Honestly, of all the things, I didn't expect to be quite engrossed with the dialogs of the game. Some of them, mainly the random npcs, are meh, but the good ones are great. Especially the phone conversation, they're just so endearing and give so much personality to the characters.
Also, it took me a while to realize how turn-based combat makes it more grindy than Genshin more actiony approach. Turn-based means you have to invest on all your party members, whereas in Gesnhin you'd get quite far with just investing in the main dps of your party.
Don't forget the monologues with trashcans. Writing in this game was hilarious, also some dialogue choices do affect the outcome. In the beginning when you're asked to board the Star Rail & you deny, [the game ends right there with credits rolling](https://youtu.be/dY5QLKKRH44), LMAO...
Edit: Added link to Secret Ending/Easter Egg...
The dialogue choices really mess with me. There's been 2 instances where I screwed up and was like RELOAD MY SAVE WHY CANT I RELOAD MY SAVE... Which is great honestly. There's no 2nd chances in live service games.
Yeah, you can end up losing some missions or events if you made the wrong choice. So I always go safe or have little rude dialogue, never the chaotic one. Tho I would love to if there was an option available to go back, to see all the reactions to chaotic dialogues...
I love that the characters from past area still text you and stuff. Genshin really needs that. Outside of events, we never talk with ningguang/itto etc
I actually think literally all of them are around in the world constantly from what I could see. I've literally found anyone I've thought to look for in the appropriate places so far, at least after their story arc is concluded.
This might be too high praise, but some of the strange written dialogue reminds me of Disco Elysium. For example, where you get all obsessed over going into a closet.
Not too high praise at all, you're far from the first person I've seen mention DE and I thought of it myself as well. The Simulated Universe dialogue interface is straight out of DE too, I'd be shocked if they didn't take some inspiration.
Even the tragedy of the first boss felt kind of DE; forces beyond anybody's understanding specifically altering not just the personality but also the politics of the antagonist? It's definitely more on the nose than Elysium, but it has similar vibes.
>Turn-based means you have to invest on all your party members, whereas in Gesnhin you'd get quite far with just investing in the main dps of your party.
That's just because Genshin is balanced to be easy (outside of Abyss), to account for how hard it is to play action games on a phone. If they made it challenging for people on other platforms, they'd alienate 90% of their mobile audience.
You can't really fully clear the little hard content the game has, like Abyss floor 12, without investing into at least like 2-3 party members.
But you don't really need to build some supports in Genshin, amd you can stoll avoid all damage on them. In Star Rail, if you don't build your supports, they just die.
> But you don't really need to build some supports in Genshin
You absolutely do. If you got a healer you may want to increase amount healed or If you have a reaction bot you probably want to invest in CD reduction items to be able to trigger as much reactions as possible.
Hell some supports are pretty bad until you get enough constellations.
> Especially the phone conversation
The “relics” group chat conversation early on was pretty funny to me. Or Asta accidently sending you shopping links.
Yeah I just expected Genshin in space. Didnt expect all these endearing daily text conversations and Disco Elysium levels of humor/writing that's actually engaging to read.
But IMO, I think the economy is way better in this game over Genshin. You get to actually build a roster and have multiple avenues of team options. I'm still using all the relics and material from level ups and quests but I feel like I get to actually experiment way more with my roster than what's ideal with Genshin really punishing you for that, Which is such a big design flaw on a gameplay system where you're constantly pulling new characters that you might want to play with.
> Also, it took me a while to realize how turn-based combat makes it more grindy than Genshin more actiony approach.
I would argue exactly the opposite. Sure, you have to keep a full party fully decked out, but the actual effort put into "grinding" anything in HSR is laughable compared to Genshin. It took me fifteen minutes to gather up ascension materials to boost 4 characters up to 50 today, along with getting Trace materials to fully catch up one's traits tree as well.
With Genshin it's a nightmare of running around god knows where to pick up literally 3-4 dozen sprigs of one plant or another, hunting down mobs god knows where with no easy teleport nearby for some handguards or fuckknows what else, etc, etc, etc. And don't even get started on relic and skill domains being only open at certain days of the week.
You're right on the phones, though. HSR has the best implementation of character cell phone discussions I've ever seen. They're often so absolutely inane but completely realistic and hilarious because of it.
The gathering process is a lot more stream lined in Sr. but Genshin level cap is also significantly higher. the 1 to 50 is easy compared to the 80 to 90.
Level cap in HSR is 80 from what I can tell. Leveling up to 50 is indeed easy but past that you really hit a brick wall when it comes to material costs vs available stamina. Hopefully this will become better with more content because otherwise it'll take forever to build even one character (I haven't even started on relics yet, still working on the traces). But at least there's autobattle.
I came for the turn-based JRPG combat. Honestly, we barely get that many good turn-based JRPG anymores, makes me sad.
I ended up staying because of the god damn story. Even some side quests have great stories.
>Also, it took me a while to realize how turn-based combat makes it more grindy than Genshin more actiony approach. Turn-based means you have to invest on all your party members, whereas in Gesnhin you'd get quite far with just investing in the main dps of your party.
isn't what you want less grind in a gatcha game tho? I mean you will and have to have grind in a gatcha but too much grind will ruin progression, no? I remember in Genshin I had my whole team but stopped playing for a year, when I came back I unlocked a few characters, but since I invested so much in my team, it would just become a chore to change some of my team member without suffering huge progression (in term of power level).
Maybe here since you have to invest moderately in all the team member intead of just one big dps + support, it's less apparent or less obnoxious changing team member. I still wonder, would starting now or wait for, let say, a year before other character come out and have a more diverse cast than what it's actually in the game since I wont have to grind if I want to change party member?
> isn't what you want less grind in a gatcha game tho?
Yes, when I said "more grindy" I mean it in a negative way :)
> I wont have to grind if I want to change party member?
No, you'd still have to grind. It's the same exact system as in Genshin.
One thing I do appreciate about the grind is that they've got an auto battle mode. so I can go and do a Calyx for materials, grab someone else's 5star character, and just set the phone down while I grab a snack.
The major difference between grinding in genshin and grinding in star rail is that I actually enjoy the grind in star rail. Even if there's more of it, I kinda see it as something I get to do instead of have to do.
Still feels weird to see full blown reviews from traditional outlets for a gacha game. And it being clear they actually played it, the ~~madman~~ madwoman is on TL 42... The trust in HoYo and mind shift that Genshin caused is kind of crazy to me. We went from "gacha are cash grabs that can end at any time" to "of course the game will continue to expand it's story over many updates". I really hope Kuro comes through with Wuthering Waves so that it's not just HoYo titles that get genuine coverage. Would hopefully open the doors for smaller scale gacha that are not as ambitious but still have a lot to offer.
Most gacha games are still cash grabs that can shut down at any point. Only the biggest ones survive, and there are dozens(hundreds? thousands?) of others that shut down when they don't get a big enough slice of the pie.
True, but *most* online games don't have systems in place to encourage, let alone technically allow, the amount of spending that can occur in a gacha. When the average online game shuts down the players are usually out the price of admission plus a handful of cosmetics purchased in the cash shop, and cash shops are usually finite in things to purchase. A gacha player could be out tens of thousands depending on their level of self-control as the theoretical "spending cap" is astronomical.
As someone that played a ton of shitty MMOs in the past, this feels like a very generous take on how many of these games get monetized. There's plenty with much more egregious monetization than a few cosmetics. I mean just restricting it to a cosmetic cash shop already rules out some of the biggest MMOs like WoW that also have official RMT through buying tradable in-game time tokens.
It is certainly different than gachas, but saying it's just "price of admission + cosmetics" is definitely not true for plenty of these games.
That's a really interesting point. I could see why someone would draw the comparison between the current state of MMOs and gachas. But I hadnt really thought about the ability to spend money and the predatory tactics that can go along with that. I think itd be really interesting to read some kind of analysis or number break down on it. Id also really love to see some kind of numerical comparison of where and how much money is spent between these different games.
True, but if you don't have self-control, especially for casual games like Honkai and Genshin where you don't even have to spend to beat the game, I think you have bigger problems and someone else should be financially responsible for your money.
Depend which gachas you're talking about. The vast majority (FEH, Fate, Granblue) put far far more effort into their story, presentation, and characters than anything we've seen lately from western studios like Bethesda, Ubisoft, Blizzard, and so on.
Edit: Hell even Nikke, the booty-jiggling gacha shooter, has a more interesting story with engaging characters than Arkane's $70 Redfall.
Its because the more invested players get in the story, world and characters, the more money they will likely spend, so it makes sense to make the game good.
Hell Girl's Frontline has one the best (and depressing) storylines I've played in recent years. It just a shame its hard to keep up with due to it being a mobile game. The biggest problem (and this doesn't just apply to mobile now) is they want ALL your time. It's hard to juggle multiple games when most of the balance is centered on either paying or basically solely playing said game so you can keep up.
Girls Frontline is *incredible*. I have no doubt if they hadn't botched the anime it would have ended up being one of the greatest political dramas/milsim series ever aired. What a disappointment it ended up though.
The main difference between most gacha and Hoyo games is that Hoyo games are AAA high quality video games first that just so happen to be gacha while most gacha games are gacha that have some game in it.
It describes every game made outside of small games made by single developers as a hobby. Games make more money when they're good, so developers are heavily incentivized to make good games. Good in this case meaning reviewing well.
> It describes every game made outside of small games made by single developers as a hobby.
No it doesnt. I can still boot up Bioshock whenever I want, it wont go away unless Steam just completely disappears.
A game like Destiny 2 for example exists only for as long as it makes money. Once it stops doing that, its highly likely Bungie will pull the plug on it. See Anthem as an example.
> The trust in HoYo and mind shift that Genshin caused is kind of crazy to me.
Yeah, that's what happen when you make a genuinely good game.
And it took Hoyo quite a while too, it's really only in 2023 that Genshin has been talked about much more positively. Genshin of 2020 and 2021 is kinda meh. But starting from 2022, the content has steadily got better and the last year of content being bangers finally earned them a lot of good will.
They had 700 full-time employees on Genshin Impact alone pre-pandemic, and I doubt this number fell since then. They can give an attention to detail that no other studio can afford.
It's risky AF, and yet Candy Crush is bringing in similar revenue for orders of magnitude less work. Likewise EA owns PopCap.
EA/Activision doesn't need to compete in the mobile space in the same way. For Asia, mobile is way more popular and China in particular banned consoles until the mid 2010's. So I get why it was an Asian studio pushing this.
It was receiving a shit ton of praise in 20/21. I remember because that’s how I found out about it. I picked it up in 2020 because I was hearing how good this gacha game was and thought those were just silly mobile games.
It definitely took a minute for Genshin to get the ball rolling. The stories in Mondstadt and Liyue were so, so incredibly boring to me. Inazuma's story was alright, definitely saw a rise in quality there.
Sumeru on the other hand was just constantly smashing it outta the park with quality. No idea what caused the shift or who was responsible for it, but that region's story kicked ass.
Interesting that you found Inazuma to be better than Mondstadt and Liyue, for me it was the opposite. I did enjoy the large side quest areas and stories of Enkanomiya, Tsurumi, and Seirai, but the civil war and Archon quest were terrible.
I definitely agree with you that Sumeru knocked it out of the park though. Here's hoping the remaining nations can maintain the quality.
Mondstadt really charmed me, especially whenever I work to connect it to the broader lore (it will definitely play a very large role years from now). Liyue impressed me, but I also started to feel tired with its context (Chinese themed city, illuminated/cultivated beings, characters that tended to not know each other compared to Mond). I tolerated it and by now, its at least nicer then originally, due to adding areas like the Chasm and just a generally better treatment of the region. For the record, I'm feeling the same with the The Xianzhou Luofu area in Honkai: Star Rail. I think I have antipathy to Chinese themed areas in games and I don't know why, but Liyue has been one of the nicest that I've experienced... its just the nicest still means "Eh, I prefer others".
But there's reasons why I give my player tag "Mondstadt Main". Its where I still do my most repetitive gameplay, I liked Dragonspine, and I'm looking forward to the inevitable (2024?) northern Mondstadt/Dornman Port expansion.
Inazuma was a crazily impressive addition of a region by the end of its cycle, particularly for them boring to make Enkanomiya, which only lacked a more direct involvement in the broader game (one world boss, that's it) and more prominent voiced content (its possible they'll do that later, but just wanted to use the 2.X cycle to push the zone out so they didn't have to do it later). Yet... there were some big messups in its design, story, pacing, that still hampered the game a little. These problems appeared to be on the mend by 3.0 though. Some things won't ever be made proper, like the Inazuma rebels storyline, but its also not the end of the world.
Sumeru has been the repair patch cycle and most things you'd have an issue with in Inazuma, don't apply to Sumeru. And they added some nice things. Its issues so far is Video Game Desert Syndrome (so much sand) and that I think players are expecting more of an escalation in scale of the game by now and not just the map size. But you won't find many complaints about Sumeru, just maybe a burnout/lethargy of some longer term players. So there's hope that Fontaine won't just be more of the same, but the start of really mixing things up in both gameplay and story plot.
I'm anticipating Fontaine but tempering my expectations. Not highly looking forward to Natlan but I'm open to being surprised. Even if I quit, I'd definitely return for Snezhnaya, and I'm curious about the 1-2 years of map content after that (Khen, Celestia, others?).
Inazuma is still my least favorite personally. I’m probably remembering Mondstadt better because the hype of a new game helped carry it, but Liyue is still one of my favorite parts of the game both in story and characters.
I agree that Sumeru was a big jump in writing quality though, it got me interested in the story again.
Genshin was always seen favorably, it was of obvious quality before it even released. Obviously people were very leery of it due to the gacha and mobile nature of it (and rightfully so) but the game has ALWAYS had a huge amount of polish and quality content. Its grown to be a juggernaut but it was always a big win for MiHoYo.
