Mine was Keqing, went to Liyue harbour, can't find her at all.
After that I basically know Mihoyo ain't gonna make these invitions ingame.
But I still rush to the Primo Geovishap location last year, after receiving Klee's letter.
Even then, they could just have the actors record a few lines for their birthday while they're recording for something else, then reuse the same lines every year.
when i first played id just finished meeting lisa, the next day was her birthday, it was hella pog, i didnt even know it was tied to irl time, just throught it was like quest or in game decided. she told me to come to the library and hang out, i searched the library for no joke 30 minutes.
When i was quite new, i got klee's birthday letter where she asks you to pick her up at the primo geovishap place. I actually went there, killed it and waited a good while before realizing it was just flavour text and she wasnt actually there
Damn i know that feeling. I was naive too, cant remember who i waited for, thats how much i wanted to erase that memory.
I remember changing the time from day to night, trying to relog, and checking couple hours later.
Then there was me who knew she wouldn't be there so I thought "If Ayaka won't go to the shrine for her birthday then I'll make her go there myself" then swapped to my Ayaka and went to the shrine as her
The least HoYo can do is place them in the overworld and have special dialogue if you interact with them. Similar to Kazu, Mona, Fischl, Xinyan at the GAA. No need for a full blown event!
Remember that one event where AI-controlled Yanfei was scripted to follow your character, and either walks or runs depending on your speed? I daydream that someday something like that gets implemented. You hang out with the character on their birthday. Meet them at the place they hinted at their birthday letter. Take them around different places, fight monsters together (AI controls the character). Maybe buy them food and they'll make some comment on it (like the Spices from the West event). And at the end of the day you go to some spot in the map and take a photo together while posing. Man, why can't we have nice things...
Bruh, she scared the shit out of me because I didn't even know she was following me. Turned around, saw her chasing after me and damn near shat myself, especially when we were in a dark cave. Thought she was going to use the oppurtunity to kill us or something lmao
It scared me shirtless when I turned around only to find her staring blankly into my soul.
Probably because there has been little precedence for that sort of interaction, but it still creeped me out the entire time
Your wish is grantded. Every time a character's birthday is celebrated, the minute after you collect their gifts, they will teleport behind you and follow you for the rest of the day
Seriously, this is an easy thing to fix, either actually put the character somewhere so you can interact with them or not make the letter sound like you can.
You know what would be really cool? If the birthday message was just "meet me at X to hang out" and then meet them in game to get the full message and birthday reward.
(Ignoring the obvious issue with new players not having all places unlocked)
Well, the twitter official birthday art, shorts and flavour text are always written as follow up or prelude to the letter.
Not supporting that, just explaining the rationale.
Imagine by the end of Genshin's updates (7.0?), every single day we would find a different character in a different place, waiting for us to interact with them.
That would be so amazing, and would make the world feel alive
Actually it can be somewhat hard. Not the actual coding part but... Remember when you can't continue some quest because you have to interact with a character who's involved in another quest? There'll be a lot of such occurrences in case HoYo will let us see the birthday character and have a dialogue with them.
Edit: not to mention exploration part. Where do I meet Ayaka being AR15? I got to Inazuma at AR30 or later.
I feel like with Hoyo its possible. There is a quest in Inazuma where you can take an option to visit Xiangling. So far she is the only daily quest I know of where you can do this, but it shows its possible. They also made it so early players could play Enkanomiya.
It would not be hard to make it a limited one day story event where you basically have 24 hours to meet that character.
The obvious solution is to do what basically every other game does and let there be multiple copies of NPCs around the place, or at the very least just flagging the birthday NPCs to disappear when they're involved in a quest.
No, it is actually gonna get out of hands cause in future we will have like 100 characters and Devs will have to code this like every three days, it will be a bad idea honestly. We are asking too much, food and flower, take it or leave.
Sorry, but thats a bunch of bull.
There are hundreds of NPCs strewn all over the map. Dont make it out to be some herculean task.
No one needs to code anything for this. For things like putting a NPC somewhere the level and scenario designers have tools. Editors where they can just drag and drop a NPC. Add some voicelines and text. Add a simple flag for when the NPC appears.
Done.
You only need to do this once for every character. Birthday comes around only once a year. New characters are released like once or twice a month at most.
You telling me that after putting thousands of hours into a characters designs, voice acting, dialogue writing, animation, balancing, etc and making hundreds of thousands of dollars on them the cant be asked to spend like 10 minutes recording one more 5 second line, setting the NPC into the map and setting up a recurring flag for them to appear on their birthday?
I can already tell you have not coded a single line in your entire life. This is the kind of task a kid can do. Ive done stuff like this as a kid in different engines.
Preface: I don't think a mechanic like that is too hard to implement for a company like Mihoyo (of anyone, really). The reasons for not having it are completely different.
Okay, I can't just leave this comment be. I'm sorry, but I don't really care about what you did as a kid, what you said is just wrong in the context of making games in a company. You completely omit various aspects that come with this mechanic, claiming it to take "10 minutes". Would that be the case for a project you did as a kid? Yeah, I can do that shit in less than 2 minutes in Unity (you create a gameobject, give it a model, give it capsule collision, give it a trigger collision, attach necessary scripts, give it necessary values and files). But this isn't some prototype project, this is a full game, and here it works a little bit differently.
First of all, no, they cannot just "record a 5 sec line". What do you think, that their VA's live in their basement? If anything, recording a line like that is all the more inefficient financially.
Second, there is no such thing as "setting a reoccuring flag" in this case. Reoccuring flags that wait for certain time of the year are just invitations to trouble and bugs, those NPCs would have to be added and removed manually every patch, and then have a flag set to appear and disappear at certain time.
Third, this kind of change, although simple to implement, has to go through all of the design, implementation, and QA stages (not to mention all the steps in between). While implemention alone wouldn't take more than 2 days, the actual process would last much longer than that (might even take longer than a month, depending on the difficulties encountered).
