The Problem With Bosses In Genshin Impact

the foundation of every video game goes as follows there is a goal the player has to achieve imposed either from the game itself or created by their own imagination and there's an obstacle or adversary that's designed to try and stop you from achieving cycle that's the basic gist of a video game you want to go from point A to point B and there's some external factor that gets in your way for most games that comes in the form of enemies the nameless moocs you run into while on your quest to achieve something then of course the game has enemies that offer something of value or represent a milestone or checkpoint in your progression referred to as bosses structurally they require more effort resources Manpower and planning to take down in RPG games well-designed bosses that are challenging engaging and rewarding are the Cornerstone of any successful title and the objective is to find that healthy Middle Ground between challenging yet beatable for the most satisfying experience if a boss ends up becoming too powerful or tedious that can work against the player's experience by making you feel like a chore or element of frustration more than something to overcome if a boss ends up becoming too trivial they can also have adverse effects such as not providing a sense of gratification or enjoyment for the player as the thumbnail of the video suggests I want to talk about Genji impact's bosses and discuss a few criticisms I have about them while we're on the subject of combat though I want to give a special announcement this video is brought to you by the new higan irutto chances are if you're a big time gotcha follower you may have heard of it recently just came out it's made by bitty bitty with high quality 2D illustrations and modeling that rival other mainstream anime games the gist of its narrative is that you take the role of the director leading Castaways through battles in both Fantasyland and reality to save people from delusion and Mayhem as for the gameplay how it 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below what your thoughts are on the new game for now though let's get back to Genji's bosses genshin's bosses follow a Creed very reminiscent of bosses and MMOs specific locations on the map that you go to in order to take them on with almost every new version there is a new boss and the incentive of each one is the character Ascension material they draw you have two standard types normal bosses and weekly bosses normal bosses are persistent entities remaining in a set area on the map and activating when a player steps into the ring so to speak when defeated they spawn a trans Blossom costing 40 resin to open in exchange for a variety of goods like artifacts Elemental stones and essential materials to name a few typically whatever essential material a character requires is associated with the boss in the region they hail from zhongli's personal material comes from hypostasis in the uh Deluxe personal material belongs to the prior Regis Vine in monstat so on and so forth exception supply of course like Mika who has a boss in sumeru but you get the idea a number of bosses in genshin serve as the Keystone of their respective areas and are for the most part the biggest reason the player would want to investigate and explore their region in the first place which I think is a nice touch as it adds geographical significance to exploring every area even the ones that aren't required to be explored fully in the archon Quest for normal bosses you're expected to fight them a number of times seeing as they're the only means of acquiring character essential materials the game implicitly mandates you to unlock every single one and if you have the whereabout to possess every character you'll eventually have to face all of them to max out all your units with your normal enemies like the hilly trolls treasure hoarders and slimes being extremely easy to take down bosses were and still are the only main challenge you have in the game outside of spiral Abyss every World boss takes place in a wide open circular Arena and every boss has a gimmick to them that either renders them immune to attack until you do something or follows a set rotate nation of attacks before giving you the opportunity to strike back with them being divided into elements as well reactions and type matchups greatly influence their threat level for example when fighting the Pyro hypostasis and Regis fine its implied you'll want to feel the team around Hydro against cryo you want a team of pyro stuff like that back in version 1 they try to keep bosses very Elementary just to give players a taste of what to expect when you look at the cryo registering compared to the newest registline being Electro the latter is a bit more sophisticated in mechanics even if they share the same weak point same goes for non-duplicate bosses the golden wolf Floyd and thunder manifestation were initially way more challenging to take down than the oceanic and it got even more challenging when sumero brought us the tomb guard and the setup we nut at least I think that's called the Wingnut the weekly boss is acted the same Trend devala and Andreas are far easier to beat than Scaramouche and shoga but that's still account for the fact we've been playing the game a lot longer and are more equipped to handle more challenging content now I don't know about you guys but even after talking about the growing difficulty and complexity of bosses there's a problem with them or rather there's several problems with them bluntly speaking genshin's bosses are both too easy and meaningless even the new ones this probably isn't a hot take as I'm sure many of you share the same opinion but after I would say the sixth month point when we all maxed out our world levels these bosses feel just as trivial as any random Hillary troll but with extra steps and it sort of puts a damper on the game's experience as mentioned at the start of the video bosses in a game are meant to serve as a checkpoint or Milestone of sorts they represent a momentous occasion for the player before they advance to the next step in their Adventure Pokemon for example illustrates this via their gym leaders and eventually the Elite Four while implementing a few non-sequential