Ryan Wu

Genshin Impact used to be a big part of the Ayala community; however, in recent years, there has been less and less talk about this massive game. What happened to it and why has it seemed to die down?

I still remember when I would walk down the halls and get assaulted by talk of the new game around the block called Genshin Impact. I mean, how could people not talk about it obsessively? The game had it all: a captivating story, weekly events that people could do with friends, and collectible anime characters implemented through an addicting gambling system. But just three years after Genshin’s release and during Genshin’s fourth Lantern Rite, there’s hardly any talk about this game at school. What happened?

Genshin is a large time commitment

It’s no understatement that Genshin Impact is a grueling game. You could spend 24 hours a day every day for the next month playing this game and still not be able to collect every character. Seriously. Originally, you had to do four daily commissions and 160 resin worth of domains which roughly equates to around 20 minutes total. This may not seem like a large amount of time, but over the course of a year, 20 minutes a day stacks up. Most high schoolers realized that the game was too big of a commitment during 2022-23 and took breaks or outright quit.

Genshin is an online casino

The scarcity of in-game primo gems means that you have a limited amount of attempts to gamble for your chosen husbando or waifu. This forces players to choose which characters they want to save up for, which can lead to disaster. Typically, if you save up your money for an item, you can guarantee that you will get it. This isn’t fully true with Genshin. Like any good casino, Genshin is a for-profit game. To make people impulsively spend money, Genshin makes its special five-star characters come out in a rotation that lasts 20 days per character. It takes 90 intertwined fates to guarantee a five-star character in Genshin, which is roughly $225 in real life. There is this other mechanic called 50/50 where there is a 50% chance that the character you pull is not the one on the event banner, so if you really want the character on banner and you pull a five-star, you better hope your luck is good. If not, you’d have to spend another 90 intertwined fates bringing your grand total up to $450. It’s no wonder that so many people have quit this game over losing their 50/50s.

Genshin has too much content

Like any good live service game, Genshin is constantly evolving. There is always a new update around the corner with new events, new quests, and most importantly, new characters. However, Genshin seems to be suffering from a rare game phenomenon called “too much stuff to do.” Downloading the game on a computer nowadays requires 160 gigabytes of storage and to play through the whole game’s main quest would take at least a month with no breaks or commitments to any other games. This excess content also causes the quality for mobile players to go down as the developers have to compress the game so that it will run on mobile. Other concerns were that the content coming out did not match what the community wanted. 

“After Sumeru, the game file got too large for me to enjoy playing at a high enough quality on a daily basis. Furthermore, the gameplay got repetitive pretty quickly while the gaps between updates got larger and larger,” Gavin Rivas (12) said. “More importantly, there were not enough hot men coming out. Sure, there’s some that look alright, but they definitely peaked after Albedo and Childe.”

Genshin isn’t the “new game on the block” anymore

Genshin has been out for four whole years. An entire global pandemic has passed since this game was released. In this time, other games have been released, drawing attention away from Genshin. There’s a good chance that you’ve seen someone playing Honkai: Star Rail. The funny thing about Star Rail is that it is made by the same company as Genshin. An even funnier fact is that Star Rail, which was released after Genshin, is outselling Genshin. Mihoyo released a direct competitor to their own game and ended up doubling their profits. People gravitated towards Honkai over Genshin due to its lower barrier to entry and less need for a long commitment. 

“Honkai: Star Rail can be a very hands-off game, due to its turn-based nature. The game features an auto-battle system in every fight, making grinding much easier. The amount of time spent running around and paying attention is generally pretty small, especially for day-to-day play, allowing you to quickly get things done,” Josh Chan (12) said.

Still, there is a dedicated fanbase to Genshin that appreciates all the updates and events coming out. 

“I’ve invested a lot of time into Genshin—exploring, learning the lore, and building characters, so it would be a waste to drop it just because it got boring for a few updates,” Evelyn Le (12) said. “It’s especially true now because I remember a lot of people stopped before the release of the new region because it was getting boring, but with the most recent updates, a lot of really interesting things have been happening with the lore, exploration, and the release of new interesting characters.”

Whether you like it or not, Genshin Impact is here to stay. With the fourth annual Lantern Rite event being recently released, maybe it’s time for some players to dust off their Genshin accounts and take a look around the map. New areas such as Sumeru and Fontaine have yet to be explored by many players and there are still many anime characters to collect.