Some people play Genshin Impact for the waifus. Others play it for the great soundtrack. I play it to explore new terrain and open lots of treasure chests. I enjoy the combat too, though the enemies are becoming rather gimmicky these days. The lore doesn’t interest me much… or rather it would interest me but it takes too long to come out and is accompanied by too much unskippable dialogue. Some of the events are fun but I wouldn’t log in specifically to do any of them.
Long story short, I like Genshin Impact when it has stuff for me to explore and I don’t like it so much when it doesn’t. But when I like it, I really like it. Since the 2.5 update doesn’t have the stuff I crave, instead of hanging around and whining, I can just put it aside for a while and jump back in when The Chasm is released. According to the latest livestream, it should be coming in the next update, which should be around late March. I think that’s a bit soon for such a major update so I wouldn’t be surprised if it got delayed. But I’ll be happy if it doesnt, because then I’ll have both Enkanomiya and The Chasm to explore, which should keep me going for a long time.
Other things I have to do when I return to Genshin Impact:
1. Build Zhongli and learn to use him. I got him all right, but I was too lazy to farm Geo Hypostasis and Domain of Guyun to build him. That will be a task of first importance, because I’m hoping a good shielder will make content faster and easier to solo. I’m not a fan of co-op in GI because the quality of joins you get is too random. Plus it makes the enemies even tankier and a lot of time is wasted on selecting characters, waiting for others, etc. I already solo 99% of stuff, but if Zhongli can speed up the process, all the better.
2. Save primogems for Kazuha. I don’t need him, but I played him in an event and loved his play style, so he would be nice to have.
3. Save primogems for the weapon banner. I have more than enough characters, so it’s time to optimize them and finalize my teams (I feel like I’ve been saying that for months, but this time I mean it). In particular I want a good spear for Xiao so he can show his full potential. I think he’s still running the Blackcliff Spear or something gnarly like that. And if fishing hasn’t improved by the next time Engulfing Lightning rolls around, I’ll try to pull one for Raiden Shogun. Yes, I’d rather spend thousands of primogems pulling a weapon than fish in Genshin Impact; it’s that bad.
4. Farm artifacts for real. Everyone has a basic set which has carried me pretty far, but they could all be doing much better. Especially when it comes to crit rate and crit damage. I haven’t been motivated to do anything about it so far because artifact farming is very boring and unrewarding and I’m getting along just fine, but I can imagine the enemies getting more HP and more annoying gimmicks down the line.
And that’s it. As you can see, there isn’t much for me to do in Genshin Impact when there’s no new area available. Sooner or later Mihoyo is going to have to change the meta to give players an incentive to pull new characters apart from the waifu and husbando factor. It’s great that there are no useless characters, but it’s too easy to get a good team together and stop pulling entirely. I’m curious to see if/how they will resolve the matter besides the usual power creep gacha games resort to.
Anyway, that’s a problem for them to worry about down the line. For now I’m just saving bandwidth and space by skipping the current update. See you all in 2.6, God willing!
Yeah, I wish there were more permanent endgame content to do in Genshin. I know it’s a tangent to compare it to a MMO because I know Genshin is a single player gacha, but man, when I was playing through Lost Ark’s dungeons, how I wish Genshin would put more effort in that area. More fleshed out dungeons with interesting bosses that would encourage a team of friends to clear……and it doesn’t even seem that hard to implement that kind of repeatable content either. It’d certainly be better than some of the nonsensical parades of mini-games they seem to pump out every patch
Indeed, the mini-games vary widely in quality and enjoyability. I like to think they’re keeping notes of which ones people engage with more so they can feature those more frequently. In theory I’m all in favor of dungeons where I can actually use the characters I’ve painstakingly built. They just have to keep it fresh somehow (randomly generated?) with good rewards and with co-op optional. Combat-focused events like the one with Shiki Taisho were right up my alley, so if we could have more of those with less talking, I might be more motivated to play between new maps.