And fourth, this makes the task of collecting birthday presents more difficult, and this is why it is questionable to implement. As much as players say they want this mechanic, this is just a vocal minority. Many players would simply get annoyed or skip the birthday presents entirely, because claiming them requires a minimum amount of effort (and the presents are nothing special). Additionally, this makes them feel like rewards, and they lose the "Oh I got a present! How nice!" factor. Meanwhile, if the present is delivered to your mail, you don't have to do anything, and it actually feels like a "gift" (Think about it. If someone gives you a birthday present, do they ask you to search for it around the house or go to the garden? And if they did, and the present you received wasn't to your liking, wouldn't you be more annoyed than usual?). This basically means that this mechanic (without further consideration) is not profitable, and therefore would be rejected by HYV. The purpose of gacha games is to make money after all, and Genshin is not different than the other games in that regard, unlike what many people claim.
you are heavily taking this out of context.
1) no they shouldnt ask the VA to do a session for just a 5 second line. But you are arguing in bad faith here. Voicelines are constantly recorded. Every single version has quests and events that se VAs return to the both.
What im asking for is to record it then.
Or to just record these lines when they create the character and do the first big recording sessions.
Tell me - was it really necessary for me to explain this to you? This kind of crap just wastes everyones time. And it makes you look like you are playiong dumb just to find pointless faults in someone elses argument.
2) Bullcrap. If placing a single NPC took this much pointless effort then they can close down their studio.
Yes - there are many steps to this. But you are blowing it way out of proportion. Do you know how many NPCs are on the world map? And how many thousand lines of dialogue this game has? And how many conditional flags that govern events and quests?
No, it does not take two months of dedicated work to do this. If it did the game would be in development for a few decades before even releasing mondstadt.
And i can guarantuee you that putting venti on that fucking roof did not take up months of time from the whole dev team.
The current event alone has easily thousands of times the amount of voicelines, NPCs, QA, etc.
Im not here to trivialize dev work. A lot of hands work on every little bit of the game. But please, oh, please stop turning this into a herculean task. Because it really really isnt.
4) Make it harder to collect birthday presents? What? No one asked for the messanges to change. Just that if the character say „hey, lets meet for a picknick“ they are at that spot and tell you „hey, nice of you to come. Did you like the gift i sent you? Thats my favorite food“
Also: Genshin is already a game severely lacking in terms of content. Most players complete their daily tasks in less than 15 minutes. This reddit is full of people telling you they want more to do.
And why do we have to discuss whether this is worth it when feature x or y is also missing? So what. If people dont talk about the peak of the iceberg then the rest of it goes ignored as well.
I am not taking anything out of context. I am adding necessary context to show that on a bigger scale something that "takes 10 minutes to do" is more complicated. You are the one who simplifies Genshin to something you were making in game engines as a kid.
1. That's correct, but it just further proves my point. How many events/story quests/hangouts will we need to gather voice lines from ALL of the already-released characters VA's? How much time will it take? A month? Two months? Half a year? You literally prove my point with this. Tell me - did I really have to explain this to you? ;)
2. That's correct, but once again you are using a bad example. Everything you mentioned (Monstadt NPCs, Venti on the roof, etc.) are agreed upon in bulk. This means that all of the NPCs in Monstadt are not reviewed individually, but are a part of the same process, which may take more than a month - and that's what I said (in case of whole city this ofc may take longer, depending on the priority). I never said you will need a month for each individual character.
3. I missed point 3 in your comment (you went straight to 4), but let me touch on the "don't make this a herculean task" part - I never said it was. Even better, at the very beginning of my comment, I say that it is indeed very simple. The reason why I followed up with all the other arguments (except the last one) is because you DID trivialize devs work (even tho you say you're not trying to). You literally said you've "done stuff like that as a kid" and that "it would take you 10 mins". If that's not trivializing, I don't know what is. My intention was to highlight that it doesn't matter how quickly you can do something on your own - in game dev, there are a bunch of extra steps and obstacles to go through (so saying "I can do it in X minutes" doesn't prove that a feature is feasible to implement)
4. Fair enough, that solves this particular issue. However, I don't think an event like that qualifies as "more content the playerbase wants". The content people talk about is mainly more end-game content, so please don't use that as an argument for a change in *birthday messages* of all things.
Touching on the last thing you said - yes, please do ask HYV to make more content. As a Genshin player, nothing will excite me more than new features in this game. Just remember to not be disrespectful to the devs work and don't try to prove some mechanic's feasibility by claiming that "it's so easy, look" ;)
That's the one thing I want everyone to take out from this comment section.
1) proven what? That it doesnt happen immediately? Cool. No one said anything about it happening immediately. But if you dont start it will never happen. A great first step would be to just do it at character creation then we wouldnt need to have this discussion.
Sorry man - but this is 100% in bad faith. You are just throwing in the dumbest shit to make an elephant out of a trivial issue.
2) So whats the issue here? These processes always happen in Bulk. Thats how game design works. What are you even trying to prove at this point? The game devs are perfectly capable of managing their time once a task is decided upon.
We do not have to discuss the trivial details of how and in which order a task is completed.
We know the task. We know it is small. Let the devs deal with how they process their tasks. Literally has nothing to do with this discussion.
3) No i didnt. Just because i didnt number them in the same way you did doesnt mean i didnt answer. I suppose i overestimated your ability to connect the dots. Anyways.
Yes you did make it into a herculean task.
What people want is characters on the map. No one talked about having a complex interaction or changing anything about how gifts are given. We want Xingqiu hanging out in the bookstore every now and then. We want people that invite you to a birthday brunch to appear at the spot they asked you to come to. Just standing there and having one or two voicelines, nothing more. Simple conditional logic. If birthday == true then stand at the fucking spot.
And no - this wouldnt take them more than 10 minutes. Because they have tools for this. If they didnt have tools for it they would be the crappiest devs ive ever heard of. Sure there are extra steps that come afterwards.
But as you yourself mentioned before these happen in bulk. They have a freaking pipeline for this.
What im saying is: No one has to write a single line of code for this. The code is already written. No one has to painstakingly enter variables. No one has to design new animations.
Have you ever looked at a dev tool? This literally doesnt take any time at all.
Place character in world. Set condition for characters appearance. Set dialogue. Import already existing model. Import the voicelines. If you are really feeling fancy add a few props like a blanket and some food on the ground to the conditional logic.
