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Happy to chat about it, HN, since otherwise I'd just be playing more Genshin Impact. My capsule review of the game nobody asked for: if you like Breath of the

Happy to chat about it, HN, since otherwise I'd just be playing more Genshin Impact. My capsule review of the game nobody asked for: if you like Breath of the Wild, you'll likely enjoy it a lot. It is not as pure of an exploration game at BotW is, and the emergent game mechanics that made BotW such a joy, a toy which produced its own unique stories with every player, are mostly absent. The exploration doesn't tie in closely with the plot like it does in BotW. But, other than that, it's an extremely, extremely effective game. Excellent art and music design; the graphics compare favorably to anything I've ever seen in an AAA game if you like this anime-inspired visual style. I find the combat similar to single-player WoW with more interesting strategic choices (regarding party comp, etc) and less interesting tactical choices. Harder encounters are fun puzzles to solve. While the actual story in the game is nothing we haven't seen done better before, the character interactions are an extremely interesting Chinese take on Chinese/Japanese/Western fantasy tropes. Someone could get an East Asian Studies thesis out of it fairly easily. It's amusing to "read" with that cultural commentary lens on; the localization is also surprisingly well done (including both English and Japanese, to the extent you credit me with being able to perceive that). The metagame about how to progress as quickly as possible, and where to invest your resources / how to harvest them efficiently, also pushes my buttons very effectively.

