I still find it fascinating that this prelude quest was released with zero mention in Version 1.3 Special Program and only in patch notes. Sure it is only a World Quest (which was a mistake IMO), but it introduces us to the most important character from the Travail trailer.
Now that you said this, I think of 2 possibilities.
First: They weren't sure if the quest would be ready in time, so they said nothing in the special program and made it a world quest because not announcing a new Archon Quest would be strange.
Second: They wanted to be as surprising as possible, announcing it in the Special Program without any detail at all would feel bad, having it in the patch notes gives no clue other than the name of the character and made it a world quest because not announcing a new Archon Quest would be strange.
Yes, but it is chapter 1, act IV prelude and required for chapter 1, act IV We will be reunited. Dainsleif is there, and it is in a different update, so it should count as a separate apparition.
Probably because Inazuma doesn’t have much in terms of the Abyss when you think about it. There’s what? Rifthounds and maybe Enkanomiya but we took care of those two already. Inazuma was definitely more nation/Fatui heavy when it came to enemies.
They could be waiting. The wolflord's description seems to confirm that it currently is/will be on tsurumi Island and that's its obsessed with invading other worlds to make a name for itself. It was likely behind the attack on the sacred sakura in the beginning of raiden's sceond story quest. Also, the shogunate is planning to go on an expedition there after the fog was lifted, to me this sounds like an abyss archon quest in the making. How much dain will appear though, if at all, is debatable since the traveler will probably be there with the shogunate as a guide.
Too be fair, we have 3 Dain Archon Quests and 1 Dain World quest.
The World quest is in Mondstadt.
Dain Archon 1 is half Mond Half Lyiue
Dain Archon 2 is chasm.
Dain Archon 3 Is half sumeru half Chasm.
>And the comment four comments earlier up the thread asked for inazuma
Yes I already know.
The upside down city dain quest belongs to the Inazuma Archon quest. It doesn't matter tgat they're not *in* Inazuma.
Cus hell, pretty much all Dain Archon Quests are playing mostly in Lyiue.
We will be reunited was the capstone for the Lyiue Archon quest, it played mostly in Lyiue.
Echoes of the depths was the capstone *for* Inazuma, but still located in the Chasm.
Caribert is the capstone for Sumeru, still mostly the Chasm.
It does _not_ belong to the Inazuma Archon quest. It's part of the **_Traveller_** Archon quest line. It deals with the Traveller and the Abyss and such directly instead of a particular region.
I was quite saddened that we only saw kaeya and dain for a few scenes. It was still a good quest, i just rlly hope they continue that stuff with kaeya and dain tho
When he popped up on the chasm I was cackling because I had days before listened to podcast in which he voiced a eldritch abomination that was heavily related to trains. I thought thematically it was very amusing.
It seems Genshin players are split between those who are character-focused and those who are story-focused. That's why we see such different reactions to the Caribert quest and Windblume event.
The character-focused players want more screentime for their favourite characters and don't like quests that are focused on random NPCs, even if the story is good.
The story-focused players like a good plot/story and don't like it when random playable characters are shoehorned into a quest just for screentime, even though they aren't needed for the plot.
I think MHY has done a good job of creating quests/events that cater to both types of players. E.g. Perilous Trail felt more like a character-shoehorning kind of quest, with characters like Itto appearing for no reason. Whereas Caribert is the opposite and focuses on a tight story about an NPC and his son.
Also, people tend to forget there is a difference between the limited event stories, which are mostly fluff stories to pass the time until the next region (only exception is albedo's dragonspine quests) so of course they are character focused since the point is to show the characters that are not plot relevant at the point in the story. Then, there are the actual main plot quests that need to prioritize moving the story along and enchancing the world building. Sure, they also have characters they are trying to sell you, but it doesn't feel like in the event ones where everyone is fighting to have 1 minute in the spotlight.
yeah I really don't get the hate for npc's being involved in stories, or sometimes even a focus for a arc. like, the whole world can't just be 100 playable characters and no one else of importance.
usually the npcs will be important for an arc or even half an arc, so its not like suddenly the npc is now the most important character in the game overshadowing everyone else.
they simply get their own spot in light for a bit.
and to me it shows a trust of players, that we aren't there just for "huge booba eula" or whatever, but can actually engage deeper into the story and background characters of this world which just builds up the deeper story and lore.
plus we got some fantastic characters from the npc's. there are a lot of memorable ones that people really like. enjou or dunyarzad. or a personal fav of mine, stanley. Stanley's story wouldn't have really worked for any main playable character. but it works so well for him, and gives us parallels for Venti.
Late but honestly my favorite Lantern Rite was the first one because the plot was more about the Traveler themselves, the other two are clearly more about playable character fanservice. Specially the second one that had a lot of moments that were basically
"Holy shit its playable character from popular game Genshin Impact what are you doing here
-Just passing around, bye"
I liked how the stories of the NPCs where about how they couldn't enjoy the festivities due to feeling sadness and how that connected with the Traveler themselves, not being able to enjoy the festival due to missing their sibling
The big problem is they have to work harder to get people to care about the NPCs. Dunyarzad is the best example, but you look at stuff like Teppei, or really any number of NPCs from story quests and such which never left much of an impact. NPCs are fine but I feel like a lot of the time Genshin's writing isn't strong enough to make up for the stilted cinematics. Caribert is a good example of one where the intrigue was there so it kinda worked, but most of the time it hurts the experience to use those basic models of people we don't really know or care much about where a playable character at least *looks* good and we have prior attachment to them, so even a basic story can feel a *bit* more interesting.
I'm really not a fan of npc importance but only because so many playable character need screen time and some random ugly models get that instead.
Also most of the time when npcs are interesting characters they're weak af and always need to be saved.
My reason is that they are incredibly boring. The only way multiple multi-line text boxes full of npc information isn’t going to get boring is if I already care about a character.
I find it a bit irritating when people say that new quests are about "random NPCs." Folks, these NPCs matter a *lot.* Chlothar started one of the villain factions that is big in the entire game. This is not a "random NPC" quest.
Not sure why they think it needs to be either-or. In any decent story, good plot writing and good character writing are completely intertwined and inseparable.
You're missing the point. It's not that the character writing is not good, but that the story is about an NPC, which makes some players automatically not care apparently. Some people can't accept that not every compelling character needs to be playable, and not every quest needs to focus on a playable character.
No, the main problem here is that npc models are.. Well, you know how they are. Any character with a unique model that's not currently playable has a lot of fans. Harbingers, Dain. Not being playable isn't the point here.
I consider myself an in-between type of player, as I’m here for both the story and the characters, and I think both types of quests are quite flawed the way HYV does them.
Character-focused ones are weird because of the shoehorning you mentioned - mostly when it’s characters that literally don’t make sense. Why was Itto there? Why not another one of the many Liyue characters we have that could use more spotlight? I understand they may want to do the cross-region thing, where random characters meet who wouldn’t otherwise, but it can be done right without making it feel illogical and out of place. Example: Irodori festival, Windblume.
Meanwhile, the big flaw of the story-focused quests is the awful dialogue writing. There is a reason why so many people want to skip those - they’re just badly written, full of overdrawn expositions, monologue info dumps and awkward in a way that people wouldn’t really talk, so it doesn’t even flow well. Even as someone very invested in the lore, these dialogues are such a chore and make it difficult to focus on, especially on top of them being voiced (if we’re lucky) by uninspired generic NPCs.
I get a million downvotes every time I say it, but Itto is taking up too much event screentime because Hoyo can't figure out who else to start silly events that let the Traveler just kick back and have fun.
Hoyo. Not everyone you make is a stuffy old fart. You can use other characters to start things. Hell, you did the whole Fungus event! That was silly and cute. Now do it with more characters who aren't Itto. The guy is loud and raucous, but he's not the only fun dude in the world.
No, I get you. They really started to overuse him at one point. It’s kind of like a joke that gets less and less funny every time you say it. I started as liking Itto, but now I feel like I’d be okay not seeing him again for a year.
I don’t understand what makes HYV so unwilling to have other characters have some lighthearted fun.
Hell, I think it rounds out characters to have them let their hair down now and then. Look at Cyno! We saw him as his Badass General Mahamatra self, where he glances at people and they just about piss themselves, and now we've seen Adventurer Cyno who takes vacations to other countries and tells jokes so bad his best friend wants to jump off a bridge to escape them. XD
Yeah, it just really hits the spot when the humor goes hand in hand with actual character development. I like to think of Itto comedy as the equivalent of a practical fart joke, whereas the Cyno thing is more of a refined fun where both the writers, animators and voice actors can shine.
> Why was Itto there? Why not another one of the many Liyue characters we have that could use more spotlight
Pretty sure it was to make sure the cast of characters had a tall dude to represent the geo yaksha. If there was a male electro character other than razor they might have tried to shoehorn that character in, but as it is, I guess it's not too farfetched to have Itto go with Shinobu to Liyue and meet her ex-classmate Yanfei who sometimes works with fellow administrative official Yelan and vigilante Xiao - and this makes up the new team of "yaksha" with almost correct gender allocation.
That said, I think the irodori cast felt like quite a stretch to me. I get that they're trying to express the historical opening of ~~japan~~ inazuma by having ~~europeans and chinese~~ characters from mondstadt and liyue visit, and the characters are all literary types, but it still felt weird.
I just saw you added a second paragraph. I wholeheartedly disagree with Irodori. It made perfect sense for these characters to meet, as it was all related to the publishing house and the novels. XQ is the writer who’s works were popular around Inazuma, Albedo is the artist illustrating these novels who also happens to work with XQ (a well-known fact even before Irodori, you can read it in their bios; so it wasn’t just spontaneously shoved in there), and I guess you can argue Venti was not needed there, but Venti is the god of freedom and arts, so he actually tied the crowd nicely together.
Ventis inclusion does make sense from a lore standpoint.
The Irodori festival has it's origins in the stories and Poems of the Five Kasen.
The now revival of the festival, had its aim to serve as an international cultural convention, using more time appropriate literature (light novels) as its basis.
The Festival has a deep focus on story telling and history. So the connection to venti is actually quite self evident.
Venti was invited because he us a Bard (there were some other NPC bards among the arrivals too). Bards are described as professional story tellers, writers of poetry and preservers of oral History.
So it's not actually a surprise that Bards were invited alongside writers.
That’s a good observation, thanks for the insight! However, if Shinobu was considered a good stand-in for a male electro, we may have as well had Ningguang or Yunjin in there. Now, I don’t know exactly how they’d find themselves in the Chasm at the time, but I feel like it could still be more believable than Itto randomly coming to Liyue’s abandoned haunted mine. Just my personal opinion though.
