@Jstorm Man, I'm pretty unlucky on these kinda things but today strange things are happening. First I've pulled a 5* char on my first try in Genshin, then I tried a box draw in PES 20 and pulled 2 end game legends (Van Basten & Puyol) on my second try, I should probably go and play lottery today haha. @JasonLL Totally agreed with your comments. Another thing I'd like to add is how clean they're handling the UI. Any gacha game on the App Store is pretty much guaranteed to have horrible & crowded UI, but they did an incredible job on Genshin imho.
What's the difference between Hokai Impact and Genshin Impact? As I understand it, this game is like Breath of the Wild... what's the other game's genre? Also, I read that there's cross-platform play with PC, which is kind of nice... but are we talking World of Warcraft level support for this game over the coming decade, or will demand drop off in 24 months and we're left with nothing to show for it at the end?
Hokai Impact is more of an arena battler, with gacha and meta elements taking a bigger role. That said, there were more extensive adventure sequences with limited “dungeon” exploration, NPC interactions, etc. In many ways, HI is more of what you would expect from an FTP mobile game, only done extremely well (especially the combat, which is a blast). Can’t speak to cross play, since it’s not something I’m interested in. But the dev/publisher has been good about supporting HI long term, and I would expect the same for GI. The game is getting some decent coverage (even in Kotaku, if you can imagine that), so we can only hope that it stays relevant for a while.
I don’t think anyone can answer that question with confidence. Heck there’re plenty of full priced games on the PlayStation, PC and Xbox that won’t have support for a decade. I can say miHoYo’s previous game Honkai Impact has been around a couple of years so far and it’s still being regularly updated and remains popular with its fanbase. Genshin Impact is on track at the moment to blow away Honkai in terms of popularity which is a good sign but that’s definitely no guarantee for longevity.
Of course, the presentation is amazing. Especially for a free to play game, this is a new milestone. Yet, everything behind that beautiful hood screams empty gatcha freemium. The characters lack uniqueness. The story is open-ended and feels stretched and pretty boring (so far), so the devs are able to add chapter after chapter to keep players glued forever (or as long as they gonna run the servers). And all of this just tasted too bitter to keep playing. I took a dive for a few hours and was deeply impressed by the game‘s world. Yet, I look for good writing, memorable moments, heart... stuff I‘ve barely seen in a freemium game. I liked that Sky had a wonderful length and beautiful, powerful ending, so I could delete it afterwards and simply ignore all the collectable and event stuff. This one is a pandora‘s box by design. That‘s why I deleted it.
We can disagree about the “empty” part — that’s a matter of opinion (I happen to think that Breath of the Wild is “empty,” too, but some people think it’s epic storytelling). But these kind of open world games (whether they’re premium or FTP) are all designed to keep you playing, for all intents and purposes, indefinitely. You can easily put 100 hours + into Breath of the Wild, Skyrim, or Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. The comparison to Sky or Journey seems strained to me — those games are about something else entirely. The questions for me are: am I enjoying the moment-to-moment gameplay? Is there an interesting world to explore? Am I making meaningful progress without spending money? Is the hero collecting aspect of the game a sidebar or the main feature? For me, GI checks all the right boxes. Could the story or characters be more compelling? Sure. But I even had fun with what people are calling the “boring” prologue. I can picture myself playing this for a long time without ever feeling the need to get a new character. I certainly don’t feel like I’m being tricked by a “Pandora’s Box.”
Then we clearly define "meaningful progress" differently. But I fully understand why people enjoy this kind of game. Yet I still feel better not having it installed any longer. Looking forward to check out The Pathless as open world hopefully done right (for me).
I’ve had a chance to spend a few more hours with the game. You’re missing out, man. This is the Citizen Kane of FTP games — the product of developers who care deeply about world building and gameplay. Case in point: I just finished the first phase of a quest to find a legendary sword that belonged to a pirate ancestor of one of the playable characters. To start the quest, all you get is a parchment with a hand drawn map and a clue in the form of a short poem. You can choose to go back to headquarters and get an extra clue — essentially a solution to the puzzle. Or you can figure things out for yourself, using contextual information in the environment. The quest takes you across a wide swath of the opening region, through multiple combat encounters with creatures of different abilities and fighting styles, a range of beautiful landscapes, optional puzzles and challenges, tons of resources to pick up and cook, multiple treasure chests, ruins to climb, ponds to swim in, NPC to talk to (each with their own little story), day and night cycles, weather changes, and on so on. Once you get through all that, your reward is discovering the entrance of a new Zelda-style dungeon, which you will need to beat to find the treasure. None of this can be done in “auto” mode; none of it involved “kill ten mobs and report to the quest giver.” In other words, all of it unrecognizable in the typical FTP MMO. What sucks is that the only way to give the devs money is to engage in the gatcha portion of the game, which I’m not interested in — and which the game make little effort to sell to you. I would gladly pay these folks $60 for the game as is. And frankly, I can’t imagine how this game would be better if it were premium (which is not to say that it’s perfect). BTW, the game has gotten positive coverage from Kotaku, Game Informer, and Destructoid — not to mention right here in TA. When was the last time that happened with a FTP mobile game?
