Before you get out your pitchforks, let me say that I enjoy playing Genshin Impact. The game is beautiful to look at and a lot of love and care has clearly been put into all the characters. And to be honest, I am something of a sucker for waifu gacha collectors. However, the more I play Genshin, the more I realise that the game’s design is fundamentally broken, suffering from an extreme identity crisis where it can’t figure out what it wants to be. The game is simultaneously trying to be an open-world adventure game, a mobile style gacha waifu collector and an MMORPG. This lack of clarity of what the game wants to be has kneecapped the game’s enjoyability, especially in the late game after around AR50. It is increasingly clear that Mihoyo needs to make substantial changes to their game if they want to keep players in the long term but their design choices have backed themselves against a wall where they do not have the ability to do so.
I started playing Genshin Impact in February of this year after being initially hesitant to pick it up because of the game’s poor Gacha rates. For context, I’m someone who primarily played Azur Lane, so I have gotten used to getting every single limited banner character with relative ease without paying. But after a bit of nudging from my friends, I finally decided to pick the game up and try it. My first 30ish hours of the game were fantastic. Genshin is really at its best when you’re exploring the world and progressing through the story. It felt like there was something new to explore, some new secret to find hidden around every corner of the map. While there is some gating of the story based on your adventure rank, there is enough to explore in the beginning that it doesn’t feel like that much of a barrier. The beginning of Genshin really feels Breath of Wild for weebs, which is something that I can get behind.
But at a certain point, the game starts to slow down. You start to run out of main story quests to do. There are some character side stories to do and the occasional event every once in a while, but once you hit AR45 you’re greeted with the primary endgame activity: running artifact domains over and over again to try and find the right artifacts for your characters. This is the point where the game transitions from being a story driven open-world adventure game into being more of a traditional MMO. By the time your AR ticks up to AR50 you have basically exhausted everything there is to do in the world. Aside from events, your only real activity is farming for artifacts and materials for leveling up characters. However, because you have to get all sorts of materials with the limited Resin system like talent level up books, world boss drops, ascension materials, EXP books, etc you still have things to do even if the primary exploration and story part of the game is over. Once you reach a point where you have all the characters you want built to your satisfaction, there is literally nothing to do anymore. You login everyday to do your daily commissions and burn some resin and then you log out after 30 minutes tops.
This is the crux of the problem with Genshin Impact, the endgame is incredibly boring. I’ve only been playing this game since February and I have already exhausted all of the game’s exploration and story elements. I still have characters to build, my team is far from optimised, but I find myself increasingly disillusioned with the game. What’s the point of doing a bunch of repetitive domains just to get some HP artifacts. The game’s primary endgame challenge is the Spiral Abyss, which itself isn’t even that hard. Unless you’re the type of person who really wants to min-max all of your character builds for fun, once you build a team that is capable of consistently 3 staring floor 12, there is genuinely nothing else to do besides log in, do your commissions, spend your resin and log out, all taking less than 30 minutes generously.
This is not a new complaint, people have been complaining about Genshin’s end game dearth of content since the beginning. I have friends who started playing at launch who have been chugging along at the daily AR55 grind for months. Mihoyo clearly must be aware that this problem exists for their endgame players, a group who inevitably gets larger and larger with every passing day. You can find no shortage of people on Reddit, or Youtube or other online forums giving their solutions for how to make end game more interesting and enjoyable. But yet, Mihoyo seems to be content to just create totally random event minigames like what they did during the Windbloom Festival or the Lantern Festival with the occasional world boss thrown in rather than trying to seriously retool the game’s end game to content in order to make it more challenging and interesting. However, this is where you get into the crux of the problem with Genshin Design. It’s attempts to be equal parts action combat, open world adventure game, MMO style loot grinder and anime gacha character collector all come into conflict and prevent the creation of a game that excels in any of these categories. This can be seen most vividly in the game’s boring endgame, where I would argue that the problem is not that Mihoyo doesn’t want to create challenging end game content, but the monetization system and game design choices they’ve made actively prevent them from creating substantively difficult and challenging end game content.