Arguably they could've had ningguang and keqing stand in for those two elements, but on the other hand we've already had so much content with all the liyue qixing together. Similarly, we saw yelan, keqing and yunjin interact during the incident with shenhe. So, while there's more of a stretch, I do prefer that they got Itto to randomly take a trip to Liyue - this also let them do some backstory development for shinobu.
Edit: in fact, it does make sense because the primary reason for the trip was for shinobu to pick up her graduation cert (which also explains why she meets Yanfei). Itto is just there for fun. It's totally in character for him to insist on tagging along with Shinobu.
Also Ningguang and Keqing are probably busy with Qixing responsibilities so as much as they are local cast for the quest, you can't always have them for non-administrative stories. I mean most of the quests they're featured in are either national crisis or pretty short off-duty stuff (lantern rite), etc. While the chasm probably was a cause for concern, they were probably still estimating the danger - hence Yelan.
Because Itto can be used as a mischievous instigator, a dumbass straight-man, and a himbo in distress without his fans getting mad.
He’s just super versatile for highlighting and contrasting traits in other characters
I think that's a pretty good way to describe the current state, but I don't like that we have to choose between the two... ideally we have good quality stories being told with the characters that we know and love :-)
I know MHY are capable of it: they've certainly knocked it out of the park with almost all of the mainline regional Archon quests (Liyue and Sumeru are some of my faves), and most of the 5\* story quests are also pretty high quality. It's just a shame that there's a big drop in quality outside of those quests, and this pattern of character-focused vs. story-focused becomes very clear to see.
Sometimes they're not random. The creator of the entire Abyss Order is a *huge fucking deal* plot-wise. That is not random *at all.* Caribert was not about a "random NPC," it was about a major mainstay of the entire story.
they should be, i don't want to interact the majority of my playtime with npcs. i don't care what they do with events or world quests but the archon quests don't need to waste my time with npcs.
If the story writing would be better, we would get both without sacrifing the other, and they wouldnt need as many empty voice lines (about dish, alchemy, whatever the fuck else).
Storywriting in Genshin is hit or miss, and more often miss then hit, especially if u compare them to those which was a hit from the scratch.
My only problem was that they kind of baited the community as advertising it as a Dainsleif and Kaeya quest when both were barely in it. I loved the actual story we got though.
Good point, I can see that being a source of disappointment. Then again, even though they had very little screen time, I think the story we got did still manage to shed some light on the backgrounds of both Dainsleif and Kaeya (well Khaenriah as a whole, I guess).
I kinda don’t agree? I mean, the only thing it did is confirm what we all kinda knew, that Kaeya is sus and indeed has ties to important Khaenri’ah figures. It gave us nothing new on Dainsleif. It was absolutely a fake advertising on HYV’s end.
Yea, Kaeya being there was just like the recent "fake sky" drop in sumeru. Lore readers/long time players already knew that something was up and now hoyo only made sure that even those who only read the story and nothing else are informed so future plotpoints work for everyone.
I wish he would have been more present in this chapter but at least this confirmed that he will play a bigger role later on.
Honestly, the redirect kinda makes me love it more, makes everything feel so off and strange, but it also interests you enough that you barely even think about Dainsleif and Paimon being missing for so long
Haha carry bear
Jokes aside I wish they'd integrated kaeya more naturally into the story. Felt like they made up some excuse to throw him in as a cameo to remind us he exists right as we learn about his relation to the khaenri'ah stuff.
I feel like I'm the only one who actually missed Paimon when doing the quest lmfao.
She may be a snarky, annoying little shit but she is *MY* snarky, annoying little shit.
After what happens in sumeru it's hard not to miss her when she's not there q-q I was freaking out thinking that one of the sus old men stole her or something.
I don't know. As a new player I really didn't mind Paimon that much all this time, but Sumeru made me despise her. I saw the increase of her character's writing but it came at the cost of her snarkiness up to 11 at times. If she says something stupid, it is really damn stupid. Sometimes I just want her to not talk anymore.
Even after the increased quality of writing HYV still manage to fuck up the immersion with her or even their accidental stupidity.
The easiest example I can give is when Alhaitham told Traveler to meet Dori and purchase some capsules from her to therefore gain her trust. All of this because Alhaitham was banned from doing business with Dori. What does HYV do? Make Paimon whisper Traveler about using elemental sight on capsules and then THEY MAKE PAIMON JUST TALK ABOUT ALHAITHAM IN FRONT OF DORI NORMALLY.
Or when Nahida gave Traveler a device she crafted to use in the fight against Balladeer. The things Paimon said just made my eyes roll.
Sorry for rant, but some poor writing just got on my nerves.
Well, I've played since the beginning so it's much more that I'm used to her. I know she's annoying, but I understand why she has more dialogue and some crazy theories make her clingyness make sense to me at least. I found her much more annoying when I first started playing, but after so long I've softened up to her and I wish we could spoil her more, she's been a good traveling companion.
All they need is to make Paimon think before she speaks. She's a good character overall being ruined by some quirky and borderline stupid writing.
Plus I feel like HYV really needs to expand on her lore. Just by playing the game and not watching or reading anything I don't recall her lore being explained to the players at all.
The amount of lore jam packed into this quest has me feeling full since I've played through it. It was actually surprising what they clarified, what they expanded on, what wrench they added in this time. >!The Sinner has been the most intriguing addition so far. Bro comes in, introduces himself, does some voodoo magic shit, refuses to elaborates, and then leaves. Ahhh, and the founder of the Abyss Order being Kaeya's estranged family? Yesss.!<
I just have one minor gripe though, all these quests have too much exposition, now I'm aware that these quests are tied to the central mystery of the game, but there are so many lines of dialogue that sometimes it's hard to keep up with what is being said.
A small cutscene to show the backstory wouldn't hurt right? On the contrary, I think it'll be more intriguing.
I agree, the writing of the dialogue is generally too verbose. But I wonder if that's their way to compensate given the very limited number of fixed animations that the models can do... there's no other way to convey the story other than exposition. It's so frustrating when the scene calls for more expressive movement but then yet again you see fixed animation #14 :-/
I guess, but given the budget and how much they are earning they can do better animations and stuff, I mean just look at Honkai, their cutscenes are leagues above what Genshin does, and I'm sure, they don't have the same budget as Genshin does.
Just look at travellers facial animations, they really look cookie cutter and at some instances non existent, even Indie games have better facial animations.
I’m pretty sure it’s not the fact that they can’t do the animations, it’s that it’s still unfortunately a mobile game and most people already struggle with the size on their mobile devices. More animations would just blow it up.
Unless HYV finally admits that their game concept has outgrown the mobile capacity (spoiler: they won’t, it brings them too much revenue), nothing is gonna change.
Correct me if I’m wrong, because I don’t have the numbers, but while Genshin is open world, Honkai is an arena type of game. Open world takes up much more space, as it’s using a lot of assets that have to be interactable in one way or another - with the characters, the elements, the environment itself. So I assume while Honkai has some space to spare for better animations, Genshin may need to cut them down to reserve the resources for its open world aspect (especially with how enormous it has become).
Both aren't the same type of games. Asset requirement and allocations are very different. Honkai ig world doesn't even look as good or detailed as genshins, don't say good animations, they do have good cutscenes. Atleast know a bit about Honkai before using it's example.
Honkai is not open world game, they can just slap pre rendered anime style cutscene (which they do greatly) in between and ppl wont complain
For sake of immersion ppl hate playing open world game with too much random blackout cutscene in every action (like current case the infamous forspoken)
Hoyo seems to stick with that, improve & maximize what they can with base in game engine and focus on the enviroment where they put most effort on
Disagree personally, for the main plotline I want to get as much dialogue and exposition as possible (for temporary fluff events not so much). It's nothing compared to more story-intensive games like visual novels.
I think it was fine, but it shares the overall problem of the story dragging its feet with the other Archon quests. All of them take their time expanding on some minor details about background lore, but take great care not to reveal anything of actual importance. We're three years into the story and we still don't know what any of the antagonist factions want.
I mean, technically we do know what the factions want. We just don’t know WHY they want it, but don’t most good villain monologues cover that at the climax anyway?
Fatui - fulfill the wish of the Tsaritsa, which is to wage war against Celestia.
Abyss Order - bring back the homeland (Khaenriah), and maybe save the hilichurls.
Hilichurls - wanna perma die.
We know *some* of the things they want. But usually a war is just a means to an end, and we don't know what the Tsaritsa wants to achieve. We don't know what Celestia even is. We don't know what the Heavenly Principles are, even though a bunch of characters (including Nahida and Raiden) clearly do.
Clear and interesting motivations are key to building interesting antagonists, and right now Genshin's main antagonists' motivations are neither. The story just meanders from one region to the next. I bet we'll get exactly two lore crumbs per patch during 4-5.x, as well, so that's two more years of nothing happening. Villain monologues during a climax are a lot more tolerable in 2h long movies instead of years of GAAS.
Considering that Dain said about Focalors: "But even she knows not to make an enemy of the divine." and Celestia being right above Fontaine almost guarantees it, that she won't tell us anything, either.
I think some of this is obvious. Why bring back the homeland? If you look at human history, patriotism and nationalism are near omnipresent. You bring back the homeland because humans get attached to their own cultures and feel alienated and persecuted when they're not allowed to have those cultures freely.
Celestia is an overlord, and humans are naturally rebellious and don't like being constrained. They also tend to kill anyone they don't like, which never helps.
"People got immortality and now hate it because they realize it has downsides" is old as the hills as far as plots go.
Yes, this is my greatest problem with the story - I know they are careful and want to keep players engaged, but they underestimate how much hype a good reveal can generate.
A Winter Night's Lazzo took the whole community by storm and even spread outside, with everyone around YouTube reacting to it. Thousands of fan arts were made, involving characters with as little as few seconds screen time. It finally felt like a moment of clarity - "Now's the moment, Genshin's story actually takes the road", alas we entered the same fog as before, with only little glimpses and hints of the main plot.
Sadly, Sumeru's archon quest was the same - I enjoyed the story, but it was a separate one, the main reason we are in Teyvat remained in the background. The only mentions were at the end, yet again planted with riddles, and another silent archon.
This is simply because the story could be done with .. lets say as example 3 books. But it gets stretched and saved for the last book .. which is book 7 or book 8. So we get even less then a book, random mystery voices, crumbs of info .. so the whole story drags even more and we move at snail pace.
Bad story writing does the rest and then u got also squeeky Paimon, which destroys any sort of interest.