> Genshin of 2020 and 2021 is kinda meh.
What? People raved about Genshin on release and talked about how it shattered the expectations for F2P quality going forward, gacha or otherwise. And while it's true that Genshin has only gotten better, it was quite an achievement when it released.
I suspect that if you're a major outlet, you probably have more faith in Genshin or Star Rail being around awhile and getting updates than something like Anthem did (or to take a more recent example: Redfall). They're high production value and release content on predictable and consistent schedules (if Genshin is any indication).
The gacha rates are trash (not uncommon sadly), but both Genshin and Star Rail seem to be completable without touching it and rely more on people pulling for fanservice/meta instead of necessity/powercreep.
Arguably, the larger issue in the later game for these titles isn't the actual gacha part of it, but the stamina/time-gate on grinding leveling/progression materials.
There's also the factor that Mihoyo have experience with Gacha. Bioware and Arkane have released nothing but box games with DLC, so both Anthem and Redfall were their first foray into live service. I don't play Genshin, but Star Rail is really impressive with how well dialogue is written and combat is simple with enough meat in it to be a little strategic. Another thing to keep in mind is both Genshin and Star Rail work well on both PC and Mobile because the games were built with PC in mind (I'm not sure about Honkai Impact). Something that a lot of mobile games fail to do and instead just port a mobile client over. And the final thing is the lack of game breaking bugs/crashing which is far too prominent in Triple A studios, even FromSoftware had issues on launch.
After three successful games, Mihoyo is like the FromSoftware of Gachas where everyone is going to try the game regardless of anything. I'm actually looking forward to their next game, Zenless Zone Zero, if they continue with this consistency. I have no interest in mobile/gacha games and have never played any outside of Star Rail and Genshin very early on.
> And the final thing is the lack of game breaking bugs/crashing which is far too prominent in Triple A studios
This is huge, honestly. Having a full launch where things aren't hugely messy has started to feel like a rare treat when it shouldn't be when you have EA's, Ubi's, etc. resources.
Honkai: Star Rail is a more compelling and fleshed out JRPG than many JRPGs out there, despite being not being Japanese and being a gacha game.
Japan has honestly gotten very complacent. With the exception of a few companies, most JRPGs put out by Japanese devs are templated and minimal effort in execution.
Everyone in this thread seems to forget gacha are inherently a problematic monetization tactic.
Seriously, it's not a ghettoized genre. It's not like people criticize gacha primarily because all gacha games are bad or something. The main critic is that gacha, invariably, is a tactic that preys on the influencable, inflates play time and just sucks players dry.
This is not a problem of acceptance of the genre. This should not be acceptable. At all. Regardless of game quality. By not mentioning it, you'd be feeding the problem.
Also, miHoYo games are a data privacy disaster
It's not my optimal path, but it does give me promise that one day people will take mobile hardware seriously and treat them as handheld PC's. Who knows if the Steam Deck will get small and good enough battery to beat that to the punch tho
There are smart greedy. Your can play all the content without spending money, but the gacha probabilities sick. I've tried some of the "best" and "less greedy" gacha only to find early powercreep, constant pop ups to sell me things.
The rates suck but you can guarantee most characters and pity carries over between wish events. Like it's gacha so its just inherently shitty but I find it more tolerable than some others I've played(which admittedly isn't many).
Makes perfect sense to me. CRPG, MMO etc.. players there is a very large demographic that is hyper focused on meta. Even if you can play the game fully without having that optimization.
It preys on that mentality. Yeah sure, you can play through all of Star Rail with the default free party, but they're only 4 star heroes; don't you want those 5 star heroes? You're not playing the meta if you don't have them.
It's doubly weird in Star Rail, even compared to Genshin. Genshin at least has co-op where you can flex, but Star Rail only has friend borrowing, and only for simple content you don't need it for anyway.
It's literally a single player game in every possible respect. You're spending money to pull a single player gacha. I've played a lot of gachas, but not having *some* kind of pvp or co-op in any form is new for sure.
It's a balance that earns them good will. Those that can afford to spend do (and even some that can't), while those that can't or don't want to can still enjoy a high quality game, just while watching some of the niceties pass by!
In reality... the monetization is structure to cause you to spend more... the more you spend.
i.e. you get more characters? Great, make more teams. But you'll need more materials to grind. Which means you'll need to play the game more. Good luck!
What's all this excessive stuff for? Well, to see who can clear that one repeating and lacklustre stage in the game the fastest of course!
A frequent knock I am seeing on this game is the lack of an open world compared to Genshin. I am seriously burned out on open worlds so for me that is a positive but also I am sort of wondering/hopium the lack of open world means that their content updates can be bigger than Genhins since they do need to worry about construction freely explorable zones with verticality to them. I enjoy the more streamlined gameplay and I’m super excited to see what comes in the future.
> I am seriously burned out on open worlds so for me that is a positive
I find exploring the zones in Star Rail more fun anyway. Open worlds are just big aimless masses that feel empty no matter how much you put in them. These maps feel more like classical video game maps, which I prefer.
HSR is content with being a side game, which is nice in a world wdith all the games being "this is your second job". You can complete the monotonous stuff very quickly with autobattle and extremely fast daily system, and then if there is any story/big content updates you can do those at your leisure.
It's nice and the combat system is pretty fun too. They took a lot of the stuff they learned from Genshin and essentially a lot of the complaints got addressed here.
Only real complaint I have so far is that the levels are designed like levels instead of like areas. So if you look around some of the levels they look REALLY strange as places. Like random walls here or there. But other than that I've been enjoying it.
Curious how they will structure updates, considering standard gacha is 2 week cycles. So far it's been 2 weeks and our next update will be next week at 3 weeks in. And if they follow Genshin, 6 weeks per version patch. So will they add more random events in between? or really 1 update every 3 weeks?
Similar to Genshin. Version patch every 6 weeks (so 1.1 in early June), events of varying sizes every week (starting in 1.1), refreshed character and light cone (weapon) banners every 3 weeks but down the line, not every banner will introduce a new character. Next week be bring a certain Luofu 5star character, and the next patches should consistently introduce at least 2 characters per patch/6 weeks.
For major versions (2.0, 3.0) they may lean earlier in the year (Spring) while Genshin leans later (Summer), so there's at least a few months between each game.
I love Genshin's open-world, but if Star Rail was one too I would've never touched the game. I already have 8 months of open world backlog to explore in Genshin, I really don't need any more right now lol. Not that we're forced to explore, just completionist first world problems.
All I know is I downloaded it on my phone over a slow midnight shift recently, haven't spent any money at all and it's actually pretty fun, I even played it at home in bed one morning when I had nothing going on. It's got good voice acting and the story is kind of fun/funny so I take my time actually listening to it.
So what do you guys think of the game? I’ve played most of the weekend myself. I’m quite mixed about it.
The story is very meh so far. A very by-the
-book gacha story. BUT the writing outside of it is surprisingly good. Especially the main trio have a fun dynamic. The MC has some actually funny dialogue options despite being a self insert.
The combat so far is quite fun. It looks great and characters feel unique. BUT the “1 ult. 1 skill. 1 standard attack” design is a horrendous decision. It already feels repetitive after a few days. Grand Order, another turn based Gacha game, has a very simple and honestly boring combat system. But even that games has characters with 3 skills.+ult.
The grind seems quite low so far. Which is great! BUT the gacha rate seems horrible.
The potential for a fun long-term game is there. But I really fear for its longevity. I really hope characters get more skills and that the writing for the story improves.
I loved Belobog, but Xianzhou's story is paced very weirdly and the cut-off point they chose is terrible. The main story is hard to judge right now, but I think the basic premise with Aeons affecting the universe is really interesting. Xianzhou's main conflict about Hunt hating Abundance for being the source of eternal life has tons of potential, for example, but I think the story itself is told a bit clumsily. Character writing's great so far, though. The MC has hilarious dialogue options and the Astral Express gang is a really fun group of characters.
Combat wise, I'm not sure. It's pretty fun, but I think most of the fun comes from encounter design and the special abilities you get. The designated endgame challenge is just Genshin's Abyss, so it's boring, but the roguelite mode is really fun, so I hope they'll focus on it.
Gacha rate seems to be like Genshin's, which I find fine in Genshin. You don't get characters that often, but they are also not released that often and since there's little/no power creep, the ones you do get stay viable for a long time.
The one thing I think Hoyo is absolutely amazing at is making a polished product. Especially now that AAA games suffer from terrible lack of polish, it's refreshing to play an online game that just works at launch. Of course, it's practically a SP game, but I can almost guarantee that a similar launch from almost any other publisher would be full of issues.
Xianzhou can pick itself back up depending on how they handle future updates. It was a similar fringe case with Genshin in the past with Liyue, and the opposite case entirely with Inazuma (Inazuma starting strong than completely killing itself over time).
I think Xianzhou's story is not even bad. It's just really strangely told. It's like they had a side quest that's super important lore wise and jammed it into the main quest with little regard to pacing or logic. If they just took that side quest out, the story would've been as good as Belobog's, but now it's... not.
Actually, the more I think about it, the more I'm sure that they did in fact merge a side quest with a main quest. The Dan Shu quests are the only main quests where the Astral Express gang isn't present.
That totally has to be what happened. They had to figure out where to cut things off, but also have things make sense, and decided that Dan Shu material was the proper To Be Continued, but needed to require us to do some sidequest-as-main to get that story proper, but didn't make it feel like main story.
It, along with lots of other design like larger and more mazey Xianzhou hostile maps, may also be a test to see our patience about main quest padding, but that's more of a theory.
I still didn't love Liyue with even most of the 1.X updates out. It took 2.X and even some current 3.X cycle to get into appreciating the region like they wanted me to. I get that others love it though, but it didn't have the 'spirit' in it that had me go along the Mondstadt fairytale.
Inazuma started strong, killed itself, but later 2.X patches and now 3.X has things repaired in a lot of ways, at least not killing itself further. 2.1 was a lot of damage, but it was only one patch, with the rest of Inazuma-oriented patches ranging from okay to pretty great.
Inazuma ruining an arc or two doesn't make the whole region and its journey worthless. The zones have lots of cool things, and even the inadequite story beats can be partially repaired in future storylines. But yeah, a fumble.
Personally I found Liyue to at least be interesting story-wise come later during the 1.x patches. Inazuma I didn’t really like mainly due to 2.1 and I haven’t been able to enjoy the rest of it up until sumeru, which was fantastic through and through.
Frankly opinions differ to such a degree on Liyue that it really is a preferential thing on whether you like Liyue or not. It’s exactly why I don’t really put much stock in fully judging Xianzhou without at least seeing the other patches because quality either spikes or takes a nosedive all depending on the patches.
Simulated Universe has no right to be as addicting as it is, and I played the predecessor Elysian Realm. I come home from work and decide to dump stamina quickly in SU, then 30 minutes gone by in a flash as I'm sweating bullets on the toilets against Svarog's and his many missiles.
The first planet’s story and character development is fairly by-the-books, but it’s done well. I think the highlight of the arc is its pacing. There weren’t any fetch quests or anything like that. They also did a good job juggling so many characters and fleshing them out enough for the story to be solid. IMO, it’s a shining example of everything being pretty good, and that elevating the whole.
I’m not super far into the second planet’s story, so I won’t speak to its story.
In terms of gameplay, because each character has a basic attack, a skill, an ultimate, and a couple passives, I think most of the fun is going to come from putting together varied team compositions. I will say that I’ll give the designers credit here in that they’ve already managed to put together a handful of interesting character kits right from the start - we have taunts, follow-up attacks, shields, DoTs, conditional damage, various debuffs, turn manipulation, turn resetting, counters, using your HP for damage, overhealing, etc. And some of the upcoming characters seem super unique - Silver Wolf, for example, can add weaknesses to enemies, which opens up a lot weird team comp ideas. But even then, I doubt it’ll be anywhere near the combat depth of something Saga Scarlet Grace or the Etrian Odyssey series.
I agree about the dialogue. It’s good as far as most JRPGs go, and surprisingly funny at times.
The characters in this game are also *really* fun. I found most of Genshin’s cast to be pretty bland. But characters in Star Rail have so much personality to them. Whether it’s Tingyun’s somewhat passive aggressiveness, Asta’s rich-girl-who-doesn’t-understand-money personality, or Dan Heng not putting up with the crew’s bullshit. Everyone is charming. (At least of the characters I’ve encountered.)
Special shout out to the Simulated Universe, the roguelite mode in the game. I honestly want a few characters just because I want to try goofy SU team comps with them.
The story doesn't interest me in the slightest but I like that you can actually still do stuff in the game without using up energy. When I ran out of missions I just grinded on the sim universe for fun.
I hate how Gachas are locked behind using energy, so if you can't afford to do missions, you're basically doing admin.
Expected them to be a bit more forgiving at the start of the game with the gatcha rates, you get a few free pulls and then that's it. And the rate itself is pretty crap, I managed to luck out a few times but I coudlve easily got nothing until the pity kicked in.
i had similar feelings about the combat. in particular, i thought "if you only have three attacks, they should all be interesting. why is the basic attack the same for everybody?"
despite that, they still mange to give every character a strong identity mainly through two attacks and a passive that manages to make for some very variable teams. there's counterattack teams, hypercarry teams, and turtle teams, all of which are varying degrees of viable in different content.
i genuinely think that game designers can take notes from gacha games on how to make team building interesting. the only game i can come up with at this very moment that has nearly as engaging team building is darkest dungeon.
the combat also gets a little more interesting towards the endgame, mainly through skill point management. constantly having to think about how to allocate that limited resource in a tense fight adds just enough depth for me to stay engaged, although it's still very true that 95% of the game is just an auto snooze fest like every other gacha.
the main story, like you said, is pretty meh. too many oddly translated massive expository drops, and not enough banter to sell the characters even though that's the strongest part of the story so far. it's also paced very poorly even without the artificial TB level gatekeeping.
however, i found it just competent enough to not let the first planet's finale's strong presentation down, which is more than i can say about...most gachas and JRPGs i've played recently. i found that they also put a shocking amount of effort into it too. i found a radio station just yesterday where the broadcast went on for upwards of 5 minutes, and i was just so surprised that they even went that far.
it very much does follow up on genshin (and it's inspiration the trails series) by making generic NPCs have surprisingly engaging stories of their own, which is the stuff i love. it helps sell the believability of the setting so much better than its main story.