So what do I mean by that? Central to the problem here is the extreme degree of randomness that is baked into almost every level of this game. I don’t just mean the Gacha system, which itself I find rather offensive. In what universe is it acceptable for it to potentially cost over $400 dollars to roll an event five star? Rather it’s the combination of this and the other random BS that goes into building a character, which is really the primary content available to you after the main story. Not only do you have to randomly roll the character and weapons off the gacha, building out your characters also comes with a host of other completely unnecessary randomness built in. To level up their talents past level 6 you need to collect materials that drop randomly from bosses you can only fight once per week. If you aren’t paying for weapons off the battle pass, gacha or starglitter shop, your best option is to forge weapons at the blacksmith which also requires random drops of prototype blueprints that also only drop from the weekly bosses at an absolutely abysmal rate. But then you have the artifact system, which is by and away one of the worst equipment systems I have ever seen in any game.
In order to get artifacts, you need to farm various “domains” which are basically rooms where you fight a couple of random monsters. Each domain has two primary sets of artifacts that it drops, and you’re only guaranteed to get two five star artifacts per run. So right off the bat, you only have a 50% chance to get the specific artifact set that you want. However, artifacts are divided into five different types: Flowers, Plumes, Goblets, Sands and Circlets. Each artifact also comes with its own set of main stats and substats. The Flowers and Plumes each are guaranteed to have HP and Attack as their main stats. Sands have one of five randomly generated stat categories. Circlets have one of seven. But where this gets really egregious is with Goblets, which not only can have one of the primary stats like HP%, ATK% or DEF% they also can have a % increase for each type of elemental damage, including physical. This means that there are 11 different possible main stats for your goblets. This wouldn’t be so bad, it wasn’t also for the second part of artifacts, the sub stats. Each 5 star artifact can randomly have either 3 or 4 substats on it when you acquire it. Basically the most important stats to roll on your artifacts are Crit damage and Crit percentage as well as Energy Recharge on some support characters. Not only is it random what substats you get on your artifacts, every time you level up an artifact by 4 levels, it randomly increases one of its substats. This means that you can roll a very good artifact, with both crit damage and crit percentage on it, and it have completely ruined only after you’ve invested thousands of Mora and Artifact EXP into because you waste all of level up rolls on flat defense or something. In conclusion, in order to get good artifacts, you need to first, randomly roll the correct artifact set out of two possible. Then you need to hope you get the right type of artifact, with the right main stats and preferably four substat rolls with two of them being crit damage and crit percentage. Even then, you still need to pray to the archons that the right substats get boosted as you level up your artifact. In practice, what this means is that there is an abysmally low, powerball lottery-esque percentage chance of getting good artifacts for your characters, not to mention that you need to get 5 artifacts for 8 different characters to complete the spiral abyss.
In other MMOs, randomly rolling for loot as a part of completing raids or dungeons is often a primary aspect of the game. But in other MMOs you have the ability to trade items with other people or buy and sell them on an in-game marketplace. If you, for example, get a really good weapon for a Black Mage, but you’re playing Astrologian and your friend happens to be a Black Mage, you can just give him the weapon. If you’re getting really unlucky, you can go on the game’s marketplace and sell your items for ones you need. But if I’m trying to build Noelle in Genshin, and my friend rolls a really good Geo damage goblet and he doesn’t have any Geo characters, he can’t give that goblet to me. None of this is to even mention the most bizarre aspect of this, which is that Genshin locks artifact progression behind their terrible stamina system which gates basically any gathering of resources related to character progression. It’s not enough that running domains is mind numbingly boring and that the artifact system is clearly already designed with 10 different layers of RNG nonsense to artificially restrict the rate at which players can build and progress their teams, they also decided it was necessary to also lock it behind a stamina system.