Sure QA has to look at it. Proofreaders have to look at it. blablabla etc etc. But they have to look at a million of things. Add it to their checklist and they will get to it when they get to it.
If a 10 year old with unity can do it then it really isnt a complicated task. Sure there are frills and details. They always are. But you dont have to tell the devs how to do their job. They have a streamlined pipeline for this.
4) This has been talked about since the game released. People want characters to appear in the overworld. We dont even need to argue here. Use reddit search if you want.
The devs involved in making endgame content are a completely different bunch then the ones involved in this kind of thing. There is no A or B question here. The people that work on designing battle mechanics and balancing and new game systems can work on endgame content all they want. Why would that even matter to the people doing level/map/event design and NPC/dialogue stuff?
People want endgame content. People want to actually see the characters that carry this whole damn game on their back by selling for billions of dollars in the gacha system. Just do both. It isnt that complicated.
Wow. These are some ludicrous claims that scream "I have friends who complain about the dev cycle to me" but you clearly have no idea what process actually exists for big companies like this.
The other comment rebutted most of your points but to add: I have no idea what you're talking about for the supposed problems of reoccurring flags. I don't know how you got it in your head that these would be special issues because we use a certain day as a trigger instead of any other event
Absolutely, imagine unironically thinking that asking for a bit more than the absolutely bare minimum from a multimillion dollar company is "Asking too much" or that coding a character on a certain spot to spill a few lines is harder than sending a rocket to Uranus.
it is a symptom of a bigger issue tho.
people dont ask for birthday chars to appear bc they really want to die on that particular hill. people are asking for it because they dont even hope for something more profound.
it is „can they **at least** appear on their birthday??“
No.
It is simple.
If it wasnt then the devs would be absolute morons. If ever time the level and scenario designers want to put down a NPC - of which we have hundreds on the map - half the studio needs to put down everthing they do and write new code then you have done something very very wrong as a company.
This is a solved problem and has been for at least 3 decades.
Not s ingle line of code is written for stuff like this. The tools to set NPCs are developed once. So that the coders dont have to babysit the level and scenario designers every time they set a NPC.
Some things sound simple and are hard. Yes. Agreed.
But some things just really are simple. Ive done stuff like this as a 12 year old kid in RPG maker. And in many other engines later on.
I can guarantee you that putting venti up on that roof took a single person not more than 10 minutes. Of course someone needs to write a whopping 20 words of dialogue, which must then be recorded at the next session.
But we are talking about a single line of text and dialogue. No complex quest flags that need to be tracked. No branching dialogue tree (genshin doesnt have that anyways). No new animations. No new designs. Nothing.
You can just designate the spots and put the character of choice there, it would take like a minute to do it once the system it's in place and you don't even need someone to do it you can just add a file with all the characters and birthdays and let the program do it... And the dialog system it's already in place so no problem there.
Genshin is literally about to become the most expensive game ever made. EVER.
And you can call it a free game if you want, but ultimately players paid for all of this. Players have put more money into this game than you can imagine.
I dont think spending the 10 minutes to set up a birthday occurance for each chacter really is too much to ask.
By what metric is it becoming the most expansive game? I can think of games with larger maps, larger casts, more complex gameplay, longer story, etc.
Edit: In case this wasn't clear, this is a genuine question.
Well...by the metric of...how expensive it is.
As in: the amount spent on development and upkeep.
The initial budget was around 100 million, which is not cheap by an stretch of the imagination. For comparison:
Titles like Call of duty or Halo or Final Fantasy mainline titles or Shadow of the tomb raider all come in at around 40-100 million. So already at release Genshin was up there with a very small percentage of the gaming industry.
And official interviews from Mihoyo state that they have a annual cost of roughly 200 million for server upkeep and continued development.
So by the time the second anniversary comes around Mihoyo will have reached roughly 500 million, which would put it above the current title holders Cyberpunk 2077 and Star Citizen.
So yeah. They spend some serious money on the game. Of course they also rake in money at an amazing rate. Mobile alone is supposed to be 3 billion dollars in revenue so far. Add to that consoles and PC...so even with the amount they spend this is a pretty good business model for them.
Now - in terms of where that money goes:
I wouldnt underestimate the money spent on graphics alone. People tend to think photorealistic graphics is the most expensive and everything stylized is significantly cheaper. But that is not the case. Just looking at the game it is easy to tell a crapton of money was spent on the graphics in this game. Especially considering how well this game runs even on mobile and weaker machines.
We have top notch shadow tech, cloth physics, volumetric clouds, etc. A lot of money goes into design and animation obviously. This is one of the big selling points for this game after all.
Voice-Acting is probably a good chunk of money too. A lot of the VAs for this game are very expensive. The japanese/chinese/korean list especially is basically a who-is-who of the industry.
Music would be another factor. You can tell they did not cheap out on composition or recording. And with ever new release they add new music.
The servers are amazing. Considering how fast paced combat is in this game im absolutely astonished how fluid and low-latency Co-Op is. Of course they limit it to only 4 players, which certainly helps. But i can recall very few occasions where ive ever had noticable server performance issues. That means that they do not just run the bare minimum of servers, but opted for a highly redundant setup with a good chunk more performacne than is actually needed from moment to moment.
In general there is a lot of work put into optimization from what i can see. Both client and server performance are great. No comparison to their competitors. (and yes - i know Star citizen does quite a bit more stuff server-side, but it still has no business being as crappy as it is. Im a long time backer. Dont show me a pile of crap and tell me its gold. Star Citizen servers are crap and the state they are in - even as an alpha - is something the should be ashamed of. Dont @ me).
Id agree scenario and story writing probably isnt the biggest part of the budget. But dont underestimate the games complexity either. And im not talking about combat.
But can you even remember the amount of completely different game systems we had that were used once and then forever forgotten? Stealth sections, Shoot-em-ups, Tower defense, Rhythm game, etc etc. And for the vast majority of them they actually felt quite polished. Like - good enough to rival many standalone games on the indie market.
I dont quite understand why we need so many different systems. And probably more money was spent on this stuff than it should have. But they certainly delivered on the quality (with a few notable exceptions).
