Genshin Impact is another one of the much-loved gacha games that are being developed by Asian gaming studios. It’s a terrific game that had an overwhelmingly positive launch. It was released on 28th September 2020, and the chances of it continuing to be a success were slim.
Genshin Impact is so popular because of:
- Frequent and Regular Updates
- Freedom to Play How You Want To
- The Environment
- Availability on Various Platforms
- Being unlike Any Other Mobile Game
- Great Character Abilities and Combos
- Great Marketing
- A Gigantic Map and Playable Areas
- The Character Designs
- The Art Style
However, despite the small, targeted audience the game focuses on, it continues to be a success even after a year and a half of its launch. Wondering why people adore this anime game? Well, you’re on just the right page. Here are ten reasons why we think Genshin became so popular around the globe.
10. Frequent and Regular Updates
Through the past two decades, we’ve seen plenty of games that were great at launch, but they just slowly died down. This wasn’t because they were bad games. This was because their developers didn’t invest any time and money to keep the game fresh. Players kept spending hours in the same exact game until the day that the game just didn’t offer them anything at all.
This is one aspect that Genshin Impact shined brightest. miHoYo, the Chinese developer of the game, paid a ton of attention to keeping the game feeling new as they added new content to the game regularly and frequently. The player count never manages to dip below a certain threshold since people constantly have something new to grind towards
On 16th February 2022, miHoYo will be unveiling patch 2.5 named ‘When the Sakura Bloom.’ This update features a completely brand-new region, Enkanomiya, for the players to explore. The update also includes a new update called “Three Realms Gateway Offerings.” There are a lot of new story quests for the players to check out. They added a new character as well, Yae Miko.
And this is just one of the many many updates that miHoYo will come out with this year. This goes to show the efforts that the devs are putting into the game. Even though it’s a game that mainly focuses on grinding, these new updates continuously make it feel like a story game. This is one of the main contributing factors that make Genshin Impact a fun game to play.
9. Freedom to Play How You Want To
If you take a look at some of the other RPG games that force you to grind side quests, the gameplay usually looks the same for pretty much everyone. They spend hours grinding a certain challenge until they level up enough to finally be able to kill that one boss that’s been staring at them from afar.
But, when we talk about Genshin Impact, the possibilities are truly endless. The game has a never-ending amount of content to offer, and you can do practically whatever you want to. Want to cook some food? Indulge in side quests? Hunt for materials? Play with others? Well, you can do all that and more.
The best part is that you can do everything on your own time. The game doesn’t force you to perform some specific activity at any given time. The game does have a ton of microtransactions, but the franchise doesn’t force you into it. There’s no paywall, and you can choose whether you want to grind or spend some money and speed things along.
The game doesn’t differentiate between a free-to-play player or someone that’s buying into the stronger characters of the game. Both players are able to dominate equally if they know what they’re doing.
8. The Environment
Genshin Impact does a lot of things correctly. But, one of the best aspects of the game is the environment the players get to walk around in. The game is absolutely beautiful with amazing graphics. They’re not realistic or anything, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing for a game of this kind.
With everything the game has to offer, it’s incredibly difficult not to get totally lost in the immersive experience this game has to offer.
Apart from the graphics, the sounds of this game are just phenomenal. miHoYo has an in-house music production team, ‘HOYO-MiX’, that did all the music for the game. This might not seem like a big reason that players like Genshin, but it definitely is, and it’s helping the longevity of Genshin Impact.
7. Available on Various Platforms
The beauty of Genshin Impact doesn’t just lie with its amazing gameplay. The game is an absolute 10/10 apart from it as well. The game is currently playable on PlayStation, Xbox, PC, Android, iOS, and Switch. So, to put it straight, if there’s a device that can run games, Genshin Impact is probably available on it. All of your devices can be synced to the same account, and you can play on the go, wherever you are.
One particular aspect of the game that makes it playable is its tendency to work on lower-end hardware. It works perfectly fine even with decade-old hardware, which shows how optimized the game really is.
This aspect of the game made it popular amongst non-gamers as well who didn’t have the hardware to run it otherwise. And, the ability to play with friends just puts that extra cherry on top enabling new players to join the game really helped with the popularity of the game.
On top of all of that, Genshin did something that even some of the AAA developers aren’t doing. They enabled crossplay across all of their platforms. This means that if you’re running the game on a PS5, your friend can play with you from a mobile device.
6. Unlike Any Other Mobile Game
Yes, we already talked about platforms, but Genshin Impact and its mobile version deserve to be discussed separately. The game has an absolutely spectacular experience on mobile. Think about all the other mainstream games that are on mobile; PUBG, COD, Fortnite. Do any of these games offer a similar experience to their PC/console counterparts?
miHoYo has mapped their entire game onto Android and iOS, and it works phenomenally. It does take up a tremendous amount of space (almost 15 GB on both iOS and Android) and holds the record for the game with the largest size on mobile.