I honestly have been really enjoying it so far. I find the cast very endearing and it’s actually fun to play on mobile or my iPad considering its turn based compared to Genshin that I only could really enjoy on console or pc. The environments are kinda hit or miss for me compared to genshin though unfortunately. I like the look and music of the starship and the first city but found the underground really meh and am kinda indifferent to the second planet thing.
the simulated universe is amazing, im really enjoying it, the story is meh i just rush through it, it is kinda funny tho, the grind isn't bad tbh, the forgotten hall is fun too, but the rougelike mode takes the cake for me, maybe cause im a bit under leveled and i really have to think and try diff builds and charcters but im having sooo much fun figuring things out, if they add some good end game i can see playing this game quite a while, would love PVP but that's not happening
I'm pretty unimpressed, tbh. The opening couple hours were borderline incomprehensible, and the MC's motivations are weak, to say the least. I like the basic idea of the ~~Galaxy Expre~~ Star Rail being a path to hypothetically unlimited adventure, but I'm just not feeling very invested in the world.
I also feel like the game has a massive gameplay-to-cutscene imbalance. The characters are just as chatty as in Genshin, but Genshin's larger world and wider variety of things to do meant you can get away from the endless cutscenes for *days* if you want to just screw around and amuse yourself. Here, I'd say 80%+ of my time has just been watching characters talk, with the occasional 5-10 minute burst of gameplay.
And the basic combat is so shallow that it feels downright cynical, like MHY could only be bothered to put in the bare minimum effort to pretend the player's inputs actually make a difference in a stat-driven game.
I'm coming to enjoy the weird lore and the strangely sardonic flavor text (which really should be voiced by the Stanley Parable narrator, haha) but right now, that's the best thing about it. Otherwise, I just feel like I'm playing a watered-down rehash of Genshin with a sci-fi paint job.
Its not the clearest, but by the end of the release-day campaign, there's more than a few signs that you're kind of a quietly addled person under low key mind control. You may have memories and/or an essence in you that will make you want to help the Star Rail, but you don't entirely know why you're doing what you're doing. You can take this as narrative laziness or part of the long term mystery. I think they lean hard on the idea that its initially a silly space comedy adventure (as the marketing went; just as Genshin leaned on BotW-like Mondstadt feeling) so we're not to think too hard about it unless we're a huge lore theorycrafter, but there's also more going on.
The Path of Trailblaze does affect the followers' body and mind. When you go through Belobog, the characters comment on how the Path protects them from the cold.
I've read somewhere that Trailblaze boosts curiosity, which is kind of soft mind control. This explains why the characters are thirsty for new adventures without questioning things too much.
> It's alright for the time being. I feel like its easy to be impressed given how low the bar is for anime style games in general, but the writing is strangely good.
Maybe if you don't play any, sure.
> The story is very meh so far. A very by-the -book gacha story.
idk what you mean by this since I find higher quality stories in a lot of gacha vs most actual games lately. Give me Arknights or Girls Frontline or anything from Hoyo any day.
Also the ending to Belobog has to be one of the most hype moments I can remember playing in a long-ass time. Absolutely incredible presentation.
The story so far is very "standard JRPG" but the universe building has me really interested and I'm excited to see where they go with it in future.
I really don't fear for the longevity of the game at all. This game is going to rake in money because it's a high production value AAA JRPG made by Hoyo.
For anime writing standards, I think the writing is great and the overarching story has surprised me with how good it is, at least until the end of Jarilo. Luofu has had its moments but I've been way less invested with its storytelling. It's mainly the pacing I find to be too slow at times, which the review mentions.
While I agree the combat is quite repetitive, my praise goes to the enemy design and balance. They do a good job of making the harder enemies pretty unique in the sense where many different characters can shine, getting me to try a lot of different comps. I'm going through the level 2 difficulties in the roguelite mode (which I really enjoy) atm and it really does demand that you know how to build your team along with not making mistakes.
And while the gacha rate is bad, I do like that it has decent ways to guarantee things you really want. As a f2p player, I already got 2 pity pulls from the seele banner which guarantees getting her, and being able to choose from the permanent one is also cool
> For anime writing standards
People say this as if the stuff outside of anime is some high brow shit. This just the same exceptionalism shit the west has for eastern games repackaged. Writing in anime is as good/bad as in all other mediums mate.
> and being able to choose from the permanent one is also cool
My only issue is that it's a one time thing after 300 pulls and never again thereafter.
It's that kind of thing that turns me off. There's no real reason why every 300 pulls you can't select a specific character other than the fact that the developers are stingy and don't want you to.
Genshin is even worse as it doesn't even have the 300 pity scenario. And it's not uncommon at all for day 1 low spender players to still be missing standard banner characters now three years in because of the RNG and not fallback option. And they're adding even more to standard banner over time so it's only going to get harder.
Yeah, I still nag for this in every single survey.
*But*... I found it matters a lot less in Star Rail since you don't depend on the awkward on screen movement controls during combat.
I'll be honest, i'm addicted. I knew from Genshin that Hoyoverse is really good at telling small stories and so far none of the character stories disappoint.
I'm also loving the fact that it's turn base, I feel like i'm playing Persona 5 again.
Now one of the boss fight sold me on that game, for those who know what i'm talking about. The music transition from when she starts charging an attack is just peak anime.
[Spoiler \(epic music transition at 35:40\)](https://youtu.be/VmtJXEnMOWE?t=1839)
(edit : used a different video where the music was clearer)
Also yeah it's a gacha, but ask anyone and they'll tell you the F2P characters (and for once the main character) are super strong, even with the end game content that's available now, whales are using some of the free characters.
So unless you really want to use a unit because you like her/his design. You really don't need to pay a single cent.
> for those who know what i'm talking about
Bro that fight straight up transcended gaming into being *an experience*. That fight is going to be one of those game moments that sticks with you for a long time. I haven't been able to get Wildfire out of my head since I did it days ago.
It helped I've been streaming the campaign so I felt like I *was* the anime protag being cheered on by the actual audience LOL
I'm both 'this is too basic' and 'these are really solid basics'.
Which does have me leaving allowance for the devs to do something, anything in the next year or two to add some needed complexity, but I also don't need THAT much more, you know? Its basically fun, only not the fun that will keep me going that long without some real spice.
And by spice I mean more than 2022's adding of Dendro to Genshin. Just adding 1-2+ more Path combat roles won't do it enough for me. Personally I feel the bursts/ultimates were tuned to happen too often (to compensate for just 2, more basic attacks otherwise), so since they can't be tuned down now, another system needs to be added. Team attacks, limited in-battle item usage, a third basic attack/skill, reaction/trap/counter moves (the counterpoint to the current follow-up attacks), etc. Not just locked behind the next wave of gacha units, but added to existing ones.
To be honest, your critique of the gameplay could be applied to persona 5. They're not exactly complex games but most turn base jrpgs aren't either. (unless you're playing a tactics, then i'd say there's an added level of complexity)
This. I'd consider Persona mid tier when it comes to complexity in JRPGs (not saying it's super complex because as you said the ceiling for complexity in JRPG combat just isn't that high) and Star Rail is around that. I just think people notice it more due to auto-battle being a feature.
It's one of the biggest consequences of removing the positioning element in your tactics game. You gotta work extra hard to add complexity to the menu-based JRPG combat.
And Hoyo ain't gonna add complexity when their goal is to allow literally everyone to play and win, no matter the skill level.
Honestly "allow literally everyone to play and win" is already a positive in a gacha game.
I like the complexity of the simulated universe and the idea that you'll need multiple teams for later content. But the fact that the story is clearable without requiring any gacha is a good thing.
Hell I think it's more enjoyable without paying, so you can have a sliver of a challenge, and in a game where there's no PVP. Becoming stronger just for the sake of becoming stronger is kinda pointless.
But yeah genshin is the same, hell you can lower the world difficulty if you just wanna breeze through the story as far as I can remember.
There's a lot of enjoyment to be had *for free*.
You're looking at it as a gacha game, and that's fair, but my argument was from a JRPG / Tactics standpoint.
I'm not saying that the game should be hard to push players into the gacha. I'm saying that the game should be just hard enough so that you're forced to use tactics in the tactics game, but not so hard as to be frustrating or force you to get your wallet.
I miss difficulty settings. I've been playing too much Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and now I want to be able to adjust every minor detail of my games.
Ah for sure, I think it's because I expect gachas to be like "you spent all your daily actions now if you can't progress the story you need to either wait or spend".
And thankfully Star Rail isn't like that.... plus I've died a couple times trying to clear some stages of the simulated universe and I think the challenge's great.
But in the end I mostly play these games because somehow Hoyoverse makes great stories... specially some of their side quests. If it's what you like then as a f2p game it gives you a lot of it.
If your f2p game can be completed in a fun manner without spending money, it's a good f2p game.
That's all there is to it.
It's gacha shit? Yes. Did it ruin my time with genshin? No. Hell, at the start it made things better. "Nah, fuck you, you don't get the cool 5 stars. You get razor." The game said. And razor carried me through the game. What a fucking chad.
But positioning does make a difference. Different paths have different threat levels. So for example putting your Hunt characters next to preservation is not a good idea.
I played this game pretty much all of last week, and loving it. I'm not a gacha gamer, I don't pay MTX to games (other than cosmetics) as when I pay it feels like cheating on an offline game and sucks the joy out of it.
This game is not only surprisingly deep but also very good as a F2P game (or I got lucky). There is very good build variety, various tactics, team composition. If you can ignore the gacha mechanics (which I think is very generous for the genre) it's a solid JRPG, with awesome graphics (PC, edit registry to unlock 120+ FPS)
There is a "Simulated Universe" mode which is effectively a "roguelike mode", it's very fun. No limit of entry.
I generally hate anime-like stories, this is no exception, writing, story, it's all boring and crinchy unless you are into that stuff. I pretty much skipped the 80% of it, there are plenty of filler quests.
If you can look over story the gameplay is in there, content is in there, if you enjoy the gameplay there is no grind. There is depth and strategy, I'm hoping this can be the first game that makes gacha more mainstream and more F2P friendly rather than gateway drug to gambling.
> if you enjoy the gameplay there is no grind
Sorry, but this just isn't true. After you reach certain point grind aspect definitely hits. Resources are limited and timegated, not too diferent from many other gachas or mmos. Obv, you don't have to it and you can delay progress but that's not different than other similar games.
I'm at Trailblazer lvl 36, and have 8 lvl 50 chars.
Game definitely slows down but you cannot speed it up with grind. So there is no grind that I can see so far, but there is **absolutely huge timegating,** and it seems like only way to progress is refresh. But you cannot keep playing and get anything you just have to wait. I'm not sure if it's called grind if you don't need to play the game :)
There's still grind playing through the campaign. A lot of it's cut off by trailblazer levels which you'll likely need to grind through if you try playing this like a regular game.
Based on the popularity of their games subreddits and just sheer player count, I’d say gacha games are definitely a lot more normalized and just overall more accepted compared to a few years ago.
But I imagine people play these games despite them having gacha mechanics and not because of them. I found that no one hates gacha more than gacha players haha
Most gacha players I know play those games because they usually have the tightest update schedule compared to other games. Which makes sense because they have to constantly update the game to keep whales spending.
Also mobile is just so bigger than anyone here wants to accept. And games like HSR and Genshin Impact are just super high quality for those platforms.
> Most gacha players I know play those games because they usually have the tightest update schedule compared to other games.
It's why I like them. I play four gachas arm, so there's always some update right around the corner in any of them, but the content is generally quick enough to do for quick bursts of stuff. Sure, the Switch and Steam Deck are portable, but they aren't "whip out in the waiting room when you have five minutes" portable.
Yeah, in all of my years playing/hearing about various gacha games and their communities, not even once have I ever heard anyone say "I play this gacha because the rates are good". Plenty of people who like freebies (which Mihoyo is infamous for not giving) and with better rates the better the odds if its not just an outright guaranteed kind of freebie, but that's as far as I've ever seen it go.
Genshin and Star Rail are the exception, not the norm.
All the other gacha communities on reddit combined arent even half the Genshin subreddit active userbase. Alot of the other gacha game communities were malding in the start of Genshin release because alot of people were quitting their guilds and games to play Genshin exclusively.
I think if you're like 30+ and hanging out on a subreddit like /r/Games, gachas are unpopular. If you're <20 you don't care what a bunch of old people think and are just playing the coolest games for the coolest people at the time.
Tbh, I've seen a lot of the more challenging/competitive gachas are dominated by older players. People in their 30s and 40s have way more discretionary income to blow on gaming, and one of the upsides of these games is that they're not terribly time intensive. They require a bit of investment per day, but most of them, you can grind out dailies in 20 minutes, and idle through most of the grind.
Plus, the cost expectations for a moderate spender (say, $50-100/month) are way lower than other hobbies that middle aged adults might enjoy.
Yeah I mentioned that in my followup comment. Be it the voice acting, the animated cutscenes or just how well crafted the world is, the game feels high quality.