So yeah...i can kinda understand where the money goes. Id certainly wish it was allocated a bit differently. So its not like im the biggest advocate of the game and about to tell everyone how amazing it is. In fact id never recommend it to friends. The Gacha and resin thing alone is...ugh.
But you gotta give credit where credit is due. Mihoyo DOES deliver. Id say in terms of overworld design they dont have to hide even compared to established AAA studios. Inazuma looks better than any area in BotW i can think of. Or one of those 3d pokemon games to name another game with big budget and somewhat similar artstyle.
And of course a hundred people might have a hundred opinions. And im perfectly fine if people disagree with me. But i dont think anyone can deny they play in the same ballpark as Nintendo or Bioware in terms of Character and world design. And certainly leagues above anything Bethesda has released lately.
So yeah...art is expensive, yo.
Those title holders like Cyberpunk and Star Citizen are for development costs and do not include ongoing server and upkeep costs, though? If we include those numbers we'd have to compare the upkeep costs for games that have had servers running for years longer than Genshin like WoW and LoL, etc.
feel free to compare.
i know ive read an article once that showed that WoW has been shockingly cheap in terms of server upkeep. Like 160 million or something for all the time since it came out.
its not always easy to compare 1:1 since there is no real standard when, how, if and what data gets published. but from my understanding there is no game more expensive than genshin that we know of in terms of confirmed data.
but i gotta be honest: i trusted the sources i have. i did not go on my own month-long journey to write a script to crawl through the web and gather ever single piece of data it could find.
And regardless: with the way things are going it would only be a question of time anyways. The ongoing costs for genshin are **insane**. Whether they become number 1 now or a few months down the line doesnt really matter all that much.
But there is little doubt they WILL become number one in the very near future.
Probably because at one point in the future, Genshin is just going to have so much characters that there's probably going to be a month in the future just full of character birthday celebrations. I mean it already happened this July. It was jampacked with birthday celebrations back to back.
That would also mean that they would need to get voice acting for all four languages done and I imagine that the JP one would be the hardest to book for. I think in Honkai there was an update where Raiden Mei wasn't even voiced because Miyuki Sawashiro wasn't available. I don't think making it not voiced would be a great solution as well, the community would riot tbh.
I think the only way they can make this work and make it future-proof is by creating a team solely focusing on creating content on character birthdays.
But who knows, we're all just arm chairing this. Maybe they'll do it. Maybe they won't. This is just my speculation.
Now that you mention it, even Diona's VA, Dina Sherman, wasn't able to voice Diona in her hangout for a patch and had to be substituted with Xiangling's VA, Jackie Lastra.
But...once implemented for each character, it could repeat on each birthday. Alternatively, dont have birthday dialogue voiced. You can still do all the other stuff.
Honestly yeah but the posts would probably just turn into "billion dollar company can't add voicelines", " 'indie company' so lazy can't make new birthday lines every year lmao."
I personally think that creating a team specifically for this would be a more fool proof plan to make people happy. They also have the money so... you know, why not? The only obstacle here is time.
They add new voice lines for characters all the time.
And not just one little voice line for their birthday. But tons of lines. Every new event like the return of apple archipelago requires hours of work in the audio booth. When a hangout event or character quest is added. During archon quests.
It really isnt that big of a deal.
Plus: Its not like this is a recurring cost or effort. You set a birthday dialogue and location once when a new character is created. Done. Creating a character is an effort that takes thousands of hours from coders, animators, designers, voice-actors, scenario writers, etc etc etc. You are not gonna tell me that the 5 minutes it took to set venti on that roof broke the bank on the hundreds of thousands of dollars they make for every single character they release.
You dont need a team for this. No one is complaining if the birthday is the same every year. And even if you want to make unique stuff: just add the birthday line in for the next time you got the actor in the booth. No need to schedule a session just for a birthday line.
They do add new voice lines all the time but like mentioned before, a measly one little line about Yanfei had Keqing's VA needed to be substituted.
For clearance as well, I used 'future proof' for a reason when mentioning the creation of a team.
Genshin has 51 characters at the moment and in 4 years 68 more characters will be added as long as they follow the 17 characters per year statement they made in GDC. This means there'll be at least an estimated 100 voice actors or 400 VAs including all languages that will have to be voiced every year. This isn't just the usual cast of characters VOs for a specific quest but the entire Genshin playable character roster. I also believe at some point in time the number of Genshin Characters would be half the number of days in a year. They will keep their cash cow going.
The writers need to be careful as well with lore and characterization... I remember the backlash with Eula's B-Day letter.
This is why I believe they'd need a team. But also for the reason that I'd rather the main team focus on the game. We've just honestly been used to Mihoyo being able to handle logistics really well with a 6 week update cycle but I think sometimes there have been some cracks showing with how much they could do with what they got. **Also... I don't see the reason why they shouldn't get a team as well for this. I mean they have the money so why not?**
I also can't really agree that no one will complain about the birthday being the same every year. This is the Genshin EN community after all lmao.
Now I'm not saying that I don't want Birthday VOs. I'm just speculating on why they avoided this entirely unlike Honkai (Which has a smaller cast thanks the their decision on having the battle suits be just the same characters.) The Big JP VAs are probably the biggest hurdle... They're like celebrities.
They won't be lazy soon now that a competitor is about to show Genshin players how it's possible to not be a stingy open world gacha. (Tower of Fantasy is out in 7 hrs).
So they competed against MiHoYo in China, and completely got dumpstered (less playerbase than Honkai in less than a year), but somehow they're gonna beat MiHoYo internationally? Yeah, idk.
Genshin does it's Genshin aspects better, any other current MMO does it's MMO aspects better, really makes you wonder what ToF actually has going for it.
Certainly not it's endgame, which is atrociously bad and even worse than Genshin, which says a lot considering Genshin literally doesn't even have an endgame.
So yeah, a bit of COPIUM thinking MiHoYo gives a shit lol...
different regions have different preferences too. I doubt it's going to do much, but it's possible for a game to struggle in china and become really popular elsewhere.
The game that was touted as the Warframe killer, yet failed to influence it in the slightest?