smoldesu 5y ago
I like Breath of the Wild, but trying Genshin Impact was like having a root canal done on my brain. After around 30 minutes of playing it I had to put it down, grinding a game for the promise of being able to buy microtransactions is not a effective way for me to spend my time. Maybe it's just because I'm not an MMO fan, but Genshin feels like a regression in the genre of JRPGs.
- kahrl 5y ago
  CRPG.
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  I'm of two minds on it. On one hand, yeah. Grind for a chance (a low one, even among other mobile games) of pulling a favorite character can be a discouraging model. And having no end in sight can be disenheartening for those wanting to binge on a compelted game. But on the other hand, JRPGs tend to not get major updates, and are now taking 3-5+ years per game to meat that criteria. Unlike fighting games, you can't make meaningful character DLC post release that would mesh into the game. The very closest I've seen to this in modern times is Kingdom Hearts' 3 DLC letting you play as 2 additional characters... for one specific boss fight each out of a ~5 hour DLC of a 30-40 hour game. Meanwhile, new characters, events, and areas drop monthly for Genshin. Without a direct subscription cost if you treat the game as a JRPG with some 4-5 playable characters gotten in story (which is average for a modern JRPG) and ignore the new characters other JRPGs don't have the option for. There are some very niche benefits and workaround of issues most JRPGs have today in Genshin. ---- I don't really have much of a point here. Just rambling on some musings that I wish console JRPGs could take lessons from. I guess I just miss those days where is didn't feel like Final Fantasy (and ONLY FF) was the only big JRPG in town pushing graphical boundaries, and Genshin gave me some of those vibes. Moreso than any JRPG in the 2010's outside of FF and KH. Tales of Arise coming in a few weeks gives me some hopes, but I want to hope this isn't just a one-off fluke in the genre.
sleibrock 5y ago
I think the distinct lack of enemy diversity is what kills it for me. Even the boss designs are overall lackluster. A bunch of cubes casting spells, or an ice/fire flower. I go to challenge this water goddess thing and instead I fight water squirrels and crabs. That and I can only kill about four bosses a day for rewards. First going in I thought I would be playing with friends and fighting bosses. Now I've been told not to do that because you don't want friends stealing your chests. Maybe I'm doing things wrong.
- professorsnep 5y ago
  Enemy diversity is just part of another big issue for me: General gameplay diversity. Most of the stuff the game has you do outside of story content is just fighting the same enemies or boss types. There's no unique dungeons or bosses, the "domains" you need to farm for gear are all just waves of enemies, daily quests are just killing enemies, etc. There's rarely any unique mechanics or novel ideas that actually change the way you play, which makes the game get stale fast.
- cosmojg 5y ago
  Just a heads up, you're the only one who can open your chests in Genshin Impact. The most that other players can do to your detriment is pick flowers.
tomjen3 5y ago
Do you think this will have any impact on aps that are not pay to win games?
ezekg 5y ago
This blog post is published tomorrow, just a funny heads up :)
- mlpinit 5y ago
  Different time zone: Time zone in Tokyo, Japan (GMT+9)
  - ezekg 5y ago
    Ah, good call. Forgot he's in Japan. My mistake.
ChuckMcM 5y ago
At some point I hope this model evolves to engage content creators. Clearly the biggest "draw" for these sorts of games is new content, and that is a sort of sunk cost with developers who pay people to create new content so that they can monetize it. However, when it shifts into something like an MLM scheme where an "end user" can develop new content and then deliver it through the game engine, and then the game engine owner and person who developed the content "share" in the monetization (one by game sales etc, the other by in game currencies) then games like PoE and others can grow diversity without hiring. The incentive alignment is pretty clear, really avid players can both improve their own playing experience (enrich themselves in game) by doing this, and the game developer gets more people playing because there is such an interesting mix of things to do an see. At some point this evolves into market exchanges where people who can conceive compelling stories find others who are skilled at art or puzzle design and they can form a group for the purposes of delivering a bit of gameplay content that they share in the rewards from. If you are having a hard time visualizing this, consider WoW for a moment. Let's say Bliz had a way for an avid player to "design" an NPC, write their back story, their interaction dialogs, and the quests they would give in the execution of their "story". An artist teams up with this person to provide textures for either an existing character type, or potentially designing a completely new kind of creature for this. All WoW quests have a fairly fixed set of game mechanics choices to work from so putting those together in ways that are interesting might be the role of a third member of this ad-hoc group. Once completing the story line you have access to a vendor NPC who will sell you various items for WoW gold (pets, spells, recipes, etc). If the "team" that came up with this whole package got a cut of the WoW gold that the vendor received for their wares, that would provide an incentive to this team to make their content compelling. That may be all the incentive they need. And Bliz gets a quest chain + vendor + content that enhances game play for all players and keeps it fresh. Sort of like the virtual gig economy where players add content to the game in exchange for in game currency.
- nxrabl 5y ago
  What you’re describing sounds a lot like Second Life, which launched in 2003 and is still running. (Incidentally, to tie it back to Genshin, Second Life recently banned gacha-style transactions on its platform [0]) [0] https://ryanschultz.com/2021/08/02/second-life-bans-gacha-machines/ https://ryanschultz.com/2021/08/02/second-life-bans-gacha-ma...
franciscop 5y ago
I've seen it announced a thousand times on the trains in Tokyo, and I'm always drooling at how beautiful it looks, but assumed it was just marketing and not the real gameplay. I'll give it a try, thanks for the review!
kbenson 5y ago
I learned all I want to know about that game while my 11 year old was playing it. Sounded like BotW with annoyingly long and useless grinding to get weird crystals or something that are needed to buy better weapons (or buy loot boxes of a sort with low good loot chace, IIRC). It didn't sound horrible, because he seemed to like the gameplay, but I didn't feel any desire to get into a game where you can pay for benefit (I tend to the other end of the spectrum, repeatedly punishing deaths until you get better, like Dark Souls). He probably spent a total of ~$80 on the game, over 4-6 months. I don't count that as too bad, as it's not much more than buying it and an expansion would cost, and it provided him a lot of entertainment. That said, the reason it as only ~$80 is because I was controlling the purse strings.
- ve55 5y ago
  That's the rough part with acquiring characters (or anything) through the equivalent of cash-funded roulette: you can set out to spend a certain amount to attain something you want, but it might not work, and if you're sufficiently unlucky it may turn into an order of magnitude more spending than you originally intended. While you could of course commit to only spending $X and dealing with the results even if they're unsatisfactory, this can be surprisingly difficult psychologically, combining the best of the gambler's fallacy with the sunk cost fallacy (among many other behaviors very cleverly inspired by the game's developers) into one.
  - kbenson 5y ago
    Worse for me, as I'll likely ignore the pay route and go the exceedingly long and grindy route, and if I feel they've made that far too punishing for the rewards, I'll likely feel the game isn't rewarding enough to play. I'm not really interesting in proving to myself that I can pay money to do better than other people, so it doesn't help me enjoy games that are competitive in any way, and if it's a non-competitive game, I just feel like I'm being manipulated, which also saps the enjoyment out of it for me. I don't mind purely cosmetic offerings being present in games, and I'll even buy a few. But if I feel like I'm competing on a field that's stratified by money, it just kills the enjoyment for me. It's the same reason I stopped playing Magic: The Gathering back in the mid nineties a few months after when it was first released. It was fun when we all had starter decks, but after friends started collecting special cards, I saw where I thought it was going an opted out. The realization just sapped a lot of the enjoyment out of the game for me.
novok 5y ago
What is the interesting Chinese take on it?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
darren_ 5y ago
Strong disagree, if you like BoTW and are looking for similar you might get tricked into liking it for a bit until you notice how incredibly lackluster it is both at being BoTW (and at being interesting otherwise). The lack of emergent mechanics is a huge deal, but even the basic exploration sucks. Mondstadt is an utterly forgettable area (OK, the town is kind of fine, but the surrounding countryside is samey and unremarkable), and while Liyue is more interesting, it's mechanically awful as suddenly the verticality of the scenery increases massively so now your 'gameplay' consists of micromanaging your stamina meter as you tediously scale mountains. I quit before the new area so maybe it's better, I suppose? And the non-BoTW elements are bad too. The 'strategic' choices in combat involve knowing what you're going to fight, matching your elements to that as best you can (oh, by the way, the two guaranteed free fire element characters are awful at actually delivering fire damage, so hope you gacha-ed one of the good ones if you need fire element). Where's the interesting strategy there? And then the actual fight is just spamming your attacks and rapid-fire switching characters so the elemental effects stack. Also, quite likely you're fighting a boss design that is literally a cube (there are multiple of these). The 'meta-game' is knowing which bosses/domains/whatever you're going to grind x times today to maximise the chances of dropping one of the hundreds of materials you need to level up whichever character/weapon/skill you're targeting at this point. It's not exactly complex, the game tells you what drops you can expect. It's just a tedious grind, and it's cynically designed to keep you coming back to the game day after day (for people who haven't played: you can only grind these bosses/domains x times per day, and it doesn't take long before grinding up the materials you need to level up something requires multiple days of this grind. You can, of course, pay IRL money to grind a few more times in a given day. Oh, and you can only grind certain things on certain days of the week. So monday you're grinding for a weapon upgrade, tuesday for a skill upgrade, etc. It's incredibly obvious manipulation.) And then after all that, the game levels up the world as you progress. You start out the game hitting level 10 hillichurls with your sword 5 times to kill them. After hours of playtime and leveling up and forging advanced weapons, you're now hitting level 60 hillichurls with your sword 5 times to kill them. Wow!

