Everything Wrong With Genshin Impact's Resin System

I'm surprised it's taken me this long to make a video on this given how ubiquitous resin is throughout the entire game regardless of if you're new or a veteran be free to play or will Etc but you know better late than never Kenshin impacts like almost every gotcha slash mobile title follows the practice of actively restricting progression by tying you to a resource that replenishes over time universally referred to as energy although every game tends to call it their own thing the Regeneration process can be accelerated typically through spending real money otherwise once exhausted all you can do is wait some games buy you entirely from playing them if you run out of energy while for other games it limits certain things you can do while still letting you enjoy the other parts of the game however much you want this practice has been scrutinized by players critics and designers alike for as long as it's been implemented for it and I wanted to bring a few of my own thoughts regarding this matter as resin plays a big role in the gameplay experience of genjin so for today I want to talk about genjin's resin system and how I feel like it can be improved upon for many of you the resin system in its entirety may seem counterintuitive the ideal goal of any video game is to be so enjoyable that players will enthusiastically spend hours and hours every day playing it and exploring all that it has to offer that's the whole reason why most popular games throughout history have either endless play or replayability Minecraft is without a doubt the best-selling individual game ever made in the history of video games and will likely forever be and the core part of the game's experience is that you can play it forever there's no end to it it stands to reason that limiting the amount of time a player is allowed to spend on a game would go against the best interest of that game he had so many titles exercised this including genshin the question is why there's been a paradox within the world of game design that's been unanimously regarded as unsolvable and that's the Paradox of the two goals every game whether digital or analog multiplayer or single player RPG or first person shooter whatever attempts to reach the player's two main goals as close as humanly possible when you play a game you have two objectives to have fun and to win or complete the game what makes this a paradox is that in terms of absolutes in order for you to achieve one of those goals you forfeit the chance to achieve the other having fun denotes enjoying your time while playing the game to maintain that fun you have to be continuously playing as you're not having fun with the game when you're not playing it winning or completing the game inherently denotes ending the game if you win a game of Monopoly if anyone's psychotic enough to even try the game is over play has ended it's physically impossible to accomplish both the goal of having fun and the goal of winning as by trying to go for one you cannot go for the other they're mutually exclusive from each other but that doesn't mean game designers won't try to get as close as they can to a mutual compromise the two most common ways to go about this are a tie to make the game endless or replayable for example Pokemon has a ton of replayability thanks to a wide variety of teams you can make or challenge ones you can do like Nuzlocke I'm sure everyone watching has returned to an older Pokemon game several times in the past an example of an endless game would be the aforementioned Minecraft a game with no concrete end goal instead giving the player the freedom to make their own end goals and to create new ones after they reach their current one for replayable games the main focus is to beat the game but they account for having fun by giving you an incentive to start over and play again even if the end goal is the same for Endless games the main focus is to have fun but they account for the end goal through Milestones within the game the experience of constant Improvement is your end goal neither approach is a perfect solution but that's what makes it a paradox you can't find a perfect solution so the only option is to get as close as possible to the perfect solution that brings us back to the original concern why do gotcha games in this case Kenshin Implement A system that by Design hamstrings the amount of time you can play for you essentially prevent the player from ever being able to achieve the goal of having fun or completing the game I could be boring and say it's a manipulative way to pressure players into spending money on the game to circumvent that restriction but predatory marketing is not the focus of the video this may sound very ironic but at least to me I find it both an effective yet self-destructive way to achieve both goals it's like the Arc Reactor in Iron Man 2 where it simultaneously keeps Tony Stark Alive by preventing the shrapnel from impaling his heart while still killing him in a roundabout way by poisoning his blood gotcha games are notorious for employing fomo AKA fear of missing out as a way to get players to stay hooked on their game and their respective Energy Systems carry more equity in that department than gotcha Banks it's also a way to buy time especially for games that routinely get new updates and expansions at the start of Genji impact due to all the excitement and anticipation a substantial number of players binge the game like crazy they reached the end of all available content in the span of like maybe a week tops from then on there were complaints about there being nothing to do but impatiently wait for new content to be released that tends to happen very often a game is released with the intention to be enjoyed in moderation that ends up being voraciously consumed by players before they're left with nothing to do the resin system is to some extent implemented with this