The Patreon Letter - 31 October, 2020

Hello and happy halloween! Em here in under the wire with a new letter. Geez it's been a month! I don't need to tell anyone here, you're all going through it, and it doesn't seem to be getting any better. So thank you for your patience as we get these out last minute (or late, I don't know what Jackson's doing) as we muddle through entering the 8th month of never leaving our homes and watching the world burn.

I've been playing a lot of Genshin Impact, at least like a half hour a day, and while I have been very positive on it my feelings have been constantly shifting as I get deeper into the game. I've noted on voip life before that the first hour or two was truly wretched, as I had built up all the Breath of the Wild comparisons in my head and found the movement in Genshin lacking, but as the combat opened up and the world expanded to explore I found myself more and more compelled to scale every mountain and unlock every waypoint and collect as many of the orbs as I could without resorting to following a map for hours. 

I wish I knew how many hours I have played Genshin Impact, but for "some reason" the game doesn't want to tell me this. I know the reason, but given the money extraction nature of even full price games when I see casino behavior in a video game it just makes me feel kind of bad about the time I've spent in it. I try to keep my phone on while I play so I can see how much time I'm spending, but that isn't in aggregate, so I just have to guess like oh between 30-50 hours? I don't know!

In that time, I've ended up in this weird place specifically about how this game compares to Breath of the Wild that I am of two minds about. You see, the second zone in the game, Liyue, is this incredible area of mountains and valleys and marshes. It's one of the most beautiful areas I've ever climbed around in a video game, and I think it shows just how much room there is to elaborate on the sort of world design that Breath of the Wild really pushed into the mainstream. 

I say mainstream, because this waypoint based, self-directed light puzzle solving and resource managed travelling as gameplay is something that to me comes out of a tradition of games that I somehow doubt the developers played but were in the consciousness, indie games like Eidolon and Miasmata that were all about these core mechanics and were themselves elaborations on the then early survival game genre. These feel so much like sanded down elaborations of harder, weirder experiments like that but I don't know if this is a real lineage or whether ideas are just in the ether sometimes. 

Anyway, to the point of Liyue, it really is just breathtaking to climb around in, but also because it's such a strange hilly landmass often as you explore it early on you'll find yourself in a situation where you climb a mountain and below you you'll see like two orbs in opposite directions, a couple of wisps (this game's korok equivalent) floating on the horizon, and then at least one but sometimes up to three different enemy camps with locked chests behind them. And in that moment, when you aren't doing this for the first time but for the thirtieth, it all feels a bit silly and cheap. 

When I talked about Breath of the Wild in our game of the year podcast that year, I talked about how it was a game that goes out of its way to convince you of its naturalism by being decidedly not-natural. It's like a botanical garden, cleverly using human designed paths and tree breaks and sight lines to guide you along around the next bend and to the next secret. It takes immensely difficult work to make something that inspires the reaction of 'oh this feels natural', often by utilizing intense study of how to convince you unnatural things aren't. Genshin, on the other hand, takes what I think of as the theme park approach, of putting you in obvious vantage points where you can spin around and see multiple activities all competing for your attention, driving you to circle around an area hitting them all until you inevitably end up at another vantage point where new activities await on plains you couldn't see from the first hill you were on. 

It's compulsive, and I mean that in a positive way (mostly), in the way that the best open world games compel me to explore every tower and gather every feather (okay that one wasn't worth it, looking at you Assassin's Creed 2), but I also mean that in the way that the game is clearly built on making sure I get the light dopamine hit of getting a chest every two minutes so that I'm constantly being dragged along by rewards. Which is fine, every game does this to some extend, but those chests containing a random assortment of upgrade materials meant to upgrade your randomly pulled characters that are purchased through the slot machine does instill disquiet. These days when I clear the hilichurl camps for chests I find myself thinking of it as a sort of loyalty rewards program to upgrade my experience more than like quest rewards, and I don't like that I think that. 

It feels cheap, like this expensive veneer of art is rubbing off and revealing that I'm spending all my time in a casino but like one really interested in writing the lore of the slot machines. And then I think about how every game, not just the gachas, are like this fundamentally. And then I feel bad about video games, again. 

That's usually when I stop playing Genshin for the night.

As I watch some of my friends play Breath of the Wild while I play Genshin I'm struck but just how different these philosophies are despite both attempting the same thing. I don't necessarily think one is better than the other, either. Breath of the Wild is often a very cold game that offers meager rewards for intense effort. You will absolutely prep for some mountain climb and maybe only get some materials or a shrine. I know shrines are the point of Breath of the Wild, but they aren't exciting for me in the same way that when I open a couple of chests in Genshin I hope maybe I'll get the books I need to level up Barbara because I'm so starved for levelling books at this point. I know a shrine is going to give me an orb, and I know that's just one quarter of the way to the next upgrade, and that's all I have to look forward to.

But by the same token, Genshin only knows how to give the rewards that feed into its many systems. I will not have the Genshin version of running across my first dragon in Breath of the Wild, or finding the monster parts vendor one hundred hours into playing the game and seeing I had just like not found a core mechanic. And it's annoying, perhaps, to have a game where something like that could be missed. But also there's a wonder to a game where you can play the whole thing and then realize that something unique was tucked away that you just missed and can go track down and see that doesn't necessarily fit into the constant feedback loop of materials to pump into another level cap, another roll, another upgrade of the weapon you got lucky pulling on your second ten pull and have nursed the entire time. 

Which is to say that the deeper I get into Genshin, the more things I have to pick at about it, but also the more I respect that it has developed a very unique perception of this type of game for itself and how much room there is in the idea of self-directed open worlds to explore if people wanted to make more of them. Liyue's world design has me sometimes exhausted, sometimes curious what future Genshin zones will look like, almost always extremely curious about Nintendo's second swing at this sort of game—but always thinking about the possibilities, even as I chafe a bit against the limitations of the designs we have, based around the nature of the games they are.

So it goes, playing games ever. Also, let's be real, what's important in Genshin is that the boss fights are sick. There should just be more of them and less grind on the ones we've got!

Until next time, enjoy Halloween, if that suits you, and talk to you next month!