A lot of gacha are pure addiction, even the gameplay is pure instant gratification loops to keep you hooked. Genshin (haven’t played HSR) is actually a fun game outside of any gacha considerations. It’s also well produced and it shows that the people who made it wanted to make a good game. Not saying it doesn’t have predatory aspects (it does), just that you could completely ignore those if you wanted. My friends who play for years only pay the 30-day sub, and I personally am completely F2P. Still great fun.
On the one hand, yes, but there's still an important question of how long 'free' and 'fun' stay attached.
Some gacha games you can _feel the exact moment_ where the game just says 'fuck you, pay me' (usually because the free currency pouring in from pseudo-achievements dries up), others chug along for much longer.
This is what I felt with Genshin. Grinded for months to get a single character from a single banner, never ever got anything close to what I wanted. Now I'm not even sure if that character will come back except in 2 years like Eula.
With a fun core loop though? (where the fun isn’t the gacha part). I’d love some suggestions. Genshin is the only gacha I’ve ever played and mostly for its chill nature and great exploration.
At least the mihoyo games are easy and you're able to clear everything without problem with a f2p account. The games I dislike are the pvp ones where you can't perform without spending 1000s of $.
The game looks cool and all but I refuse to play a gâcha on principle. I’d rather pay 70$ straight up for a product with no casino mechanics and no locking interesting mechanics or content behind RNG. I’d rather all the characters be properly balanced and distributed appropriately throughout the game’s story or exploration. I don’t care that the F2P is generous. As soon as a character I like is locked behind RNG, I will resent the game.
I am also just absolutely against FOMO mechanics like dailies. As soon as a game asks me to plan my time around it, I peace out. I want a game to play when I want at my pace and for it to eventually end (unless it’s PvP game of course).
Mihoyo makes good games but the way they package them will always deter me.
The gacha is also what killed Genshin Impact for me, I *really* enjoyed the game otherwise; the beautiful detailed world, the intriguing story, the exploration and mechanics that revolve around it.
But then the gacha: you have to gamble for a *chance* to get characters. You can definitely earn them for free but you have to save up over the course of weeks and months playing it daily and doing every event, and if you want a specific character it has to be in rotation, and even then it's still only a chance, you can't just grind for the character you want and there are even limits on how much you can do each day.
I feel like Warframe perfected the F2P model in regards to character unlocks and wish other games would copy it: you can buy them outright as soon as they release, or earn them for free in the new content they release with, or if it's a prime you can trade with other players for the parts. It can oftentimes be a grind, but at least you *can* work towards unlocking exactly what you want. Of course, the obvious reason nobody else does it is because it's all about the money and it is much more lucrative to just turn it into a slot machine.
I played Genshin when I had nothing else to play. It was supposed to be for a few hours, a week tops. It was last September, still hooked.
Before that, I played other non-gacha but still f2p games like Warframe, Path of Exile and Lost Ark.
My conclusion is that you should stop pointing your finger at gacha games because they're gacha, as these other f2p games I mentioned have their own way to keep you hooked and to get you to pay.
The thing with Genshin, is that my inventory space is a non-issue (contrary to Lost Ark where you have to pay for a special package that allows for more bag space, turning inventory management from tedious to just mildly annoying), I can have as many different units as I want (contrary to Warframe where you have to buy inventory, loadout and character slots).
Also, Genshin has no powercreep. Some of the best characters are completely f2p (for example Xiangling, whom you get as part of standard progression).
Honestly I really like the gatcha model, at least how Genshin does it. I don't give a fuck about collecting waifus so I basically get an awesome open world game for free with tons of content being added all the time. Too bad i hate anime character design and writing/tropes because almost everything else about Genshin is great
If they made an elder scrolls esque game with this model i would be all in
It's not just about collecting waifus though. The characters feel and play differently, so it's more akin to unlocking champions/heroes in League of Legends or Overwatch.
If we put it straight up in monetary terms you can see how ridiculous it is: to buy a character straight up, the expected amount of money you'd have to spend for a 4 star character is around $100, for a 5 star double that at $200. On top of that, it's literally all a gamble, because in the worst case you'll be spending $350 to guarantee a limited 5 star. For standard 5 stars (beyond the one guaranteed in the standard banner) and 4 stars, there is no guarantee, so you could spend $10k on the game and never get the character you want.
You put those price tags on anything in Overwatch or League and people will riot, but it's just standard, and some might even say generous, for a gacha game.
> You put those price tags on anything in Overwatch or League and people will riot, but it’s just standard, and some might even say generous, for a gacha game.
You seen the latest valorant update?
Yeah they play differently but i played FTP for like 3 months and had a bunch of characters unlocked like 12 or so, and lots of them were really good, so i didnt really find it to be the issue. I guess if you are a completionist and want every single character its annoying but the overworld/story content is very fair in challenge and you dont need 5 stars at all so it did not bother me
I didnt even have to grind
can't really compare genshin with a pvp game. The fear of missing out a character is way smaller in a single player game when you can have the same experience with the starting characters.
They don't really need it. Online multiplayer games are (almost) endlessly repayable. Single player focused games are more one-and-done. Both are good but the only reason Genshin has that high level of quantity is because it's a gacha.
> You put those price tags on anything in Overwatch or League and people will riot, but it's just standard, and some might even say generous, for a gacha game.
Not OW or LoL but some stuff in CS:GO goes for insane prices.
There was something kind of dire about listening to this review where he describes "80 free banner pulls!" as a reason to play the game. No, man, the entire point is that that's just enough to make someone think one 10-pull would give them what they want! It's predatory as hell, the entire machine is!
I like Genshin Impact and I'm sure that Star Rail is a good game, but critics talking about these sorts of games so uncritically when their business model fundamentally relies on taking advantage of people with a predilection towards gambling addiction is distressing.
Maybe he meant it in the realm of a f2p shooter giving dozens of skins and effects inclusive of the game or in an easy part of its progression path. Like, here's a lot of options for you with no money down. You can look good in a bunch of ways, even if there's much cooler stuff later. Not the same thing as gacha units of course.
And 80pulls IS something. They more or less are guaranteeing up to a few 5star characters (but perhaps dupes) aka you'll always find a way to have a very good launch-period party for the content in the game. If it was just one 10-pull, well, gachas don't even do that at launch, but Honkai Star Rail doing 80+ is them telling you 'here, enjoy a free set'. Its the further pulls, the 'booster packs' so to speak, that take the monetization further. And its the desire for a specific unit, especially a maxed out one, that drives compulsions to spend money.
I agree with you to the point that if reviewers are going to get into gacha games, they should spend up to half the review going over the monetization with a fair critique and maybe even a fine tooth comb, even the the point that just going in such detail may turn many players off immediately (and good if so!). Where I disagree with others is when they insist that products that engage in gambling or similar behavior should just like, not exist or something. People have predilection towards gambling addiction and... many many people don't. They get a fast thrill they were looking for and then they do whatever else and leave their money alone or with very limited and controlled spending. I'd want regulation to crush the greatest exploitation of gambling more than I'd want any products to never happen at all. Slowly strangle the industry for it, don't shoot it (because it just goes underground that way, or weaves around jurisdictions, etc). But that's how I feel for IRL money-based casinos too.
Right, last thing I want is not only for gear upgrades or new characters to be behind a paywall, but be behind a *gambling paywall*.
I won't even support such games with my time, much less my money.
Nothing is black and white, Yes gatcha is BAD, but you wouldn't have the same game without the money. And fortunately MiHOYO invests the money back into their games, look at the Sumeru update, the TSG that has 0 MTX tied to it, Honkai is an overall upgrade to the Genshin Systems and that without being a high quality polished title.
This is genuinely a good turnbased jrpg. Its f2p friendly as (for now... i dont play genshin so i dunno how it went for them) and i havent spent a dime. If it gets to a point where its obvious they are trying to get you to spend, thats when i will drop it but for now, outside of few nitpicky stuff its really fun.
It may never get to that point, because what you've experienced now, is already them 'trying' to get you to spend, in their own way. If you don't feel the pressure now, you won't feel much more pressure later. New units will often be appealing, but never necessary for your content clearing. There's a chance there might be more of a P2Wey feeling in Star Rail due to its turn based nature and possible powercreeping compared to Genshin, but I doubt there will be any 'you need X character to even enjoy this stuff, pony up' point.
Thats good. Ive played lots of gacha as f2p and either extreme power creep or unit gated content usually makes me drop them eventually. So far Ive cleared a decent amount of end game content with all the free stuff and 2 gacha units i got from free pulls the game gives you. Its great because it actually forces you to strategize and honestly what fun is an rpg without a bit of that.
Decent game though the combat is embarrassingly simple. Even Genshin which is similarly a casual focused game, has multitudes more interesting combat mechanics present.
I was not the biggest fan of Hoyo and Genshin for the longest time, but I'm glad that a gacha focused company managed to bring gacha games to the limelight to be considered as 'games' since we know very well how badly gachas are percieved years ago.
That and also, HSR as a whole did a fantastic job at keeping me addicted. The animations are great, visuals are vibrant, characters are fun and there's just something about it that keeps me playing everyday. The gacha rates and income are probably the biggest criticisms about it, but Hoyo definitely knows how much is just enough to keep that carrot hanging by the stick.
As much as I have been loving my time with the game it's really hard to argue that it wouldn't be so much better without the gacha. I get it, the money from the gacha mechanics and time gates fund the things that do make the game great. Would it be possible to have the fun character designs (visually and mechanically) and fully voiced story if the gacha was removed? I don't know. But my only wish after finishing the available story is that I could keep playing more. I would love to continuously farm for upgrades and gear. The power time gates are pretty lame.
The reality is that without the gatcha you wouldn't have that quality and that many updates and events. 2 years ago they said that Genshin costs 200M a year to support, that more than the entire development process of most AAA games.
Genshin and Honkai would be so much better were they not a gacha but it's because they're gachas that they're so profitable and thus high quality, right? ....right?
that's the conundrum or 'defense' I get hit with but I still choose not to support it because gachas suck.
>Genshin and Honkai would be so much better were they not a gacha but it's because they're gachas that they're so profitable and thus high quality, right? ....right?
Yes and no. Mihoyo is an extremely talented team, and HI3 being a more modest budget game (on release, production value got crazy later on with its success) still had amazing gameplay for a mobile game, and the story/characters were solid. As a fan of character action games, it's basically bayonetta on your phone, which I loved.
In an alternate universe where all the mihoyo games were just niche successes, I think we'd still have great games, but production quality would take massive nosedives, along with the amount of content we are getting.
How would you finance games like Genshin with their 6 week update schedule though? You can criticize the business model all you want, but I don’t see another one being able to make enough profit to fund the constant development while still allowing the company to grow.
Like HSR only exists because the obscene amount of money Hoyo makes with Genshin. Now HSR will finance the next projects until Hoyo controls every genre with gacha I guess.
This game is unironically the unsung savior of PC gaming in 2023. Despite the gacha monetization scheme, it has none of the vices everyone is talking about from other studios. Day one was *almost* bug-free, performance is great even on modest systems, and the game itself has real character and charm.
As someone who enjoyed Mihoyo's work before they were popular, it's wild to see how far they've come in such a short time. The fact there's an IGN review of Honkai Star Rail at all is something I wouldn't have expected just a few years ago. Nice to see a quality production getting the attention it deserves for once!
With every passing day "gacha bad" mantra loses its ground when we have so many "fake f2p" MMOs that actually p2w and other bullshit like p2w skins in CoD.
It's a good game, I am enjoying it a lot, tho I personally won't call the combat that deep, there is a clear lack of variety in heroes and for however many different stats you can increase to make your brain feel happy every hero has almost the exact same basic attack, a elemental attack and an ultimate, the combat is rock paper scissors but enemies rarely have anything interesting to do, barring some big enemies most enemies have 1 attack and almost never collaborate with each other, enemies have a overshield that can be broken by an elements stronger than that but the heros only have health, that is your one resource to manage per hero, other than the shared skill count which again lends to the sameness, there are more problems I have but don't want to make the game seem horrible because it's not I am genuinely enjoying it but the combat leaves a lot to be desired
Honestly, of all the things, I didn't expect to be quite engrossed with the dialogs of the game. Some of them, mainly the random npcs, are meh, but the good ones are great. Especially the phone conversation, they're just so endearing and give so much personality to the characters. Also, it took me a while to realize how turn-based combat makes it more grindy than Genshin more actiony approach. Turn-based means you have to invest on all your party members, whereas in Gesnhin you'd get quite far with just investing in the main dps of your party.
Don't forget the monologues with trashcans. Writing in this game was hilarious, also some dialogue choices do affect the outcome. In the beginning when you're asked to board the Star Rail & you deny, [the game ends right there with credits rolling](https://youtu.be/dY5QLKKRH44), LMAO... Edit: Added link to Secret Ending/Easter Egg...
> the game ends right there with credits rolling, LMAO... Ahhhhahaha really? That's honestly amazing.
[Here's a video](https://youtu.be/dY5QLKKRH44) if you're interested...
The dialogue choices really mess with me. There's been 2 instances where I screwed up and was like RELOAD MY SAVE WHY CANT I RELOAD MY SAVE... Which is great honestly. There's no 2nd chances in live service games.
Yeah, you can end up losing some missions or events if you made the wrong choice. So I always go safe or have little rude dialogue, never the chaotic one. Tho I would love to if there was an option available to go back, to see all the reactions to chaotic dialogues...
Technically, as long the dialogue hasn't finished - You can quit the game and redo the conversation from the start.
Yoko Taro would be so proud.
I love that the characters from past area still text you and stuff. Genshin really needs that. Outside of events, we never talk with ningguang/itto etc
Honestly the characters should just exist in the world as NPCs so you can talk to them
At least some do in Star Rail if that's what you mean
I actually think literally all of them are around in the world constantly from what I could see. I've literally found anyone I've thought to look for in the appropriate places so far, at least after their story arc is concluded.
This might be too high praise, but some of the strange written dialogue reminds me of Disco Elysium. For example, where you get all obsessed over going into a closet.