in mind if we could endlessly Farm artifacts Talent character and weapon essential materials and whatnot the game will lose enjoyability very fast thus disqualifying them from the goal of having fun by limiting how much you can do per day it ensures you can't binge the game and exhaust all there is to do in a short time when I said earlier that it's an effective yet self-destructive way to achieve both goals it's sort of like the care on a stick analogy by attaching it to the player they will continuously chase after it but since it's attached to the player the carrot will always remain a fixed distance away from them inducing a cycle of endless Chase it's been proven time and time again that the only feasible way to achieve both goals to the player is as depressing as it may sound to ensure they never achieve those goals while at the same time making them think that they can to always keep them hungry and wanting if you satisfy them they won't crave it anymore countless individuals have addressed this both in text and video platforms about how Genji's presence system is designed to make you addicted to the game to make you keep logging on every day because God forbid you miss a day's worth of rest and you'll never get it back hence fomo if you think about it for the vast majority of us the only thing we do every day is log on use our resin and log off perhaps there are a few repetitive things you can do like Farm monster drops or collect items but those are also intrinsically finite in quantity identical to how resin behaves there are benefits to this practice though not to roast my fellow Gamers but we do struggle with self-control or lack their off and the only way to fix this is to either make it take a painstakingly long time to achieve the end point of a game or enforce a speed limit on the player to prevent them from blitzing through all of the game's content in days and then spending weeks or months waiting for the next update historically the first option has worked but produced mixed results MMORPGs like MapleStory World of Warcraft RuneScape and the like are some of the most beloved games for many thanks to all the memories and experiences we made through our childhoods but a frequent criticism towards them that's carried lasting impacts on the genre to this day was how time consuming they can be the snail paced leveling progression of MapleStory back in the day for example was legendary you can grind for hours and hours and hours and only gain like half a level it was extremely inefficient now for the hardcore Gamers that may not sound too bad as they can play the game for however long they want and still have something to do but for those who don't have that kind of time or don't want to spend that much time they can alienate them from the game and in this day and age most players have not at the time nor patience to play a game for 10 hours a day video games do this to allow any player regardless of time to still progress at a reasonable pace which is especially appropriate for mobile titles given the scenarios where most people would play them being in short bursts like during your commute to work while having lunch or to wind down for the evening all while still making meaningful progress through the game of course that compromises the hardcore game's ability to play for Endless amounts of hours but it is more inclusive anyway that's about as detailed as I think we should go on that subject the video is not meant to be a lecture on game design philosophy but I thought it would be good for background information since it's conducive to the next part the video's title is a major problem with genshin impact's resin system indicating despite everything is said so far there's something I take issue with among all the gotchas I've played Gyan Chin's resin system is by no means the worst but I'm definitely not a fan of how it was implemented I acknowledge why it's there and why it should be there however it could use a bit of a rework or some improvements the biggest problem with resin is that it doesn't guarantee tangible progression it only guarantees attempts at tangible progression a combination that only damages a player's experience one of the main goals is to win and because gentian is an endless game instead of an end goal players create Milestones with the resin system in effect you can only have fun for a set amount of time unless you spend Primo gems to extend it therefore it's of Paramount importance that progression towards the Milestone is assured sadly for genshin it isn't at least not entirely certain resin based activities like Talent OR character weapon essential materials do promise a minimum number of items per attempt with the chance of getting more but there's one activity that infamously doesn't promise anything of value in fact you can go days or even weeks before making any meaningful progress artifacts artifacts make up the entirety of a character's individual strength once you complete their talents and weapon as that's really the only thing you can work on that differentiates your character from someone else's the problem with artifacts is that nine times out of 10 or 99 times out of 100 is more like it the artifacts you get are complete junk with no redeemable sub stats whatsoever and even if hypothetically you do get a good artifact there's a chance it may turn into a bad one through bad upgrades the excessive amount of RNG tied to artifacts effectively means you can go for long stretches of time without any positive changes to your account thus diminishing what little gratification players are able to get out of the scheme I'm aware that if progress was unrestricted players could probably max out their entire roster in the span of like a few dozen hours leaving them with nothing to do but I feel like setting a limit on materials alone is enough something so inconsistent as artifacts should not cost rust due to how long it