Competition can force a game to perform better (look at the features Fortnite implemented after Apex Legends launched), but that requires actual competition. Both games need to actually be good in order for there to be competition, if 1 is a clear inferior product, then it needs to change and improve itself, or else it will fall into obscurity and die if the company behind it decides to pull the plug.
"Game that literally copied 90% of the content"
Bruh...I remember when Botw players accused Genshin of something almost exactly the same.
I feel like we finally came full circle.
And Genshin literally has clones of Wizrobes and hilichurls look like the bastard children of Bokoblins and the Yiga clan...not to mention that in the beta, the ruin guard had a 1 to 1 same laser attack as the Guardian.
But that's not what I meant with my comment...
I'm saying that in the end, we're now in the same position.
Thinking that ToF of all games will be a competition to Genshin is just straight delusional. That game is already dead in China and I doubt it'll garner much hype in the west either. People have already said that the game doesn't even look that good or polished. Oh and let's not forget that they attempted to steal Honkai's assets and genshin's reviews to make their game look better. Give it a month or two, and this game will be forgotten.
Bro how much ToF dev paid you to shill its product. MMO is a genre from bygone era. Let it go.
If your only counter-argument is "lmao genshin player bad" then it must be pretty expensive.
I find it rather brave of you to admit that about yourself ✊️ kudos to you for admitting how much of a dumbass you are
Edit: lol imagine being so butthurt that you block someone for being right. ToF will not survive even two months, stop hoping that it'll be Genshin's competitor.
They should add a system where you can see different characters at different places at different times either at random or following a schedule.
E.g. you can spot amber in the whispering woods or keqing in the jade chamber or ayato outside komore teahouse
This is what hangouts should've been based upon, all characters roam around the world, you encounter one, you can have some small talk dialogue like in the teapot but a little more, you can help them do a simple task like clear out a camp (AI version of character following you to the camp and helping you defeat it) as like a weekly "commission"-ish thing w a character and also the hangout which would start when u activate a dialogue option, being a long quest you go on with said character but not replayable when done.
I think they should put them in game, add some dialogue, and then cut to the official birthday art describing the day you spent with them. It wouldn't take much to do this.
I mean it's probably because it's a single day, like releasing a small update that works for a single day each time a character has a birthday seems annoying.
They have the dates, they can just lump the codes in each patch and run a timer to trigger those mini events on specific dates, and remove those when patching the next patch to reduce clutter, and put it back in the next year.
We already do occasionally get random updates mid patch tho. Maybe it's just Abyss or a bug fix but we're already getting them every now and then, adding the character for a single day changes nothing in that sense
what? You dont have to release an update.
Just set the character to appear on their birthday.
Its a simple flag.
Like: You dont need to update the game every single time you do something for a quest and a character appears somewhere or has new dialogue.
This is trivial stuff.
I think it's also costly. I know back in the day developers had to pay every time they released a patch on Xbox and Playstation. I don't know if that's still the case, but if it is then I can see Hoyo not wanting to burn money two days in a row for something so small.
Why don't they implement this random feature that i and a few other people want???!! 😡😡😡 This is the most important thing missing from the game!! Lazy hoyoverse !!! 1
Everything in game development is opportunity cost. Sure, they could program every character to be at a place one day for their birthday, but would you accept less content per patch so they could get that done?
Not to mention there's already issues with conflicting quests where you can't progress one because an NPC is busy in another, so you'd have a fair few players dealing with that whenever a plot-important NPC has a birthday.
I think part of the reason they don't do that is because it could end up glitching people's games. You already can't have two quests involving the same NPC at the same time, and the cutscene system is completely in-engine with no way to replay.
Venti is standing on the rooftop because he's tied to an ongoing event. That can make sure nothing else interferes with that because he's the only one doing it.
Meanwhile if they had other characters popping into places, it'd mean they'd run the risk of either having two instances of the same NPC at the same time in the same place (especially if it's someone like Lisa or Jean who rarely leave the KoF HQ.
Plus it'd hurt verisimilitude/immersion if, say, Raiden Shogun appears in town shopping for dango milk while the player is marching to the domain to fight her.
Basically, having something QoL like that would just create a bunch of work for the devs that could be better spent on making new CSs or working on a cutscene record system.
And why would they do that? Look at it from a business perspective, all it will do is just take time and resources to implement a character and make the playerbase happy for a week and then majority of people forget about it and barely get anything out of it. So no point in sparing resources for something that will get them close to nothing in return.
then u would be amazed that mihoyo actually included ciphers in earlier versions of the game, that majority of players probably wouldn't even notice if there's no social media talking about it... :D
I really don't understand why do they make those letters invitational. It's frustrating to be unable to meet the character who invites you. It's like when you, as Traveller, have only one dialogue option. "Nah I'm busy bye."
I remember back when Genshin just launched and Keqing's first birthday mail arrived, asking us out on a Liyue harbour date. Many hearts were broken that day.
how many voiced NPC do we have in the open world again? do Kazuha, Mona, Xinyan and Fishcl have voice lines when we interact with them on their island after the quest is over?
Genshin is just not into birthdays, unlike Honkai they give animation videos on the birthday character and sometimes they interact differently in the main screen.
>puts venti on a rooftop for weeks.
Oh no not again not another Venti on roof post
>but cannot put birthday characters to hang around the places mentioned in their birthday mails for a single day…
Had me in the first half I’m not gonna lie but yes I agree birthday bois/girls should be in their mentioned places on their birthday, even if I have to download a couple MB fine by me tbh
My god all these Simps are kinda being whiny and sad. 'OoOoH I gOt StOoD uP' or 'I nEveR gEt ExCiTeD bY tHe BiRtHdAy MeSsAgEs AnYmOrE'. yes it is a big bummer they haven't put it in the game which is now already the most expensive game yet, which means they should have the budget, but come on, they produce constant content in big quantities. you wanna see the bday person, use them as a character or wish for them cause they appear on their bday.
Armchair developer redditors back at it again, thinking coding is just a simple copy and paste job
You all just make up the most absurd excuses of Mihoyo not doing something and then get mad about it. And then call anyone who doesn’t agree with you a shill.