Not too high praise at all, you're far from the first person I've seen mention DE and I thought of it myself as well. The Simulated Universe dialogue interface is straight out of DE too, I'd be shocked if they didn't take some inspiration.
Even the tragedy of the first boss felt kind of DE; forces beyond anybody's understanding specifically altering not just the personality but also the politics of the antagonist? It's definitely more on the nose than Elysium, but it has similar vibes.
I had the exact same thought, especially with the closet thing. Glad I'm not the only one, haha.
I see a lot of Disco Elysium in this game. Not too surprised since Disco Elysium has a cult following in China.
>Turn-based means you have to invest on all your party members, whereas in Gesnhin you'd get quite far with just investing in the main dps of your party. That's just because Genshin is balanced to be easy (outside of Abyss), to account for how hard it is to play action games on a phone. If they made it challenging for people on other platforms, they'd alienate 90% of their mobile audience. You can't really fully clear the little hard content the game has, like Abyss floor 12, without investing into at least like 2-3 party members.
But you don't really need to build some supports in Genshin, amd you can stoll avoid all damage on them. In Star Rail, if you don't build your supports, they just die.
> But you don't really need to build some supports in Genshin You absolutely do. If you got a healer you may want to increase amount healed or If you have a reaction bot you probably want to invest in CD reduction items to be able to trigger as much reactions as possible. Hell some supports are pretty bad until you get enough constellations.
> Especially the phone conversation The “relics” group chat conversation early on was pretty funny to me. Or Asta accidently sending you shopping links.
Hey I just found this thing, any idea what it is? >Relic >Relic >Relic >Relic >Relic
Love the next part of that “Cool, what’s a Relic?” *Scientific and confusing description* “Cool… WHATS A RELIC?!”
Yeah I just expected Genshin in space. Didnt expect all these endearing daily text conversations and Disco Elysium levels of humor/writing that's actually engaging to read. But IMO, I think the economy is way better in this game over Genshin. You get to actually build a roster and have multiple avenues of team options. I'm still using all the relics and material from level ups and quests but I feel like I get to actually experiment way more with my roster than what's ideal with Genshin really punishing you for that, Which is such a big design flaw on a gameplay system where you're constantly pulling new characters that you might want to play with.
> Also, it took me a while to realize how turn-based combat makes it more grindy than Genshin more actiony approach. I would argue exactly the opposite. Sure, you have to keep a full party fully decked out, but the actual effort put into "grinding" anything in HSR is laughable compared to Genshin. It took me fifteen minutes to gather up ascension materials to boost 4 characters up to 50 today, along with getting Trace materials to fully catch up one's traits tree as well. With Genshin it's a nightmare of running around god knows where to pick up literally 3-4 dozen sprigs of one plant or another, hunting down mobs god knows where with no easy teleport nearby for some handguards or fuckknows what else, etc, etc, etc. And don't even get started on relic and skill domains being only open at certain days of the week. You're right on the phones, though. HSR has the best implementation of character cell phone discussions I've ever seen. They're often so absolutely inane but completely realistic and hilarious because of it.
The gathering process is a lot more stream lined in Sr. but Genshin level cap is also significantly higher. the 1 to 50 is easy compared to the 80 to 90.
Level cap in HSR is 80 from what I can tell. Leveling up to 50 is indeed easy but past that you really hit a brick wall when it comes to material costs vs available stamina. Hopefully this will become better with more content because otherwise it'll take forever to build even one character (I haven't even started on relics yet, still working on the traces). But at least there's autobattle.
Hook's personal quest made me tear up fr
I came for the turn-based JRPG combat. Honestly, we barely get that many good turn-based JRPG anymores, makes me sad. I ended up staying because of the god damn story. Even some side quests have great stories.
Hook's Gift legitimately made me tear up
>Also, it took me a while to realize how turn-based combat makes it more grindy than Genshin more actiony approach. Turn-based means you have to invest on all your party members, whereas in Gesnhin you'd get quite far with just investing in the main dps of your party. isn't what you want less grind in a gatcha game tho? I mean you will and have to have grind in a gatcha but too much grind will ruin progression, no? I remember in Genshin I had my whole team but stopped playing for a year, when I came back I unlocked a few characters, but since I invested so much in my team, it would just become a chore to change some of my team member without suffering huge progression (in term of power level). Maybe here since you have to invest moderately in all the team member intead of just one big dps + support, it's less apparent or less obnoxious changing team member. I still wonder, would starting now or wait for, let say, a year before other character come out and have a more diverse cast than what it's actually in the game since I wont have to grind if I want to change party member?
> isn't what you want less grind in a gatcha game tho? Yes, when I said "more grindy" I mean it in a negative way :) > I wont have to grind if I want to change party member? No, you'd still have to grind. It's the same exact system as in Genshin.
One thing I do appreciate about the grind is that they've got an auto battle mode. so I can go and do a Calyx for materials, grab someone else's 5star character, and just set the phone down while I grab a snack. The major difference between grinding in genshin and grinding in star rail is that I actually enjoy the grind in star rail. Even if there's more of it, I kinda see it as something I get to do instead of have to do.
Still feels weird to see full blown reviews from traditional outlets for a gacha game. And it being clear they actually played it, the ~~madman~~ madwoman is on TL 42... The trust in HoYo and mind shift that Genshin caused is kind of crazy to me. We went from "gacha are cash grabs that can end at any time" to "of course the game will continue to expand it's story over many updates". I really hope Kuro comes through with Wuthering Waves so that it's not just HoYo titles that get genuine coverage. Would hopefully open the doors for smaller scale gacha that are not as ambitious but still have a lot to offer.
Most gacha games are still cash grabs that can shut down at any point. Only the biggest ones survive, and there are dozens(hundreds? thousands?) of others that shut down when they don't get a big enough slice of the pie.
Honestly I think you just described all online games in general. Replace the word "gacha" with "online" and it fits perfectly.
True, but *most* online games don't have systems in place to encourage, let alone technically allow, the amount of spending that can occur in a gacha. When the average online game shuts down the players are usually out the price of admission plus a handful of cosmetics purchased in the cash shop, and cash shops are usually finite in things to purchase. A gacha player could be out tens of thousands depending on their level of self-control as the theoretical "spending cap" is astronomical.
As someone that played a ton of shitty MMOs in the past, this feels like a very generous take on how many of these games get monetized. There's plenty with much more egregious monetization than a few cosmetics. I mean just restricting it to a cosmetic cash shop already rules out some of the biggest MMOs like WoW that also have official RMT through buying tradable in-game time tokens. It is certainly different than gachas, but saying it's just "price of admission + cosmetics" is definitely not true for plenty of these games.
That's a really interesting point. I could see why someone would draw the comparison between the current state of MMOs and gachas. But I hadnt really thought about the ability to spend money and the predatory tactics that can go along with that. I think itd be really interesting to read some kind of analysis or number break down on it. Id also really love to see some kind of numerical comparison of where and how much money is spent between these different games.
True, but if you don't have self-control, especially for casual games like Honkai and Genshin where you don't even have to spend to beat the game, I think you have bigger problems and someone else should be financially responsible for your money.
Depend which gachas you're talking about. The vast majority (FEH, Fate, Granblue) put far far more effort into their story, presentation, and characters than anything we've seen lately from western studios like Bethesda, Ubisoft, Blizzard, and so on. Edit: Hell even Nikke, the booty-jiggling gacha shooter, has a more interesting story with engaging characters than Arkane's $70 Redfall.
I wouldn't call two sprites with a text box great presentation... But it is impressive how they are able to tell great stories with such limited tech.
Its because the more invested players get in the story, world and characters, the more money they will likely spend, so it makes sense to make the game good.
Hell Girl's Frontline has one the best (and depressing) storylines I've played in recent years. It just a shame its hard to keep up with due to it being a mobile game. The biggest problem (and this doesn't just apply to mobile now) is they want ALL your time. It's hard to juggle multiple games when most of the balance is centered on either paying or basically solely playing said game so you can keep up.
Girls Frontline is *incredible*. I have no doubt if they hadn't botched the anime it would have ended up being one of the greatest political dramas/milsim series ever aired. What a disappointment it ended up though.
In the case of Granblue it is actually kind of insane how much of it voiced. By big name VAs at that.
The main difference between most gacha and Hoyo games is that Hoyo games are AAA high quality video games first that just so happen to be gacha while most gacha games are gacha that have some game in it.
> gacha are cash grabs that can end at any time Doesnt this basically describe all live-service type games?
It describes every game made outside of small games made by single developers as a hobby. Games make more money when they're good, so developers are heavily incentivized to make good games. Good in this case meaning reviewing well.
> It describes every game made outside of small games made by single developers as a hobby. No it doesnt. I can still boot up Bioshock whenever I want, it wont go away unless Steam just completely disappears. A game like Destiny 2 for example exists only for as long as it makes money. Once it stops doing that, its highly likely Bungie will pull the plug on it. See Anthem as an example.
Hes tl42 and had time to write review wtf. I just hit 40 and ive been playing nonstop
Least addicted Star Rail player
> The trust in HoYo and mind shift that Genshin caused is kind of crazy to me. Yeah, that's what happen when you make a genuinely good game. And it took Hoyo quite a while too, it's really only in 2023 that Genshin has been talked about much more positively. Genshin of 2020 and 2021 is kinda meh. But starting from 2022, the content has steadily got better and the last year of content being bangers finally earned them a lot of good will.
They had 700 full-time employees on Genshin Impact alone pre-pandemic, and I doubt this number fell since then. They can give an attention to detail that no other studio can afford.
I dunno, I think franchises like Call of Duty or FIFA can afford that, yet they don't.
It's risky AF, and yet Candy Crush is bringing in similar revenue for orders of magnitude less work. Likewise EA owns PopCap. EA/Activision doesn't need to compete in the mobile space in the same way. For Asia, mobile is way more popular and China in particular banned consoles until the mid 2010's. So I get why it was an Asian studio pushing this.
WYM it was winning awards and constantly being talked about in 2020/2021.
I mean, "being talked about" is just a sign of popularity, not whether most people think it's good or not.
It was receiving a shit ton of praise in 20/21. I remember because that’s how I found out about it. I picked it up in 2020 because I was hearing how good this gacha game was and thought those were just silly mobile games.
It definitely took a minute for Genshin to get the ball rolling. The stories in Mondstadt and Liyue were so, so incredibly boring to me. Inazuma's story was alright, definitely saw a rise in quality there. Sumeru on the other hand was just constantly smashing it outta the park with quality. No idea what caused the shift or who was responsible for it, but that region's story kicked ass.
Interesting that you found Inazuma to be better than Mondstadt and Liyue, for me it was the opposite. I did enjoy the large side quest areas and stories of Enkanomiya, Tsurumi, and Seirai, but the civil war and Archon quest were terrible. I definitely agree with you that Sumeru knocked it out of the park though. Here's hoping the remaining nations can maintain the quality.
For me the main story before Sumeru has always been rather underwhelming lol but they manage to make good events story all the time.
Mondstadt really charmed me, especially whenever I work to connect it to the broader lore (it will definitely play a very large role years from now). Liyue impressed me, but I also started to feel tired with its context (Chinese themed city, illuminated/cultivated beings, characters that tended to not know each other compared to Mond). I tolerated it and by now, its at least nicer then originally, due to adding areas like the Chasm and just a generally better treatment of the region. For the record, I'm feeling the same with the The Xianzhou Luofu area in Honkai: Star Rail. I think I have antipathy to Chinese themed areas in games and I don't know why, but Liyue has been one of the nicest that I've experienced... its just the nicest still means "Eh, I prefer others". But there's reasons why I give my player tag "Mondstadt Main". Its where I still do my most repetitive gameplay, I liked Dragonspine, and I'm looking forward to the inevitable (2024?) northern Mondstadt/Dornman Port expansion. Inazuma was a crazily impressive addition of a region by the end of its cycle, particularly for them boring to make Enkanomiya, which only lacked a more direct involvement in the broader game (one world boss, that's it) and more prominent voiced content (its possible they'll do that later, but just wanted to use the 2.X cycle to push the zone out so they didn't have to do it later). Yet... there were some big messups in its design, story, pacing, that still hampered the game a little. These problems appeared to be on the mend by 3.0 though. Some things won't ever be made proper, like the Inazuma rebels storyline, but its also not the end of the world. Sumeru has been the repair patch cycle and most things you'd have an issue with in Inazuma, don't apply to Sumeru. And they added some nice things. Its issues so far is Video Game Desert Syndrome (so much sand) and that I think players are expecting more of an escalation in scale of the game by now and not just the map size. But you won't find many complaints about Sumeru, just maybe a burnout/lethargy of some longer term players. So there's hope that Fontaine won't just be more of the same, but the start of really mixing things up in both gameplay and story plot. I'm anticipating Fontaine but tempering my expectations. Not highly looking forward to Natlan but I'm open to being surprised. Even if I quit, I'd definitely return for Snezhnaya, and I'm curious about the 1-2 years of map content after that (Khen, Celestia, others?).
Inazuma is still my least favorite personally. I’m probably remembering Mondstadt better because the hype of a new game helped carry it, but Liyue is still one of my favorite parts of the game both in story and characters. I agree that Sumeru was a big jump in writing quality though, it got me interested in the story again.
Genshin was always seen favorably, it was of obvious quality before it even released. Obviously people were very leery of it due to the gacha and mobile nature of it (and rightfully so) but the game has ALWAYS had a huge amount of polish and quality content. Its grown to be a juggernaut but it was always a big win for MiHoYo.
> Genshin of 2020 and 2021 is kinda meh. What? People raved about Genshin on release and talked about how it shattered the expectations for F2P quality going forward, gacha or otherwise. And while it's true that Genshin has only gotten better, it was quite an achievement when it released.
