honestly it extremely rules that the first of presumably Many breathofthewildlikes is a weirdass chinese action-rpg that infuses a bunch of MMO and gacha progression systems that are just utterly baffling and alien to the Hardcore Gamer design traditions

and also runs on phones

every time I pick up a gacha-vicinity game I get this powerful sensation of like "oh, THIS must be what Non Gamers must feel like if they just pick up, I dunno, the newest Assassin's Creed"

like it so clearly expects you to already be familiar with, like, its own entire context

like genshin impact HAS tutorials. It explains how its combat system works and how to use the UI and a ton of other normal "tutorial" stuff

what it doesn't explain is the seven hundred thousand different types of Gems and how they all interrelate with the IRL money store

You don't get XP from combat (mostly), you get it from DROPS, as consumable items. I think you can buy them? You have to CONSUME them to level up. You have no idea what's rare and what isn't. Everything just costs inscrutable numbers of inscrutable gem icons

I think I'm supposed to have pulled by now? Good thing I know what the word "pull" means in this context because it's sure never going to explain that. What's a banner? The answer is "fuck you" apparently. Serves me right for being a Casual who hasn't played 20 other gachas

and like, I *have* played nonzero gachas; I have a rough idea of how these systems typically work. But all of these games ASSUME YOU KNOW THE DESIGN TRADITION

if I play 2 JRPGs I can, like, reason about their systems and how their designs work. I can't do that with these games

Like it really hammers home this realization that playing and enjoying videogames requires a significant level of cultural immersion in game-design traditions, which can make them WILDLY inapproachable if you didn't start as a kid

(to say nothing of internet gamer gatekeeping)

it's a really wild experience to pick these games up and feel the same sense of bafflement that I felt trying to comprehend an N64 controller as an 8 year old lol

Anyway I guess this is the Genshin Impact thread now so I might as well loop this on in here

Impressions thus far: Genshin Impact is Good and also Confusing as Hell

why are there are two DIFFERENT currencies for pulls

there are Special Gems that you use to buy Pull Gems, but there are two different kinds of Pull Gems that correspond to different Banners so you can't just mass-convert your Special Gems to Pull Gems unless you know ahead of time which Banners you need them for

I still don't really know what game-design purpose is served by having like hundreds of different currencies that turn into each other. You'd think it would relate to monetization, but most of them don't even involve the cash shop; it's seemingly just complexity for its own sake

Arknights was like this too. I guess it's part of the "forever game" progression model? Just gives you more Things to put in chests? Like these games are very much about CONSTANTLY giving the player "rewards" for the most trivial of actions, so you've gotta dilute the loot pool

alright I'm gonna do it

I'm gonna turn my gems into bigger gems

and then I'm gonna turn the bigger gems into anime girls

and then I'm gonna find out if they turn into good anime girls or not

...the bigger gems turned into an anime girl that I already had, so SHE turned into several OTHER gems

this, is gameing

can't have a fantasy setting without catholicism

there's a secret staircase behind this altar just kind of chilling here in the open

you can't enter it and none of the NPCs mention it

just kind of a normal, everyday feature of a cathedral I guess

gonna revolutionize this industry by releasing a game where you just pay a fixed cost at the beginning and then it just comes with all the anime girls already in there

videogame elevators: always good

man as someone who Doesn't Go Here this stuff looks absolutely insane

you could buy dozens of whole-ass videogames for that? I mean I get the appeal of Rare Anime Girls but you could just go on skeb and straight up commission hentai artists if you're dropping this much

there are other ways to spend money that use weird time gates so price per pull is a lot lower but you have to sign on every day to get your gems

as soon as you get past the basic gameplay and start dealing with the meta this turns into, like, a job that pays negative dollars

whoever did the voice acting for Paimon was having an absolute blast lmao

genshin impact is generally extremely polished but it has a lot of hilarious We Have Never Made A PC Game Before issues

You have to manually enable controller support every time the game starts, some parts of the UI can only be accessed by mouse, DPI scaling breaks mouse coords

also it correctly uses button icons for xbox controllers, but uses switch/japanese-playstation layout, so B is confirm and A is cancel, which is absolutely brain-melting if your brain still knows it's holding an xbox controller lol

I'm not even dunking on them here; they clearly know what they're doing as far as actual craft is concerned. The sheer number of totally weird gotchas on PC is absurd and it's pretty funny seeing an otherwise-accomplished studio whiff them entirely

for some reason the voice acting and the subtitles are occasionally COMPLETELY DIFFERENT and it's absolutely hilarious every time

Like sometimes it'll just be one or two words or slightly different phrasing, and sometimes it an actually totally different translation that means roughly the same thing, and then SOMETIMES it's like a totally different line that might still work in context

I have no idea how this happened but it's amazing

Fischl is good because when she takes damage she yells INSUBORDINATION

tfw insufficient luminous sands from guyun

am I misunderstanding some systems or is Geo just a worthless element

like okay if the cooldowns are up and I've got a target within reach with the desired element I can hopefully spawn a gem that I can run over that will spawn an elemental shield that's weak to like 3 other elements

like the only reaction it ever has with anything is "spawn a gem that spawns a shield on pickup"

so it does no damage, it's incredibly complicated to actually use defensively, and even then it's only useful if your enemies all use EXACTLY 1 element?

man I was not prepared for how good the music gets when you go to Liyue

A really good trick is the combat music slowly gets more and more hype as it goes on, essentially under the assumption that if you're in combat for a long time you must be fighting something big

(BotW did this too but I there are probably earlier examples I'm forgetting)

extremely funny aspect of team composition:

in addition to needing a good spread of elements, you also need at least one (1) character with the Tall skeleton because they run and climb DRAMATICALLY faster than the other characters lmao

omg this cutscene spawned a bunch of enemies to introduce a combat encounter but then I didn't push B for a while

Amber you are extremely cute but I really really need a fire character who can do Any DPS Whatsoever

Fischl is good

no thoughts head empty

I appreciate that genshin impact wants to give all the girls cute skirts but doesn't want to go all-in on anime panty shots so instead everyone wears a slightly different pair of elaborately-designed hotpants

think I'm just about Done with genshin impact tbh

the new banner doesn't have any of the characters I want, and I'm not about to blow everything on the like 0.06% chance of pulling them from the standard banner lmao

it's a pretty fun videogame but if there was a way to just, like buy it and then play it and then finish it I'd be much happier lol

all of the weird Forever Game mmo-loop stuff just kinda works to its detriment

part of this is just my brain/tastes obv; I don't usually like MMOs either

but it has an ENORMOUS amount of incentives built into its design to keep you logging on and playing every day, but it makes no particular argument for WHY you should do that beyond filling progress bars

again, I realize Make Numbers Go Up is like a whole end unto itself for some people

but like... the *fun* part is the BotW exploration/climbing/gliding/discovery stuff, and the numbers barely even matter there. It doesn't even gate off zones by character level really

like say I spent ten thousand dollars and absolutely maxed out an anime girl

Numbers would go up but the combat system still works exactly the same way. I could tackle higher-level dungeons, but all that means is the enemy numbers are scaled equivalent to my anime girl numbers

if pouring money into anime girls meant I could sprint forever and glide at 80mph and do kickflips off of mountains or something I'd probably be tempted lol

but the perpetual engagement/monetization hooks aren't linked to the part of the game that's actually fun, for some reason