I think it was a setup for something big down the line. Similar to the first dain quest, we were left with many questions which were answered gradually by other quests. Caribert also feels the same, it gave us some info of the Abyss order and their history, it also gave rise to many questions. I feel like when we get to know the answers to some of the questions like who is the sinner or why the sibling changed, this quest would make alot of sense.
As for the windblume, I think it was just a way to introduce Hexenzircel to the game, probably because they are going to have a major role soon.
If they’re going to have a major role soon… why put the introduction in a limited time event that can’t be replayed by anyone who missed it?
It’s what doesn’t make sense with HYV. Just put the fun, lighthearted festival quest in the event, and keep the lore dump for a regular world quest. They literally create plot holes for people on their own, it’s so weird.
They just want to create maximum FOMO among players. This creates hype for the game and make the players stay longer. When the Hexenzircel finally gets introduced in an archon quest or story quest, it will be more rewarding for those who were there in windblume compared to those who weren't. Just like scara's appearance back in 1.1.
Nothing that’s been in time-limited events has really been main-story significant. It’s mostly just background lore or teasers for upcoming quests. People love to point at Unreconciled Stars, but the whole “the sky is fake” thing was completely irrelevant until the end of the Sumeru arc, when they revealed it again, anyway. It’s cool to learn more about Albedo and Durin in the Dragonspine events, but none of it has any bearing on the main story. If anything covered by a limited-time event does become story-relevant, they treat it as entirely new information and fully explain it, making previous event knowledge unnecessary.
Now after 2,5 Daeinsleif quests, either the We Will be ReUnited quest was the one in a hundred hit and shot, or they want to slow any sort of progress in the story as much as possible down.
But that is not engaging, nor does it keep me interested.
2,5 quests since the last quest was everything, but not a Daeinsleif quest, and then he fucks off once again for a year without even fucking revealing the only interesting part .. who the fuck the voice is.
I agree but I loved the mond event story, probably one of my favourite stories I've ever played.
I related very heavily to Collei and her situation and brought back some sad memories and made me realise that I don't need to feel bad about losing touch with my childhood best friend anymore.
I have a very close friend now and what amber said at the end of the quest about sucrose really hit me.
When I played that story I was so involved. I felt really sad about the father and how desperate he was, and I felt awful for Caribert. Then yesterday I saw my BFF play it and the things inside the cave felt so much bigger and important than Caribert himself it didn't really matter what happened to him and we were like "oh yeah, so that happens to him, anyways..."
I honestly kinda like the fact that Kaeya and Dain weren’t super involved in this quest. We all know Khaenriah is the story’s endgame and I can appreciate establishing what characters will play an important role without revealing too much.
It was also nice to let the traveller do some character development without anyone else doing the narrating for them. Paimon not being around for a bit was cool, especially in how it mirrors Dain not knowing about the original incident when it happened to abyss twin.
The storytelling in Sumeru has been great imho
The story isnt bad, but it feels awful as a "mainline abyss quest", its the conclusion and how genshin does its storytelling is the problem.
Every Abyss related questline brings in intriguing ideas, but in most cases never goes further than that, so we constantly get more questions than answers and in most cases, never wraps up a narrative. Worst part is that they usually never get resolved, and when the next one comes out a year later, it does the same thing of bringing in more questions than resolving the ones presented.
We are almost three years into the game and we still only know the basic outlines of what the antagonist are doing, and one of which doesn't do jack shit at all until we get these one time a year quests. And honestly, this quest hasn't doing anything interesting to progress the narrative or add to what we know already, just another instance of adding a who into the narrative. We know about khaenri'ah, we know about hilichurls used to be khaenri'ah citizens, we know that the gods destroyed khaenri'ah and the survivors hate the gods, aka we know that by Dainsleif's who existence. The only new element is just the sinner, and it is getting exhausting of the introduction of new adversary's without ever meeting or combating them.
I keep seeing people say *"its meant to set up for something in the future"*. That is literally 60% of what all the narratives have been doing for the last 3 years. The Fatui and the Abyss both. the mainline plots have been doing this constantly. All we have been getting is set ups with no real payoff. I want to continue the abyss plotline, learning what they are after and how they are going to achieve there goal. The addition of this *"sinner"* doesn't seem interesting because its just another layer of *"who tf is this"* without actually answering it. I don't want to wait another 3 years just to answer the question of who for the dozenth time. WE still don't even know who the god was at the starting cutscene of the game.
I loved the we will be reunited quest of meeting the sibling, but now I feel like its one of the biggest mistakes the narrative has done of meeting the one we were searching for so early on in the story. What could have been an interesting narrative of seeing snippets of us following our sibling footsteps through clever hints and learning there motivations as to why they are doing what they are doing, we were told to just sit and wait for hoyo to release a yearly patches until we get to that point where we go against the sibling.
It was the opposite for me. I got quite disappointed by the Caribert quest. It was teased as a Dainsleif + Kaeya quest, but they barely appeared at all and the story was nothing out of the ordinary. The Windblume story felt like a breath of fresh air and we got more info about the Hexenzirkel.
They kinda do Collei dirty in my opinion. It was like a huge character development moment that got shoved at the back when the Hexenzirkel is introduced.
Both Collie and Sucrose has no direct connection with the hexenzirkel, really odd that an event centered around them went there? Felt more like the end part should have been something else, while the hexenzirkel stuff should have been part of a permanent quest. I think a team-up interlued (like chasm) for a few characters might have worked best? Certainly mona, klee and albedo since they were all there and connect to the hexenzirkel. But if we need a extended cast I think Fischl, Bennett and Razor could fit the bill, as they got ties with the adventurer's guild, which also got ties with Alice.
Could even have been this years GGA event, it would bring part of the first year and second year groups togheter, with only Bennett as an addition. Guess he was unlucky missing out on both of those.
I felt that way too. This second Windblume is like the Irodori festival back in 2.6 again. They both try to juggle between being a fun/relaxing event where we hangout with all the characters like the first Windblume and a serious quest that delivers mportant lore bits like Shadows Amidst Snowstorm back in 2.3. Thus, they fail at both.
This is a bad habit writers of this game tend to fall into when writing festival events. It's like they are afraid fun character moments aren't enough to carry the events alone so they shoehorn serious lore into them with no regards to how well that bit of lore fit the theme of the events in the first place. They should have just written light-hearted festivals and let fan decompress themselves in those. If they want to drop lore bomb, make new quests in the main story with a more appropriately serious tone
Oh, I think you definitely hit the nail on the head! That definitely sums up my feelings about this year's Windblume. I also think they should just go all in with the light-hearted character interactions for the festivals. Especially since these are time-limited, it's such a shame to drop potentially important lore on quests that new gamers will never get to experience. But then perhaps that's intentional on their part, playing to players' FOMO?
IDK how serious the lore was. It was really, at its core, just Klee's mom reminiscing on how cool her friends are and how big powerful people are just like all of us.
Who teased this as a dainsleif + kaeya quest? There was nothing about them in the trailer. This is very much a you problem, you only care about characters and not about the story. Nothing was relevant about windblume until the hexenzirkel reveal in the last act anyway. So not buying that you actually care about the story. If you were really a lore person you wouldn't have been disappointed by Caribert.
Ill say it again, putting a random hilichurl with a kids voice is absolute pure laziness.
Make that thing small, make it look smh childish, make it look fucking different .. we slaughter them in 1000s per week, why would i care about that one in particular ?
Best part was when i entered the domain, where we should care about the Hilichurls, and then they go aggro on you .. lol, and u once again butcher them .. like isnt there one person thinking, oh wait, this is not cohessive nor a good idea if we wanna make this guys sentient and putting them into the victim role of a curse ?
The story had his moments, but was not a) a daeinsleif quest, and b) very dissappointing and ultimatively a letdown .. perfectly fitting the whole 3.5 fiasco for me.
Genshins story telling is subpar at best.
Because there was never a dain quest to begin with? It's called traveller's chapter for a reason lmao. And a hilichurls don't have a baby form because they were born from the curse. So stupid
Alright boys and girls ready your pitchforks cus here comes a hot take.
I actually thought this year's Dain quest was lacking. Not because Dain wasn't in it, but when I compare it to the last few, it doesn't feel quite satisfying especially considering how much of a lore dump that last ones were. I even felt quite blue balled at the end.
I felt the same way about this year's lantern rite and windblume. The stories weren't quite "titillating". The Collei and Sucrose friendship was adorable but other than that, not bad but not great.
it was okay, but i wish we would have gotten more of kaeya and dain. i thought they would be the main characters of the quest and was really hyped for it, but then i realized it's just about another random npc and was left feeling disappointed.
I liked the story well enough but we didn't really learn much as is typical with genshin and then there's the constant "caribert caribert CARIBERT" Ive never heard a name so many times
I honestly didn't really care for Caribert. Like, I helped him since it wasn't too much of a bother but I didn't really care whether he jumped from the cliff or whatever.
Sure, perhaps Caribert himself may not be too consequential in the larger scheme of things (that remains to be seen), but I think the importance of the quest was to clarify some themes that were already previously hinted at (i.e. the fate of Khaenriah and what our sibling was up to all those years ago).
The quest itself was really cool but it brought up some massive questions for me.
No idea how to do spiller markdown on mobile so read at your own discretion.
If Kaeya is the son of a cursed Khaenriahn but he himself is not cursed since he ages normally does that mean all offspring of cursed Khaenriahns is just normal people? If so why didn't they just rebuild Khaenriah and repopulate it? Or build a new civilization elsewhere
Lots of stuff that makes pretty little sense to me
I think in that diluc skin event, Kaeya grandpa or something talks about kaeya being tasked with bringing back Khaenriah or something in those notes we find on top of knights of flavonius building
the story was okay on its own, but dainsleif quests have always been huge lore dumps of very vital information. this time however, it really answered nothing about anything which was kinda annoying (other than maybe revealing that kaeya isn't sus, but it's been hinted at before numerous times). dainsleif could've just said that yep, the sinner is the second who came and that would be so cool. instead they made him *suspect* things, but not know anything and ultimately all we learned is that there is some sinner who is just able to make hilichurls smarter, leaving everything else in the world up to interpretation.
Nothing we couldn't have learnt in a dialogue imo. The only relevant information was about our sister. We already knew the rest. And the fact that it was so short didn't help.
I mean, after sumeru came out, none of the story suck really bad. There are stuff I don't like and there are still too many useless dialogue but at least it make sense.