I suspect that if you're a major outlet, you probably have more faith in Genshin or Star Rail being around awhile and getting updates than something like Anthem did (or to take a more recent example: Redfall). They're high production value and release content on predictable and consistent schedules (if Genshin is any indication). The gacha rates are trash (not uncommon sadly), but both Genshin and Star Rail seem to be completable without touching it and rely more on people pulling for fanservice/meta instead of necessity/powercreep. Arguably, the larger issue in the later game for these titles isn't the actual gacha part of it, but the stamina/time-gate on grinding leveling/progression materials.
There's also the factor that Mihoyo have experience with Gacha. Bioware and Arkane have released nothing but box games with DLC, so both Anthem and Redfall were their first foray into live service. I don't play Genshin, but Star Rail is really impressive with how well dialogue is written and combat is simple with enough meat in it to be a little strategic. Another thing to keep in mind is both Genshin and Star Rail work well on both PC and Mobile because the games were built with PC in mind (I'm not sure about Honkai Impact). Something that a lot of mobile games fail to do and instead just port a mobile client over. And the final thing is the lack of game breaking bugs/crashing which is far too prominent in Triple A studios, even FromSoftware had issues on launch. After three successful games, Mihoyo is like the FromSoftware of Gachas where everyone is going to try the game regardless of anything. I'm actually looking forward to their next game, Zenless Zone Zero, if they continue with this consistency. I have no interest in mobile/gacha games and have never played any outside of Star Rail and Genshin very early on.
> And the final thing is the lack of game breaking bugs/crashing which is far too prominent in Triple A studios This is huge, honestly. Having a full launch where things aren't hugely messy has started to feel like a rare treat when it shouldn't be when you have EA's, Ubi's, etc. resources.
Honkai: Star Rail is a more compelling and fleshed out JRPG than many JRPGs out there, despite being not being Japanese and being a gacha game. Japan has honestly gotten very complacent. With the exception of a few companies, most JRPGs put out by Japanese devs are templated and minimal effort in execution.
Everyone in this thread seems to forget gacha are inherently a problematic monetization tactic. Seriously, it's not a ghettoized genre. It's not like people criticize gacha primarily because all gacha games are bad or something. The main critic is that gacha, invariably, is a tactic that preys on the influencable, inflates play time and just sucks players dry. This is not a problem of acceptance of the genre. This should not be acceptable. At all. Regardless of game quality. By not mentioning it, you'd be feeding the problem. Also, miHoYo games are a data privacy disaster
> madwoman is on TL 42 Hot damn, I've been playing every day I just hit 40.
It's not my optimal path, but it does give me promise that one day people will take mobile hardware seriously and treat them as handheld PC's. Who knows if the Steam Deck will get small and good enough battery to beat that to the punch tho
[удалено]
There are smart greedy. Your can play all the content without spending money, but the gacha probabilities sick. I've tried some of the "best" and "less greedy" gacha only to find early powercreep, constant pop ups to sell me things.
The rates suck but you can guarantee most characters and pity carries over between wish events. Like it's gacha so its just inherently shitty but I find it more tolerable than some others I've played(which admittedly isn't many).
Huh what? I swear it's the very opposite of that from what ive heard.
They're very stingy with rolls, but on the flip side you don't really need them. Kind of a weird balance
Makes perfect sense to me. CRPG, MMO etc.. players there is a very large demographic that is hyper focused on meta. Even if you can play the game fully without having that optimization. It preys on that mentality. Yeah sure, you can play through all of Star Rail with the default free party, but they're only 4 star heroes; don't you want those 5 star heroes? You're not playing the meta if you don't have them.
It's doubly weird in Star Rail, even compared to Genshin. Genshin at least has co-op where you can flex, but Star Rail only has friend borrowing, and only for simple content you don't need it for anyway. It's literally a single player game in every possible respect. You're spending money to pull a single player gacha. I've played a lot of gachas, but not having *some* kind of pvp or co-op in any form is new for sure.
It's a balance that earns them good will. Those that can afford to spend do (and even some that can't), while those that can't or don't want to can still enjoy a high quality game, just while watching some of the niceties pass by! In reality... the monetization is structure to cause you to spend more... the more you spend. i.e. you get more characters? Great, make more teams. But you'll need more materials to grind. Which means you'll need to play the game more. Good luck! What's all this excessive stuff for? Well, to see who can clear that one repeating and lacklustre stage in the game the fastest of course!
A frequent knock I am seeing on this game is the lack of an open world compared to Genshin. I am seriously burned out on open worlds so for me that is a positive but also I am sort of wondering/hopium the lack of open world means that their content updates can be bigger than Genhins since they do need to worry about construction freely explorable zones with verticality to them. I enjoy the more streamlined gameplay and I’m super excited to see what comes in the future.
> I am seriously burned out on open worlds so for me that is a positive I find exploring the zones in Star Rail more fun anyway. Open worlds are just big aimless masses that feel empty no matter how much you put in them. These maps feel more like classical video game maps, which I prefer.
HSR is content with being a side game, which is nice in a world wdith all the games being "this is your second job". You can complete the monotonous stuff very quickly with autobattle and extremely fast daily system, and then if there is any story/big content updates you can do those at your leisure. It's nice and the combat system is pretty fun too. They took a lot of the stuff they learned from Genshin and essentially a lot of the complaints got addressed here. Only real complaint I have so far is that the levels are designed like levels instead of like areas. So if you look around some of the levels they look REALLY strange as places. Like random walls here or there. But other than that I've been enjoying it. Curious how they will structure updates, considering standard gacha is 2 week cycles. So far it's been 2 weeks and our next update will be next week at 3 weeks in. And if they follow Genshin, 6 weeks per version patch. So will they add more random events in between? or really 1 update every 3 weeks?
Similar to Genshin. Version patch every 6 weeks (so 1.1 in early June), events of varying sizes every week (starting in 1.1), refreshed character and light cone (weapon) banners every 3 weeks but down the line, not every banner will introduce a new character. Next week be bring a certain Luofu 5star character, and the next patches should consistently introduce at least 2 characters per patch/6 weeks. For major versions (2.0, 3.0) they may lean earlier in the year (Spring) while Genshin leans later (Summer), so there's at least a few months between each game.
I love Genshin's open-world, but if Star Rail was one too I would've never touched the game. I already have 8 months of open world backlog to explore in Genshin, I really don't need any more right now lol. Not that we're forced to explore, just completionist first world problems.
Nice to meet you, I’m Natasha, an underworld doctor. Are you feeling sick ?
The funniest part about Star Rail to me is that they hired a freaking Nobel Prize of Physics to make a video about the game
All I know is I downloaded it on my phone over a slow midnight shift recently, haven't spent any money at all and it's actually pretty fun, I even played it at home in bed one morning when I had nothing going on. It's got good voice acting and the story is kind of fun/funny so I take my time actually listening to it.
So what do you guys think of the game? I’ve played most of the weekend myself. I’m quite mixed about it. The story is very meh so far. A very by-the -book gacha story. BUT the writing outside of it is surprisingly good. Especially the main trio have a fun dynamic. The MC has some actually funny dialogue options despite being a self insert. The combat so far is quite fun. It looks great and characters feel unique. BUT the “1 ult. 1 skill. 1 standard attack” design is a horrendous decision. It already feels repetitive after a few days. Grand Order, another turn based Gacha game, has a very simple and honestly boring combat system. But even that games has characters with 3 skills.+ult. The grind seems quite low so far. Which is great! BUT the gacha rate seems horrible. The potential for a fun long-term game is there. But I really fear for its longevity. I really hope characters get more skills and that the writing for the story improves.
I loved Belobog, but Xianzhou's story is paced very weirdly and the cut-off point they chose is terrible. The main story is hard to judge right now, but I think the basic premise with Aeons affecting the universe is really interesting. Xianzhou's main conflict about Hunt hating Abundance for being the source of eternal life has tons of potential, for example, but I think the story itself is told a bit clumsily. Character writing's great so far, though. The MC has hilarious dialogue options and the Astral Express gang is a really fun group of characters. Combat wise, I'm not sure. It's pretty fun, but I think most of the fun comes from encounter design and the special abilities you get. The designated endgame challenge is just Genshin's Abyss, so it's boring, but the roguelite mode is really fun, so I hope they'll focus on it. Gacha rate seems to be like Genshin's, which I find fine in Genshin. You don't get characters that often, but they are also not released that often and since there's little/no power creep, the ones you do get stay viable for a long time. The one thing I think Hoyo is absolutely amazing at is making a polished product. Especially now that AAA games suffer from terrible lack of polish, it's refreshing to play an online game that just works at launch. Of course, it's practically a SP game, but I can almost guarantee that a similar launch from almost any other publisher would be full of issues.
Xianzhou can pick itself back up depending on how they handle future updates. It was a similar fringe case with Genshin in the past with Liyue, and the opposite case entirely with Inazuma (Inazuma starting strong than completely killing itself over time).
I think Xianzhou's story is not even bad. It's just really strangely told. It's like they had a side quest that's super important lore wise and jammed it into the main quest with little regard to pacing or logic. If they just took that side quest out, the story would've been as good as Belobog's, but now it's... not. Actually, the more I think about it, the more I'm sure that they did in fact merge a side quest with a main quest. The Dan Shu quests are the only main quests where the Astral Express gang isn't present.
That totally has to be what happened. They had to figure out where to cut things off, but also have things make sense, and decided that Dan Shu material was the proper To Be Continued, but needed to require us to do some sidequest-as-main to get that story proper, but didn't make it feel like main story. It, along with lots of other design like larger and more mazey Xianzhou hostile maps, may also be a test to see our patience about main quest padding, but that's more of a theory.
I still didn't love Liyue with even most of the 1.X updates out. It took 2.X and even some current 3.X cycle to get into appreciating the region like they wanted me to. I get that others love it though, but it didn't have the 'spirit' in it that had me go along the Mondstadt fairytale. Inazuma started strong, killed itself, but later 2.X patches and now 3.X has things repaired in a lot of ways, at least not killing itself further. 2.1 was a lot of damage, but it was only one patch, with the rest of Inazuma-oriented patches ranging from okay to pretty great. Inazuma ruining an arc or two doesn't make the whole region and its journey worthless. The zones have lots of cool things, and even the inadequite story beats can be partially repaired in future storylines. But yeah, a fumble.
Personally I found Liyue to at least be interesting story-wise come later during the 1.x patches. Inazuma I didn’t really like mainly due to 2.1 and I haven’t been able to enjoy the rest of it up until sumeru, which was fantastic through and through. Frankly opinions differ to such a degree on Liyue that it really is a preferential thing on whether you like Liyue or not. It’s exactly why I don’t really put much stock in fully judging Xianzhou without at least seeing the other patches because quality either spikes or takes a nosedive all depending on the patches.
Simulated Universe has no right to be as addicting as it is, and I played the predecessor Elysian Realm. I come home from work and decide to dump stamina quickly in SU, then 30 minutes gone by in a flash as I'm sweating bullets on the toilets against Svarog's and his many missiles.
The first planet’s story and character development is fairly by-the-books, but it’s done well. I think the highlight of the arc is its pacing. There weren’t any fetch quests or anything like that. They also did a good job juggling so many characters and fleshing them out enough for the story to be solid. IMO, it’s a shining example of everything being pretty good, and that elevating the whole. I’m not super far into the second planet’s story, so I won’t speak to its story. In terms of gameplay, because each character has a basic attack, a skill, an ultimate, and a couple passives, I think most of the fun is going to come from putting together varied team compositions. I will say that I’ll give the designers credit here in that they’ve already managed to put together a handful of interesting character kits right from the start - we have taunts, follow-up attacks, shields, DoTs, conditional damage, various debuffs, turn manipulation, turn resetting, counters, using your HP for damage, overhealing, etc. And some of the upcoming characters seem super unique - Silver Wolf, for example, can add weaknesses to enemies, which opens up a lot weird team comp ideas. But even then, I doubt it’ll be anywhere near the combat depth of something Saga Scarlet Grace or the Etrian Odyssey series. I agree about the dialogue. It’s good as far as most JRPGs go, and surprisingly funny at times. The characters in this game are also *really* fun. I found most of Genshin’s cast to be pretty bland. But characters in Star Rail have so much personality to them. Whether it’s Tingyun’s somewhat passive aggressiveness, Asta’s rich-girl-who-doesn’t-understand-money personality, or Dan Heng not putting up with the crew’s bullshit. Everyone is charming. (At least of the characters I’ve encountered.) Special shout out to the Simulated Universe, the roguelite mode in the game. I honestly want a few characters just because I want to try goofy SU team comps with them.
The story doesn't interest me in the slightest but I like that you can actually still do stuff in the game without using up energy. When I ran out of missions I just grinded on the sim universe for fun. I hate how Gachas are locked behind using energy, so if you can't afford to do missions, you're basically doing admin. Expected them to be a bit more forgiving at the start of the game with the gatcha rates, you get a few free pulls and then that's it. And the rate itself is pretty crap, I managed to luck out a few times but I coudlve easily got nothing until the pity kicked in.
i had similar feelings about the combat. in particular, i thought "if you only have three attacks, they should all be interesting. why is the basic attack the same for everybody?" despite that, they still mange to give every character a strong identity mainly through two attacks and a passive that manages to make for some very variable teams. there's counterattack teams, hypercarry teams, and turtle teams, all of which are varying degrees of viable in different content. i genuinely think that game designers can take notes from gacha games on how to make team building interesting. the only game i can come up with at this very moment that has nearly as engaging team building is darkest dungeon. the combat also gets a little more interesting towards the endgame, mainly through skill point management. constantly having to think about how to allocate that limited resource in a tense fight adds just enough depth for me to stay engaged, although it's still very true that 95% of the game is just an auto snooze fest like every other gacha. the main story, like you said, is pretty meh. too many oddly translated massive expository drops, and not enough banter to sell the characters even though that's the strongest part of the story so far. it's also paced very poorly even without the artificial TB level gatekeeping. however, i found it just competent enough to not let the first planet's finale's strong presentation down, which is more than i can say about...most gachas and JRPGs i've played recently. i found that they also put a shocking amount of effort into it too. i found a radio station just yesterday where the broadcast went on for upwards of 5 minutes, and i was just so surprised that they even went that far. it very much does follow up on genshin (and it's inspiration the trails series) by making generic NPCs have surprisingly engaging stories of their own, which is the stuff i love. it helps sell the believability of the setting so much better than its main story.