Yep, even people against the usual F2P model, which includes myself, really should play this. It’s outstanding.
I think we are at a point where we‘re simply used to FTP, the new normal. The industry worked hard for years to make us accept it. Thanks for your example though, sounds lovely, yes. But I‘m currently highly enjoying Slash Quest, close to finishing it.
While I love full premium games the great upside of f2p is that as long as people spend money on the game, in theory, it can keep expanding without the need of a continuous upfront cost. I can’t wait to see how miHoYo is going to expand and add even more content to Genshin over time especially since there’s such a stark contrast between GI and other gatchas in the AppStore (and miHoYo’s Honkai Impact is known for its steady stream of new content.) Personally I picked up the daily premium currency package for 4.99 and plan on picking up the “battle pass” once I reach adventure rank 20. I’ve never felt the need to spend a huge amount of money on character/item collecting but I definitely want to put some money towards this game. It’s all about devs/pubs having control over their content and being paid a decent price for their work. The reason f2p is a viable option for many devs (and the only option for some) is because they’re compensated better than going premium especially on mobile where nobody wants to pay for nothing upfront except for people like us who visit TA or other mobile gaming forums. Genshin Impact would have never been made without the loyalty of those who stuck by and kept spending on Honkai even from the casual spenders. In the coming years the big battlefront won’t be free to play versus premium it will be the rise of server side cloud gaming which gives all the control to the devs/companies and the pros and cons that it will bring to gaming in general.
I am suspicious about the longevity of the game. The low gacha percentage became widely known to the players, and combined with the requirement of 6 duplicates required to maximize a character, even gacha addicts would think twice.
Barring any unfortunate incident with miHoYo I believe the game will do just fine. Honkai Impact drop rates aren’t the greatest either yet people still enjoy it since it’s a great playing mobile gatcha (in a more traditional sense than Genshin) and it must do pretty well for miHoYo since they’re continually releasing large updates for the game years after the game has been released. I’ve seen more buzz for Genshin in the last week than I’ve seen during the entire lifespan for Honkai Impact. I feel there are many who play Honkai and Genshin Impact because they genuinely enjoy the games and are not just in it for the legendary pulls.
Thank goodness I’m not a gacha addict. Haven’t even thought once about the gotcha rate because there doesn’t seem to be any need to care for those just playing for enjoyment. People passing on this are the ones losing. Glad to see it got TA’s GotW.
Well, I am talking about the purchase of IAP, not about the gameplay. The game being nice to free/light users like you is a good thing, but a f2p needs gacha addicts to keep going.
Almost at adventure rank 15 and unless something unbelievably massive hits mobile this year this game has easily been game of the year for me and one of the best RPGs (f2p or premium) I’ve played in a long time. In a previous post I said that Genshin Impact will raise the bar on free to play gatcha RPGs and I stand by that. No matter how one may feel personally about f2p or Genshin this game is great for free to play going forward.
I tried to play this , I really did. Unfortunately I experienced 2 show stopping bugs: (1) The game didn’t show any loading progress indicators when opening the game. Just a white screen with no indication if it had crashed or was just slow loading. Had to wait a full minute before seeing anything on screen (2) Randomly this full screen white bloom blob would appear obstructing scenes. This would make it very challenging to play as the white dazzle would cover over 50% of the screen. During battle I could kinda see health bars but I couldn’t see anything then white dazzle. iPad Pro model # iPad 6,3 type J127AP iOS 14
Sorry to hear about that. 1. The white screen at the beginning is a common issue many are having including myself. I’m not sure if it’s a preload screen that doesn’t show anything or a genuine bug but the easy way around this is to wait about a minute and you should see the miHoYo logo pop up and everything should be good. 2. I have no idea about this one. My best advice would be to check out the Reddit Genshin Impact subreddit they may have some good advice to help you out or the official miHoYo forums. https://www.reddit.com/r/Genshin_Impact/ https://forums.mihoyo.com/genshin/
