Checking in on Genshin Impact

yo what up I'm kazuko cat and one time I made a video well I've made quite a few of those actually but the only one's important and it's this one where I listed a lot of issues genin impact might face in the future which I made nearly a year and a half ago and got way more attention than it probably should especially since it was my first time doing anything like that so I made a couple mistakes the biggest mistake ended up being that I didn't make it clear enough that I loved genion impact at the time and that all of the things I was listing were just my personal worries about small things that wouldn't even become issues until years down the line I remember just a month after that video came out genin dropped the super exciting fouille Harbinger trailer and I got way too many comments that immediately wrote off my entire video even though the entire reason I was worried is because I'm excited about the future content and I don't want genin to be bad before we get to that that didn't stop people from saying I was wrong though and hey it's been well not Year's plural but it's been more than one year and I've just recently dived back into a big genin addiction after not playing the game for a really long time so I think there's no better opportunity to re-examine that original video of mine and see where I might have been right or wrong so let's start with the very same points I began with [Music] before in the original video most of the issues I had with characters had to do with Rarities and well all three of these are still issues I just don't know if I care about the issues as much anymore I always understood that all of these were very intentional decisions to make more money but I I just personally didn't like how they were categorized having Chichi be a five star when ning Guang wasn't bothered me since ning Wang is one of the most important people in the leeway Aron Quest and just in leeway in general while Chi-Chi just told us to go find milk once but that isn't really an issue that will ruin genin or anything and it's actually gotten better the most recent five stars seem to be important enough to earn that Rarity sure it's a bit weird that Linny and Lynette aren't the same Rarity but at least Lenny is noticeably more involved with the story than Lynette is and while baju doesn't feel as important as some other five stars he's at least way more important and mysterious than Chi-Chi so we're doing pretty good in this regard overall as for Rarity ratios it really just comes down to I think it'd be nicer to have a 2:1 ratio of four to five stars although that was based on the assumption that five stars were supposed to be more rare than four stars because of the name Rarity which isn't even a valid assumption because the stars are called quality not Rarity so it doesn't really matter I think adding more four stars would be cool but I'm fine with how it is now the last issue of having too many five stars to cycle through banners is still an issue and I still like my suggestion in the original video to put more people on the standard banner and let you pick a specific character like you can pick weapons on the weapon banner and while they've put a couple more five stars on the standard there isn't an indication that anything else will really be done to combat this issue at least not until there's so many five stars that they can't avoid it any longer though I'm confident that when that time comes they'll address the issue somehow I just hope they do it soon and that's all the Rarity issues addressed but there's one last problem I had with characters some five stars are just better than others at the time this had only barely started happening every once in a while however since then five stars like de have been released who is considered weaker than a lot of four stars so this is definitely still an issue and I think it will likely always be and yeah it sucks don't get me wrong as well archons should definitely be better than anybody else in their same element having two non archons be so dramatically different in strength just isn't fun but the issue only starts to shine in places where you need to care about the meta like the spiral Abyss in casual play you can realistically get away with pretty much anything at least until things get more difficult later on but we'll revisit that thought for now let's move on [Music] to my main issue with timed events was with the story heavy events I felt that these onetime quests shouldn't hold crucial lore to the game because then the main story can't ever address that lore without reintroducing it in an AR conquest and this was proven completely right with the classic example of unreconciled stars where Scaro shows up tells us that the sky is fake and then leaves for a year and when he finally shows up again he doesn't make mention of that at all because it was a timed event so the main story can't acknowledge it since any players that started after 1.1 wouldn't know that that's a thing so though finally in sumeru they had to reintroduce that lore drop through dor which means that the game can actually address it now but proves that hiding it in an event was a poor decision however gin hasn't done this in a long time some recent events have had stories that contain major characters and those can give us some bonus insight into those characters but nothing in an event has been crucial to the main story line in quite a while and I can confidently say that hoyo verse would have to add any lore drops that important to the main story anyway just like they did with the sky being a lie so this just isn't an issue anymore though it is a great example of hooe making bad design decisions early on before they really knew what they were doing I mean it's obvious to everyone the genjin gameplay and design has been getting better over time but it's still interesting to me to look at these clear examples of that and yeah that's it for timed events not much to talk about which is also true of the small things I talked about at the end of my original video so let's just mow through those real quick too since resin is a time-based currency people who have been playing longer will have more resin overall yep I was right about that but I don't think it matters as much as I used to think there's so many ways to get more resin if you need to each day and ultimately the only thing resin stops you from doing is getting stronger which you only need to do if you've been playing for a long time so it kind of just works out enemies are becoming more annoying that's kind of still the case though Fontaine