The game I want to review is Genshin Impact, a popular action role-playing game. Official website: Genshin Impact – Step Into a Vast Magical World of Adventure (mihoyo.com)

I started playing the game several days after its release, and I have been playing for more than one year now.

Game Experience

1. Exploration

When the player just starts playing the game, there are tons of things to explore, the combat system, different characters, unknown areas on the map, etc. This is probably one of the most enjoyable parts of the game, the beautiful game scenes, the great music, the interesting stories and characters, as well as some unexpected but nice details.

The Lens of Problem Solving: There are a lot of puzzles in the game at this stage, some hard content also require player to adjust their combat strategies.

2. Casual Daily Activities

Although the game has a lot of great content, players will still finish doing most quests and exploring most areas eventually. For many games, this means the game is finished, and the player will either play again or quit. But that is not completely true for Genshin Impact, there are many players like me who have finished most content of the game but still play the game everyday.

The experience of the game becomes mostly doing daily quests and farming resources, as well as participating in the various events from the game updates.

The Lens of Time: The gameplay time decreases significantly at this stage, which can be frustrating sometimes. But spending less time on game is actually not a bad thing (can focus more on real life activities).

3. Making Progress

Doing similar things everyday does not sound very interesting, and some people indeed quitted the game after the finishing the “exploration” state of the game. So why are there still many people willing to do the repeating daily events and farming?

As I am one of those people, I think I can share why I am not getting bored with the repeating tasks in some games.

MAKING PROGRESS. Although doing daily events and farming can feel repetitive, but the resources gotten can make the player’s characters stronger and also allow them to pull for new character or weapons. The feeling of getting stronger/making progress is really satisfying, especially when the progress is becoming from some “hard work”. This can also apply to real life, for instance, some people enjoy workout as they can feel that they are getting stronger in the process.

The Lens of Motivation: Making progress is a crucial motivation of the game, how to keep this motivation or add new types of motivation is something that need to be considered carefully.

4. Communication with other Players

A large amount of time I spent in Genshin Impact was chatting, most of the time with the friends I know in real life.

The Lens of Friendship: Features such as visiting other players’ worlds and doing dungeons with other players are nice to have.