In the latest issue of PLAY magazine, Genshin Impact developer Hoyoverse acknowledged that the game's overwhelming new-player experience can be "an issue," and one that the studio's working to improve.
"This is an issue we are considering as well," Hoyoverse says of the new-player experience. "While we continue to produce more exciting content, we are also trying to ease the burden of returning players or new players.
"In addition to the ongoing system optimizations and beginner tutorial adjustments, client capacity optimization, and intelligent management of past content are also under development," the team adds.
Technology and time can both be intimidating for new Genshin Impact players. As the game continues to grow, so too does its install size, and this is becoming especially unwieldy for mobile players who can only spend so much of their limited device storage on one game. Hoyoverse has optimized many parts of the game already, and with the new Sumeru region already set to get even larger in update 3.1, it's encouraging to hear that it's continuing work to control the game's growing appetite for gigabytes.
Genshin also faces the MMO problem: you have to work through a ton of content to access the latest and greatest stuff that everyone's excited about. Sumeru, for example, is technically attached to Liyue, one of the game's base areas, but it sits at the end of massive quest chains for regions like Inazuma and subregions like the Chasm.
You don't have to do everything in the game to enjoy Sumeru, but there's definitely some information overload at the start. Hoyoverse has thankfully added quick-start options for many quests and events to speed up the onboarding process, but there's still some hefty catching up baked into the game.
This type of content frontloading can also have a knock-on effect on Genshin Impact's coveted and heavily promoted gacha characters. You could easily use your limited Wishes and Primogems on the Genshin Impact 3.1 banners, for example, only to wind up with a character that requires upgrade materials you won't even be able to get until you clear roughly a zillion quests and/or raise your time-gated Adventure Rank.
This can be especially confusing for new players already trying to get their head around the game's many currencies and resource types, and it seems like one of the biggest opportunities for the "intelligent management of past content" that Hoyoverse describes.
