Making an Impact

I’ve been playing Genshin Impact on and off for a couple of months now. Last week, with work being temporarily halted due to a rise in Covid cases in our county, I got to do the daily challenges on a more consistent basis. I’m having a lot of fun with it. The gameplay is creative, the characters are endearing, and the story has a fairly good flow to it.

However, as I played the daily grind, I was backed into a corner as a glaring issue reared its ugly head. If this issue goes unresolved, players could enter the deadlock that I unwittingly put myself into.

Genshin Impact is the latest Free-to-Play craze by Mihoyo, the creators of Honkai Impact. In Genshin, you take control of one of two twins in their search for the other. It plays much like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in its open world exploration, complete with swimming, mountain climbing, and hang-gliding. A key difference is that you can swap between four party members to create fun elemental effects and synergies.

There are some key mechanics to the game I need to cover before I address the aforementioned dilemma.

1. Gacha Mechanics

Genshin is a Free-to-Play game, which means Mihoyo charges $0 for you to download and play it. So, how do they make money? Simple: through random character rolls. Genshin is a type of gachapon. Gachapons are Japanese toy dispensers that pop out random prizes, almost like gambling for kids. My friends and I here in the West call them “gachas” for short, since pulling a prize is like saying, “Gotcha!”

Gachas have crept into many recent games. Overwatch has a random roll system for cosmetics. EA had a notorious run with Star Wars Battlefront II, in which their almost “pay to win” model landed them in legal trouble. Genshin is a hero collector, where your random rolls net you characters and weapons. While you can earn primogems, the game’s summon currency, just by playing the game, the easiest way to get them is to buy them with real money. A new character is released, you spend all your primogems hoping to land them, and you come up short. The temptation to keep trying by spending a few bucks is difficult to resist. Like I said, it’s like a new form of gambling. At least here, unlike what went down in Battlefront II, you can build yourself a decent team without having to spend real world money. It’s harder, sure, but it’s doable.

2. Levels

There are three key levels to keep track of in the game: Character Levels, Adventurer Rank, and World Level.

Character levels are for each character you pull from the gacha banners. The higher your characters’ level, the better their stats.

Adventurer Rank covers your personal profile. As you complete quests and gain rewards, your Adventurer Rank goes up. Leveling up your Adventurer Rank nets you unique rewards, as well, like character leveling materials or primogems for gacha pulls.

World Level dictates how strong the enemies are when you encounter them in the field. When you reach a certain Adventurer rank, your World Level goes up, too. When that happens, the enemies spike in level and become more powerful. This keeps players from growing complacent in old areas and provides a consistent challenge.

3. Character Experience

I want to focus in on Character levels for a bit here. There are two ways you can level up your characters: fighting enemies and using Experience (EXP) materials. Characters can require hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of points of EXP to level up, and defeating enemies grants you about fifteen EXP each. Since this is not a viable source of EXP, using the EXP materials is the best way to go, since they grant you between one to twenty thousand EXP each.

The difficult part about this leveling system is that early on, you earn a lot of EXP materials. However, once you’ve gone up in your Adventurer Rank and World Level, you start to see fewer and fewer of these helpful items. You can earn them through special Ley Line activities, but they don’t reward you with much. Also, certain activities, like Ley Lines, cost something called Resin. You only get a certain amount per day. If you use them all up, you have to buy more if you want to keep going for that day. You can certainly buy EXP materials, but once those in-game currencies run out, it’s back to using real world money.

It soon becomes abundantly clear that you cannot keep your growing roster of characters at the same level. Pro streamers like Mtashed have recommended that you level up only key members and leave the rest of them alone. This goes against what most hero collector games do, where the goal is to get as many characters as you can and level them as much as you can.

Here’s the rub: I do not like how this current leveling process stands.

At the time of writing this entry, Genshin is running a summon banner for a new character: Ganyu, an ice element archer. I played her demo level and really enjoyed her gameplay. Since I plan on streaming my attempts to pull her on Round Two Gaming, I’ve been stocking up on primogems for when I do get to stream it. After all, there’s a very good chance I won’t get her in the first pull (unlike what happened when I went for Zhong Li). I also decided to save up my EXP materials, so she could join the main force sooner rather than later.

While I played the daily grind and unlocked new areas outside of the main story, my Adventurer Rank reached the point where it unlocked World Level 3. This became a problem because my characters were all around Level 31, and the weakest enemies were now showing up at level 37. Certain bosses were ten to fifteen levels higher than me. Because I had wanted an evenly leveled party for any situation, I had not followed Mtashed’s strategy and spread my EXP materials between all my characters. Now, I don’t have enough to get even my main team to a level that can keep them alive during regular content. Furthermore, even if I do get Ganyu, I wouldn’t be able to get her remotely close to battle ready.

I’ve encountered a similar leveling system in Fate/Grand Order, another Free-to-Play mobile game I’ve indulged in for the past two or three years. Unlike Genshin, Fate GO’s characters level up only by using EXP materials, not through battle. When I first discovered that, I admittedly complained. Why couldn’t I get experience from using characters? It felt like a waste of potential.

However, Fate GO has a striking advantage: farming for EXP materials is BY FAR easier than in Genshin. There are specific, repeatable levels where you can earn about nine EXP items per run. They aren’t difficult, and at high enough levels, you can earn enough for a Level 50 character to level up after a single run. Consistent login rewards also grant EXP materials, which make it easier to level up both your main team and the horde of extra characters you’ve accumulated.

I’ve heard most people complain about the Resin system, how they don’t give you enough per day to get anything done. Personally, I’m not too upset about it. It’s a good way to limit your playtime and remind you to be a responsible adult. My issue is more with the scarce EXP materials. Because I upgraded the World Level sooner than I was ready for, the struggle to catch back up is all too real (I’d mention how I can’t even run co-op with friends because I’m locked in a Story Quest right now, but griping about Genshin’s cooperative play is a rant for another day).

Please don’t misunderstand. I’m thoroughly enjoying Genshin Impact. It’s hitting a lot of the notes I look for in a game, and I want more people to play it. However, the dire lack of means to level up your characters is detrimental to the experience, especially for the Free-to-Play gamers. Yes, I understand that Mihoyo needs to earn revenue from this game somehow, but I don’t think bottlenecking the flow of EXP materials is the way to do it. Most other Free-to-Play games just stick to the character banners, and they’re doing just fine. Once they fine-tune this, I think Genshin Impact will be a truly stellar experience for everyone.

*UPDATE*

A couple of days after this review was posted, Mihoyo announced the All That Glitters event in their next update. One of the perks of this event is double the EXP material rewards for certain activities. This is just the kind of thing we need. It’s unfortunate that this is a limited event, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction!