The playable characters are probably the
single most important aspect of Genshin Impact. The new 5 star released every 3 weeks is what
brings a lot of players back to log into the game, as well as how MiYoHo racks up millions of
dollars. But one thing that this game can't be praised enough for is how great the 4 star
characters are. I know tBennett has his own cult, but even the guaranteed free units are solid and
can be made even better with some constellations. With a 5% base pull rate as opposed to the 5
star’s 0.6%, it is extremely easy for free to play players to get access to these powerful units.
On the 1.1 banners with Tartaglia and Zhongli, we were also blessed with Diona and Xinyan.
I like both of these units a lot, so I was pretty sad when I saw there would not be any new
4 star on Albedo’s banner, and there presumably won’t be one on Ganyu’s. I couldn’t find where
but I think I read somewhere that they still don’t have any new 4 stars on the Chinese Beta
server, so we really don’t have any idea if new 4 stars will even be coming in 1.3 when that
comes out in 6 weeks. But anyways, the actual point of this video is that I began to wonder,
how much work exactly goes into the creation of a new character? I have a feeling there’s a
lot more than what you might initially think. The most general thing that characters share
is their basic animations. Currently there are 5 body types that every playable character in
the game falls under. A standard size male and female (I say standard because this is the size
that the main character is), a taller sized male and female, and the small girls. Characters with
the same body type share animations for walking, running, sprinting, jumping, landing, rolling,
climbing, falling, gliding, and getting hit. Out of these, the one most unique to their body type
is the landing animation. The tall males have this cool superhero landing while the smaller males
have this kinda silly looking stick landing. For weapon animations, each character has a completely
unique string of basic attacks. There are a few rare cases however, where 4 stars from the same
region share animations for some of their attacks. Interestingly, all characters of the same weapon
type have the same plunging Attack. I guess that kinda makes sense though because I can’t think of
that many different ways to do a falling attack. Also, each character has a unique animation for
making their weapon disappear, and I think these ones look incredibly cool. Of course, every
character has a unique animation for their elemental skill and elemental burst. 5 star
characters (and Barbara for some reason) have a cinematic shot on their elemental bursts, and
some have a background pop up. Character’s have up to two different idle animations. A majority
of characters got their second in the 1.1 update, Xinyan got hers in the 1.2 update,
and maybe one day Kaeya will get his. On the character menu there are quite a few
unique animations you won’t see anywhere else in the game. When you open the weapon tab,
you’ll see a slick animation of your character pulling out their weapon and holding it
in a way where you can see it clearly. When you go to talents there is also another
pose which matches up to the character’s personality. Some of my personal favorites are
Noelle’s blush and Beidou’s hands-on-the-hips. For both of the animations I just mentioned, some
characters share them, but many are completely unique. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like 5 star
characters are guaranteed to have unique ones. Each character has a design with a crazy amount
of fine detail. Each character has an official full body portrait, although these do not show
up in the game anywhere as far as I can know. There is also a cool art with the character
showing off their power, and you’ll see these on the various banners as well as when you pull
them. Each character has this design translated to a well made 3D model. The characters in this
game are all extremely different from one another, but one thing that seems to be a recurring theme
is flowy hair or clothing. I’ve seen some people say that they think it’s boring and makes the
characters look the same, but I think that’s pretty ridiculous. I see it as a trademark of
Genshin Impact character design at this point. Last thing about visual design which I think has
gone criminally overlooked is character eyes. Some anime have characters with
varied eye designs but some have each one look exactly the same. I’m glad
Genshin Impact falls under the former. You probably weren’t expecting this
one, but it’s actually pretty important. So each character has numeric values
for their base HP, attack, and defense, which scale with level. Each character also has
their own unique stat which scales with ascension level. This could include elemental damage,
a crit stat, healing percentage, and so on. All characters have a base crit rate of 5 percent
and crit damage percent of 50 at all levels. In terms of attacks, there is a percentage value
for each hit of a character’s basic attack combo, their charged attack, and plunge attack, which
determines how much damage they do in relation to the character’s attack stats. Elemental skills
obviously vary a lot, but most need to factor in the skill damage, duration, cooldown, and
energy particle production. For elemental burst, you generally have the skill damage,
cooldown, and energy cost. Of course, for both of these abilities there are scalings
for levels up to 15. Passive talents unlocked through ascension often only change certain
values or restrictions to character abilities, but some also add minor changes to
character mechanics. Such an example would be Xiangling’s Guoba dropping a damage boosting
pepper on despawn. Constellations work in pretty much the same way. Characters also have that
one passive talent that works outside of combat, which can range from super useful, to pretty
awful. All of these things are very important to the cohesiveness of the character’s kit, which
is why there is a Chinese Beta for players to help MiYoHo make sure they adjust things right. I
don’t know what happened with Zhongli, but usually they do a good job of making characters
feel strong while being pretty balanced. In terms of lore, each character gets a lot
of love. On the character screen you can open up the profile menu, which directly explains
their lore. It starts with Character Details, which gives a very brief general idea of what the
character is about. Next they have 5 different stories so you get to know quite a bit about that
character’s past. There is one story that is not about the character themselves, but is closely
related to them. And last but not least, the story of how they got their vision. I definitely
recommend you go read these for your favorite characters if you have them unlocked by increasing
their friendship. But obviously friendship takes a long time to increase, so you can just go on
the wiki and read if you want. However, not everyone wants to read, I get that, so thankfully
Genshin impact also has story quests which focus around a single playable character. In these
you get to learn more about their personality and motivations first hand. Unfortunately there
are only 14 in the game right now, but new story quests will be added for more characters, and
there will be more acts added to old ones. So that’s something very exciting to look forward to.
This is also a great time to tell you that if you don’t know, Genshin Impact has a manga. You can
read chapters 1 to 13 on the official Genshin Impact website, but for some reason chapters 14
to 16 are not officially translated to English. So if you do decide to read you’ll need to
look up the fan translations. I recommend it, it’s a relatively short read, it’s interesting,
and it makes Amber look extremely cute. The voice acting in this game is absolutely top
notch. I mean, like 90% of the reason why I want Xiao is because I want to hear the voice
of Kirito. I personally play the game in Japanese because I’m a huge weeb, but I
think the English voice actors really do a great job of portraying these characters
as well. Each character has multiple voice lines that you can hear while playing with
them, but they also have a ton of voice lines that you won’t really hear in game.
These ones are about various random things, but they are definitely interesting to listen
to. I especially like the ones where you can hear what the character thinks about other
characters. It really makes the world feel real. To sum up my findings and answer the original
question of the video, to make a new character, you need: the character design, official
artwork, the 3D model, weapon animations for attacking and resetting, animations for the
elemental skill and burst, idle animations, character menu animations (may be reused), damage
scalings (1-15 for attacks, elemental skill, and elemental burst), passive talents (2 in combat and
1 out of combat), constellations (2 that upgrade talents and 4 that don’t), lore (8+ stories), and
fully voice acted voice lines (in 4 languages) I hope you see that there is a lot of work
to be done to create even a single character, so getting two of them every 3 weeks is kinda
crazy. After researching for this video, I have a bigger appreciation for all the work MiHoYo puts
into making desirable characters. I’m confident that they will continue to release more amazing
characters that are 100% worth waiting for. That’s all for the video, thank you so
much for watching, and have a nice day.