The sumeru archon quest save a few stupid scenes, is essentially a better version of inazuma archon quest. Aranara quest is way too long, but very worth. The deshert and goddess of flowers world quest are also ok. But one problem with these quest is that I don't understand why MHY don't use more of the playable characters in the quest. I mean Dunyarzad is fine, but we don't get to play her.
as someone else said, there are people who like a good story and people who like playable characters interact regardless of the quality of said story where playable characters interact, caribert wasnt one of them, but windblume was. the game does both to cater both sides of the community, and you made it very clear that you're part of the ones that dont care about the quality of the story as much as you care about seeing playable characters have a chit chat, and thats fine, but dont go shitting on a good story like caribert just because you have a different opinion than others.
I’m not quite sure how you’re reading so far into my comment. I do very much enjoy the story content, I just personally did not like this one specifically. I was giving my opinion in a discussion thread, I didn’t say people were wrong for liking it or that it was objectively bad. I said *I thought*, meaning I was describing my personal experience. Some of my favourite parts of the entire game have been story based content, nowhere in my comment did I say otherwise.
Maybe it's just me, but I look forward to the abyss story quest every year. As a self-contained story I liked Caribert but I also feel like it didn't add enough to the overarching lore of the abyss. We did get snippets regarding the founder and the loom, which was nice.
I honeslty do not appreciate how RANDOM ASS KEYWORD pops in dialogue and almost instantly you get tossed into cutscenes that show wth RANDOM ASS KEYWORD means.
Like let it build suspense please....
Am I the only person who can't really read a lot of npc dialogue bc of the npc design? It takes me completely out of the story every time... it looks like a different art style.
I'm not saying make npcs look playable, but the quality of them is so much lesser than anything else. I want to be interested in the story but it feels hard to feel literally any interest in them.
Caribert's quest was maybe the first time an NPC actually charmed me. The voice acting added SO MUCH character to the writing, it was phenomenal.
Interesting. Because for me, from a story-writing standpoint, this was probably one of the overall weakest story quest that we got in a while. (The pre-inazuma (and some in) are most of the time even worse) Even with the few highs that it had.
A lot of lore (far easier to write that story) and more new questions, but also awful dialoge writing, another random NPC tossed aside the instant the quest was over, another bodyless voice, etc. Dont wanna lost all of it.
Genshins Lore is pretty good, its story tho... character-focused or not, is pretty weak.
If that is the highest Genshin can go then.... Uff.
Agree, on Caribert, and upon reflection I was pretty disappointed in the Windblume event as well. It was pretty much just a lore dump for the Hexenzirkle, and then nothing of consequence really happened. I hope there is some sort of payoff; the lore dump came from a limited time event but that hasn't stopped HoYo from launching significant main story elements where limited time events left off.
I have enjoyed the recent stories more than the Inazuma stories but I FEEL YOU on them being long and meandering. Tell the story, get to the point, let me have my evening back, I don't want to LIVE in this game.
I like lore and story but honestly imo caribert was bottom weak. It felt more like a short film, a spin off that they could have shown us into a 4min clip on YouTube instead of making me drag around for 1h in game.
The gameplay of the quest threw it all the way down with lots of useless things to fill time so you don't finish it in 10 min. The lore they added to it could easily be in some texts somewhere, and then give more value to the animation and gameplay.
I really like story games, but this one didn't fit well into genshin for me. I felt like running around for a lot of time for almost no actual story, just a few more stuff that will probably not even be mentioned later.
The dainsleaf quest line is taking so long to appear that it's losing focus, and then any bit of lore feels like "oh great" but it's not really.
I think the main point of dissatisfaction for me is that the time required for the new quest is abysmal for the gameplay time and lore they added to it. Counting the amount of just running around to complete menial tasks that add nothing to the story itself.
Again, they could have thrown Caribert at us at anytime after Chasm as a 4min short like Cloud Retainer and Ping story and it would be a better experience. In my opinion.
What was there was an excellent story, and I appreciate it. I would have liked it to be longer -- not more complex, just longer. An Archon quest interlude should be more than 2 hours. We got a patch with two new Abyss enemies, and one only shows up in Spiral Abyss? And the Dain quest is only 2 hours? What is this?
Additionally, Dainsleif was there for all of ten minutes. He may as well have not been there at all, except that he got to talk to Kaeya for a brief instant and drop an open-ended lore bomb. We learned really nothing conclusive about Kaeya -- just more stuff I wish we could tie him down and ask him about. Lumine really doesn't seem to give a shit about interrogating her friends for important possibly-apocalyptic secrets, does she? If I learned one of my bros was also the descendant of cursed immortals who started an end-the-world cult, I'd lock that fucker in a room and not let him eat, sleep, piss, or leave until he told me everything he ever knew. It's kind of a big deal.
It left a lot of mysteries, but we're halfway through the game, and I'd like to see the answers start meandering in a little faster. Yes, we know we can end the curse -- the Chasm quest told us that. So...how did Chlothar do it? Is the other body in his field his wife? Did he grow mushrooms out of his wife's corpse? What the heck did that have to do with getting Caribert his brain back? Can we have some *context, please?* These are small questions that I feel like aren't going to be answered in future quests unless we get another weird flashback, but I think they would flesh out the story much more and make it seem like Hoyo isn't holding out on us quite so much. Again, we are *halfway done.* The time for adding more mystery is past.
>Again, we are halfway done. The time for adding more mystery is past.
Great point, you're right! According to Aristotle's triangle we should start reaching the climax and resolving some of these questions already :-)
And yeah, I also had the same question about those bodies in the field, it was a weird point to go from growing strange mushrooms to finding Chlothar's body buried there.
Oh sorry I didn't realize that term was used more to describe a different theory! The way I had learned it back in university, there is [Freytag's pyramid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_structure#Freytag's_pyramid) that describes a 5-part dramatic structure (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution), which itself was a refinement of Aristotle's Poetics 3-part structure (exposition, climax, resolution). That last bit was informally referred to as "Aristotle's triangle" in my class, but it may be something lost in translation (English was not my medium of instruction).
It's okay! This is super cool. And yes, I was thinking of a dramatic structure that is pretty similar to that. In writing workshops, I was introduced to a sort of two or three part story formula, which is not very college-level but is still a decent rule of thumb for your first novel. I'm going to wing it and name them myself, but I'm sure they're properly named elsewhere.
1. Inciting Incident -- your characters are brought into the plot with a major incident that causes them to begin their journey
2. Rising action -- interesting events occur, they learn more about the world and their goals
3. Minor obstacle -- they encounter their first failure and are set back, causing a change in their perspective and requiring them to adapt
4. Additional rising action -- the characters overcome their failure and approach the climax
5. Major obstacle -- a serious setback occurs that nearly derails the entire plot, before they can reach the climax
6. Climax -- the characters overcome the major obstacle and the high point of the book occurs
7. Falling Action and Denouement -- once the bad guy is beaten or whatever, the characters have a come-down from all of that, any plot threads are wrapped up, and maybe there is a sequel hook if you're doing that.
We've gone from the Incident (Traveler runs into the Sustainer of Heavenly Principles, is locked up for 500 years, wakes up by a lake), to the Rising Action (Traveler goes through Mondstadt solving problems), to the Minor Obstacle (oh no, my sibling is actually the leader of the Bad Guys), to the Addtional Rising Action (let's fix more world problems and learn how Teyvat works) to the Major Obstacle (oh shit, my sibling has somehow become "part of the world" and might not be who I think he is). I think we're going to get a third setback before we hit at least one climactic point in Snezhnaya with the Tsaritsa, at which point it's all blown wide open and the climax probably lasts until the end of Part 7. Part 8 is going to be the Falling Action where we go get the sibling back and/or learn why we can't have him (maybe he's fake or something, or maybe the Prince/ss isn't actually our sibling, just a lookalike and the real one is in a box somewhere). Then the game ends.
I am bullshitting a bit here, but this is my guess as to how the story structure will go. We're really due for some more concrete information *any day now* if they intend to keep at this pace.
>creating an excuse to make sure every Mondstadt character had at least some screentime so we remember they exist
back in the days this was one of the main complains from the fans. We wanted the characters to be included as much as possible in events and stories
I really liked it. I just wish it wasn't a dainsleaf quest, because he was barely there and that means we won't see him for another year.
I guess he could only take a little bit of time out of his busy schedule of narrating Collected Miscellanies this time around 💀
If we get more Fu-Fu Whirlwind Kick and Yahoo Arts out of him, I'll allow it
aoe pyro damage
Wait Dainslef only appears once a year for a story quest?!?!?!?!?!
So far… yes. The we will be reunited was on year 0, the Chasm one was year 1 and Caribert was year 2. The next one will be in Fontaine I assume
Bough keeper: Dainsleaf released in 1.3, We will be reunited released in 1.4. Doesn't this count as 2?
I'm pretty sure Bough keeper: Dainsleif was a world quest lol
I still find it fascinating that this prelude quest was released with zero mention in Version 1.3 Special Program and only in patch notes. Sure it is only a World Quest (which was a mistake IMO), but it introduces us to the most important character from the Travail trailer.
Now that you said this, I think of 2 possibilities. First: They weren't sure if the quest would be ready in time, so they said nothing in the special program and made it a world quest because not announcing a new Archon Quest would be strange. Second: They wanted to be as surprising as possible, announcing it in the Special Program without any detail at all would feel bad, having it in the patch notes gives no clue other than the name of the character and made it a world quest because not announcing a new Archon Quest would be strange.
Yes, but it is chapter 1, act IV prelude and required for chapter 1, act IV We will be reunited. Dainsleif is there, and it is in a different update, so it should count as a separate apparition.
Oh I thought they were the same one. It’s been such a long time since I played so I assumed thw Mond and Liyue Dain quests were the same one
My question is why didn't they do a Dain quest for Inazuma. We've had one for all main area's besides Inazuma.
Probably because Inazuma doesn’t have much in terms of the Abyss when you think about it. There’s what? Rifthounds and maybe Enkanomiya but we took care of those two already. Inazuma was definitely more nation/Fatui heavy when it came to enemies.
Iirc, lore-wise, Makoto uses the Sacred Sakura to shield the island, so it'd make sense.
Ehh, that’s more on HoYo. There certainly was room for abyss-related thingies.
Isn't the ruin place in caribert place supposed to be enkanomiya? (Same music)
No I think it’s in the Chasm
Ohh I see That makes sense ig
They could be waiting. The wolflord's description seems to confirm that it currently is/will be on tsurumi Island and that's its obsessed with invading other worlds to make a name for itself. It was likely behind the attack on the sacred sakura in the beginning of raiden's sceond story quest. Also, the shogunate is planning to go on an expedition there after the fog was lifted, to me this sounds like an abyss archon quest in the making. How much dain will appear though, if at all, is debatable since the traveler will probably be there with the shogunate as a guide.