bosses like the leader of the evil organization running amok in that region even though Pokemon is relatively easy there's an imposed degree of challenge usually in the form of their Pokemon's levels no matter how skilled you are at the game you still have to work towards making your team strong enough to take on whatever Jin is next in life Kenshin impact doesn't have a progressive difficulty curve as the game is meant to be played endlessly there's no start and end point instead the strength and accompanying challenge of the boss is affected by the character's World level a universal difficulty parameter that makes enemies more challenging the higher set parameter goes in exchange for more or better rewards with the game allowing only a limited amount of progression each day assigning a static level and difficulty to every boss is anything but a good idea year one players will always be further ahead in progression than year 2 since they had a full year extra to play the World level mechanic is meant to be considerate of a player's circumstances and so they can adjust the difficulty at their own discretion but even when turning the World level all the way to the max bosses are ridiculously easy for players who've been playing for a while and frankly even for those who haven't as well it's got to the point where a fully geared team can steamroll a boss in a matter of seconds provided they don't have invincibility frames theoretically the World level is supposed to scale every boss and enemy in difficulty to maintain that consistent challenge but I feel like it's failing to do that a lot of this is a result of genshin following the early game hell truck where the early part of a video game is often the hardest due to the lack of resources skills money equipment care characters Etc lack of opportunities to grind or acquire said materials and lack of experience with the game's mechanics then towards the mid to late game the rate at which the player improves in strength begins to outpace the rate at which content gets more difficult that being said the game should still try its best to match a player's rate of progression as closely as possible for them to stay challenged and motivated this is where again Shin fell short they released new bosses almost every version and yet each one of them feels as easy to one shot as the ones that came before often resulting in whatever Unique Mechanics or faces that boss may have to not even occur since they die so fast the unfortunate part is that a noticeable amount of thought is put into these bosses and yet all of that is made irrelevant because you can power through them with stats and big damage there are so many ways to amplify your team's DPS and survivability that floor 12 chamber 3 enemies which are level 100 can be cleared in under 60 seconds if you have the right team which has me convinced even if they added a floor 13 with level 110 enemies we would still be able to run through them with a team of 90s just because the means to complete the game's content are far more advanced than the content itself when it really should be the other way around or at the very least even down does that mean the solution to bosses being too easy is to increase the World level in the short term yes adding a higher World level will certainly make the boss more challenging and therefore make the players actually think but remember there has to be an accompanying reward for that difficulty you can make something hard just for the sake of being hard there has to be a benefit Kenshin does not take advantage of this enough drops are effectively guaranteed and kind of generic there is a chance you might get more drops but there's no real incentive to fight a boss outside of just having to level up your character but once you do there's no significance to them anymore usually in MMOs or other RPGs the whole reason you want to fight a boss is for items money and most importantly they're exclusive rare drops whatever that may be but again Shin there is no practical incentive to fight a boss once you exhaust the need for their Ascension materials that also applies to weekly bosses once you Max all your characters talents you never have to fight them again because none of them drop weapons or a unique set of artifacts it's all the same Wanderers or Gladiator your stuff that you can get from the strong Box by trading in chunk artifacts anyway so in a way bosses in genshin are no different from regular enemies they just have more HP and their own personal room some of you might try to argue that genshin was never meant to be like you know MLG tryhard sweaty gamer and that I shouldn't compare it to an MMO because Genji is a casual game not something you have to grind for hundreds of hours while that is true from a technical standpoint I'm not saying we need 30 men raids to take hours on end just to complete one run in fact that's what the World level mechanic is for to let players have control over how challenging they want the game for those who want a more mellow and laid-back experience they can choose the lower difficulty provided they're okay with less rewards those who want a more challenging experience can opt into that and have higher rewards moreover difficulty in and of itself is only a small problem with genshin's bosses as stated earlier there should be incentives for players who do want to challenge or to grind for a long time throughout the past like two years I've heard comments from players who detest the idea of raising genshin's difficulty because that only makes bosses take longer to kill and as a result make them more tedious to fight but that's only because there's nothing to strive for besides leveling materials nothing that encourages you to take on a boss or adds excitement to it fighting them wouldn't feel like a chore if there was something anything you could work towards and besides refighting the boss doesn't always correlate to increased TDM if there's a big enough reason to do so you can design the most aggravating annoying and unenjoyable boss fight in the world but players will still willingly fight it if there's an item weapon or drop that makes it worth it a game I used to play very often was swam of the Mad God and I would argue some of the most fun I've had was