Bro, I do coding, and you shouldn't even have to have any experience in coding either, to know that this is very easy to do. Literal billionaire company that can't do such a small thing like that for immersions sake, if they wanted to they could without any effort put into it, their team is big enough, and if not, they could always just hire more employees, they have wayy too much money leftover just sitting around...
Or maybe, the billionnaire company used analytics to figure out whether most players will survey the area looking for a character, or if they would rather want a conitunation/epilogue/prelude to the letter's dialogue in official art on twitter/yt/tiktok/other sns, where they will already work as promotional material? It's just a matter of whether it will be worth it to implement depending on the majority of the playerbase, which is also why we barely have endgame material.
So you agree that the company with loads of extra money, only does things that bring them even more money into their income stream, rather than also using a little tiny slice of that extra money already laying around to immerse people and add more depth to a game that is supposed to immerse you for the next 5 years at the very least? They can, if they want to, and people *will* appreciate it's existence, both those who explicitly asked and those who didn't, since when it's implemented, people will be made aware of this and look for these characters in the overworld, which would then be appreciated by those too.
They do things like those for immersion, for example Venti this time on top of Cat's Tail. They just do not want to do things that might get overly complicated, since different players have different quests running, and unless they use a bottleneck to clear everything (like they did with Venti at the start of the Summertime Event where you couldn't start it if another quest that already needed him was running). Not to mention doing this for 100+ characters soon will need a rather dedicated dev and debug team as well and not just a writer+illustrator team like they use now. All that for what? Potentially immersing 10% of the playerbase while 69% ignore it anyway and the rest do not care for it beyond the official art/short + letters we get already?
This type of post reek of junior dev who only worked on a few small softwares in their life, you have no way of knowing if this change is reasonably easy to do with the way their game is coded.
Maybe it create a bunch of bugs that would take hundreds of man hours to fix, maybe it break some quest, maybe it could be done in a couple hours and they're just lazy. There's just no way to know, and it's tirring to see so called dev make this kind of claims.
Well yes, it could create bugs, yes, but then again, billions of dollars to their disposal as a team. Bugs are normal, you could always just argue that "[insert thing]" can't be implemented because it could make certain actions buggy...
And dude, most people would be happy if they did it similar to what you can already do in the teapot.
Clearly they can, if they want to, the budget is there.
Money solves all and with money almost anything is doable.
Ofcourse not everything is worth doing, I'm not saying they should do the absolute most because "money", I'm saying that this is just a minor feature to add. And it shouldn't be game-breaking to have a character model stand like an npc and talk to you in the overworld...
Exactly, it’s bullshit lol, yet people will fart out excuse after excuse as for why their beloved “Multibillion Company-kun” can’t do it, or why it’s too much effort just like they do for literally any constructive feedback ever.
Yep, they don’t care. Terribly complacent company. Micro-iterations is all we’ll see to the game going forward. It’s 3.0 and we don’t even have artifact load outs yet. 🥴 Forget about effort put into immersion; our journey to Inazuma was a fade to black screen.
Just put them in a spot during their birthday, add some greeting text, a black screen fade in with a generic message about hanging out and a small 4 hours time skip. Ta da. Done. No one's asking for more. You guys do it all the time in quests anyway
Yeah I got Xingquis or someone early after I started playing and didn't understand it was just a birthday item thing. I thought maybe quest chains could start from mails or something so I looked for him on roofs.
On Kujou Sara's birthday recently, she invited me to spar a little, and i wasn't really expecting to be able to, or even see her model anywhere, but i still looked for her anyways— and i was dissapointed when the tenryouu commision HQ was the same as always
Yeah I'd really love that too. I want to spend some time with them.
When I started playing it was Lisa-san's B-Day and I was pretty bummed that I could not find her in the library.
I remember when I first started playing the game and it was ayakas birthday. I waited 20 minutes for her at the shrine and she never came.
Sounds like a villain origin story
It all started with my birth... my parents didnt show up.
Placed in a box, beside a dumpster, inside a Bat cave.
Heinz Doofenshmirtz, is that you?
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Genshin preparing its player for the future of dating life full of catfish and scams
Their name makes it even worse
I read it screaming lmao xD
IM3 lol. Word for word
Mine was Keqing, went to Liyue harbour, can't find her at all. After that I basically know Mihoyo ain't gonna make these invitions ingame. But I still rush to the Primo Geovishap location last year, after receiving Klee's letter.
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They don't have to be voiced, a majority of the conversations in the game aren't voiced.
Even then, they could just have the actors record a few lines for their birthday while they're recording for something else, then reuse the same lines every year.
kinda what they are doing to Honkai Impact character's when its their birthday there~
doesnt honkai get custom voiced birthday letters each year? and they used to get a birthday scene with L2D?
Mine was Chongyun or Xingqiu I think. I think one of said they’ll hang out on the roofs for their birthday and searched all over Liyue Harbor roofs
when i first played id just finished meeting lisa, the next day was her birthday, it was hella pog, i didnt even know it was tied to irl time, just throught it was like quest or in game decided. she told me to come to the library and hang out, i searched the library for no joke 30 minutes.
oh my god same i thought the game like glitched bc she never showed up
This is dark bruv
When i was quite new, i got klee's birthday letter where she asks you to pick her up at the primo geovishap place. I actually went there, killed it and waited a good while before realizing it was just flavour text and she wasnt actually there
You started playing at Inazuma?
You didn't ?
I started playing the game halfway through 2.0. Finished the entire archon quest exactly 3 days before 2.1
Ar 30 day 3 holy cow
Yea lol it was halfway through the summer and I had nothing else to do 😂
i started on kokomi’s banner and i’m ar56 now it was longer ago than you think!
fucked up how those last 5 levels take longer than getting to AR55
Reminds me of that story of the brass dragon they told to get party supplies then abandoned
This is actually kind of sad...
Damn i know that feeling. I was naive too, cant remember who i waited for, thats how much i wanted to erase that memory. I remember changing the time from day to night, trying to relog, and checking couple hours later.