is better than other regions have been recently I still miss being able to toss most enemies around with ano though there's not enough hot men not anymore well kind of there's been quite a few hot men added since that video there's still not as many male characters as female though but things are looking good for men enjoyers overall dendro artifact domains will likely be in suu and inaccessible for new players yep they are I was completely right about that you can go to suu immediately after the tutorial but it's a harder area and that's still not an ideal situation to have to go all the way to samaru just to get any dendr related artifacts but past me was stupid and forgot that the cry and hydro artifacts are locked behind a massive quest line in one of the hardest early game areas on the map so djo doesn't actually have it the worst menus will be too long Yep this is still true and there's nothing that's been done to address it but I'm sure they'll do it eventually there's not going to be any disastrous repercussions for hooe not dealing with menu length yet I just hope they do it soon and with all those points out of the way let's get down to the issues I think really still apply I was ready and willing to admit that I just can't be fully right about this point I had felt that Inazuma was too hard too early into the game but there's so many variables that go into difficulty I mean for my part my combat strategy up until then was to use ano to crouch control enemies and Inazuma was when that became an entirely ineffective strategy plus there's a good chance my world level had just increased since the minimum required Adventure rank to go to Inazuma is 30 and that's right when a World level increase happens so it's just not possible for me to be objectively right about Inazuma being too difficult but I kind of was just a month after my video went out version 2.8 had a massive Nerf to all major enemies in Inazuma therefore Inazuma was too hard and I was right all you naysayers making fun of me before probably aren't watching this so let's move on I then talked about how World level and manual enemy scaling both conflict with each other which is actually a far more interesting issue but I'm going to save that for a later section that suits it better because my organizational skills were terrible back then that means we're done with difficulty after a solid clean win for me pretty nice I'm sure that'll continue as we move into my first point was that artifact passes were becoming too long making it inconvenient to experiment with or even understand newer artifacts and that's been kind to fixed no artifact passive has come even close to reaching ocean hued plam in word count but the bigger issue of not being able to experiment with artifacts persists because of just how many there are how complex both artifacts and characters are getting and the fact that it's more important to have the right artifacts now since the game keeps ramping up and difficulty but maybe that's not fair to say if we're going off the most recent artifacts Fontaine has only added two of them and they're incredibly straightforward and actually seem like they could be fun to experiment with like they're actually simple enough that I can think of some characters I might want to try these sets with and that hasn't happened in a long time so maybe I'm being too harsh maybe they are fixing this issue as for the rest of my thoughts on artifacts my original video focused a lot more on exploring the game design question of how do we keep the artifact system relevant to players once they've already farmed up their character once at the time my brain told me players shouldn't be able to get their team so strong a monat that it carries them through the rest of the game cuz that's just not how progression in a game should work but that was stupid sure you can grind in monat long enough to carry you through the game but that's because you are progressing progression in genin isn't strictly tied to location or getting through Arun quests you progress just by playing the game for a long time so I don't actually think hoyo needs to make it impossible to avoid artifacts if you grind for a character once and frankly as a player I would vastly prefer that they don't because grinding artifacts is by far the worst part of the game so I'm glad to say it seems like you can get by just fine with early game artifacts monster artifacts are very generalized being mostly just flat damage boosts to specific elements as opposed to the far more specific artifacts introduced later that give bigger boosts to smaller niches but you can still use monstad artifacts they just might not be ideal for your characters and that only becomes an issue when making your characters insanely strong as your priority which shouldn't be necessary for casual gameplay but as I've alluded to a couple times already it's not as easy to just ignore the meta anymore after all the level cap has stayed the same since 1.0 eventually the only way to make a character strong enough to deal with the rising difficulty throughout the game is to optimize your team which finally brings me to the part of my original video that I think I was spot on with let me cut to the Chase and say World level shouldn't make enemy stronger now that's a bit extreme and maybe confusing so let me explain earlier in this video when talking about timed events I mentioned that hooe made a lot of poor design decisions early on in genin's life and I think that the way World levels work is one of them hooe was obviously taking a lot from breath of the wild when making gench an impact early on as you know they hadn't made a massive open world game before so I think World level was only added because hoyo saw breath of the Wild's invisible level up system which was where enemy would become stronger variants of themselves as you play the game longer hoyo took that system without really thinking about how it would Clash with the rest of the design decisions they made for genin in breath of the wild the dynamic World scaling is the only form of balancing the game has sure there are some areas that are more dangerous and they have better loot but they are only late game areas if you choose for them to be the whole point of breath of the wild is that there's no set path no linear progression compare that to genin impact where there is a set linear path of areas you're expected to go through so the enemies in Fontaine are stronger than the enemies in monad not because it's a more dangerous place with better loot but because you're not supposed to go there until later in the