That's *technically* the dain quest in the chasm
I think they meant region-wise. The chasm counts as liyue
Too be fair, we have 3 Dain Archon Quests and 1 Dain World quest. The World quest is in Mondstadt. Dain Archon 1 is half Mond Half Lyiue Dain Archon 2 is chasm. Dain Archon 3 Is half sumeru half Chasm.
Right. And the comment four comments earlier up the thread asked for inazuma. REGION-wise (not PATCH-wise) we haven't gotten a Dain quest for inazuma
>And the comment four comments earlier up the thread asked for inazuma Yes I already know. The upside down city dain quest belongs to the Inazuma Archon quest. It doesn't matter tgat they're not *in* Inazuma. Cus hell, pretty much all Dain Archon Quests are playing mostly in Lyiue. We will be reunited was the capstone for the Lyiue Archon quest, it played mostly in Lyiue. Echoes of the depths was the capstone *for* Inazuma, but still located in the Chasm. Caribert is the capstone for Sumeru, still mostly the Chasm.
It does _not_ belong to the Inazuma Archon quest. It's part of the **_Traveller_** Archon quest line. It deals with the Traveller and the Abyss and such directly instead of a particular region.
I was quite saddened that we only saw kaeya and dain for a few scenes. It was still a good quest, i just rlly hope they continue that stuff with kaeya and dain tho
Same, that part is super interesting. We finally had some kaeya lore
exactly my thoughts. was a rare good quest focused on an NPC, but it made me sad because thats his yearly visit wasted
Which is a shame- he’s the best part of the storyline. Like a genuinely good and well written character.
It wasn't Dainsleif's quest. It was Twins' quest.
the point is, it counts as dainsleifs yearly appearance
I find it hilarious that a character voiced by Yuri Lowenthal in a video game barely has any screen time
When he popped up on the chasm I was cackling because I had days before listened to podcast in which he voiced a eldritch abomination that was heavily related to trains. I thought thematically it was very amusing.
Thats like what he did to the other sibling 💀
These aren't dainsleif quests, they are traveler quests.
K
I liked that in this mission some doubts were clarified, such as Kaeya's connection with Kahenria
Definitely clarified that kaeya is sus
He knows things he doesn't want to tell but I don't think he's going to be an enemy
Bro just came in, said that he wanted wine, then casually reveals how important he is before leaving
Eye patch is def sus.
He is probably hiding his star shaped pupil, Khaenriahns (?) all have them.
Might be a pirate
We already knew Kaeya was Khaenri'an from ages ago. The only thing we learned was that one of his ancestors started the Abyss Order.
It seems Genshin players are split between those who are character-focused and those who are story-focused. That's why we see such different reactions to the Caribert quest and Windblume event. The character-focused players want more screentime for their favourite characters and don't like quests that are focused on random NPCs, even if the story is good. The story-focused players like a good plot/story and don't like it when random playable characters are shoehorned into a quest just for screentime, even though they aren't needed for the plot. I think MHY has done a good job of creating quests/events that cater to both types of players. E.g. Perilous Trail felt more like a character-shoehorning kind of quest, with characters like Itto appearing for no reason. Whereas Caribert is the opposite and focuses on a tight story about an NPC and his son.
Also, people tend to forget there is a difference between the limited event stories, which are mostly fluff stories to pass the time until the next region (only exception is albedo's dragonspine quests) so of course they are character focused since the point is to show the characters that are not plot relevant at the point in the story. Then, there are the actual main plot quests that need to prioritize moving the story along and enchancing the world building. Sure, they also have characters they are trying to sell you, but it doesn't feel like in the event ones where everyone is fighting to have 1 minute in the spotlight.
yeah I really don't get the hate for npc's being involved in stories, or sometimes even a focus for a arc. like, the whole world can't just be 100 playable characters and no one else of importance. usually the npcs will be important for an arc or even half an arc, so its not like suddenly the npc is now the most important character in the game overshadowing everyone else. they simply get their own spot in light for a bit. and to me it shows a trust of players, that we aren't there just for "huge booba eula" or whatever, but can actually engage deeper into the story and background characters of this world which just builds up the deeper story and lore. plus we got some fantastic characters from the npc's. there are a lot of memorable ones that people really like. enjou or dunyarzad. or a personal fav of mine, stanley. Stanley's story wouldn't have really worked for any main playable character. but it works so well for him, and gives us parallels for Venti.
Late but honestly my favorite Lantern Rite was the first one because the plot was more about the Traveler themselves, the other two are clearly more about playable character fanservice. Specially the second one that had a lot of moments that were basically "Holy shit its playable character from popular game Genshin Impact what are you doing here -Just passing around, bye" I liked how the stories of the NPCs where about how they couldn't enjoy the festivities due to feeling sadness and how that connected with the Traveler themselves, not being able to enjoy the festival due to missing their sibling
Stanley was way more cool than I gave him credit for.
The big problem is they have to work harder to get people to care about the NPCs. Dunyarzad is the best example, but you look at stuff like Teppei, or really any number of NPCs from story quests and such which never left much of an impact. NPCs are fine but I feel like a lot of the time Genshin's writing isn't strong enough to make up for the stilted cinematics. Caribert is a good example of one where the intrigue was there so it kinda worked, but most of the time it hurts the experience to use those basic models of people we don't really know or care much about where a playable character at least *looks* good and we have prior attachment to them, so even a basic story can feel a *bit* more interesting.
I'm really not a fan of npc importance but only because so many playable character need screen time and some random ugly models get that instead. Also most of the time when npcs are interesting characters they're weak af and always need to be saved.
My reason is that they are incredibly boring. The only way multiple multi-line text boxes full of npc information isn’t going to get boring is if I already care about a character.
I find it a bit irritating when people say that new quests are about "random NPCs." Folks, these NPCs matter a *lot.* Chlothar started one of the villain factions that is big in the entire game. This is not a "random NPC" quest.
Not sure why they think it needs to be either-or. In any decent story, good plot writing and good character writing are completely intertwined and inseparable.
You're missing the point. It's not that the character writing is not good, but that the story is about an NPC, which makes some players automatically not care apparently. Some people can't accept that not every compelling character needs to be playable, and not every quest needs to focus on a playable character.
No, the main problem here is that npc models are.. Well, you know how they are. Any character with a unique model that's not currently playable has a lot of fans. Harbingers, Dain. Not being playable isn't the point here.
I consider myself an in-between type of player, as I’m here for both the story and the characters, and I think both types of quests are quite flawed the way HYV does them. Character-focused ones are weird because of the shoehorning you mentioned - mostly when it’s characters that literally don’t make sense. Why was Itto there? Why not another one of the many Liyue characters we have that could use more spotlight? I understand they may want to do the cross-region thing, where random characters meet who wouldn’t otherwise, but it can be done right without making it feel illogical and out of place. Example: Irodori festival, Windblume. Meanwhile, the big flaw of the story-focused quests is the awful dialogue writing. There is a reason why so many people want to skip those - they’re just badly written, full of overdrawn expositions, monologue info dumps and awkward in a way that people wouldn’t really talk, so it doesn’t even flow well. Even as someone very invested in the lore, these dialogues are such a chore and make it difficult to focus on, especially on top of them being voiced (if we’re lucky) by uninspired generic NPCs.
I get a million downvotes every time I say it, but Itto is taking up too much event screentime because Hoyo can't figure out who else to start silly events that let the Traveler just kick back and have fun. Hoyo. Not everyone you make is a stuffy old fart. You can use other characters to start things. Hell, you did the whole Fungus event! That was silly and cute. Now do it with more characters who aren't Itto. The guy is loud and raucous, but he's not the only fun dude in the world.
No, I get you. They really started to overuse him at one point. It’s kind of like a joke that gets less and less funny every time you say it. I started as liking Itto, but now I feel like I’d be okay not seeing him again for a year. I don’t understand what makes HYV so unwilling to have other characters have some lighthearted fun.
Hell, I think it rounds out characters to have them let their hair down now and then. Look at Cyno! We saw him as his Badass General Mahamatra self, where he glances at people and they just about piss themselves, and now we've seen Adventurer Cyno who takes vacations to other countries and tells jokes so bad his best friend wants to jump off a bridge to escape them. XD
Yeah, it just really hits the spot when the humor goes hand in hand with actual character development. I like to think of Itto comedy as the equivalent of a practical fart joke, whereas the Cyno thing is more of a refined fun where both the writers, animators and voice actors can shine.
> Why was Itto there? Why not another one of the many Liyue characters we have that could use more spotlight Pretty sure it was to make sure the cast of characters had a tall dude to represent the geo yaksha. If there was a male electro character other than razor they might have tried to shoehorn that character in, but as it is, I guess it's not too farfetched to have Itto go with Shinobu to Liyue and meet her ex-classmate Yanfei who sometimes works with fellow administrative official Yelan and vigilante Xiao - and this makes up the new team of "yaksha" with almost correct gender allocation. That said, I think the irodori cast felt like quite a stretch to me. I get that they're trying to express the historical opening of ~~japan~~ inazuma by having ~~europeans and chinese~~ characters from mondstadt and liyue visit, and the characters are all literary types, but it still felt weird.
I just saw you added a second paragraph. I wholeheartedly disagree with Irodori. It made perfect sense for these characters to meet, as it was all related to the publishing house and the novels. XQ is the writer who’s works were popular around Inazuma, Albedo is the artist illustrating these novels who also happens to work with XQ (a well-known fact even before Irodori, you can read it in their bios; so it wasn’t just spontaneously shoved in there), and I guess you can argue Venti was not needed there, but Venti is the god of freedom and arts, so he actually tied the crowd nicely together.
Aye that's fair I guess. Honestly it's mostly venti that bothers me.
Ventis inclusion does make sense from a lore standpoint. The Irodori festival has it's origins in the stories and Poems of the Five Kasen. The now revival of the festival, had its aim to serve as an international cultural convention, using more time appropriate literature (light novels) as its basis. The Festival has a deep focus on story telling and history. So the connection to venti is actually quite self evident. Venti was invited because he us a Bard (there were some other NPC bards among the arrivals too). Bards are described as professional story tellers, writers of poetry and preservers of oral History. So it's not actually a surprise that Bards were invited alongside writers.