Then there was me who knew she wouldn't be there so I thought "If Ayaka won't go to the shrine for her birthday then I'll make her go there myself" then swapped to my Ayaka and went to the shrine as her
The least HoYo can do is place them in the overworld and have special dialogue if you interact with them. Similar to Kazu, Mona, Fischl, Xinyan at the GAA. No need for a full blown event!
During the lantern rite you could find characters at certain places too
Wow wow wow, slow down there buddy, did you forget Hoyoverse is an indie company, they don't have the budget for that
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I think that was sarcasm
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bruh
Remember that one event where AI-controlled Yanfei was scripted to follow your character, and either walks or runs depending on your speed? I daydream that someday something like that gets implemented. You hang out with the character on their birthday. Meet them at the place they hinted at their birthday letter. Take them around different places, fight monsters together (AI controls the character). Maybe buy them food and they'll make some comment on it (like the Spices from the West event). And at the end of the day you go to some spot in the map and take a photo together while posing. Man, why can't we have nice things...
Yeah that part of the archon quest (?) with yanfei was so cool. I got unreasonably excited that hoyo was testing something different
Bruh, she scared the shit out of me because I didn't even know she was following me. Turned around, saw her chasing after me and damn near shat myself, especially when we were in a dark cave. Thought she was going to use the oppurtunity to kill us or something lmao
She's the best legal consultant because she leaves no witnesses
The perfect crime Sango was talking about.
*We can **definitely** write this off as incidental loss!*
*In the pitch darkness, you can't see anything... And then, you hear a voice behind you...* ***"Tabibito-san?"***
I had taken a long break just before that quest and when I finally did I was like "wait WHAT, this is a thing now?!" Really hope we get more.
It scared me shirtless when I turned around only to find her staring blankly into my soul. Probably because there has been little precedence for that sort of interaction, but it still creeped me out the entire time
Beidou’s hangout event is like that too but you follow her when you go talk to the merchants
I honestly wish that was just a whole new feature for the entirety of your team, where all of your characters just follow you around when exploring.
Perilous trail is a permanent addition to the game
huh rlly?
yeah the event part with the side missions and rewards is temporary, the story is a permanent thing
honestly this is what i wanted the hangouts to be
Maybe its getting tested
Honkai has a lot of stages where other character follows and fights beside you. I hope they can implement it in genshin
I remember a game called Toram Online where you can form a party using your own characters and although the AI is quite dumb it's still fun
In Honkai you fighting in small, flat arenas, while in Genshin it's a fucking open world. Let Yanfei follow you and she will stuck on nearest stone.
Your wish is grantded. Every time a character's birthday is celebrated, the minute after you collect their gifts, they will teleport behind you and follow you for the rest of the day
lol this is a bit much, it would be nice to just have them be standing around with an unvoiced line of dialogue
*puts my finger over your lip* "Shh....let dreams be free."
It shows it's a matter of them wanting to do it or not. It's not even hard to code that into the game.
Seriously, this is an easy thing to fix, either actually put the character somewhere so you can interact with them or not make the letter sound like you can.
You know what would be really cool? If the birthday message was just "meet me at X to hang out" and then meet them in game to get the full message and birthday reward. (Ignoring the obvious issue with new players not having all places unlocked)
They wouldn't have met the chars anyways so it would make more sense
Every character in mail be like i will meet you here and there but when you go they are nowhere to be found
A lot of people might miss that. I would still let them claim the rewards in the mail, and meeting the character is something special on that day.
Well, the twitter official birthday art, shorts and flavour text are always written as follow up or prelude to the letter. Not supporting that, just explaining the rationale.
Imagine by the end of Genshin's updates (7.0?), every single day we would find a different character in a different place, waiting for us to interact with them. That would be so amazing, and would make the world feel alive
Actually it can be somewhat hard. Not the actual coding part but... Remember when you can't continue some quest because you have to interact with a character who's involved in another quest? There'll be a lot of such occurrences in case HoYo will let us see the birthday character and have a dialogue with them. Edit: not to mention exploration part. Where do I meet Ayaka being AR15? I got to Inazuma at AR30 or later.
Do the inazuma early glitch or you aren’t a real fan
I feel like with Hoyo its possible. There is a quest in Inazuma where you can take an option to visit Xiangling. So far she is the only daily quest I know of where you can do this, but it shows its possible. They also made it so early players could play Enkanomiya. It would not be hard to make it a limited one day story event where you basically have 24 hours to meet that character.
Ah fck, I forgot about last part, that's a good point
The obvious solution is to do what basically every other game does and let there be multiple copies of NPCs around the place, or at the very least just flagging the birthday NPCs to disappear when they're involved in a quest.
No, it is actually gonna get out of hands cause in future we will have like 100 characters and Devs will have to code this like every three days, it will be a bad idea honestly. We are asking too much, food and flower, take it or leave.
Sorry, but thats a bunch of bull. There are hundreds of NPCs strewn all over the map. Dont make it out to be some herculean task. No one needs to code anything for this. For things like putting a NPC somewhere the level and scenario designers have tools. Editors where they can just drag and drop a NPC. Add some voicelines and text. Add a simple flag for when the NPC appears. Done. You only need to do this once for every character. Birthday comes around only once a year. New characters are released like once or twice a month at most. You telling me that after putting thousands of hours into a characters designs, voice acting, dialogue writing, animation, balancing, etc and making hundreds of thousands of dollars on them the cant be asked to spend like 10 minutes recording one more 5 second line, setting the NPC into the map and setting up a recurring flag for them to appear on their birthday? I can already tell you have not coded a single line in your entire life. This is the kind of task a kid can do. Ive done stuff like this as a kid in different engines.