story on top of that the way link gets stronger in breath of the wild is from the player getting better at the game beating tougher enemies and then taking their better equipment in genin Impact you level up having the entire world get stronger as you progress through the game is entirely unnecessary and causes so many issues you increase your World level so that you can make your characters higher leveled so you can deal with stronger enemies but increasing your World level also makes the enemies stronger so you haven't gained an advantage everything's the same it's just that the numbers are higher and outside of all that each region is made harder than the one before anyway because it's built on linear progression but that just clashes with the dynamic progression of the world levels you shouldn't have two entirely different ways of balancing the game because they'll constantly conflict that's why it honestly feels like enemy levels should be set manually in each region and World level increases just allow you to make your character stronger obviously that would have been an awful decision back in version 1.0 because then all the level four enemies and mod stat wouldn't do much to keep addicted players with level 90 characters interested in the game I will but now that we've gotten far enough into the game to start catching up with the original World level cap it's becoming pretty clear that this system has problems that I'm sure Hoover wishes they could fix but it's pretty much ingrained into the game by now look it isn't awful it isn't unplayable I'm literally playing the game right now but the World level system makes things significantly less enjoyable when it comes to characters when I I pull for a new character I want to have fun playing them nearly immediately not to have a new list of chores I have to do just for them to be barely effective enough to fight recent enemies but grinding up characters gives me things to do and goals to achieve which for a veteran genjin player is a rare luxury so it can be fun to build up a new character as long as I don't need to grind artifacts so much that it takes weeks just to get any Improvement at all but I might need to do that anyway if the difficult it keeps increasing to the point where artifacts are the only way to get any stronger maybe maybe the main issue with genin [Music] is why did I stop playing genin in the first place well I would love to say that I stopped for any of the reasons I listed in my original video I didn't and I also didn't quit from the thousands of people telling telling me that I suck at video games my opinions are awful and that I shouldn't play genin since I clearly hate it in fact I kept playing after that original video all the way until version 3.3 before starting scar musha's interlude Quest and before exploring several brand new desert areas which means I didn't quit because I had no content left to do either I quit because I liked a lot of characters in genin and the combat was super fun so I wanted a ton of characters from more variety for that I needed to have a lot of poles for that I needed a lot of Primo gems for that I needed to optimize my time playing so that I could get as many Primos as possible and one of the key sources of that was the spiral Abyss so I needed my characters to be good enough to complete the entire spiral Abyss consistently so I had to grind artifacts and that's when I started to burn myself out the thing is if you care a lot about beating the spiral abyss and you're wanting to follow the meta then you should already be fine with not getting to use the characters or strategies you personally enjoy that's just the reality of playing into the meta of any game my issue was that I wanted to play whoever I felt like while still forcing myself to worry about the optimal strategies so the solution was to just stop making myself do what I didn't want to I didn't need to beat the spiral Abyss to get Primo gems and if I ever want to I don't need to worry about what builds I use for it I'll just get as many stars as I can while still having fun but again that's just for now I didn't say all of this just to suggest that the only issue with genin was how I was playing it I mean I'm avoiding artifacts ignoring the spiral Abyss decreasing My World level putting off countless quests and sitting on maxed resin right now as I type this script there there's a lot of elements of the game I'm just not interacting with and I won't be able to ignore the looming threat of the meta for very long since the game continues to get harder and harder without the power cap of characters ever increasing so there's definitely issues here and I'm certain that I'll get burnt out on the game again and probably sooner than the first time I got into it but I'm having fun again and I'm so hyped for the future of the story so I'm going to keep playing off and on only doing what I want to after all the only thing stopping me from having fun is forcing myself to do what I thought I needed to when I didn't want to and also suo suo is the actual issue that made me stop playing look the region is very pretty it has great themes environments and music but it's just not fun especially the desert after playing Fontaine for a while I went back to do some of the suo stuff I like left uncompleted and it sucked so many things are left behind quests that you have to go and find on the complete opposite side of the region and then go through mountains of dialogue just to get to the thing you wanted to do in the first place and it's just not enjoyable to fight three super tough enemies that ignore CC and can combo you from po to death all just for a common chest so I'm just glad Fontaine is better thank you to all my generous patrons which I I actually have now I only have one Patron because I never really talk about my patreon I mean there's literally zero benefits outside of just being a way to support me in my content so I never feel morally Justified to advertise it but my first video had a fake patreon plug at the end so doing a real one here feels fitting so go support me if you want to before it's no longer your choice

Channel: KazooCat

Views: 198,035

Keywords: genshin impact, genshin, genshin impact game, genshin impact gameplay, genshin impact update, genshin impact getting worse, genshin impact bad, game design, genshin bad, genshin timed events, genshin impact difficulty, gemshin, genshin artifacts, genshin impact artifacts, genshin impact good, kazoocat, genshin impact problems

Id: SsnKaAN-43I

Length: 21min 54sec (1314 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 25 2023