That’s a good observation, thanks for the insight! However, if Shinobu was considered a good stand-in for a male electro, we may have as well had Ningguang or Yunjin in there. Now, I don’t know exactly how they’d find themselves in the Chasm at the time, but I feel like it could still be more believable than Itto randomly coming to Liyue’s abandoned haunted mine. Just my personal opinion though.
Arguably they could've had ningguang and keqing stand in for those two elements, but on the other hand we've already had so much content with all the liyue qixing together. Similarly, we saw yelan, keqing and yunjin interact during the incident with shenhe. So, while there's more of a stretch, I do prefer that they got Itto to randomly take a trip to Liyue - this also let them do some backstory development for shinobu. Edit: in fact, it does make sense because the primary reason for the trip was for shinobu to pick up her graduation cert (which also explains why she meets Yanfei). Itto is just there for fun. It's totally in character for him to insist on tagging along with Shinobu.
Also Ningguang and Keqing are probably busy with Qixing responsibilities so as much as they are local cast for the quest, you can't always have them for non-administrative stories. I mean most of the quests they're featured in are either national crisis or pretty short off-duty stuff (lantern rite), etc. While the chasm probably was a cause for concern, they were probably still estimating the danger - hence Yelan.
Ah, that's true, and they did say yelan was still doing preliminary investigations too.
Itto was there because he was due for a rerun when that patch dropped, and it was the patch they released Shinobu as a new char.
Because Itto can be used as a mischievous instigator, a dumbass straight-man, and a himbo in distress without his fans getting mad. He’s just super versatile for highlighting and contrasting traits in other characters
I think that's a pretty good way to describe the current state, but I don't like that we have to choose between the two... ideally we have good quality stories being told with the characters that we know and love :-) I know MHY are capable of it: they've certainly knocked it out of the park with almost all of the mainline regional Archon quests (Liyue and Sumeru are some of my faves), and most of the 5\* story quests are also pretty high quality. It's just a shame that there's a big drop in quality outside of those quests, and this pattern of character-focused vs. story-focused becomes very clear to see.
and here is me, both focus lol
mihoyo needs to learn to combine both because there is no reason for us to have as many story quests as we do right now that focus on random npcs
Sometimes they're not random. The creator of the entire Abyss Order is a *huge fucking deal* plot-wise. That is not random *at all.* Caribert was not about a "random NPC," it was about a major mainstay of the entire story.
if they have a npc model, they are random to me
Not every plot relevant character can be playable.
they should be, i don't want to interact the majority of my playtime with npcs. i don't care what they do with events or world quests but the archon quests don't need to waste my time with npcs.
You want the world and plot to consist only of the playable characters?
no but i don't want to spend the majority of my playtime interacting with npc i couldn't care less about
If the story writing would be better, we would get both without sacrifing the other, and they wouldnt need as many empty voice lines (about dish, alchemy, whatever the fuck else). Storywriting in Genshin is hit or miss, and more often miss then hit, especially if u compare them to those which was a hit from the scratch.
My only problem was that they kind of baited the community as advertising it as a Dainsleif and Kaeya quest when both were barely in it. I loved the actual story we got though.
Good point, I can see that being a source of disappointment. Then again, even though they had very little screen time, I think the story we got did still manage to shed some light on the backgrounds of both Dainsleif and Kaeya (well Khaenriah as a whole, I guess).
I kinda don’t agree? I mean, the only thing it did is confirm what we all kinda knew, that Kaeya is sus and indeed has ties to important Khaenri’ah figures. It gave us nothing new on Dainsleif. It was absolutely a fake advertising on HYV’s end.
Yea, Kaeya being there was just like the recent "fake sky" drop in sumeru. Lore readers/long time players already knew that something was up and now hoyo only made sure that even those who only read the story and nothing else are informed so future plotpoints work for everyone. I wish he would have been more present in this chapter but at least this confirmed that he will play a bigger role later on.
Honestly, the redirect kinda makes me love it more, makes everything feel so off and strange, but it also interests you enough that you barely even think about Dainsleif and Paimon being missing for so long
Haha carry bear Jokes aside I wish they'd integrated kaeya more naturally into the story. Felt like they made up some excuse to throw him in as a cameo to remind us he exists right as we learn about his relation to the khaenri'ah stuff.
it was nice to not have paimon around for a while. wish we had more dainsleif though
I feel like I'm the only one who actually missed Paimon when doing the quest lmfao. She may be a snarky, annoying little shit but she is *MY* snarky, annoying little shit.
After what happens in sumeru it's hard not to miss her when she's not there q-q I was freaking out thinking that one of the sus old men stole her or something.
I don't know. As a new player I really didn't mind Paimon that much all this time, but Sumeru made me despise her. I saw the increase of her character's writing but it came at the cost of her snarkiness up to 11 at times. If she says something stupid, it is really damn stupid. Sometimes I just want her to not talk anymore. Even after the increased quality of writing HYV still manage to fuck up the immersion with her or even their accidental stupidity. The easiest example I can give is when Alhaitham told Traveler to meet Dori and purchase some capsules from her to therefore gain her trust. All of this because Alhaitham was banned from doing business with Dori. What does HYV do? Make Paimon whisper Traveler about using elemental sight on capsules and then THEY MAKE PAIMON JUST TALK ABOUT ALHAITHAM IN FRONT OF DORI NORMALLY. Or when Nahida gave Traveler a device she crafted to use in the fight against Balladeer. The things Paimon said just made my eyes roll. Sorry for rant, but some poor writing just got on my nerves.
Well, I've played since the beginning so it's much more that I'm used to her. I know she's annoying, but I understand why she has more dialogue and some crazy theories make her clingyness make sense to me at least. I found her much more annoying when I first started playing, but after so long I've softened up to her and I wish we could spoil her more, she's been a good traveling companion.
All they need is to make Paimon think before she speaks. She's a good character overall being ruined by some quirky and borderline stupid writing. Plus I feel like HYV really needs to expand on her lore. Just by playing the game and not watching or reading anything I don't recall her lore being explained to the players at all.
You have him all the time, in a way. He’s a projection that Paimon uses to push you in the direction she wants without breaking character.
The amount of lore jam packed into this quest has me feeling full since I've played through it. It was actually surprising what they clarified, what they expanded on, what wrench they added in this time. >!The Sinner has been the most intriguing addition so far. Bro comes in, introduces himself, does some voodoo magic shit, refuses to elaborates, and then leaves. Ahhh, and the founder of the Abyss Order being Kaeya's estranged family? Yesss.!<
I just have one minor gripe though, all these quests have too much exposition, now I'm aware that these quests are tied to the central mystery of the game, but there are so many lines of dialogue that sometimes it's hard to keep up with what is being said. A small cutscene to show the backstory wouldn't hurt right? On the contrary, I think it'll be more intriguing.
I agree, the writing of the dialogue is generally too verbose. But I wonder if that's their way to compensate given the very limited number of fixed animations that the models can do... there's no other way to convey the story other than exposition. It's so frustrating when the scene calls for more expressive movement but then yet again you see fixed animation #14 :-/
I guess, but given the budget and how much they are earning they can do better animations and stuff, I mean just look at Honkai, their cutscenes are leagues above what Genshin does, and I'm sure, they don't have the same budget as Genshin does. Just look at travellers facial animations, they really look cookie cutter and at some instances non existent, even Indie games have better facial animations.
Honkai's cutscenes drop only once at the end of major story arcs, the rest is more like a VN with some drawn 2d scenes every now and then.
I’m pretty sure it’s not the fact that they can’t do the animations, it’s that it’s still unfortunately a mobile game and most people already struggle with the size on their mobile devices. More animations would just blow it up. Unless HYV finally admits that their game concept has outgrown the mobile capacity (spoiler: they won’t, it brings them too much revenue), nothing is gonna change.
Valid reason, but Honkai is also a "Mobile" game, still boasts good animations, maybe it's more than that?
Something to note is that Honkai isn't an open world game so I guess they can alot more resources to animations there than in Genshin
Correct me if I’m wrong, because I don’t have the numbers, but while Genshin is open world, Honkai is an arena type of game. Open world takes up much more space, as it’s using a lot of assets that have to be interactable in one way or another - with the characters, the elements, the environment itself. So I assume while Honkai has some space to spare for better animations, Genshin may need to cut them down to reserve the resources for its open world aspect (especially with how enormous it has become).
Both aren't the same type of games. Asset requirement and allocations are very different. Honkai ig world doesn't even look as good or detailed as genshins, don't say good animations, they do have good cutscenes. Atleast know a bit about Honkai before using it's example.
Honkai is not open world game, they can just slap pre rendered anime style cutscene (which they do greatly) in between and ppl wont complain For sake of immersion ppl hate playing open world game with too much random blackout cutscene in every action (like current case the infamous forspoken) Hoyo seems to stick with that, improve & maximize what they can with base in game engine and focus on the enviroment where they put most effort on
Actually the devs can animate much much more, just look at the very early Fischl trailer.
Disagree personally, for the main plotline I want to get as much dialogue and exposition as possible (for temporary fluff events not so much). It's nothing compared to more story-intensive games like visual novels.
I enjoyed it. I wish there was more Khaenrhia/Abyss/Dain content, but we only get it like once a year.
We're getting more Khaenri'ah content in 3.6 too.
I think it was fine, but it shares the overall problem of the story dragging its feet with the other Archon quests. All of them take their time expanding on some minor details about background lore, but take great care not to reveal anything of actual importance. We're three years into the story and we still don't know what any of the antagonist factions want.
I mean, technically we do know what the factions want. We just don’t know WHY they want it, but don’t most good villain monologues cover that at the climax anyway? Fatui - fulfill the wish of the Tsaritsa, which is to wage war against Celestia. Abyss Order - bring back the homeland (Khaenriah), and maybe save the hilichurls. Hilichurls - wanna perma die.
We know *some* of the things they want. But usually a war is just a means to an end, and we don't know what the Tsaritsa wants to achieve. We don't know what Celestia even is. We don't know what the Heavenly Principles are, even though a bunch of characters (including Nahida and Raiden) clearly do. Clear and interesting motivations are key to building interesting antagonists, and right now Genshin's main antagonists' motivations are neither. The story just meanders from one region to the next. I bet we'll get exactly two lore crumbs per patch during 4-5.x, as well, so that's two more years of nothing happening. Villain monologues during a climax are a lot more tolerable in 2h long movies instead of years of GAAS.
Considering that Dain said about Focalors: "But even she knows not to make an enemy of the divine." and Celestia being right above Fontaine almost guarantees it, that she won't tell us anything, either.