smoldesu 5y ago

I like Breath of the Wild, but trying Genshin Impact was like having a root canal done on my brain. After around 30 minutes of playing it I had to put it down, grinding a game for the promise of being able to buy microtransactions is not a effective way for me to spend my time. Maybe it's just because I'm not an MMO fan, but Genshin feels like a regression in the genre of JRPGs.

kahrl 5y ago
CRPG.
johnnyanmac 5y ago
I'm of two minds on it. On one hand, yeah. Grind for a chance (a low one, even among other mobile games) of pulling a favorite character can be a discouraging model. And having no end in sight can be disenheartening for those wanting to binge on a compelted game. But on the other hand, JRPGs tend to not get major updates, and are now taking 3-5+ years per game to meat that criteria. Unlike fighting games, you can't make meaningful character DLC post release that would mesh into the game. The very closest I've seen to this in modern times is Kingdom Hearts' 3 DLC letting you play as 2 additional characters... for one specific boss fight each out of a ~5 hour DLC of a 30-40 hour game. Meanwhile, new characters, events, and areas drop monthly for Genshin. Without a direct subscription cost if you treat the game as a JRPG with some 4-5 playable characters gotten in story (which is average for a modern JRPG) and ignore the new characters other JRPGs don't have the option for. There are some very niche benefits and workaround of issues most JRPGs have today in Genshin. ---- I don't really have much of a point here. Just rambling on some musings that I wish console JRPGs could take lessons from. I guess I just miss those days where is didn't feel like Final Fantasy (and ONLY FF) was the only big JRPG in town pushing graphical boundaries, and Genshin gave me some of those vibes. Moreso than any JRPG in the 2010's outside of FF and KH. Tales of Arise coming in a few weeks gives me some hopes, but I want to hope this isn't just a one-off fluke in the genre.