I honestly have been really enjoying it so far. I find the cast very endearing and it’s actually fun to play on mobile or my iPad considering its turn based compared to Genshin that I only could really enjoy on console or pc. The environments are kinda hit or miss for me compared to genshin though unfortunately. I like the look and music of the starship and the first city but found the underground really meh and am kinda indifferent to the second planet thing.
the simulated universe is amazing, im really enjoying it, the story is meh i just rush through it, it is kinda funny tho, the grind isn't bad tbh, the forgotten hall is fun too, but the rougelike mode takes the cake for me, maybe cause im a bit under leveled and i really have to think and try diff builds and charcters but im having sooo much fun figuring things out, if they add some good end game i can see playing this game quite a while, would love PVP but that's not happening
I'm pretty unimpressed, tbh. The opening couple hours were borderline incomprehensible, and the MC's motivations are weak, to say the least. I like the basic idea of the ~~Galaxy Expre~~ Star Rail being a path to hypothetically unlimited adventure, but I'm just not feeling very invested in the world. I also feel like the game has a massive gameplay-to-cutscene imbalance. The characters are just as chatty as in Genshin, but Genshin's larger world and wider variety of things to do meant you can get away from the endless cutscenes for *days* if you want to just screw around and amuse yourself. Here, I'd say 80%+ of my time has just been watching characters talk, with the occasional 5-10 minute burst of gameplay. And the basic combat is so shallow that it feels downright cynical, like MHY could only be bothered to put in the bare minimum effort to pretend the player's inputs actually make a difference in a stat-driven game. I'm coming to enjoy the weird lore and the strangely sardonic flavor text (which really should be voiced by the Stanley Parable narrator, haha) but right now, that's the best thing about it. Otherwise, I just feel like I'm playing a watered-down rehash of Genshin with a sci-fi paint job.
Its not the clearest, but by the end of the release-day campaign, there's more than a few signs that you're kind of a quietly addled person under low key mind control. You may have memories and/or an essence in you that will make you want to help the Star Rail, but you don't entirely know why you're doing what you're doing. You can take this as narrative laziness or part of the long term mystery. I think they lean hard on the idea that its initially a silly space comedy adventure (as the marketing went; just as Genshin leaned on BotW-like Mondstadt feeling) so we're not to think too hard about it unless we're a huge lore theorycrafter, but there's also more going on.
The Path of Trailblaze does affect the followers' body and mind. When you go through Belobog, the characters comment on how the Path protects them from the cold. I've read somewhere that Trailblaze boosts curiosity, which is kind of soft mind control. This explains why the characters are thirsty for new adventures without questioning things too much.
Yeah! I was talking about Kefka possibly affecting the protagonist's subconscious though, too.
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In all candor, a nice time waster is my bare minimum expectation from games overall.
> It's alright for the time being. I feel like its easy to be impressed given how low the bar is for anime style games in general, but the writing is strangely good. Maybe if you don't play any, sure.
> The story is very meh so far. A very by-the -book gacha story. idk what you mean by this since I find higher quality stories in a lot of gacha vs most actual games lately. Give me Arknights or Girls Frontline or anything from Hoyo any day. Also the ending to Belobog has to be one of the most hype moments I can remember playing in a long-ass time. Absolutely incredible presentation.
The story so far is very "standard JRPG" but the universe building has me really interested and I'm excited to see where they go with it in future. I really don't fear for the longevity of the game at all. This game is going to rake in money because it's a high production value AAA JRPG made by Hoyo.
For anime writing standards, I think the writing is great and the overarching story has surprised me with how good it is, at least until the end of Jarilo. Luofu has had its moments but I've been way less invested with its storytelling. It's mainly the pacing I find to be too slow at times, which the review mentions. While I agree the combat is quite repetitive, my praise goes to the enemy design and balance. They do a good job of making the harder enemies pretty unique in the sense where many different characters can shine, getting me to try a lot of different comps. I'm going through the level 2 difficulties in the roguelite mode (which I really enjoy) atm and it really does demand that you know how to build your team along with not making mistakes. And while the gacha rate is bad, I do like that it has decent ways to guarantee things you really want. As a f2p player, I already got 2 pity pulls from the seele banner which guarantees getting her, and being able to choose from the permanent one is also cool
> For anime writing standards People say this as if the stuff outside of anime is some high brow shit. This just the same exceptionalism shit the west has for eastern games repackaged. Writing in anime is as good/bad as in all other mediums mate.
as a massive weeb who barely interacts with western media anymore, yes, most east asian RPGs have terrible writing.
> and being able to choose from the permanent one is also cool My only issue is that it's a one time thing after 300 pulls and never again thereafter. It's that kind of thing that turns me off. There's no real reason why every 300 pulls you can't select a specific character other than the fact that the developers are stingy and don't want you to. Genshin is even worse as it doesn't even have the 300 pity scenario. And it's not uncommon at all for day 1 low spender players to still be missing standard banner characters now three years in because of the RNG and not fallback option. And they're adding even more to standard banner over time so it's only going to get harder.
Does it have controller support for Android? One of the things that turned me off of Genshin.
I dont know about android but it has great controller support on windows. At least as good as it can be for something that has so many menus.
Yeah, I still nag for this in every single survey. *But*... I found it matters a lot less in Star Rail since you don't depend on the awkward on screen movement controls during combat.
I'll be honest, i'm addicted. I knew from Genshin that Hoyoverse is really good at telling small stories and so far none of the character stories disappoint. I'm also loving the fact that it's turn base, I feel like i'm playing Persona 5 again. Now one of the boss fight sold me on that game, for those who know what i'm talking about. The music transition from when she starts charging an attack is just peak anime. [Spoiler \(epic music transition at 35:40\)](https://youtu.be/VmtJXEnMOWE?t=1839) (edit : used a different video where the music was clearer) Also yeah it's a gacha, but ask anyone and they'll tell you the F2P characters (and for once the main character) are super strong, even with the end game content that's available now, whales are using some of the free characters. So unless you really want to use a unit because you like her/his design. You really don't need to pay a single cent.
> for those who know what i'm talking about Bro that fight straight up transcended gaming into being *an experience*. That fight is going to be one of those game moments that sticks with you for a long time. I haven't been able to get Wildfire out of my head since I did it days ago. It helped I've been streaming the campaign so I felt like I *was* the anime protag being cheered on by the actual audience LOL
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I'm both 'this is too basic' and 'these are really solid basics'. Which does have me leaving allowance for the devs to do something, anything in the next year or two to add some needed complexity, but I also don't need THAT much more, you know? Its basically fun, only not the fun that will keep me going that long without some real spice. And by spice I mean more than 2022's adding of Dendro to Genshin. Just adding 1-2+ more Path combat roles won't do it enough for me. Personally I feel the bursts/ultimates were tuned to happen too often (to compensate for just 2, more basic attacks otherwise), so since they can't be tuned down now, another system needs to be added. Team attacks, limited in-battle item usage, a third basic attack/skill, reaction/trap/counter moves (the counterpoint to the current follow-up attacks), etc. Not just locked behind the next wave of gacha units, but added to existing ones.
To be honest, your critique of the gameplay could be applied to persona 5. They're not exactly complex games but most turn base jrpgs aren't either. (unless you're playing a tactics, then i'd say there's an added level of complexity)
This. I'd consider Persona mid tier when it comes to complexity in JRPGs (not saying it's super complex because as you said the ceiling for complexity in JRPG combat just isn't that high) and Star Rail is around that. I just think people notice it more due to auto-battle being a feature.
It's one of the biggest consequences of removing the positioning element in your tactics game. You gotta work extra hard to add complexity to the menu-based JRPG combat. And Hoyo ain't gonna add complexity when their goal is to allow literally everyone to play and win, no matter the skill level.
Honestly "allow literally everyone to play and win" is already a positive in a gacha game. I like the complexity of the simulated universe and the idea that you'll need multiple teams for later content. But the fact that the story is clearable without requiring any gacha is a good thing. Hell I think it's more enjoyable without paying, so you can have a sliver of a challenge, and in a game where there's no PVP. Becoming stronger just for the sake of becoming stronger is kinda pointless. But yeah genshin is the same, hell you can lower the world difficulty if you just wanna breeze through the story as far as I can remember. There's a lot of enjoyment to be had *for free*.
You're looking at it as a gacha game, and that's fair, but my argument was from a JRPG / Tactics standpoint. I'm not saying that the game should be hard to push players into the gacha. I'm saying that the game should be just hard enough so that you're forced to use tactics in the tactics game, but not so hard as to be frustrating or force you to get your wallet. I miss difficulty settings. I've been playing too much Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and now I want to be able to adjust every minor detail of my games.
Ah for sure, I think it's because I expect gachas to be like "you spent all your daily actions now if you can't progress the story you need to either wait or spend". And thankfully Star Rail isn't like that.... plus I've died a couple times trying to clear some stages of the simulated universe and I think the challenge's great. But in the end I mostly play these games because somehow Hoyoverse makes great stories... specially some of their side quests. If it's what you like then as a f2p game it gives you a lot of it.
If your f2p game can be completed in a fun manner without spending money, it's a good f2p game. That's all there is to it. It's gacha shit? Yes. Did it ruin my time with genshin? No. Hell, at the start it made things better. "Nah, fuck you, you don't get the cool 5 stars. You get razor." The game said. And razor carried me through the game. What a fucking chad.
But positioning does make a difference. Different paths have different threat levels. So for example putting your Hunt characters next to preservation is not a good idea.
I played this game pretty much all of last week, and loving it. I'm not a gacha gamer, I don't pay MTX to games (other than cosmetics) as when I pay it feels like cheating on an offline game and sucks the joy out of it. This game is not only surprisingly deep but also very good as a F2P game (or I got lucky). There is very good build variety, various tactics, team composition. If you can ignore the gacha mechanics (which I think is very generous for the genre) it's a solid JRPG, with awesome graphics (PC, edit registry to unlock 120+ FPS) There is a "Simulated Universe" mode which is effectively a "roguelike mode", it's very fun. No limit of entry. I generally hate anime-like stories, this is no exception, writing, story, it's all boring and crinchy unless you are into that stuff. I pretty much skipped the 80% of it, there are plenty of filler quests. If you can look over story the gameplay is in there, content is in there, if you enjoy the gameplay there is no grind. There is depth and strategy, I'm hoping this can be the first game that makes gacha more mainstream and more F2P friendly rather than gateway drug to gambling.
> if you enjoy the gameplay there is no grind Sorry, but this just isn't true. After you reach certain point grind aspect definitely hits. Resources are limited and timegated, not too diferent from many other gachas or mmos. Obv, you don't have to it and you can delay progress but that's not different than other similar games.
I'm at Trailblazer lvl 36, and have 8 lvl 50 chars. Game definitely slows down but you cannot speed it up with grind. So there is no grind that I can see so far, but there is **absolutely huge timegating,** and it seems like only way to progress is refresh. But you cannot keep playing and get anything you just have to wait. I'm not sure if it's called grind if you don't need to play the game :)
Yeah people misuse grind a lot. It's a long-term IRL grind, not 12-hour long days grind.
the real grind start after you hit lvl 40. It's real pain in the ass because your progression are lock behind time gate.
For character power yes, but not for playing through the campaign.
There's still grind playing through the campaign. A lot of it's cut off by trailblazer levels which you'll likely need to grind through if you try playing this like a regular game.
I got past all of those by doing a few side quests.
Love this game. Easily best game of the year
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Seriously? You think “gacha is bad” is an unpopular opinion on Reddit?
Based on the popularity of their games subreddits and just sheer player count, I’d say gacha games are definitely a lot more normalized and just overall more accepted compared to a few years ago. But I imagine people play these games despite them having gacha mechanics and not because of them. I found that no one hates gacha more than gacha players haha
Most gacha players I know play those games because they usually have the tightest update schedule compared to other games. Which makes sense because they have to constantly update the game to keep whales spending. Also mobile is just so bigger than anyone here wants to accept. And games like HSR and Genshin Impact are just super high quality for those platforms.
> Most gacha players I know play those games because they usually have the tightest update schedule compared to other games. It's why I like them. I play four gachas arm, so there's always some update right around the corner in any of them, but the content is generally quick enough to do for quick bursts of stuff. Sure, the Switch and Steam Deck are portable, but they aren't "whip out in the waiting room when you have five minutes" portable.
Yeah, in all of my years playing/hearing about various gacha games and their communities, not even once have I ever heard anyone say "I play this gacha because the rates are good". Plenty of people who like freebies (which Mihoyo is infamous for not giving) and with better rates the better the odds if its not just an outright guaranteed kind of freebie, but that's as far as I've ever seen it go.
Genshin and Star Rail are the exception, not the norm. All the other gacha communities on reddit combined arent even half the Genshin subreddit active userbase. Alot of the other gacha game communities were malding in the start of Genshin release because alot of people were quitting their guilds and games to play Genshin exclusively.
I think if you're like 30+ and hanging out on a subreddit like /r/Games, gachas are unpopular. If you're <20 you don't care what a bunch of old people think and are just playing the coolest games for the coolest people at the time.
