Two years ago, I visited Mondstadt, a large city fortified by massive cobbelstone walls in the northern parts of Tevyat. an ordinary-looking city fortified by massive cobblestone walls. No matter where I would wander off from here, I was met with acres of grasslands, soaring hilltops, and primitive-looking monsters donning masks ready to chase me with wooden clubs. Things looked so simple in Genshin Impact, and the plot sounded serviceable—cleansing a now-corrupt dragon who once protected the entire frontier for thousands of years.
Fast-forward to today, and I find myself in a freshly added nation of scholars, Sumeru, overwhelmed with the lush foliage of the rainforest and the diversity of biomes contained therein. From giant fluorescent mushrooms, to a major city built into a divine tree, every turn revealed something strikingly different. Head westward, and you’ll come upon miles of sand dunes with colossal mausoleums hiding remnants of the past; the only greenery as far as the eye can see being that of the occasional oasis. Things in Sumeru are grander than in any major region previously seen in Genshin Impact.
And that’s exactly what a live-service game should be, each major content update raising the previously established quality bar.
For years, the touted appeal of “live service games” was an ever-growing and evolving experience. While most of these games do grow and evolve, their evolution all too often entails evolving from a broken release to a more stable one. Consider all the major live-service releases of these past years – Anthem, Halo Infinite (multiplayer), Fallout 76, No Man’s Sky, Rainbow Six: Siege, For Honor, and Call of Duty, to name a few. If you have played even half of them, you’ll recall that none of these exactly hit the ground running. In contrast, Genshin Impact had a very humble but immaculate beginning. No major bugs, solid content, and great overall value. Then it took strides, seamlessly, from update to update, and things kept getting better.
The game doesn’t just try to outperform what existed before, but also greatly diversifies its content with each release. Just recently, a full-fledged card game mode, Genius Invokation TCG, was added. It had me occupied for weeks, as the rules are simple and are based on the game’s core tenets: teamwork and elemental reaction. Instead of boasting an entirely new system, it makes you feel like you’re in familiar territory, and you don’t get overwhelmed—or intimidated— by the complex sets of rules to rehearse. Similar to the main game, the mode receives regular updates, with cards added periodically and small tweaks here and there.
As with any live-service game, there are limited-time events as well. But these events in Genshin Impact don’t just confine themselves to combat, and sometimes get a bit silly (but in a good way). Are you telling me you’re not interested in taking bartender academy lessons to brew lemon tea together while the world outside is facing all kinds of perils and probably needs your assistance? Or stealthily saving “little” animals from the ninja dogs that kidnapped them?
That’s not all. Other limited events added throughout the game include: prop hunt, a quasi-Super Mario Maker mode, drum rhythm-game, block breaker, tower-defense mode, city-building, and a lot more in terms of content variety. The best part? All of that can be enjoyed for absolutely no cost. Not only do they offer variety but also work as, sort of, a nice little break from the hum-drum of daily endgame grind and combat.
Even if we consider service games that didn’t have a disastrous start, they often end up doing something silly eventually, like design decisions that end up disrespecting your time and dedication towards it. For instance, just a year into the game’s lifecycle, The Division 2 raised the gear level cap and locked those additional levels behind a $40 DLC. A year’s worth of grinding up to that point was suddenly no longer competitive, and you had to cough up to progress.
Other live-service games sideline or phase out previous content. Enjoying most service games without pouring hundreds of hours of grinding in is rarely possible, and asking you to simply redo that in some pricey slab of new content not only sounds daunting but is tiring.
Genshin Impact itself doesn’t sport a blemish-free balancing or gear system, but having spent over a thousand hours in it over the course of two years, I never felt the game disrespected the work I put into building my characters. I’m still rocking with my Xiao double-geo team that I’ve had since about five months into the game. The team can clear any content the game throws at them, and I clear the game’s hardest content, Spiral Abyss, in a similar amount of time as more recent teams are capable of. Almost all limited banner characters (locked behind gacha and available for a limited amount of time) are capable of holding their own.
Genshin Impact isn’t without issues. The game gates you with resin when it comes to grinding gears or raising characters—similar to energy systems in other mobile games that limit your amount of runs. Conveniently, you can lose the restriction a bit by spending money.
There are occasional meta shifts as well, with the new element Dendro making some units more powerful and some less valuable—as Dendro-related team compositions and reactions are packing a stronger punch than all other elemental teams. Some characters that were released early on, like Diluc and Klee, have now been phased out. But the game’s lack of endgame, for better or worse, never compels you to wish for the meta-est characters, which also enables you to enjoy the game at your own pace.
Most live service games also struggle to keep the game stable and running with each update (hello, Warzone). Surprisingly, I have never faced any server issues while playing Genshin and each update transition is smooth. The industry has seen an influx of live service games in the past couple of years, and the trend is showing no signs of slowing. While it feels weird to advocate for a mobile gacha game (a genre often associated with predatory monetization), the fact is that the industry should look up to Genshin as a reference for the right amount and quality of content a service title needs.