sleibrock 5y ago

I think the distinct lack of enemy diversity is what kills it for me. Even the boss designs are overall lackluster. A bunch of cubes casting spells, or an ice/fire flower. I go to challenge this water goddess thing and instead I fight water squirrels and crabs. That and I can only kill about four bosses a day for rewards. First going in I thought I would be playing with friends and fighting bosses. Now I've been told not to do that because you don't want friends stealing your chests. Maybe I'm doing things wrong.

professorsnep 5y ago
Enemy diversity is just part of another big issue for me: General gameplay diversity. Most of the stuff the game has you do outside of story content is just fighting the same enemies or boss types. There's no unique dungeons or bosses, the "domains" you need to farm for gear are all just waves of enemies, daily quests are just killing enemies, etc. There's rarely any unique mechanics or novel ideas that actually change the way you play, which makes the game get stale fast.
cosmojg 5y ago
Just a heads up, you're the only one who can open your chests in Genshin Impact. The most that other players can do to your detriment is pick flowers.

tomjen3 5y ago

Do you think this will have any impact on aps that are not pay to win games?

ezekg 5y ago

This blog post is published tomorrow, just a funny heads up :)

mlpinit 5y ago
Different time zone: Time zone in Tokyo, Japan (GMT+9)
- ezekg 5y ago
  Ah, good call. Forgot he's in Japan. My mistake.

ChuckMcM 5y ago

At some point I hope this model evolves to engage content creators. Clearly the biggest "draw" for these sorts of games is new content, and that is a sort of sunk cost with developers who pay people to create new content so that they can monetize it. However, when it shifts into something like an MLM scheme where an "end user" can develop new content and then deliver it through the game engine, and then the game engine owner and person who developed the content "share" in the monetization (one by game sales etc, the other by in game currencies) then games like PoE and others can grow diversity without hiring. The incentive alignment is pretty clear, really avid players can both improve their own playing experience (enrich themselves in game) by doing this, and the game developer gets more people playing because there is such an interesting mix of things to do an see. At some point this evolves into market exchanges where people who can conceive compelling stories find others who are skilled at art or puzzle design and they can form a group for the purposes of delivering a bit of gameplay content that they share in the rewards from. If you are having a hard time visualizing this, consider WoW for a moment. Let's say Bliz had a way for an avid player to "design" an NPC, write their back story, their interaction dialogs, and the quests they would give in the execution of their "story". An artist teams up with this person to provide textures for either an existing character type, or potentially designing a completely new kind of creature for this. All WoW quests have a fairly fixed set of game mechanics choices to work from so putting those together in ways that are interesting might be the role of a third member of this ad-hoc group. Once completing the story line you have access to a vendor NPC who will sell you various items for WoW gold (pets, spells, recipes, etc). If the "team" that came up with this whole package got a cut of the WoW gold that the vendor received for their wares, that would provide an incentive to this team to make their content compelling. That may be all the incentive they need. And Bliz gets a quest chain + vendor + content that enhances game play for all players and keeps it fresh. Sort of like the virtual gig economy where players add content to the game in exchange for in game currency.

nxrabl 5y ago
What you’re describing sounds a lot like Second Life, which launched in 2003 and is still running. (Incidentally, to tie it back to Genshin, Second Life recently banned gacha-style transactions on its platform [0]) [0] https://ryanschultz.com/2021/08/02/second-life-bans-gacha-machines/ https://ryanschultz.com/2021/08/02/second-life-bans-gacha-ma...

franciscop 5y ago

I've seen it announced a thousand times on the trains in Tokyo, and I'm always drooling at how beautiful it looks, but assumed it was just marketing and not the real gameplay. I'll give it a try, thanks for the review!