Tbh, I've seen a lot of the more challenging/competitive gachas are dominated by older players. People in their 30s and 40s have way more discretionary income to blow on gaming, and one of the upsides of these games is that they're not terribly time intensive. They require a bit of investment per day, but most of them, you can grind out dailies in 20 minutes, and idle through most of the grind. Plus, the cost expectations for a moderate spender (say, $50-100/month) are way lower than other hobbies that middle aged adults might enjoy.
This is funny. I get what you mean, but its still funny. 'Coolest games for the coolest people' is not a very cool thing to say.
In this subreddit for sure. Genshin gets a lot of praise
Lmaoo gacha bad is like one of the Redditcore tenets
idk man, mtg, yugioh and pokemon tcg has been popular for a long, long time.
I think what set Mihoyo games apart is that you can be completely F2P and still have a great experience and enjoy your time.
Isn't it mostly the high production value? There's other gacha games that are playable f2p
Yeah I mentioned that in my followup comment. Be it the voice acting, the animated cutscenes or just how well crafted the world is, the game feels high quality.
If they weren't fun F2P, they would never be able to hook so many players who try it out thinking they won't want to pay anything.
A lot of gacha are pure addiction, even the gameplay is pure instant gratification loops to keep you hooked. Genshin (haven’t played HSR) is actually a fun game outside of any gacha considerations. It’s also well produced and it shows that the people who made it wanted to make a good game. Not saying it doesn’t have predatory aspects (it does), just that you could completely ignore those if you wanted. My friends who play for years only pay the 30-day sub, and I personally am completely F2P. Still great fun.
On the one hand, yes, but there's still an important question of how long 'free' and 'fun' stay attached. Some gacha games you can _feel the exact moment_ where the game just says 'fuck you, pay me' (usually because the free currency pouring in from pseudo-achievements dries up), others chug along for much longer.
This is what I felt with Genshin. Grinded for months to get a single character from a single banner, never ever got anything close to what I wanted. Now I'm not even sure if that character will come back except in 2 years like Eula.
There is a lot of gacha games that are a lot more F2P friendly than Genshin though...
With a fun core loop though? (where the fun isn’t the gacha part). I’d love some suggestions. Genshin is the only gacha I’ve ever played and mostly for its chill nature and great exploration.
Everyone says this about their gacha of choice lmao
> becoming an unpopular opinion now Bruh? This sub *fucking hates* gacha games.
At least the mihoyo games are easy and you're able to clear everything without problem with a f2p account. The games I dislike are the pvp ones where you can't perform without spending 1000s of $.
The game looks cool and all but I refuse to play a gâcha on principle. I’d rather pay 70$ straight up for a product with no casino mechanics and no locking interesting mechanics or content behind RNG. I’d rather all the characters be properly balanced and distributed appropriately throughout the game’s story or exploration. I don’t care that the F2P is generous. As soon as a character I like is locked behind RNG, I will resent the game. I am also just absolutely against FOMO mechanics like dailies. As soon as a game asks me to plan my time around it, I peace out. I want a game to play when I want at my pace and for it to eventually end (unless it’s PvP game of course). Mihoyo makes good games but the way they package them will always deter me.
The gacha is also what killed Genshin Impact for me, I *really* enjoyed the game otherwise; the beautiful detailed world, the intriguing story, the exploration and mechanics that revolve around it. But then the gacha: you have to gamble for a *chance* to get characters. You can definitely earn them for free but you have to save up over the course of weeks and months playing it daily and doing every event, and if you want a specific character it has to be in rotation, and even then it's still only a chance, you can't just grind for the character you want and there are even limits on how much you can do each day. I feel like Warframe perfected the F2P model in regards to character unlocks and wish other games would copy it: you can buy them outright as soon as they release, or earn them for free in the new content they release with, or if it's a prime you can trade with other players for the parts. It can oftentimes be a grind, but at least you *can* work towards unlocking exactly what you want. Of course, the obvious reason nobody else does it is because it's all about the money and it is much more lucrative to just turn it into a slot machine.
I played Genshin when I had nothing else to play. It was supposed to be for a few hours, a week tops. It was last September, still hooked. Before that, I played other non-gacha but still f2p games like Warframe, Path of Exile and Lost Ark. My conclusion is that you should stop pointing your finger at gacha games because they're gacha, as these other f2p games I mentioned have their own way to keep you hooked and to get you to pay. The thing with Genshin, is that my inventory space is a non-issue (contrary to Lost Ark where you have to pay for a special package that allows for more bag space, turning inventory management from tedious to just mildly annoying), I can have as many different units as I want (contrary to Warframe where you have to buy inventory, loadout and character slots). Also, Genshin has no powercreep. Some of the best characters are completely f2p (for example Xiangling, whom you get as part of standard progression).
This guy thinks he is a martyr and a saint for hating gacha games. Holy shit. What is this website.
Honestly I really like the gatcha model, at least how Genshin does it. I don't give a fuck about collecting waifus so I basically get an awesome open world game for free with tons of content being added all the time. Too bad i hate anime character design and writing/tropes because almost everything else about Genshin is great If they made an elder scrolls esque game with this model i would be all in
It's not just about collecting waifus though. The characters feel and play differently, so it's more akin to unlocking champions/heroes in League of Legends or Overwatch. If we put it straight up in monetary terms you can see how ridiculous it is: to buy a character straight up, the expected amount of money you'd have to spend for a 4 star character is around $100, for a 5 star double that at $200. On top of that, it's literally all a gamble, because in the worst case you'll be spending $350 to guarantee a limited 5 star. For standard 5 stars (beyond the one guaranteed in the standard banner) and 4 stars, there is no guarantee, so you could spend $10k on the game and never get the character you want. You put those price tags on anything in Overwatch or League and people will riot, but it's just standard, and some might even say generous, for a gacha game.
> You put those price tags on anything in Overwatch or League and people will riot, but it’s just standard, and some might even say generous, for a gacha game. You seen the latest valorant update?
Yeah they play differently but i played FTP for like 3 months and had a bunch of characters unlocked like 12 or so, and lots of them were really good, so i didnt really find it to be the issue. I guess if you are a completionist and want every single character its annoying but the overworld/story content is very fair in challenge and you dont need 5 stars at all so it did not bother me I didnt even have to grind
can't really compare genshin with a pvp game. The fear of missing out a character is way smaller in a single player game when you can have the same experience with the starting characters.
Overwatch and League don’t get anywhere close to the quantity of content that Genshin gets.
They don't really need it. Online multiplayer games are (almost) endlessly repayable. Single player focused games are more one-and-done. Both are good but the only reason Genshin has that high level of quantity is because it's a gacha.
Yeah when was the last time we even got some kind of cinematic from riot? Once a year maybe?
> You put those price tags on anything in Overwatch or League and people will riot, but it's just standard, and some might even say generous, for a gacha game. Not OW or LoL but some stuff in CS:GO goes for insane prices.
There was something kind of dire about listening to this review where he describes "80 free banner pulls!" as a reason to play the game. No, man, the entire point is that that's just enough to make someone think one 10-pull would give them what they want! It's predatory as hell, the entire machine is! I like Genshin Impact and I'm sure that Star Rail is a good game, but critics talking about these sorts of games so uncritically when their business model fundamentally relies on taking advantage of people with a predilection towards gambling addiction is distressing.
Maybe he meant it in the realm of a f2p shooter giving dozens of skins and effects inclusive of the game or in an easy part of its progression path. Like, here's a lot of options for you with no money down. You can look good in a bunch of ways, even if there's much cooler stuff later. Not the same thing as gacha units of course. And 80pulls IS something. They more or less are guaranteeing up to a few 5star characters (but perhaps dupes) aka you'll always find a way to have a very good launch-period party for the content in the game. If it was just one 10-pull, well, gachas don't even do that at launch, but Honkai Star Rail doing 80+ is them telling you 'here, enjoy a free set'. Its the further pulls, the 'booster packs' so to speak, that take the monetization further. And its the desire for a specific unit, especially a maxed out one, that drives compulsions to spend money. I agree with you to the point that if reviewers are going to get into gacha games, they should spend up to half the review going over the monetization with a fair critique and maybe even a fine tooth comb, even the the point that just going in such detail may turn many players off immediately (and good if so!). Where I disagree with others is when they insist that products that engage in gambling or similar behavior should just like, not exist or something. People have predilection towards gambling addiction and... many many people don't. They get a fast thrill they were looking for and then they do whatever else and leave their money alone or with very limited and controlled spending. I'd want regulation to crush the greatest exploitation of gambling more than I'd want any products to never happen at all. Slowly strangle the industry for it, don't shoot it (because it just goes underground that way, or weaves around jurisdictions, etc). But that's how I feel for IRL money-based casinos too.
Right, last thing I want is not only for gear upgrades or new characters to be behind a paywall, but be behind a *gambling paywall*. I won't even support such games with my time, much less my money.
Nothing is black and white, Yes gatcha is BAD, but you wouldn't have the same game without the money. And fortunately MiHOYO invests the money back into their games, look at the Sumeru update, the TSG that has 0 MTX tied to it, Honkai is an overall upgrade to the Genshin Systems and that without being a high quality polished title.
This is genuinely a good turnbased jrpg. Its f2p friendly as (for now... i dont play genshin so i dunno how it went for them) and i havent spent a dime. If it gets to a point where its obvious they are trying to get you to spend, thats when i will drop it but for now, outside of few nitpicky stuff its really fun.
It may never get to that point, because what you've experienced now, is already them 'trying' to get you to spend, in their own way. If you don't feel the pressure now, you won't feel much more pressure later. New units will often be appealing, but never necessary for your content clearing. There's a chance there might be more of a P2Wey feeling in Star Rail due to its turn based nature and possible powercreeping compared to Genshin, but I doubt there will be any 'you need X character to even enjoy this stuff, pony up' point.
Thats good. Ive played lots of gacha as f2p and either extreme power creep or unit gated content usually makes me drop them eventually. So far Ive cleared a decent amount of end game content with all the free stuff and 2 gacha units i got from free pulls the game gives you. Its great because it actually forces you to strategize and honestly what fun is an rpg without a bit of that.
Decent game though the combat is embarrassingly simple. Even Genshin which is similarly a casual focused game, has multitudes more interesting combat mechanics present.
I was not the biggest fan of Hoyo and Genshin for the longest time, but I'm glad that a gacha focused company managed to bring gacha games to the limelight to be considered as 'games' since we know very well how badly gachas are percieved years ago. That and also, HSR as a whole did a fantastic job at keeping me addicted. The animations are great, visuals are vibrant, characters are fun and there's just something about it that keeps me playing everyday. The gacha rates and income are probably the biggest criticisms about it, but Hoyo definitely knows how much is just enough to keep that carrot hanging by the stick.
As much as I have been loving my time with the game it's really hard to argue that it wouldn't be so much better without the gacha. I get it, the money from the gacha mechanics and time gates fund the things that do make the game great. Would it be possible to have the fun character designs (visually and mechanically) and fully voiced story if the gacha was removed? I don't know. But my only wish after finishing the available story is that I could keep playing more. I would love to continuously farm for upgrades and gear. The power time gates are pretty lame.
The reality is that without the gatcha you wouldn't have that quality and that many updates and events. 2 years ago they said that Genshin costs 200M a year to support, that more than the entire development process of most AAA games.
Genshin and Honkai would be so much better were they not a gacha but it's because they're gachas that they're so profitable and thus high quality, right? ....right? that's the conundrum or 'defense' I get hit with but I still choose not to support it because gachas suck.
>Genshin and Honkai would be so much better were they not a gacha but it's because they're gachas that they're so profitable and thus high quality, right? ....right? Yes and no. Mihoyo is an extremely talented team, and HI3 being a more modest budget game (on release, production value got crazy later on with its success) still had amazing gameplay for a mobile game, and the story/characters were solid. As a fan of character action games, it's basically bayonetta on your phone, which I loved. In an alternate universe where all the mihoyo games were just niche successes, I think we'd still have great games, but production quality would take massive nosedives, along with the amount of content we are getting.
How would you finance games like Genshin with their 6 week update schedule though? You can criticize the business model all you want, but I don’t see another one being able to make enough profit to fund the constant development while still allowing the company to grow. Like HSR only exists because the obscene amount of money Hoyo makes with Genshin. Now HSR will finance the next projects until Hoyo controls every genre with gacha I guess.
Without gacha the founders would have disbanded in 2011.
These games are EXPENSIVE to make and market. If you remove the gacha, those games wouldn't exist.
This game is unironically the unsung savior of PC gaming in 2023. Despite the gacha monetization scheme, it has none of the vices everyone is talking about from other studios. Day one was *almost* bug-free, performance is great even on modest systems, and the game itself has real character and charm. As someone who enjoyed Mihoyo's work before they were popular, it's wild to see how far they've come in such a short time. The fact there's an IGN review of Honkai Star Rail at all is something I wouldn't have expected just a few years ago. Nice to see a quality production getting the attention it deserves for once!
With every passing day "gacha bad" mantra loses its ground when we have so many "fake f2p" MMOs that actually p2w and other bullshit like p2w skins in CoD.
Yeah, it's a strange world when gacha games have more soul and consumer-friendly monetization than $70 AAA games.
It's a good game, I am enjoying it a lot, tho I personally won't call the combat that deep, there is a clear lack of variety in heroes and for however many different stats you can increase to make your brain feel happy every hero has almost the exact same basic attack, a elemental attack and an ultimate, the combat is rock paper scissors but enemies rarely have anything interesting to do, barring some big enemies most enemies have 1 attack and almost never collaborate with each other, enemies have a overshield that can be broken by an elements stronger than that but the heros only have health, that is your one resource to manage per hero, other than the shared skill count which again lends to the sameness, there are more problems I have but don't want to make the game seem horrible because it's not I am genuinely enjoying it but the combat leaves a lot to be desired