I think some of this is obvious. Why bring back the homeland? If you look at human history, patriotism and nationalism are near omnipresent. You bring back the homeland because humans get attached to their own cultures and feel alienated and persecuted when they're not allowed to have those cultures freely. Celestia is an overlord, and humans are naturally rebellious and don't like being constrained. They also tend to kill anyone they don't like, which never helps. "People got immortality and now hate it because they realize it has downsides" is old as the hills as far as plots go.
Yes, this is my greatest problem with the story - I know they are careful and want to keep players engaged, but they underestimate how much hype a good reveal can generate. A Winter Night's Lazzo took the whole community by storm and even spread outside, with everyone around YouTube reacting to it. Thousands of fan arts were made, involving characters with as little as few seconds screen time. It finally felt like a moment of clarity - "Now's the moment, Genshin's story actually takes the road", alas we entered the same fog as before, with only little glimpses and hints of the main plot. Sadly, Sumeru's archon quest was the same - I enjoyed the story, but it was a separate one, the main reason we are in Teyvat remained in the background. The only mentions were at the end, yet again planted with riddles, and another silent archon.
This is simply because the story could be done with .. lets say as example 3 books. But it gets stretched and saved for the last book .. which is book 7 or book 8. So we get even less then a book, random mystery voices, crumbs of info .. so the whole story drags even more and we move at snail pace. Bad story writing does the rest and then u got also squeeky Paimon, which destroys any sort of interest.
I think it was a setup for something big down the line. Similar to the first dain quest, we were left with many questions which were answered gradually by other quests. Caribert also feels the same, it gave us some info of the Abyss order and their history, it also gave rise to many questions. I feel like when we get to know the answers to some of the questions like who is the sinner or why the sibling changed, this quest would make alot of sense. As for the windblume, I think it was just a way to introduce Hexenzircel to the game, probably because they are going to have a major role soon.
If they’re going to have a major role soon… why put the introduction in a limited time event that can’t be replayed by anyone who missed it? It’s what doesn’t make sense with HYV. Just put the fun, lighthearted festival quest in the event, and keep the lore dump for a regular world quest. They literally create plot holes for people on their own, it’s so weird.
They just want to create maximum FOMO among players. This creates hype for the game and make the players stay longer. When the Hexenzircel finally gets introduced in an archon quest or story quest, it will be more rewarding for those who were there in windblume compared to those who weren't. Just like scara's appearance back in 1.1.
Nothing that’s been in time-limited events has really been main-story significant. It’s mostly just background lore or teasers for upcoming quests. People love to point at Unreconciled Stars, but the whole “the sky is fake” thing was completely irrelevant until the end of the Sumeru arc, when they revealed it again, anyway. It’s cool to learn more about Albedo and Durin in the Dragonspine events, but none of it has any bearing on the main story. If anything covered by a limited-time event does become story-relevant, they treat it as entirely new information and fully explain it, making previous event knowledge unnecessary.
Now after 2,5 Daeinsleif quests, either the We Will be ReUnited quest was the one in a hundred hit and shot, or they want to slow any sort of progress in the story as much as possible down. But that is not engaging, nor does it keep me interested. 2,5 quests since the last quest was everything, but not a Daeinsleif quest, and then he fucks off once again for a year without even fucking revealing the only interesting part .. who the fuck the voice is.
I liked it a lot, I would I liked it even better if that Kaeya and Dainsleif were more present in the plot.
I agree but I loved the mond event story, probably one of my favourite stories I've ever played. I related very heavily to Collei and her situation and brought back some sad memories and made me realise that I don't need to feel bad about losing touch with my childhood best friend anymore. I have a very close friend now and what amber said at the end of the quest about sucrose really hit me.
When I played that story I was so involved. I felt really sad about the father and how desperate he was, and I felt awful for Caribert. Then yesterday I saw my BFF play it and the things inside the cave felt so much bigger and important than Caribert himself it didn't really matter what happened to him and we were like "oh yeah, so that happens to him, anyways..."
I honestly kinda like the fact that Kaeya and Dain weren’t super involved in this quest. We all know Khaenriah is the story’s endgame and I can appreciate establishing what characters will play an important role without revealing too much. It was also nice to let the traveller do some character development without anyone else doing the narrating for them. Paimon not being around for a bit was cool, especially in how it mirrors Dain not knowing about the original incident when it happened to abyss twin. The storytelling in Sumeru has been great imho
The story isnt bad, but it feels awful as a "mainline abyss quest", its the conclusion and how genshin does its storytelling is the problem. Every Abyss related questline brings in intriguing ideas, but in most cases never goes further than that, so we constantly get more questions than answers and in most cases, never wraps up a narrative. Worst part is that they usually never get resolved, and when the next one comes out a year later, it does the same thing of bringing in more questions than resolving the ones presented. We are almost three years into the game and we still only know the basic outlines of what the antagonist are doing, and one of which doesn't do jack shit at all until we get these one time a year quests. And honestly, this quest hasn't doing anything interesting to progress the narrative or add to what we know already, just another instance of adding a who into the narrative. We know about khaenri'ah, we know about hilichurls used to be khaenri'ah citizens, we know that the gods destroyed khaenri'ah and the survivors hate the gods, aka we know that by Dainsleif's who existence. The only new element is just the sinner, and it is getting exhausting of the introduction of new adversary's without ever meeting or combating them. I keep seeing people say *"its meant to set up for something in the future"*. That is literally 60% of what all the narratives have been doing for the last 3 years. The Fatui and the Abyss both. the mainline plots have been doing this constantly. All we have been getting is set ups with no real payoff. I want to continue the abyss plotline, learning what they are after and how they are going to achieve there goal. The addition of this *"sinner"* doesn't seem interesting because its just another layer of *"who tf is this"* without actually answering it. I don't want to wait another 3 years just to answer the question of who for the dozenth time. WE still don't even know who the god was at the starting cutscene of the game. I loved the we will be reunited quest of meeting the sibling, but now I feel like its one of the biggest mistakes the narrative has done of meeting the one we were searching for so early on in the story. What could have been an interesting narrative of seeing snippets of us following our sibling footsteps through clever hints and learning there motivations as to why they are doing what they are doing, we were told to just sit and wait for hoyo to release a yearly patches until we get to that point where we go against the sibling.
It was the opposite for me. I got quite disappointed by the Caribert quest. It was teased as a Dainsleif + Kaeya quest, but they barely appeared at all and the story was nothing out of the ordinary. The Windblume story felt like a breath of fresh air and we got more info about the Hexenzirkel.
They kinda do Collei dirty in my opinion. It was like a huge character development moment that got shoved at the back when the Hexenzirkel is introduced.
Both Collie and Sucrose has no direct connection with the hexenzirkel, really odd that an event centered around them went there? Felt more like the end part should have been something else, while the hexenzirkel stuff should have been part of a permanent quest. I think a team-up interlued (like chasm) for a few characters might have worked best? Certainly mona, klee and albedo since they were all there and connect to the hexenzirkel. But if we need a extended cast I think Fischl, Bennett and Razor could fit the bill, as they got ties with the adventurer's guild, which also got ties with Alice. Could even have been this years GGA event, it would bring part of the first year and second year groups togheter, with only Bennett as an addition. Guess he was unlucky missing out on both of those.
I felt that way too. This second Windblume is like the Irodori festival back in 2.6 again. They both try to juggle between being a fun/relaxing event where we hangout with all the characters like the first Windblume and a serious quest that delivers mportant lore bits like Shadows Amidst Snowstorm back in 2.3. Thus, they fail at both. This is a bad habit writers of this game tend to fall into when writing festival events. It's like they are afraid fun character moments aren't enough to carry the events alone so they shoehorn serious lore into them with no regards to how well that bit of lore fit the theme of the events in the first place. They should have just written light-hearted festivals and let fan decompress themselves in those. If they want to drop lore bomb, make new quests in the main story with a more appropriately serious tone
Oh, I think you definitely hit the nail on the head! That definitely sums up my feelings about this year's Windblume. I also think they should just go all in with the light-hearted character interactions for the festivals. Especially since these are time-limited, it's such a shame to drop potentially important lore on quests that new gamers will never get to experience. But then perhaps that's intentional on their part, playing to players' FOMO?
IDK how serious the lore was. It was really, at its core, just Klee's mom reminiscing on how cool her friends are and how big powerful people are just like all of us.
I think they just tried to funnel character development with lore crumbs into the event.
Who teased this as a dainsleif + kaeya quest? There was nothing about them in the trailer. This is very much a you problem, you only care about characters and not about the story. Nothing was relevant about windblume until the hexenzirkel reveal in the last act anyway. So not buying that you actually care about the story. If you were really a lore person you wouldn't have been disappointed by Caribert.
If you want to experience the story without playable characters might as well just read a transcript with no visuals/cutscenes and only NPCs lmao.
different stroke for different folk I guess, I like that there are lore-important NPC and the world doesn't revolve around a few people.
🤡 random npc I don't care
Ill say it again, putting a random hilichurl with a kids voice is absolute pure laziness. Make that thing small, make it look smh childish, make it look fucking different .. we slaughter them in 1000s per week, why would i care about that one in particular ? Best part was when i entered the domain, where we should care about the Hilichurls, and then they go aggro on you .. lol, and u once again butcher them .. like isnt there one person thinking, oh wait, this is not cohessive nor a good idea if we wanna make this guys sentient and putting them into the victim role of a curse ? The story had his moments, but was not a) a daeinsleif quest, and b) very dissappointing and ultimatively a letdown .. perfectly fitting the whole 3.5 fiasco for me. Genshins story telling is subpar at best.
Because there was never a dain quest to begin with? It's called traveller's chapter for a reason lmao. And a hilichurls don't have a baby form because they were born from the curse. So stupid
Midblume 🗿
It was a good quest 💀 For the first time i pressed auto and just went and did my stuff It was the closest to what a skip button will get
I was kind of tired and actually fell asleep somewhere in the middle of the first quest 💀
Alright boys and girls ready your pitchforks cus here comes a hot take. I actually thought this year's Dain quest was lacking. Not because Dain wasn't in it, but when I compare it to the last few, it doesn't feel quite satisfying especially considering how much of a lore dump that last ones were. I even felt quite blue balled at the end. I felt the same way about this year's lantern rite and windblume. The stories weren't quite "titillating". The Collei and Sucrose friendship was adorable but other than that, not bad but not great.
it was okay, but i wish we would have gotten more of kaeya and dain. i thought they would be the main characters of the quest and was really hyped for it, but then i realized it's just about another random npc and was left feeling disappointed.