kbenson 5y ago

I learned all I want to know about that game while my 11 year old was playing it. Sounded like BotW with annoyingly long and useless grinding to get weird crystals or something that are needed to buy better weapons (or buy loot boxes of a sort with low good loot chace, IIRC). It didn't sound horrible, because he seemed to like the gameplay, but I didn't feel any desire to get into a game where you can pay for benefit (I tend to the other end of the spectrum, repeatedly punishing deaths until you get better, like Dark Souls). He probably spent a total of ~$80 on the game, over 4-6 months. I don't count that as too bad, as it's not much more than buying it and an expansion would cost, and it provided him a lot of entertainment. That said, the reason it as only ~$80 is because I was controlling the purse strings.

ve55 5y ago
That's the rough part with acquiring characters (or anything) through the equivalent of cash-funded roulette: you can set out to spend a certain amount to attain something you want, but it might not work, and if you're sufficiently unlucky it may turn into an order of magnitude more spending than you originally intended. While you could of course commit to only spending $X and dealing with the results even if they're unsatisfactory, this can be surprisingly difficult psychologically, combining the best of the gambler's fallacy with the sunk cost fallacy (among many other behaviors very cleverly inspired by the game's developers) into one.
- kbenson 5y ago
  Worse for me, as I'll likely ignore the pay route and go the exceedingly long and grindy route, and if I feel they've made that far too punishing for the rewards, I'll likely feel the game isn't rewarding enough to play. I'm not really interesting in proving to myself that I can pay money to do better than other people, so it doesn't help me enjoy games that are competitive in any way, and if it's a non-competitive game, I just feel like I'm being manipulated, which also saps the enjoyment out of it for me. I don't mind purely cosmetic offerings being present in games, and I'll even buy a few. But if I feel like I'm competing on a field that's stratified by money, it just kills the enjoyment for me. It's the same reason I stopped playing Magic: The Gathering back in the mid nineties a few months after when it was first released. It was fun when we all had starter decks, but after friends started collecting special cards, I saw where I thought it was going an opted out. The realization just sapped a lot of the enjoyment out of the game for me.

novok 5y ago

What is the interesting Chinese take on it?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

darren_ 5y ago

Strong disagree, if you like BoTW and are looking for similar you might get tricked into liking it for a bit until you notice how incredibly lackluster it is both at being BoTW (and at being interesting otherwise). The lack of emergent mechanics is a huge deal, but even the basic exploration sucks. Mondstadt is an utterly forgettable area (OK, the town is kind of fine, but the surrounding countryside is samey and unremarkable), and while Liyue is more interesting, it's mechanically awful as suddenly the verticality of the scenery increases massively so now your 'gameplay' consists of micromanaging your stamina meter as you tediously scale mountains. I quit before the new area so maybe it's better, I suppose? And the non-BoTW elements are bad too. The 'strategic' choices in combat involve knowing what you're going to fight, matching your elements to that as best you can (oh, by the way, the two guaranteed free fire element characters are awful at actually delivering fire damage, so hope you gacha-ed one of the good ones if you need fire element). Where's the interesting strategy there? And then the actual fight is just spamming your attacks and rapid-fire switching characters so the elemental effects stack. Also, quite likely you're fighting a boss design that is literally a cube (there are multiple of these). The 'meta-game' is knowing which bosses/domains/whatever you're going to grind x times today to maximise the chances of dropping one of the hundreds of materials you need to level up whichever character/weapon/skill you're targeting at this point. It's not exactly complex, the game tells you what drops you can expect. It's just a tedious grind, and it's cynically designed to keep you coming back to the game day after day (for people who haven't played: you can only grind these bosses/domains x times per day, and it doesn't take long before grinding up the materials you need to level up something requires multiple days of this grind. You can, of course, pay IRL money to grind a few more times in a given day. Oh, and you can only grind certain things on certain days of the week. So monday you're grinding for a weapon upgrade, tuesday for a skill upgrade, etc. It's incredibly obvious manipulation.) And then after all that, the game levels up the world as you progress. You start out the game hitting level 10 hillichurls with your sword 5 times to kill them. After hours of playtime and leveling up and forging advanced weapons, you're now hitting level 60 hillichurls with your sword 5 times to kill them. Wow!