But it ends up giving you the entire PC/console experience, so it’s a pretty fair trade. It looks like a AAA game on mobile, and if you don’t have super-fast internet to play on GeForce Now and other services, Genshin Impact is the closest experience you’re going to get to a AAA game. This is why the game gets 3 million mobile players every day across both iOS and Android.
5. Character Abilities and Combos
One of the primary things that keep the game super fresh is the sheer diversity of character abilities that miHoYo clearly has worked so hard on. The game is carefully designed to ensure that no two characters are similar, and the balance between their gameplay and the way you can combo them is pretty unique.
The game doesn’t restrict you from playing with any specific character at any point in time. This means that you can swap characters as often as you want during boss fights to combo their abilities and deal devastating damage.
The game has several different elements; Anemo, Cryo, Dendro, Electro, Geo, Hydro, and Pyro. These elements are wind, frost, nature, lightning, earth, water, and fire, respectively. Each of these elements has its own distinct reactions, and you can combo them together to amplify damage.
For instance, one of the most common combos you’re going to be executing is superconduct, which happens when you combine Cryo and Electro.
Apart from that, the devs have also made diverse enemies, and bosses keep fighting fresh. Even if you go through endless boss fights, at no point will you feel like you’re doing the same thing over and over again. Every boss has a specific set of abilities, and they will be easier to kill with some characters as compared to the other.
4. Great Marketing
We have to give credit to miHoYo where it is due. Their marketing team is phenomenal and made the difficult decisions that most developers would avoid. The majority of the anime games on the internet these days are using overly sexualized characters to draw a player base. Genshin also has its fair share of beautiful female models in the game, but they didn’t use these as a way to advertise the game.
The promo video for the game that you find on the Play Store and the App Store shows exactly what the game is all about. It’s about 3 minutes in length, which is very long as compared to most games in the stores. The promo starts with a story of Duran and the mountain paired with beautiful slow-paced piano in the background.
The promo shows actual gameplay and includes some of the characters in boss fights. It shows their abilities and the way that bosses interact with players during the fight. It also teases the story a bit and shows the players all they can do in the diverse world of Genshin Impact. It gives players the background, but it doesn’t reveal too much and leaves them longing for more.
3. Gigantic Map and Playable Areas
Another unique aspect of the game that makes it such a beloved title among players is the sheer map size of Genshin Impact. The game released a pretty large map on launch, and miHoYo has continued to go through the game’s existence. As of the 2.2 updates, the game has three nations and one sub-area that make it the gigantic open-world game players have grown to love.
But, how big is the map really? When Inazuma, one of the three nations, was added to the game, the map size tripled. If you include the vast bodies of water, the map is approximately 54 square miles of irl real estate.
The game is often compared to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in a lot of ways. However, even though the map is huge, it still falls short of the map in Breath of the Wild. Though, developers promise to add more content on the map in future updates.
Just like everything we’ve talked about in this blog, the continuous addition to the playable area keeps the game fresh and exciting for everyone. The developers are great at creating unique new regions, and they don’t plan on stopping yet. Their plans are to get a bigger map than Breath of the Wild at some point in the future.
2. Character Designs
Currently, there are 48 playable characters in Genshin Impact. One aspect that makes the game so attractive to the weebs of the world is the way they’ve designed the characters.
miHoYo’s character design team certainly deserves a raise because they’ve done a phenomenal job in making the characters different from each other. The artists created beautiful personalities for each character with well-written backstories that make every character unique.
Other than just the character model and lore, the game does a phenomenal job in creating the ability as well. Every character in the game has its own separate set of distinct abilities that make it a viable character to play.
1. Art Style
Another major factor explaining the overwhelming success of Genshin Impact would be its immaculate art style. There’s no doubt that anime games are one of the most popular genres of games in 2022 and will continue to dominate the rest of the year.
One of the things that makes this genre such a worthy one to invest in would be its fanbase. Anime fans will never give up a chance to consume some sort of anime content. That’s why Genshin Impact has been able to retain such an enormous amount of its player base despite its grind-intensive nature.
Genshin Impact has its moral compass extremely high. The game didn’t fall for the mainstream sexual practices that are common for most recent anime games.
So, it didn’t attract the temporary fanbase. Instead, the game managed to garner an audience that started playing because of the gameplay and stayed because of it. The phenomenal art style got the game the right kind of audience that is still playing the game two years into its release.
Closing Thoughts
There’s a special kind of flair that each successful game needs to get to a point where they can compete with AAA games. While Genshin Impact is far from an indie game, it’s a brilliant example of what developers can do if they play their cards right.
miHoYo pulled a rabbit out of the rat with Genshin Impact, and there’s no doubt that they’re going to continue working on the game and make it one of the most popular RPGs to date.