Genshin Impact 2020 Final Closed Beta Impressions

Genshin Impact is a beautiful upcoming co-op Anime RPG that I, Mrs Stix personally had the pleasure of streaming over on Twitch for the last few days. It’s a free-to-play title from the makers of Honkai Impact and is a title we’ve all been eagerly anticipating for the year or so since its announcement.
I’ve experienced a lot of what the game has to offer, with the exception of the multiplayer aspect since that takes a while to actually unlock. And today, I want to show you my experience within the game.

There’s no denying the fact that Genshin Impact is incredibly beautiful. It’s probably the best looking Anime game I’ve ever played. It offers players a large, completely open world to explore, providing players countless hours of fun in some of the most gorgeous environments I’ve come across in an RPG.  

There are various quests you can take from NPCs in towns, from characters in your party, as part of the story – and, you can find NPCs out in the world just.. chilling, waiting for you to come along and inquire as to what they could possibly be doing standing out in a vineyard. Only to be told, contrary to what you might have initially thought, they were out here looking to scare away some boars and if you could help them get rid of them in the expected time limit. Yup – there’s quite a variety to the quests and NPCs you’ll encounter, and they help populate the world, providing a sense of life.

But at the same time, beneath that sense of freedom, that enormous world lies an issue that some players complained about: And that is that the world at times can feel a little empty. And this is, in my experience, something that isn’t necessarily exclusive to Genshin Impact – even Breath of the Wild and The Witcher had times where you’d feel like you were just wandering around aimlessly trying to make it from Point A to Point B.  So while I can definitely agree and see this as I explore, it’s not much of an issue considering there are teleportation nodes eliminating much of the issue you’d run into running back and forth around the world. And also, I personally just enjoyed going about seeing the scenery and finding little mobs along the way. 

There’s a story – a pretty in-depth one at that which takes you on a wild adventure all over the world of Teyvat, recruiting a variety of different characters each with their own unique personalities and voice actors, as you attempt to save the world. And your sibling. Because they were useless if the intro is anything to go off of. I don’t wanna really spoil anything, so I’ll leave that there, but suffice it to say the story is definitely worth listening to and each language sounds surprisingly good – yes, even the English dub!

Combat isn’t what I’d expected out of the game, nor is it what I’m used to. You can have up to 4 different characters in your group at any given time, and can alternate to each character at the single press of a button. Since you can have parties composed of 4 characters, this means that the game has a level of strategy involved. Large melee boss? Let’s pull out the tank. Lots of adds? AoE-time. Boss keep flying out of range? Time to swap to the mage or archer! Interestingly, the combat is incredibly fluid for a game built with cross-play compatibility in mind between PC, PS4 and Mobile platforms. We’ve played plenty of mobile games and none have ever played like this – this feels like it was designed for consoles and PC as opposed to mobile devices; something a lot of us did not expect. There was one problem I kept running into and that was the fact my character would auto-attack a torch that was behind me when I’m trying to fight an enemy ahead of me. It got a little frustrating at times because I just wanted to focus on what was ahead!

At the end of the day, I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Genshin Impact. Or at least, I enjoyed my solo time in Genshin Impact. This is an online cooperative RPG – allowing 4 players to play together. However the level requirement to participate in cooperative multiplayer was a lot higher than I had anticipated it being.  After over 15 hours in game, I still wasn’t a high enough level to group up with other players, which is fine in the grand scheme of things but I was a little disappointed that I couldn’t play with any of our community over the couple days I streamed the game. Furthermore, it was brought to my attention that story-related progress is only applicable to the owner of the instance, as opposed to the entire group participating. Meaning that once you leave co-op mode, you’ll be back to where you left off in your own game. Additionally, you’re limited in terms of what you can loot, what you can do, what chests you can open – honestly, there are a lot of multiplayer restrictions. In that aspect it reminded me of Code Vein’s co-op.

This might be one of only 2 things I was genuinely disappointed at within the game. The other being the Gacha system. There are currently well over 30 playable characters – which is an astonishingly large number of recruitable characters to play as. Naturally, miHoYo need to make a profit off of the game, this is free-to-play after all. So as one might expect, the vast majority of characters are unlocked via the in-game Gacha system. Yup, the completely random Gacha system, meaning that if you’re as unlucky as I am.. you’ll end up spending a ton of money in-game and seeing no return on investment made. This is perhaps the worst part of the game to me, as I had experienced something akin to this in Arknights – where I spent more money than I would’ve liked trying to unlock heroes, and.. learned my lesson the hard way. 

This is a game that I can see myself getting truly lost in, wasting hours exploring a beautiful, large world filled with exciting new things to seek out and explore, and I look forward to not only continuing to stream this if I’m able to, but also record and stream it when it officially launches. The exact release date is still currently unknown, but here’s hoping it releases this year! What do you guys think of what you’ve seen thus far? Are you excited? I know I am!