The Problem With Genshin Impact's Artifact System

i've been playing this game ever since the first wiki came out and while there isn't that much to do from day to day barring whatever event is available gangshin like almost every game nowadays has a few activities you can only do a set number of times per day commonly referred to as dailies we have a four commissions expeditions maybe a few monster hunting routes but most importantly the oh so valuable 180 resin you get every day resin is the one resource that powers 90 percent of anything you want to do in the game do you want to farm bosses resin do you want to get tile materials resin mora resin experience resident that's how the system works it's part of the whole design structure to encourage players to log on to the game every day so you can't beat it all in one day though many people try to character progression in gangshin is very straightforward you level up a unit give them a weapon level that weapon up maybe refine it if you can afford to level up talents and then spend however many hundreds of thousands of resin to get five artifacts all with the right main stat and proper combinations of substance with upgrades of the highest rolls for the right sub-stats for every single character artifacts have long been the sore spot of genji's simple and pleasantly surprising rng apps and gear progression in a game with one of the most meager daily energy supplies even for a gacha game it serves as more or less a roadblock that impedes your progress for no real particular reason while it's not the worst mechanic i've seen having played no shortage of games with random probability it's arguably the part of working on a character that people don't really look forward to especially given how few chances you have per day so for today's video we're going to be looking into the artifact system and how it's terribly designed even for kenshin standards in terms of equipment you don't really have the same kind of upgrading systems like you do in other games depending on the title they're just fun little side grades to work on or completely game changing which leads to equips that can range from completely worthless to one in a million that can affect you probably several hundreds of dollars in real world transaction marketplaces when it comes to game design conventions there's no set rule or criteria for what makes an equipment system good or bad which is why players often form inconsistent viewpoints from game to game even if there are objectively problematic issues to one however one aspect of equipment progression that can illustrate some semblance of uniformity is where the player's motivation to progress comes from as an example let's look at a sandbox game like terraria which is well known for having modifiers or prefixes to items it's been a while since i played the game but if memory serves you don't actually upgrade your equips to give them better stats rather it's determined by the type of modifier they come with in other words you can have two of the same pickaxe but one might have a modifier that gives you more mining speed while another gives you more reach distance both of them are valuable in their own ways i think many players of terraria enjoy the mods because it adds less linearity to progression without completely undermining the impact of acquiring a kind of rare weapon you'd be compelled to take on a difficult boss multiple times over as you would want to get a more optimal modifier on their drops even if you already have one that's perfectly fine it's a personal sense of achievement that drives you forward because why the hell not on the other hand we can look at an mmorpg like maplestory which has several aspects to their equipment progression for all intents and purposes the items you get are completely unusable at base as the stats they provide on their own don't correspond in proportion to the difficulty scaling of enemies dungeons and bosses as such you have to increase the strength of each piece of equipment through not one not two not three but five different ways scrolling star forcing flames main potential and bonus potential two weapons of the same name can provide a statistical difference so massive that a perfectly maxed out one can give a player more power than the combined stat total of a player fully equipped with items at base level that's like one piece versus over 20. equipment progression in that game spans far beyond merely obtaining the necessary items that's only five percent of the equation if that perfecting a single piece of equipment can cost you on average over a thousand dollars and all of it is done purely at random genji's progression system taps into a little bit of both though not to the same extremes of course as far as weapons are concerned the goal is to just have it would it be nice to have an r5 aimis ball and ganyu oh for sure never a bad thing to have extra damage on your attacks but the weapon is perfectly serviceable at base and thus unless you're one of those overachievers you don't really need to go for multiple copies artifacts are not so easy to come by while acquiring them fortunately doesn't require primo gems it is far more difficult to get the exact things you want and unlike weapons the difference between the most and least optimized artifact is quite meaningful for starters there are five the flower the feather the timepiece the goblet and the headpiece each artifact is responsible for a different stat and function to some extent but the foundation applies universally there's a main stat and four substats the main stat increases in parameter the most and is guaranteed to do so with each artifact level up to 20 for five star ones sub stats are unlocked or enhanced every four levels and five star artifacts can come with three or four sub stats already available furthermore only one sub-stat is enhanced at a time contrary to popular belief artifacts are not actually based on random chance in an equal sense for example the timepiece main stats are skewed more in favor of health defense and attack as opposed to elemental mastery and energy recharge almost three times less likely to get either of the latter two so for any of you wondering why you keep getting hp and defense goblets instead of elemental damage that's actually because the good stats are intentionally harder to come by adding on to that each character has an optimal artifact set that