can take to get a functional set of five on a single unit let alone however many we have right now it depends on how much of a perfectionist you are but even with how few new characters mihoil releases per month we simply don't have enough resin and time to gear them up not unless we unequip one character and move their stuff to the new one it takes an inordinate amount of time to bring a new unit to endgame standards if you start from zero unless you're really freaking lucky you might still be stuck on a character that came out several patches ago the essential experience of a gotcha game is the white cast of playable units you can choose from the most enjoyable ones in my opinion are ones that encourage or even better mandate the use of many character emphasizing the importance of team building and planning residence order prevents you from doing that so much of the game's character building is tied to a limited resource that doesn't even guarantee progress rendering it a very long arduous process of playing every day going to an artifact domain a few times and finding mostly garbage all while new characters come out that you can't even work on because you're still working on existing ones if they're against making artifacts less RNG based then what they could do is decrease the cost of resin for all activities across the board on a given day if I remember correctly you generate just over 200 resin 200 resident equals five World bosses or 10 domain attempts that's it to ascend a character from level 80 to 90 it takes 20 boss materials bosses usually drop two plus a chance of a third per run meaning you can spend an entire days worth of resin and still not have enough materials to ascend a character Talent materials are even worse to go from Level 8 to 9 not even 9 to 10 it takes 12 tier 3 materials domains give you a minimum of two tier ones and about one and two tier twos per run considering it takes nine tier ones or three tier two used to give one tier three you need a combination of 100 a tier ones or 36 tier 2s to level up one Talent from 8 to 9 and every character has three in nihoya's defense genshin's character progression is nowhere near as long and drawn as an MMO but it's also the only gotcha I know of that kind of does things backwards most gotchas restrict the number of attempts for bosses or dungeons to challenge players to carefully plan out their strategy and teams before attempting them while making the upgrading materials and whatnot more accessible to allow players to enjoy the new character's full potential right away players generally prefer to get past that part as fast as possible highlighted by a measurable portion of the community stocking up on materials and equipment for characters that are yet to come the section of a gotcha game that should have the least focus on is character progression in a game like Pokemon where you're a Pokemon are with you for a long time that's the focal point but gotchas expected to use dozens upon dozens of units so having to invest that much time in each individual one will take far too long your time would be better than figuring out how to use those characters to take on the new boss or dungeon instead of how to get those characters to to a usable state of course to even do that part you have to first make the bosses in content challenging enough to Warrant actual Team Planning and strategy but in my humble opinion it would be better for the future of genshin Hit the character progression portion of this game was made more streamlined or less overemphasized and the content Dungeons and bosses to instead beware resin is focused on personally I would have a lot more fun playing the game if I could actually equip all of my characters and then figure out different ways to use them they actually sort of build off of each other mihoyo is afraid of making dungeons harder or making more in-game content out of concern for players not having the means to efficiently complete that content but that's only because we don't have the means to acquire the means to efficiently complete that content in the first place for most half the singachu games getting the memes is an easy part the difficult part is the content itself if you get a brand new character you should be able to upgrade it without sacrificing power from your existing units in the event that you need to field all of them it wouldn't feel very good to get a brand new unit only to take weeks or occasionally months just to bring them to the same level as your current endgame team their needs to be a shift in the Resident system's priorities either in terms of its generosity or by altering what should and shouldn't cause resin it not only doesn't make for a gratifying experience but it can make it a tedious one what are your guys's thoughts on the resident system if you have suggestions on how they could rework it then feel free to share in the comments down below that's gonna be it for today so if you enjoyed the video it would be great if you left a like And subscribe to the channel consider following me on Twitter at Forest fairing joining my Discord server and checking out my other discussion videos if you haven't yet but for now thanks so much for watching and I'll see you again soon in the next one take care [Music] thank you [Applause]

Channel: Vars II

Views: 117,665

Keywords: genshin, genshin impact, vars genshin impact, genshin why no one plays, genshin impact gameplay, genshin discussion, genshin impact analysis, mihoyo, hoyoverse, genshin impact resin, genshin resin guide, resin genshin resin farm, genshin impact resin problem, resin, genshin impact problem, vars genshin impact resin, resin genshin impact, genshin impact resin farm, genshin impact 3.6, genshin impact sumeru, genshin impact fontaine, genshin impact baizhu, genshin impact kaveh

Id: IThX38ukg-s

Length: 14min 2sec (842 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 29 2023