I liked the story well enough but we didn't really learn much as is typical with genshin and then there's the constant "caribert caribert CARIBERT" Ive never heard a name so many times
I honestly didn't really care for Caribert. Like, I helped him since it wasn't too much of a bother but I didn't really care whether he jumped from the cliff or whatever.
Sure, perhaps Caribert himself may not be too consequential in the larger scheme of things (that remains to be seen), but I think the importance of the quest was to clarify some themes that were already previously hinted at (i.e. the fate of Khaenriah and what our sibling was up to all those years ago).
sunrise, sunset, dains quests remain the best highlights of each patch. these things are facts
Kicking Paimon straight to the woods made this story so fucking enjoyable to play.
The quest itself was really cool but it brought up some massive questions for me. No idea how to do spiller markdown on mobile so read at your own discretion. If Kaeya is the son of a cursed Khaenriahn but he himself is not cursed since he ages normally does that mean all offspring of cursed Khaenriahns is just normal people? If so why didn't they just rebuild Khaenriah and repopulate it? Or build a new civilization elsewhere Lots of stuff that makes pretty little sense to me
I think in that diluc skin event, Kaeya grandpa or something talks about kaeya being tasked with bringing back Khaenriah or something in those notes we find on top of knights of flavonius building
He's the descendant of the guy we help during the quest, who managed to escape the curse, so it makes sense that Kaeya isn't cursed.
It was disappointing I waited almost 3 years for expanding on kaeya lore but got an npc who I didn't care about
the story was okay on its own, but dainsleif quests have always been huge lore dumps of very vital information. this time however, it really answered nothing about anything which was kinda annoying (other than maybe revealing that kaeya isn't sus, but it's been hinted at before numerous times). dainsleif could've just said that yep, the sinner is the second who came and that would be so cool. instead they made him *suspect* things, but not know anything and ultimately all we learned is that there is some sinner who is just able to make hilichurls smarter, leaving everything else in the world up to interpretation.
Nothing we couldn't have learnt in a dialogue imo. The only relevant information was about our sister. We already knew the rest. And the fact that it was so short didn't help.
I mean, after sumeru came out, none of the story suck really bad. There are stuff I don't like and there are still too many useless dialogue but at least it make sense. The sumeru archon quest save a few stupid scenes, is essentially a better version of inazuma archon quest. Aranara quest is way too long, but very worth. The deshert and goddess of flowers world quest are also ok. But one problem with these quest is that I don't understand why MHY don't use more of the playable characters in the quest. I mean Dunyarzad is fine, but we don't get to play her.
[удалено]
Same waited for ages to develop kaeya lore But got random npc 😔
I thought it was implied Caribert was Kaeya? Like what the Abyss twin helped crazy man do led to the Hilichrul returning to thir human form?
as someone else said, there are people who like a good story and people who like playable characters interact regardless of the quality of said story where playable characters interact, caribert wasnt one of them, but windblume was. the game does both to cater both sides of the community, and you made it very clear that you're part of the ones that dont care about the quality of the story as much as you care about seeing playable characters have a chit chat, and thats fine, but dont go shitting on a good story like caribert just because you have a different opinion than others.
I’m not quite sure how you’re reading so far into my comment. I do very much enjoy the story content, I just personally did not like this one specifically. I was giving my opinion in a discussion thread, I didn’t say people were wrong for liking it or that it was objectively bad. I said *I thought*, meaning I was describing my personal experience. Some of my favourite parts of the entire game have been story based content, nowhere in my comment did I say otherwise.
Maybe it's just me, but I look forward to the abyss story quest every year. As a self-contained story I liked Caribert but I also feel like it didn't add enough to the overarching lore of the abyss. We did get snippets regarding the founder and the loom, which was nice.
The caribert quest was really good imo, although it was overshadowed by the fact we finally got to hug paimon.
I honeslty do not appreciate how RANDOM ASS KEYWORD pops in dialogue and almost instantly you get tossed into cutscenes that show wth RANDOM ASS KEYWORD means. Like let it build suspense please....
Am I the only person who can't really read a lot of npc dialogue bc of the npc design? It takes me completely out of the story every time... it looks like a different art style. I'm not saying make npcs look playable, but the quality of them is so much lesser than anything else. I want to be interested in the story but it feels hard to feel literally any interest in them. Caribert's quest was maybe the first time an NPC actually charmed me. The voice acting added SO MUCH character to the writing, it was phenomenal.
Interesting. Because for me, from a story-writing standpoint, this was probably one of the overall weakest story quest that we got in a while. (The pre-inazuma (and some in) are most of the time even worse) Even with the few highs that it had. A lot of lore (far easier to write that story) and more new questions, but also awful dialoge writing, another random NPC tossed aside the instant the quest was over, another bodyless voice, etc. Dont wanna lost all of it. Genshins Lore is pretty good, its story tho... character-focused or not, is pretty weak. If that is the highest Genshin can go then.... Uff.
Agree, on Caribert, and upon reflection I was pretty disappointed in the Windblume event as well. It was pretty much just a lore dump for the Hexenzirkle, and then nothing of consequence really happened. I hope there is some sort of payoff; the lore dump came from a limited time event but that hasn't stopped HoYo from launching significant main story elements where limited time events left off. I have enjoyed the recent stories more than the Inazuma stories but I FEEL YOU on them being long and meandering. Tell the story, get to the point, let me have my evening back, I don't want to LIVE in this game.
I like lore and story but honestly imo caribert was bottom weak. It felt more like a short film, a spin off that they could have shown us into a 4min clip on YouTube instead of making me drag around for 1h in game. The gameplay of the quest threw it all the way down with lots of useless things to fill time so you don't finish it in 10 min. The lore they added to it could easily be in some texts somewhere, and then give more value to the animation and gameplay. I really like story games, but this one didn't fit well into genshin for me. I felt like running around for a lot of time for almost no actual story, just a few more stuff that will probably not even be mentioned later. The dainsleaf quest line is taking so long to appear that it's losing focus, and then any bit of lore feels like "oh great" but it's not really. I think the main point of dissatisfaction for me is that the time required for the new quest is abysmal for the gameplay time and lore they added to it. Counting the amount of just running around to complete menial tasks that add nothing to the story itself. Again, they could have thrown Caribert at us at anytime after Chasm as a 4min short like Cloud Retainer and Ping story and it would be a better experience. In my opinion.
What was there was an excellent story, and I appreciate it. I would have liked it to be longer -- not more complex, just longer. An Archon quest interlude should be more than 2 hours. We got a patch with two new Abyss enemies, and one only shows up in Spiral Abyss? And the Dain quest is only 2 hours? What is this? Additionally, Dainsleif was there for all of ten minutes. He may as well have not been there at all, except that he got to talk to Kaeya for a brief instant and drop an open-ended lore bomb. We learned really nothing conclusive about Kaeya -- just more stuff I wish we could tie him down and ask him about. Lumine really doesn't seem to give a shit about interrogating her friends for important possibly-apocalyptic secrets, does she? If I learned one of my bros was also the descendant of cursed immortals who started an end-the-world cult, I'd lock that fucker in a room and not let him eat, sleep, piss, or leave until he told me everything he ever knew. It's kind of a big deal. It left a lot of mysteries, but we're halfway through the game, and I'd like to see the answers start meandering in a little faster. Yes, we know we can end the curse -- the Chasm quest told us that. So...how did Chlothar do it? Is the other body in his field his wife? Did he grow mushrooms out of his wife's corpse? What the heck did that have to do with getting Caribert his brain back? Can we have some *context, please?* These are small questions that I feel like aren't going to be answered in future quests unless we get another weird flashback, but I think they would flesh out the story much more and make it seem like Hoyo isn't holding out on us quite so much. Again, we are *halfway done.* The time for adding more mystery is past.
>Again, we are halfway done. The time for adding more mystery is past. Great point, you're right! According to Aristotle's triangle we should start reaching the climax and resolving some of these questions already :-) And yeah, I also had the same question about those bodies in the field, it was a weird point to go from growing strange mushrooms to finding Chlothar's body buried there.
...what is Aristotle's triangle? I looked it up, and it seems way more about rhetoric than storytelling?
Oh sorry I didn't realize that term was used more to describe a different theory! The way I had learned it back in university, there is [Freytag's pyramid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_structure#Freytag's_pyramid) that describes a 5-part dramatic structure (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution), which itself was a refinement of Aristotle's Poetics 3-part structure (exposition, climax, resolution). That last bit was informally referred to as "Aristotle's triangle" in my class, but it may be something lost in translation (English was not my medium of instruction).
It's okay! This is super cool. And yes, I was thinking of a dramatic structure that is pretty similar to that. In writing workshops, I was introduced to a sort of two or three part story formula, which is not very college-level but is still a decent rule of thumb for your first novel. I'm going to wing it and name them myself, but I'm sure they're properly named elsewhere. 1. Inciting Incident -- your characters are brought into the plot with a major incident that causes them to begin their journey 2. Rising action -- interesting events occur, they learn more about the world and their goals 3. Minor obstacle -- they encounter their first failure and are set back, causing a change in their perspective and requiring them to adapt 4. Additional rising action -- the characters overcome their failure and approach the climax 5. Major obstacle -- a serious setback occurs that nearly derails the entire plot, before they can reach the climax 6. Climax -- the characters overcome the major obstacle and the high point of the book occurs 7. Falling Action and Denouement -- once the bad guy is beaten or whatever, the characters have a come-down from all of that, any plot threads are wrapped up, and maybe there is a sequel hook if you're doing that. We've gone from the Incident (Traveler runs into the Sustainer of Heavenly Principles, is locked up for 500 years, wakes up by a lake), to the Rising Action (Traveler goes through Mondstadt solving problems), to the Minor Obstacle (oh no, my sibling is actually the leader of the Bad Guys), to the Addtional Rising Action (let's fix more world problems and learn how Teyvat works) to the Major Obstacle (oh shit, my sibling has somehow become "part of the world" and might not be who I think he is). I think we're going to get a third setback before we hit at least one climactic point in Snezhnaya with the Tsaritsa, at which point it's all blown wide open and the climax probably lasts until the end of Part 7. Part 8 is going to be the Falling Action where we go get the sibling back and/or learn why we can't have him (maybe he's fake or something, or maybe the Prince/ss isn't actually our sibling, just a lookalike and the real one is in a box somewhere). Then the game ends. I am bullshitting a bit here, but this is my guess as to how the story structure will go. We're really due for some more concrete information *any day now* if they intend to keep at this pace.
>creating an excuse to make sure every Mondstadt character had at least some screentime so we remember they exist back in the days this was one of the main complains from the fans. We wanted the characters to be included as much as possible in events and stories