usually caters towards this specific element or combat style at the present moment there are 20 different five-star artifact sets each with very unique bonuses and in a lot of cases those unique bonuses are only applicable to one or two characters at best with the only real exception being the noblest oblige which is more or less a solid artifact set on any support quicksaw character like shinto and bennet so not only do you have to get the right mainstat artifacts on each character but the right artifact set substance rather complicate things as you can get any random assortment of three to four per drop upon which you then have to level up that artifact to boost the parameters of the substats at random prevailing wisdom recommends most characters pursue a combination of crit damage qrik chance energy recharge and elemental mastery so those are your main sub stats of interest getting even three of them on a single artifact is difficult let alone four sub stats don't increase consistently either for instance if you have a crit rate sub stat you can get anywhere between 2.7 to 3.9 bonus crit rate so even if you score a one in four chance five times over you still have to hit a one in four chance of the highest possible five times over as well compounding the randomness to a point where getting a quote-unquote perfect artifact happens only maybe one in every hundred thousand artifacts perhaps even a million we've all experienced this countless times by now you get a perfect headpiece to accurate rate means that and perfect substance attack percent crit damage energy recharge and elemental mastery quite literally could you not have gotten a better setup then as you start funneling experience into it the bonuses go to attack then energy recharge then attack again then elemental mastery and then elemental mastery again suddenly what could have been a best in slot is now pretty much unusable after toiling away for what felt like dozens upon dozens of artifacts you finally stumble upon a diamond in the rough only to have it crumble to dust the moment you pick it up not a very satisfying moment now is it now this might be an unpopular opinion but i actually think randomness can greatly enhance the experience of a video game if used moderately and more importantly correctly there's no other sensation quite like playing the odds it's part of the reason why gambling can be so addictive risking what you have in the hopes of getting something better people live for that kind of stuff shiny pokemon rare drops rare characters it's all over the place but there's a right way to incorporate rng in a wrong way i'm not going to start a tirade on the intricacies of randomness and how gacha games use it as a means to prey on vulnerable consumers who lack self-control that's a video for another day back to the matter at hand though artifacts are a bad way to design randomness and i have three reasons why one it stagnates progression for no practical purpose relative to the content gear progression is different from game to game but usually is quite linear the closer the end game you get the curve will flatten out somewhat but mostly because the later stages of working on a character and such are naturally more expensive that being said the pace holds true for every new character every new weapon etc look at talents the early town levels 1 to 5 are pretty quick but from 5 to 10 it takes a lot more to do so however it's a fixed rate and so as you get more and more stuff and acquire more resources throughout your playthrough you can expedite the process ahead of time that way you don't have to repeat all the tedium over again to better understand what i'm talking about let's use minecraft naturally at the beginning when you're starting a brand new world progression is rather slow relatively speaking getting your first couple diamonds and whatnot will be tough but once you get your hands on an efficiency 5 fortune 3 pickaxe getting more diamonds and coal and stuff will take much less time it's not like if you want to get more diamonds you have to spend the same amount of time getting them like you did before the problem with artifacts is that it's the only form of gear progression against you that doesn't get any faster you can be ar100 and be no quicker at farming artifacts than an ar30 player that doesn't make much sense now does it a veteran player who's gone through the same routine for the past x amount of characters wants to skip all of that as quickly as possible and continue where they left off imagine if you were playing pokemon and all wild pokemon were level one no one will want to catch anything in the mid to late game because they would have to spend so much time playing catch-up for any new addition to their party that's why they scale the levels of wild pokemon in later areas so you only have to spend a small amount of time to get them up to speed a potential defense for this would be that it keeps players from speed running the game thus preventing them from being able to coast through any new content the moment it comes out as you'd be overlevelled to hell if getting perfect artifacts was guaranteed it would reduce the total amount of time spent on a game which goes against its main goal of keeping their player base playing for as long as possible the thing is that really only applies to optional content getting artifacts is obligatory it's a huge part of a character's gear progression yet it's bottlenecked to essentially buy time for developers to make more stuff that's not the right way to do it if your goal is to prevent players from speed running through the game you could very easily add daily attempt limits to things and you already do the resin system you don't need both of them that just slows down the progression for the sake of slowing it down which brings me to my next point 2. rng on top of rng is one of the worst conventions of game design and a very easy way to burn out players i'm not saying you need perfect 4 sub stats at base level and perfect high rolls on the right substance to function unless you're trying to 36 star spiral abyss in record time you don't need that much optimization however that doesn't make farming artifacts any less tedious than it actually is the only major rng based mechanic in most well-designed gacha games is the gacha system itself everything else is usually set in stone thus allowing you to feel a tangible sense of progress