place after you finish up your business in liyue and come back to visit mond (which makes sense to me bc it really does sound like venti is hurrying you off to liyue at the end of mond) now that you're kind of just waiting around for an opportunity to get to inazuma. the first dain quests are also unlocked at ar36 and are mostly mondstadt based. are we, like, popping back into mond to hang out for a while before briefly stepping foot in the harbor to pick up mona (a stranger) and escort her back to mond…?

and we need to be back in the harbor to get on the alcor to get to inazuma eventually, so if we're going to be in mond, we better be making the most of it bc it's a long trip back to the harbor, and also doesn't it make more sense if unreconciled stars happens before we meet dain so that we have "the sky is a lie?" to give dain's beef w/celestia a bit more credence?

we could arguably solve this issue of logistics by just going "well they have tp points" but if tp points Are A Diegetic Thing, why is mona walking to mondstadt? like i suppose regular people don't have access to its powers (and it says so in the tp point lore that the people of teyvat don't really know what they're for anymore i think) but you'd think that someone would comment on the way the traveler seems to always be popping up out of nowhere at some point then.

like, i obviously do also take release patch order into consideration here as well, since i think there is an inevitable sense of the game timeline happening in parallel to real time, but we also have quests like paralogism, which seem to take place before fontaine aq by nature of not having it as a prereq, and therefore taking place in kind of a backpoint on the timeline. but also, the simulanka it references was the summer after fontaine and recommended you finish fontaine for the best experience (probably bc it has navia as a major character), which is kind of?!? What Is The Truth, hoyo…

one of my friends says to just consider the timeline whatever the release order is as it happens in real time, which is definitely an occam's razor to my nonsense, and makes a lot of sense for us as long-term players since the 1.X patches. but i can't help but want to compensate for the fact that it's a live service game which has to design its story around the fact that some players will not play the game in release order. to do that while joining the game now would require looking up external context, but i want to judge the game's story as it stands alone, death-of-the-author style: can this narrative cohere by simply following the guided intuition provided by its mechanics (i.e. the AR system + existing prereqs)? if limited events were reintroduced as permanent content, how might their prereqs be altered in such a way to fit seamlessly into the current permanent timeline without affecting their own story?

idk maybe i'm just spoiled by coming into genshin as an anime/manga fan: i've never had to deal with canon complications like "important shit just isn't part of the out-of-box experience for everyone" before the way, like, comic book fans or smth might have to. what if i'm a some weird child eight hundred years into the future, long after gacha games and the live service model have been outlawed or gone out of style and therefore doesn't have the same intuitive context as we do, trying to piece together what the story is? chatlogs, where most people tend to get the context of "oh, you can go here to watch/read old events since they're inaccessible to you now" are ephemeral and unlikely to survive a printed copy of the story. (my friend also said i could add a note at the start of the volumes with that context, but that feels like it would be in tension with my desire to have genshin as a story which can be experienced without the Need for that immediate snip of context)

also, tbh, i just like having a coherent linear timeline that i can keep with me across all my fics. and i think that's kind of what this boils down to LOL: the fact that my headcanons for how teyvat should be portrayed and worldbuilt aren't necessarily compatible with how teyvat is experienced as a video game story and narrative.

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