Genshin Impact

Official site

Anyone who’s somewhat in tune with the gaming world will have at least heard of Genshin Impact by now. I won’t do a very thorough write-up of the game and its mechanics here, since that information is widely available. Instead, I want to focus on what makes this game so appealing to me, to the point that I’ve been playing it on and off for almost a year now (for comparison, the only games that normally capture my attention for such an amount of time tend to be roguelike/run-based in nature, card games, or both). Further, I want to show how specifically this game is rewarding to someone with my kind of ADD brain.

Genshin in brief

Genshin Impact is an open-world character action game, where you control a team of four characters, of which only one is ever out on the field at any time. It takes a lot of its visual and gameplay inspiration from Nintendo’s Breath of the Wild, the breakout hit game that launched with their Switch console. However, where Breath of the Wild placed a lot more of its focus on the depth and complexity of the interactions and physics in the world, and using them to solve puzzles, Genshin instead chooses to place much more emphasis on the way the various elemental forces interact, and on a fluid combat system that lets you layer your team’s skills together. Some minor environmental interactions do remain, such as setting grass on fire to damage enemies (and yourself!) or freezing water to make a temporary ice bridge), they are mostly vestigial and serve as amusing flavour more than anything else. What Genshin Impact does take from Breath of the Wild, and one of the core things that makes it so pleasing, is that every landmark you see, no matter how far in the distance, is a promise: you will eventually be aple to reach that cool thing you see in the distance, and there will be something interesting to see or do there.

At any time, you can instantly swap to one of your team members by pressing their button and use their special powers or attacks. Since each character is associated with a specific element, and each two elements interact together in a specific way (e.g. water plus ice freezes enemies, lightning plus fire causes an overload explosion), there is a huge space here for personal preference and expression in how you approach any given encounter, especially since much care has been spent on each character to make them a distinct individual, with their own looks, skills, weapon of choice and optimal combat role.

The game is free-to-play, with gacha mechanics to make money (that is, gambling with currency to get new characters). Unlike many other gacha games, however, Genshin can be completed entirely with the characters that it gives you for free just for following the plot’s progression. You are also drip-fed sufficient currency as a free player to acquire new weapons and characters at a steady, albeit slow, rate.

Since its launch in September 2020, multiple areas have been added to the game world, each time showing the result of many lessons in game design having been learned from the previous sections. It will be interesting to see whether Mihoyo decides to at some point revisit the original areas and bring them up to the same standards.

What I love

The world is expansive, beautiful and full of references to real-world geology and architecture. The Genshin team has made several charming videos about the areas they used for reference, such as this one. The use of colour, contrast and light makes for some truly tremendous vistas at times. .

There is a ton of puzzles and other rewards for explaration littered around the landscape. From little ghosts that want to be led back to their home statue, to floating balloons to pop with archery, to resources you can only harvest by correctly applying an elemental reaction, to multi-stage hidden quest lines triggered by discovering the right item or person, exploration is truly rewarding.

The expansive combat and elemental reaction system, paired with the unique skills that each character brings to the team, make a dizzying amount of team combinations viable for exploration, combat or both. Experimenting with different compositions is rewarding and fun, although it is also one of the way that the game tries to limit free players to some extent: leveling and upgrading a new character needs a significant investment of time and resources beyond a certain point.

Many combat challenges can be overpowered simply by investing sufficient resources into your characters, and there are ways to lower the difficulty of the world, but overall Genshin Impact is sufficiently well-designed to allow skill and clever application and combination of abilities to trump raw numerical power. Similar to e.g. the Souls games, dodging, practice and observation can get you all the way to the most difficult content in the game. The mastery curve is therefore extremely satisfying to me.

The story of the game is refreshingly positive overall, with enough of a dark undercurrent at times to keep things from becoming overly saccharine. For me at least, storylines about characters helping and supporting each other, and forming bonds of friendship, are very welcome at the moment, and a breath of fresh air compared to much of the dark and ‘gritty’ storytelling elsewhere. There’s also all kinds of fascinating deeper lore and plot twists going on for the kind of person who enjoys diving deep into such things. I tend to appreciate such things summarised second-hand, but there’s a lot of it here as well. The name of Genshin’s world, for example (Teyvat) might be a reference to Noah’s Ark, and has led some to conclude that it’s actually a kind of generation ship traveling between the stars.

Finally, the game allows cooperative play (with some limitations), which meant I could play it together with my children and wife. This let me enjoy the world all over again, exploring it together with them, and showing them little tricks and secret places, as well as being able to help them in general.

Genshin and ADD

This video gives one of the better presentations of what ADD (Attendion Deficit Disorder) is, and also what it isn’t. For me, the primary issue it causes me is that whenever I am doing something that’s less fun or interesting, it is extremely easy to go off and do something else, and forget about the task at hand. The distraction might be useful in and of itself, and I’d argue that my tendency to scrape together information from all kinds of disparate sources has served me well, in spite of the corresponding stress around deadlines. Still, if there is a task that needs finishing, ADD can be a huge handicap.

In Genshin Impact, things are different. Take a look at the following two screenshots:

First, look how far you can see. Second, note the little glowing and sparkling things out there in the world. There’s lots of things to catch one’s interest. The shipwreck off in the distance might have enemies to fight. The red activity icon represents a challenge (in this case an archery-based one) which will reward me with a treasure chest on completion. Any sparkles are resources to be gathered, from useful herbs to mineral ores. The landscape is cunningly designed so that whenever you go off-track to chase a distraction, new vistas and challenges will be revealed. As such, playing the game is incredibly soothing to me because rather than fight my natural tendency to chase seemingly irrelevant details, here I can give in to it, secure in the knowledge that it is likely to be rewarded in one way or another.

Breath of the Wild was similarly rewarding, but one key difference is that there were much less concrete rewards one could gain - weapons would wear out, currency wasn’t especially in short supply and armour sets were strictly limited. In contrast, in Genshin any rewards are always welcom, be they currency to spend on wishing for characters (gacha mechanics), upgrade materials for weapons or characters, or resources to spend on cooking or one of the many other subsystems I didn’t have space to cover here.

When the game came out, a lot of the press around it boiled down to: “Genshin Impact innovates in the free-to-play space by making a game that’s actually good and fun to play without engaging with the paid mechanics at all.” I think that’s still true today, and I credit them for it. There is however still the unfortunate way in which free-to-play games, and gacha games specifically, tend to prey on a specific type of person to extract the majority of their income, letting the rest of us play largely for free. So there’s some questionable ethics at work. Given that there’s not much I can do about that, however, I am still enjoying my time in the world of Teyvat.