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Honkai Star Rail has been out for two days and already has some highly-requested quality of life features that Genshin Impact, the previous game from developer Hoyoverse, has yet to add even after more than two years of player feedback.
Daily activities are the focus here, though it's worth noting that many players (myself included) are also envious of Honkai Star Rail's mercifully dark-mode launch screen after years of Genshin Impact flashbanging them on startup. Genshin Impact players have also praised Honkai Star Rail for having an actual, well-written protagonist instead of... Paimon. But the assignments and daily commissions you're meant to clear every day are more important, and they're way better in Star Rail.
Like Genshin, Star Rail lets you assign a few of your characters to automated background tasks that generate specific resources, usually every 20 hours. Unlike Genshin, it also has a single button that lets you collect the materials from your completed assignments and instantly reassign the same characters to start that assignment again. So if I just want to continue farming character XP card assignments, I can keep the farm going with one button, whereas Genshin makes you manually collect, select, assign, and start all five daily assignments individually.
This might sound like a small thing – and let's be honest, it is – but when you have to navigate the same needlessly click-intensive menus every single day for more than two years, you do get tired of clicking dozens of things a day when, as Star Rail has now proven, a single button would suffice.
Daily commissions, the odd-jobs you do to collect your regular allowance of Primogems or Stellar Jades, are in a similar spot. Genshin Impact makes you do four commissions a day, and while most are brisk combat or platforming challenges, at least one of them is usually an annoyingly long, boring, and repetitive NPC conversation or delivery errand. Instead of that crap, Star Rail lets you collect your daily resources by completing a range of tasks that you'd probably do anyway, like leveling up a weapon.
This isn't to say Genshin Impact won't eventually receive quality of life features like this. Even if the two games have different teams, Hoyoverse is clearly aware that these features are in demand. It's just a little eyebrow-raising that some of Star Rail's features, which were unabashedly ripped straight from Genshin right down to the UI, launched in a better state.
Why Honkai Star Rail is the coolest thing to happen to turn-based JRPGs since Persona 5.
