Genshin Impact - Impressions by Alrik Fassbauer

Genshin Impact features many game mechanics - only the most important ones are mentioned in this article.

Some options like world building are only available later in the game.
Alrik has not touched the Spiral Abyss yet - an end game dungeon that resets all two weeks.

One of the greatest fun factors for me are the diverse riddles in the game while exploring - almost like an adventure game.
 
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Thanks, Alrik, for the article. I learned enough about the game to reinforce what I already suspected, and that is that Genshin Impact is probably not a game for me. However, I knew very little about the game before reading your article and now have a much better idea how it plays.
 
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Genshin Impact features many game mechanics
I can only stress that. It's quite a bit overwhelming at the beginning.

I even dare to say that this is rather a game for lateral thinkers.



The only real problem I personally see is that there is no explanation for the abbreviations in the character sheet. The German-language ones were not intuitive for me (maybe they are for other people).
 
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[...]
The only real problem I personally see is that there is no explanation for the abbreviations in the character sheet. The German-language ones were not intuitive for me (maybe they are for other people).
The German abbreviations:

LP = max hp = LebensPunkte
KT = crit rate = Kritischer Trefferrate
KSCH = crit dmg = Kritischer SCHaden
VTD = def = VerTeiDigung
WDS = res = WiDerStand
 
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Thank you.
 
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If you're into exploration, then this game has definitively a "only 5 more minutes ... oops, I'm playing it for 2 hours now ???" vibe to it.
There is always something more that catches your interest / curiosity ...
 
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I played this when it first came out and felt it had interesting mechanics but the world didn't really matter....has that gotten better? I have installed it on my PS5 but haven't tried again.
 
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The world has become much bigger and the world quests have become more diverse since release.
 
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Just wanted to add this. ^^

Genshin Impact cost of Development was Expensive - PCGamesn
Genshin Impact cost of development is (almost) the most Genshin Impact had an initial budget of around $100 million USD, which already put it on a list of the most expensive games ever made. Constantly creating new content and making sure that everything runs as smoothly as possible isn’t cheap, especially when new version updates arrive nearly every six weeks. The president of HoYoverse, Cai Haoyu, stated in a 2021 presentation that Genshin Impact costs $200 million USD annually for its development as a live-service game, twice the initial budget needed to bring it to life. ever
Very expensive yes but they made back that money easily.:nod:
 
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It really looks that expensive. It's very impressive how much detail they had put into everything. Plus the online mini-games they release for that, too.

With the new area of forests (and desert), they also introduce now environmental awareness.
 
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I have noticed ( I'm late, I know ;) ) that it is possible to play this game entirely without spending a single coin of real money. As long as you restrict yourself to a core of a certain number of party members - or 2 cores, that's great, imho, too.

The more party members you "win" through the "gacha", the more levelling ressources are needed - which are a) rare or/and b) not easy to farm. Especially the "written knowledge" items are not available in great numbers. Unlike raw materials, like, for example, ore to level weapons.

The more expensive this game looks, the more I often wonder how they get their money from ? As it is - like with some MMOs - entirely possible to play the game without any real money spent.

The "gacha" is, I think an important point of getting money for the company, I think, as it appears to me to be a bit like a "collectible cards game".

My guess is, that people who spend real money are a) those who want/pull a certain figure/character from the "gacha", and those who want to maintain a big "army" of party members.

There aren't even many cosmetic items like in other games. As far as I can see, the number of cosmetic items is even astonishingly rare - and some can even be achieved through in-game activities. Without spending any real money.




The gigantic mountain "Dragonspine" has a mechanic I haven't seen in any game before. The figure/character you play can literally freeze to death. Literally.
The environment has a bar, which shows the progress of the "freeze" or "cold" on the figure/character. Once it is full, the person rapidly loses health. And then dies of freezing.

I like that mechanic. It vaguely reminds me of the mechanic of illnesses in the old TDE "Realms Of Arcania" games. The party could die from that as well.

In Genshin Impact, you see always only 1 gigure on the screen, and this is the one freezing. The other party members don't, as long as they are not actively played. So, to some degree, a different healer character could heal the main character. Or, you could run to the next best source of warmth with a different character.

On the Dragonspine, you are greatly hindered by the fact that sources of warmth (and of other energies like with teleporters) are sparse, and must often be lit by a fire ("pyro") character in the first place.

This is especially dangerous against powerful enemies - and even more dangerous idf these powerful enemies can put out the fire ! Like with frost enemies using an attack againt the own character figure, and this attack also snuffs out the flame of a torch. THEN the Freeze begins !

This can be circumvented for a very short time by using scarlet coloured crystals, which look like blood. They stop The Freeze for a short while.
Plus, only with them, you can destroy harder ice blocks.

This mechanic has found a similar implementation in the jungle area of Sumeru with The Decay. Plants become corrupted, the environment as well, and the sources of that Decay mustg be destroyed. When staying too long in this area of decay, the own character figure decays as well, until death.
There is a certain quest line explaining that more.
 
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They are doing a huge marketing thing now ... They plan to launch a huge, inflatable Paimon near the River Thames / London on October 2-4 ... That's something - if it is true - one doesn't see often ... And it is also a sign that they have earned quite a lot of money from the game, and plan - through attraction of more people - to earn even more ...

The "subtext", so to say, of this is, that a colourful game like this is something people apparingly want, not something grimdark.
And, as I suspect, that this game has also opened up the RPG genre for female players a lot. Which is a generally very underrepresented group of players, and I suspect that female players don't like to play RPGs so much as long as they are "grimdark". Genshin Impact, by the way, has lots of stories - main stories and NPC stories - which are very emotionally driven, or, in other words, show the emotional state of NPCs (I#ve had this in a recent NPC story again), rather that mere fighting and combat in most "western" "grimdark" games.

I suspect that a lot of this game's success comes from developing it for a player base which "western" developers didn't develop for so far. A bit like the opposite side of "Dark Souls".
 
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As far as I understood it, there is a CCG coming.
In-game this is will be published soon, out-game, it apparingly is in development.
 
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