Genshin Impact has gotten more press than likely any Gacha game to date and with it a whole cottage industry has sprung up of channels devoted the game. I’ve noticed as several Destiny YouTubers have even been bitten by the bug and it is shocking just how wide spread the appeal has been. However I am also starting to watch as folks slam into the wall that begins around Adventure Rank 30 as the breaks get applied to player progress and the huge open world seems to shrink a little bit. During the early days in this game it has boundless enjoyment, but as you gain levels you start being funneled into a tighter and tighter scope of activities that can actually provide progression.

I’ve just dinged AR37 and I feel like it will probably take a week or so for me to finally progress to AR40 and open up the next World Level. I was able to move upwards at level 35, and two levels later I am nowhere near close to having my full team of four characters leveled, their weapons upgraded and their talents purchased. This says nothing to the rest of my squad of characters which are in complete disarray as they got abandoned somewhere around 40 or 50 when the material and gold crunch started. This is a whole that you can buy yourself out of but the amount of money that it would take to restore reasonable forward momentum is not something for the faint of heart.

The challenge is there are three progress bars that essentially need to keep going up for your party of characters as you progress. The first is character level and this is fairly straight forward and mostly involves the acquisition of experience books and the application of gold to train your character with them. The next is the talents on your characters and these require books which come from dungeons that drop 2 or 3 at most at a time as well as a huge resource cost each time you need to ascend to a higher tier. Lastly there is the leveling of your weapon which can be done through the combination of mining resources and gold with a huge outlay of resources when you need to ascend to the next tier of levels much like character progression.

You gain these resources by completing dungeons that have a resin cost associated with them. So for example when I move to the next weapon tier I am going to have to spend 6 purple quality weapon widgets that spawn in dungeons only on a specific day of the week. Right now Domains of Forgery III should in theory be dropping purple items, but the reality is each time I go in I get 3 green resources and 2 blue resources. If I keep acquiring at that rate the essentially crafts up into a single purple resource, which means I am going to need a grand total of 120 resin to ascend a single weapon. 120 resin represents your full rested allotment for a day.

This same pool of resin is used for essentially everything that gives meaning progress in the game. You need it for weapon components, character ascension elemental drops, skill books, as well as it is also a primary source of leveling books, acquiring gear from bosses, and getting additional gold. You get four quests each day and they reward 10 primagem and then an additional 10 for turning all four back in at the adventurers guild. These can of course be saved for wishes giving you a shot at getting more characters and weapons… or you can spend it to buy 60 more resin giving you a few more attempts to farm the resources that you need.

Unfortunately it isn’t a flat 50 primagem per 60 resin and is instead a sliding scale that increases each time you refresh during a day. So you can in theory buy an additional 360 Resin each day on a scale that looks a little something like this:

• First Refresh – 50 primagem
• Second Refresh – 100 primagem
• Third Refresh – 100 primagem
• Fourth Refresh – 150 primagem
• Fifth Refresh – 200 primagem
• Sixth Refresh – 200 primagem

There are also Fragile Resin, which are doled out sparingly either through the Adventurer’s Guild level up rewards or gained through the battle pass, but there is no way to buy more of these once you have spent them all.

The challenge set by the game is that there are really enjoyable things to do, like the various World Bosses which can drop pieces of gear that feeling meaningful. However each and every one of these things requires an expenditure of resin in order to get any rewards from it. So when I killed Stormterror this week and got my very first 5 star artifact, it felt bad seeing how poorly its stat allocation was knowing that it cost me 1/2 of my daily allotment of resin and locked me for other loot from that same encounter.

Part of the challenge with all of this is the fact that Genshin Impact is maybe the first Gacha game that is actually legitimately fun to play. This is also a game that because it is extremely enjoyable is bringing in a lot of people who may have never played a game like this in the past. The itemization, the constant push towards gambling mechanics, and the painfully slow energy recharge mechanics are all part and parcel for the Gacha industry. However none of these games before have really had fun and enjoyable gaming mechanics that pushed players to spend MMORPG type amounts of hours grinding away and exploring.

Most Gacha games look like this and are barely a game at all… and more something that you do out of idle boredom than something that you actually enjoy playing. I’ve spent time poking my head into more than a few of these over the years as I am constantly in search of something enjoyable to do with my phone. The games have this visual overload going on and are loaded with “auto play” functionality that largely just keeps you clicking buttons much akin to hitting spin on a slot machine. Nothing about this is terribly enjoyable but it looks almost like a game and as a result you end up holding on hoping that it eventually opens up into something enjoyable. These games are a trap and Genshin looks and plays nothing like this.

Genshin instead presents this gorgeous world to explore filled with puzzles to unlock. It features extremely enjoyable action combat with complex character designs that interact with each other in unique and interesting ways. It might be one of the best games I have ever played, but it is unfortunately shackled to a series of mechanics that don’t necessarily do it any favors. It is a game designed to limit your play time into small chunks scattered throughout the day, and as a result it is quickly becoming a game where I can only realistically get 15-20 minutes worth of forward momentum each day and then while the world itself is still enjoyable to explore… there is a limited amount of things that I can do that actually impact something that feels like progress.

None of this to this point has really even touched the challenge of how this game goes about allowing you to acquire new characters. Like so many Gacha games you receive characters rarely through “summoning” as it is colloquially called or in this game by spending “wishes” upon the various “banners” in the game. The game has a pity system and will give you something of 4 star rarity every 10 wishes and something of 5 star rarity every 90 wishes. Tenha is a YouTube that covers this game and claims that he spent $7000 chasing Diluc, one of the best and most sought after 5 Star Champions in the game.

There are currently 21 different playable characters in the game and 7 of them are at the 5 Star rarity. Any given “wish” has a .06% chance of pulling one of these 5 stars. As I have gotten free primagems I have been spending them primarily on wishes and managed to trigger the pity system after 90 pulls. Instead of getting a champion like I was hoping for… I instead got a 5 star weapon which also felt awful. So when the game says it is going to give you are 4 star every 10 pulls… you might end up with a weapon instead of a character.

Also extremely likely is that you are going to get multiple copies of the same character, which the game has built around by giving you different “constellations” to unlock. What you are looking at is proof that I have not only gotten Barbara which you get for free by getting to AR20, but have pulled five more copies of this same character unlocking an additional constellation each time. All of which is designed to keep you spinning the wheel and trying to push your luck of maybe pulling what you were after the next time. So I guess I am completely not shocked at all that someone on YouTube spent $7000 chasing a single copy of a specific champion.

Genshin Impact is an exceptionally enjoyable game, but I fear that as more folks hit the wall that is AR30 and beyond… that it is also going to continue shedding players. I’m still enjoying myself but I feel like I am progressing less and less and have reached a point where it doesn’t make much sense to be playing more than thirty minutes a day. I doubt Mihoyo will make significant changes at a fast enough pace to turn this ship of opinion around before it comes crashing into the docks. I accepted the game for what it was, but I look forward to someone taking this formula and making it a little more user friendly. Had they just made it so that champions were outright purchases and removed the resin system… I probably would have actually purchased every single one.

However now I figure that eventually my interest will wain as we get into this season with some really big releases. I am likely going to stick around for the time being because I really want to see how far I can get in the battle pass before it ends in 25 days or so. There however is going to be a point folks reach along this path where they start to check out. For me AR30 was when the resource costs started to bog me down, but for others that might come sooner. I am still enjoying myself, but the honeymoon phase is definitely over. That isn’t to say that I can’t settle into a routine that makes me happy, but the overwhelming excitement that I once felt is now a bit tinged with reality. The post Genshin Honeymoon Over appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.