Hoyoverse released its 5.0 version update of Genshin Impact on Wednesday. While players tend to be excited for flashy additions to the game, such as new characters and regions to explore, this big update also contains more quality-of-life features. The developers have reduced the requirements for people to play late-game content and added a gadget that will cut down on grinding for certain items. But not everyone is thrilled and some long-time Genshin Impact players are lamenting the changes.
The 5.0 Genshin Impact update, called “Flowers Resplendent on the Sun-Scorched Sojourn,” introduced several updates that alleviate grind in the game. The developers made the new region Natlan, and its mainline Archon Quests, open to all early and mid-game players so now players don’t need to slog through dozens of hours of quests just to play the new story or go play in the region. On top of that, the addition of a new gadget makes building strong characters in the game a lot less tedious. In the latest version of the game, players can now custom-design items called artifacts, equipable items that assign character stats, rather than just repetitively playing until they happen to get an artifact optimized for their character.
Now, dedicated players who grinded away in the Genshin Impact mines over the years seem to be a bit salty. In one viral video, a person layered text over gameplay of the character Kazuha jumping off a cliff to say “how it feels knowing i can customize artifacts now.” The top comment under the video, liked more than 13,300 times, said, “these new gens will never understand what i went through to get my xiao artifacts.”
Another video, viewed more than 1.6 million times, shows a person looking happy as the text says, “Genshin Impact: ‘You can now choose your substats for artifacts! No more endless farming!’” After a few moments, the tone of the video switches to muted-down audio and we see a person crouching over a table with the text, “OG Genshin fans who spent countless hours farming for the best artifact.”
In the comment sections of these videos, some people say that changes like these are “making genshin easy.” Here’s my take: I don’t think that taking away the grind and the time investment in a game makes it “easy,” but I can at least empathize. Depending on your luck, it can take weeks or months to farm for the right combination of items for a single character. The process can be arduous and seemingly endless and frequently resulted in me questioning why I played the game.
But even then, I am still glad the developers are making these changes. If anything, this speaks to why the developers should have released features like these sooner. If people hadn’t been grinding it out for all these years — and the team released changes like these sooner — the bitter sting of what could have been wouldn’t feel so bad.
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