when oryx 3 came out the way bosses in that game work is that they're at the end of a dungeon and when you kill the boss they have a set of guarantee drops usually stat potions and then a potential rare drop that comes in the form of a white bag since white bags are exceedingly rare you can go half a dozen to a dozen runs without getting one but players don't care they will fight the boss 100 times over to get that specific drop even if that boss takes 20 minutes to beat when oryx 3 first came out I remember there was a guild that did 200 runs in the first month bear in mind in optimize throw 3 run at the time took anywhere between 5 18 to 20 minutes I should mention the rare white bag drops weren't necessarily better than the existing equipment the game's normal tier 12 and 13 weapons were still more than enough to complete all of the game's content to this day but the white bags added an extra incentive for a player to revisit that dungeon even after they've completed it either for the sake of collective purposes or because Min Max's want to get his best in slot as humanly possible the funny thing is when O3 first came out 99.99 of players lost more than they gained from that dungeon Realm of the Mad God has a prima death system meaning if your character dies it's effectively deleted and you have to make another one the average player I think lost about 5 to 8 fully maxed characters before they clear their first rx3 but the challenge made it all the more gratifying when we finally took it down for the first time up until that point dungeons were brain dead easy oryx 3 was hard but not unbeatable kenshin's bosses suffer from being both mind-numbingly easy and unfulfilling which is why players see them as a chore I know I'm a broken record with the whole hardcore vs casual debate but I've said this before I'll say it again it's one thing to make a game design to be casual and add casual constraints to it it's another to make a game that's supposedly meant to be casual but then have the same grind experience you would expect to see in a game for a hard course if genshin was meant to be a casual game why even add stuff like artifacts or waste upgrade characters in the first place on a side note I find the Casual versus hardcore thing to be completely asinine they're not mutually exclusive people argue against making engine more difficult because that would alienate the Casual player base who either doesn't have the motivation interest or time to spend on a game but that's based on the notion that casual players are turned off by challenge challenge is what makes the game fun it's just that hardcore players require a greater challenge than casual ones but that doesn't mean casual players don't want a challenge by that logic every casual player should only play Animal Crossing or Minecraft on pistol more even casual players stand to benefit from the game being challenging that's the whole reason we play video games and that's the thing gianshin has no challenge either in terms of difficulty or something to strive for at its core it's an action RPG the quality of an action RPG lies in this com systems and mechanics which to his credit are fantastic the characters which aside from a few outliers is also fantastic and most of all the enemies and goals to achieve they nailed the first half of the equation but completely botched the second half action RPGs are nothing with that meaningful Challenge and meaningful reward that's why a lot of players get bored of the game after finishing the latest Quest because there's legitimately nothing to do other than use up your resin and that's it there's a few other nitpicks I can go over like how I don't enjoy that every boss battle takes place in an open flat room like Sword Art online and how there's no real comprehensive strategy other than just spamming attacks but I wanted to mostly focus on the two core problems bosses are too easy relative to how strong we can make our characters and there's no worthwhile reason to keep fighting a boss once you finish upgrading your characters giving players nothing to do besides sit and wait for the next update also I feel like fixing those two problems when indirectly fix others too in my video on the problem with weapons I talked about how players who can't afford to pull for both the 5 Star character and their weapons are out of luck there are no 5 star weapons available in game giving them to World bosses or at the very least weekly ones would not only solve the issue of free-to-play players having decent weapons but also solve the issue of the lack of motivation to fight bosses increasing the difficulty of a boss could also give players a reason to want to play co-op to my knowledge a team of four players piloting one character each can do more damage than a single player with a team of four characters as that's four on fielders versus only one that accelerates how fast you can clear a boss while also adding a reason to play co-op which is a heavily underutilized function it feels like a lapse in common sense to me I don't understand why they choose to ignore this but anyways sorry for coming off a bit ranty in this video as I was writing it I started getting more and more tilted about the whole ordeal that it made me frustrated but what are your thoughts on this do you think genshin's bosses are fine as they are or do you think they could benefit from these changes feel free to share in the comments down below aside from that if you enjoyed the video don't forget to give it a like And subscribe consider following me on Twitter at vars ferm 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] foreign [Music]

Channel: Vars II

Views: 142,378

Keywords: genshin, genshin impact, vars genshin impact, genshin why no one plays, genshin impact gameplay, genshin discussion, genshin impact analysis, mihoyo, hoyoverse, genshin bosses, genshin impact bosses, bosses, the problem with genshin impact, genshin impact problems, genshin problems, genshin bad, genshin impact version 3.6, genshin impact 3.6, genshin impact world bosses, genshin impact weekly bosses, genshin impact boss, genshin 4.0, genshin fontaine, genshin impact version 4

Id: yhGvgtDqy6k

Length: 15min 32sec (932 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 06 2023