with each and every day you do your dailies and log on what it comes down to is the amount of time and resources required to do so such as farming experience materials enhancement materials or maybe for a farmable unit there might be fluctuating drops or amounts such as getting between two and five but the end goal is in sight and you can rest assured your account will be in better standing now than it was yesterday gentian does that improper with talents levels and whatnot to fully max out a character's level it takes anywhere between i don't know five to seven hundred russians just for the sake of argument it's a lot of resin mind you gonna take a few days to do so but if you set your sights on it you will achieve it in a reasonable time frame that's motivation enough for a player to log on every day one of the main facets of player psychology is that gamers are very goal driven artifacts completely betray this notion by having so many layers of randomness on top of one another that you can go days or weeks without making any progress whatsoever and it's not because you're not efficient or skilled enough you just weren't lucky enough i've had characters who've got all five artifacts near perfect in less than a thousand resin and i've had others where i've burned probably well over 10 000 and they still aren't finished yet it kills your enjoyment and often leads to players burning out as they have zero control over how strong they can become you can either do limited resources or random chance not both if you want to add rng on top of rng you should allow artifact domains to be resin free so the player can go through it as many times as they want no one enjoys being gay kept three artifacts are usually character specific and can't be interchanged between one or the other further increasing how tiresome collecting the right ones for each character is that is extremely counterintuitive for a gotcha game the genre whose entire business model is to collect and play them all but how can you do that when it takes an unreasonable amount of time gearing up even one character let alone all of them even whales who dumped an entire year's salary on the game are probably still not finished decking out every character no matter how much they want to not only are artifacts heavily contingent on random chance not only can you get maybe 10 to 12 new artifacts a day at most but you also have to get brand new ones for every single character while there's nothing wrong with adding equipment variety there is such a thing as having too much variety there are 20 different five-star artifacts sets to date and mehoil will likely continue to add more and more what this does is spread your already scarce resources even thinner and leads to a lot more dead artifacts that would otherwise not have been the case if it wasn't so specific let's say you got your hands on kanye and her farming for the blizzard strayer set you managed to get a flower with really solid substance for her and while you're trying to get the other four pieces you come across another really good flower but the problem is you have no other character that makes use of lizard strayer so despite being too good of an artifact to throw out it's essentially worthless as set bonuses are too good to pass up on any character am i saying you can only use emblem a server fade on shogun and that the set bonus from gladiator or nobles is unusable on her no but it's nowhere near as efficient if artifacts didn't make up such a huge portion of the character's potential power and was more of a flavor touch thing then sure that'd be fine sadly though that's not the case one might argue that you're allowed to use one artifact that doesn't belong to the set you want while still maintaining a four-piece set bonus that is true most players use their freebie on the goblet seeing as how it's difficult to get the proper main and sub stats however that's only one out of five you still have to get the other four not much room to recycle at the end of the day while i don't think genji's artifact system is the worst thing i've seen out of all the games i've played it's definitely close to the bottom i do stand by the notion that this game is not meant to be played for 8 hours a day anyone who binges everything the instant it comes out then complains about the lack of stuff to do should honestly just go play a grind heavy game like runescape or world of warcraft trust me you'll have plenty of things to do all the same i dislike how cumbersome it is to farm artifacts i'm a day one player who regularly purchases extra residency primo gems and i've only managed to get like 80 best in slot for maybe 15 characters believe me i want to have everyone level 90 and decked out but it can take months just to finish one unit if mihoya wants players to pull for new units they should at the very least make it possible to max them easily because forget primo gems we don't even have enough resin to spend on our characters once we do get them sorry for the more ranty tone i had throughout the video as someone who studied game design if i were to explain the artifact system to any of my professors they would most likely call it one of the worst they've ever seen doesn't matter if you're an overachieving mid-maxer who wants to perfect everything or a casual who settles for decent roles i don't think anyone likes the artifact system so with that said let me know in the comments down below whether you agree or disagree with my points for now though if you enjoyed the video i'd appreciate it if you left a like and subscribed consider following me on twitter joining my discord server our genji community is starting to get pretty big which is awesome oh and check out my previous discussion videos if you haven't yet but until next time thank you so much for watching and i look forward to seeing you again soon take care [Music] you

Channel: Vars II

Views: 127,366

Keywords: genshin impact, genshin, genshin impact guide, genshin impact game, genshin impact graphics, genshin impact gameplay, genshin artifacts, genshin ayato, genshin 2.6, artifacts genshin, genshin impact artifact guide, artifacts, vars genshin impact, artifacts bad, badly desgned, bad artifacts genshin, artifacts explained, genshin impact discussion, genshin problems, genshin impact artifact system bad

Id: 6XUvqozjF3g

Length: 15min 20sec (920 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 19 2022