Genshin Impact seems to have come from nowhere. A month ago nobody knew what it was; now ads for it are plastered all over the New York subway and it’s the talk of gaming Twitter. It has raked in more than $100m (£75m) in its first two weeks, placing it among the Chinese games industry’s most successful forays into the global scene. That’s because it’s a pretty good game that looks, sounds and feels expensive, but is available for free – at least at face value.
Like Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – which it heavily resembles, at least on a surface level – Genshin Impact is an action-packed role-playing game with a huge world, chock-full of gorgeous vistas to explore by running, climbing and gliding. The appearance might be similar but the feeling is significantly different. Breath of the Wild’s aesthetic is based on the beauty and solitude of nature; Genshin, by contrast, is the theme park version of that. Where BotW was content to merely hint at hidden treasures and leave vast spaces in-between, you can’t go 30 seconds in Genshin without tripping over some glowy object or mysterious chest. A constant stream of new weapons, trinkets, crafting materials, coins and characters to play with makes it dangerously easy to keep playing.
Where Genshin shines brightest is in combat; it’s almost as complex as a combo-heavy fighting game. Every character has elemental moves (fire, water etc) that combine to create fun special effects: for instance, hitting an enemy with water followed by ice will freeze them instantly. Combine this with the usual attacking, dodging and special moves, and swapping between different anime-styled characters mid-battle, and you find yourself with engaging, involved fights that test both your reflexes and forward planning.
The catch, though, is this: the game makes money by encouraging players to pay for a chance to win new characters. This business model is known in Japanese as “gacha”, after the gachapon vending machines that dispense little randomly selected toys in plastic spheres. Here, this is what we call loot boxes. You can slowly earn most of Genshin Impact’s bewildering array of custom currencies by playing the game – or you can just hand over your credit card details right now for a dice roll and a dopamine shot straight to the brain.
Loot boxes already infest much of the modern gaming landscape, from Fifa to the Avengers, and Genshin is by these standards relatively gentle. Right now, there’s no real “difficulty paywall” where the game becomes impossible to complete without putting money in. And as a Chinese company, developer miHoYo is legally compelled to publish the abysmally low odds of getting rare characters (it’s also legally compelled to censor any messaging deemed anti-CCP), so there’s at least some transparency.
But however the games industry tries to defend these monetisation techniques, this is essentially gambling where you win virtual trinkets instead of money. This insidious practice kills Genshin’s happy-go-lucky vibe. Every chest you open, every dungeon you complete, every level you attain earns you a couple of fake funbucks that you need to roll the dice. A cool character you meet may have an interesting backstory, but if you don’t acquire them on your next pull of the lever then you can’t even begin exploring it. And later in the game, it starts to restrict your rewards based on a timer unless, of course, you spend a couple of dollars to circumvent it.
Playing Genshin Impact means constantly resisting the temptation to spend too much money on it. For players who find it easy to resist the siren call of new shiny things and an ever-expanding collection of characters, it has a lot to offer. It’s playable across PC, PS4 and smartphones (though there are, alas, minor issues on each platform; unwieldy virtual controls on phones, performance problems on console, and questionable button placements). This is a gorgeous, engaging game for a low, low price – but then, the first hit’s always free, isn’t it?