The only reason Genshin Impact is able to get away with having such a predatory monetization scheme, where the game’s best characters and weapons are directly locked behind a gacha system with hilarious low rates and having an artifact system that is designed to be as annoying as humanly possible is because there’s not any content in the game that requires you to have the strong 5 star characters and min-maxed artifacts. Let’s be clear, Genshin Impact is pay to win. The five stars characters are all objectively better than any of the four star or free options. The best characters in this game, namely Hu Tao and Ganyu for DPS and Zhongli for support are all locked behind the limited gacha. All of the free characters that you are given, Lisa, Kaeya, Amber and the Traveler are some of the weakest characters in the entire game, which pushes you towards rolling on the gacha system to get stronger characters. Not to mention the constellation system, which awards you upgrades to your characters for rolling them multiple times on the gacha. Ironically, the f2p characters are the hardest to get constellations for because they only drop from the standard banner and are never rated up on the event banners, so they are ironically the most expensive characters to max out. There’s also the weapon system. The game deliberately locks all of the best weapons behind some form of payment. Whether it be the weapon gacha banner, which no free to play players probably ever use or the battle pass or star glitter shop. In most other games, this would be seen as insanely predatory, but Genshin is able to massage their terrible game design decisions behind cute anime waifus and husbandos and people just eat it up primarily because one, there is no competitive multiplayer component and more importantly, none of the currently available content requires you to have any of this. This crap is only here for mega whales or waifu evangelists who feel like they need to C6 and max out their waifu of choice. It is very possible to complete floor 12 of the Spiral Abyss being a free to play player because ultimately the artifact system is the primary determinant of power.
But therein lies the problem, by structuring their game like this, they have completely shot themselves in the foot when it comes to creating challenging and interesting end game content. The last three patches have all been full of filler content as everyone waits for Inazuma. At present, the only real reason to play Genshin is as a waifu collecting game. If you’re someone who’s drawn to the exploration or combat aspect of it, there is frankly not enough content for you. Mihoyo fundamentally cannot create difficult end game content that has decent rewards without risking alienating large parts of their player base. At present, most of the game’s most difficult content is basically just a DPS stat check of your character’s equipment. Compare this to a game like Monster Hunter, which also has a degree of randomness in monster drops that power up your gear, but ultimately requires the player to have a degree of game knowledge and skill in execution to succeed. Genshin cannot heavily require player execution as a facet of difficulty because a substantial part of the playerbase plays on mobile and simply would not have the ability to make complicated maneuvers. They also cannot increase the DPS check too high either because they have structured their game where paying money directly increases your power level. At present, no one cares that it can cost literally $2000 to C6 a five star because that 30–40% boost in power literally does not matter. People tolerate the horrid artifact system because you don’t need to waste hundreds of hours of your life min-maxing artifacts since none of the content requires it. If Mihoyo were to ever create content that did require you to do either of these things, people would, understandably, be quite pissed at what seems like an openly greedy maneuver to punish people who didn’t spend money to get the best characters and equipment.
To be clear, I’m not saying that you can’t enjoy Genshin Impact, I still play the game despite my complaints, but ultimately you need to accept that this game can never really become more than a casual, anime waifu collecting game because of its failures of design, which is really a shame because the game has so much potential. The game will never be a Breath of the Wild level contained adventure game because it is also trying to be a live service, anime gacha game. The game can also never succeed as a dungeon or boss oriented action combat MMO because of how the game’s monetization system is directly tied to player power level. In essence, the game’s broken elements: namely the gacha system and the artifact system are only allowed to exist precisely because the MMO and adventure aspects of the game are not meaningfully challenging. Mihoyo’s only real solution to keep players playing long term is to constantly churn out these filler events where you play hide and seek or something because they don’t have any other options. Creating new regions like Inzauma is no doubt time consuming and expensive and fixing the game’s end game by creating challenging raid-esque experiences would alienate players who don’t want to waste their life min-maxing in Genshin. Quite frankly, I think if you stripped away the cute anime characters, this game would rightfully be panned for its predatory and hostile monetization and game design choices. Cynically, one could say that Mihoyo knows precisely what they’re doing and have deliberate designed their game full of random elements to hook people onto a skinner box that uses the fear of missing limited time anime waifus to milk money out of people. If you want to spend hundreds of dollars getting the anime waifus you want, that’s fine, but I think people need to be aware of Mihoyo’s failure in creating a game with a coherent design philosophy seriously consider whether it is worth spending this money on a game that is frankly, not especially interesting to play after a certain point.