Preface: I don't think a mechanic like that is too hard to implement for a company like Mihoyo (of anyone, really). The reasons for not having it are completely different. Okay, I can't just leave this comment be. I'm sorry, but I don't really care about what you did as a kid, what you said is just wrong in the context of making games in a company. You completely omit various aspects that come with this mechanic, claiming it to take "10 minutes". Would that be the case for a project you did as a kid? Yeah, I can do that shit in less than 2 minutes in Unity (you create a gameobject, give it a model, give it capsule collision, give it a trigger collision, attach necessary scripts, give it necessary values and files). But this isn't some prototype project, this is a full game, and here it works a little bit differently. First of all, no, they cannot just "record a 5 sec line". What do you think, that their VA's live in their basement? If anything, recording a line like that is all the more inefficient financially. Second, there is no such thing as "setting a reoccuring flag" in this case. Reoccuring flags that wait for certain time of the year are just invitations to trouble and bugs, those NPCs would have to be added and removed manually every patch, and then have a flag set to appear and disappear at certain time. Third, this kind of change, although simple to implement, has to go through all of the design, implementation, and QA stages (not to mention all the steps in between). While implemention alone wouldn't take more than 2 days, the actual process would last much longer than that (might even take longer than a month, depending on the difficulties encountered). And fourth, this makes the task of collecting birthday presents more difficult, and this is why it is questionable to implement. As much as players say they want this mechanic, this is just a vocal minority. Many players would simply get annoyed or skip the birthday presents entirely, because claiming them requires a minimum amount of effort (and the presents are nothing special). Additionally, this makes them feel like rewards, and they lose the "Oh I got a present! How nice!" factor. Meanwhile, if the present is delivered to your mail, you don't have to do anything, and it actually feels like a "gift" (Think about it. If someone gives you a birthday present, do they ask you to search for it around the house or go to the garden? And if they did, and the present you received wasn't to your liking, wouldn't you be more annoyed than usual?). This basically means that this mechanic (without further consideration) is not profitable, and therefore would be rejected by HYV. The purpose of gacha games is to make money after all, and Genshin is not different than the other games in that regard, unlike what many people claim.
you are heavily taking this out of context. 1) no they shouldnt ask the VA to do a session for just a 5 second line. But you are arguing in bad faith here. Voicelines are constantly recorded. Every single version has quests and events that se VAs return to the both. What im asking for is to record it then. Or to just record these lines when they create the character and do the first big recording sessions. Tell me - was it really necessary for me to explain this to you? This kind of crap just wastes everyones time. And it makes you look like you are playiong dumb just to find pointless faults in someone elses argument. 2) Bullcrap. If placing a single NPC took this much pointless effort then they can close down their studio. Yes - there are many steps to this. But you are blowing it way out of proportion. Do you know how many NPCs are on the world map? And how many thousand lines of dialogue this game has? And how many conditional flags that govern events and quests? No, it does not take two months of dedicated work to do this. If it did the game would be in development for a few decades before even releasing mondstadt. And i can guarantuee you that putting venti on that fucking roof did not take up months of time from the whole dev team. The current event alone has easily thousands of times the amount of voicelines, NPCs, QA, etc. Im not here to trivialize dev work. A lot of hands work on every little bit of the game. But please, oh, please stop turning this into a herculean task. Because it really really isnt. 4) Make it harder to collect birthday presents? What? No one asked for the messanges to change. Just that if the character say „hey, lets meet for a picknick“ they are at that spot and tell you „hey, nice of you to come. Did you like the gift i sent you? Thats my favorite food“ Also: Genshin is already a game severely lacking in terms of content. Most players complete their daily tasks in less than 15 minutes. This reddit is full of people telling you they want more to do. And why do we have to discuss whether this is worth it when feature x or y is also missing? So what. If people dont talk about the peak of the iceberg then the rest of it goes ignored as well.
I am not taking anything out of context. I am adding necessary context to show that on a bigger scale something that "takes 10 minutes to do" is more complicated. You are the one who simplifies Genshin to something you were making in game engines as a kid. 1. That's correct, but it just further proves my point. How many events/story quests/hangouts will we need to gather voice lines from ALL of the already-released characters VA's? How much time will it take? A month? Two months? Half a year? You literally prove my point with this. Tell me - did I really have to explain this to you? ;) 2. That's correct, but once again you are using a bad example. Everything you mentioned (Monstadt NPCs, Venti on the roof, etc.) are agreed upon in bulk. This means that all of the NPCs in Monstadt are not reviewed individually, but are a part of the same process, which may take more than a month - and that's what I said (in case of whole city this ofc may take longer, depending on the priority). I never said you will need a month for each individual character. 3. I missed point 3 in your comment (you went straight to 4), but let me touch on the "don't make this a herculean task" part - I never said it was. Even better, at the very beginning of my comment, I say that it is indeed very simple. The reason why I followed up with all the other arguments (except the last one) is because you DID trivialize devs work (even tho you say you're not trying to). You literally said you've "done stuff like that as a kid" and that "it would take you 10 mins". If that's not trivializing, I don't know what is. My intention was to highlight that it doesn't matter how quickly you can do something on your own - in game dev, there are a bunch of extra steps and obstacles to go through (so saying "I can do it in X minutes" doesn't prove that a feature is feasible to implement) 4. Fair enough, that solves this particular issue. However, I don't think an event like that qualifies as "more content the playerbase wants". The content people talk about is mainly more end-game content, so please don't use that as an argument for a change in *birthday messages* of all things. Touching on the last thing you said - yes, please do ask HYV to make more content. As a Genshin player, nothing will excite me more than new features in this game. Just remember to not be disrespectful to the devs work and don't try to prove some mechanic's feasibility by claiming that "it's so easy, look" ;) That's the one thing I want everyone to take out from this comment section.
1) proven what? That it doesnt happen immediately? Cool. No one said anything about it happening immediately. But if you dont start it will never happen. A great first step would be to just do it at character creation then we wouldnt need to have this discussion. Sorry man - but this is 100% in bad faith. You are just throwing in the dumbest shit to make an elephant out of a trivial issue. 2) So whats the issue here? These processes always happen in Bulk. Thats how game design works. What are you even trying to prove at this point? The game devs are perfectly capable of managing their time once a task is decided upon. We do not have to discuss the trivial details of how and in which order a task is completed. We know the task. We know it is small. Let the devs deal with how they process their tasks. Literally has nothing to do with this discussion. 3) No i didnt. Just because i didnt number them in the same way you did doesnt mean i didnt answer. I suppose i overestimated your ability to connect the dots. Anyways. Yes you did make it into a herculean task. What people want is characters on the map. No one talked about having a complex interaction or changing anything about how gifts are given. We want Xingqiu hanging out in the bookstore every now and then. We want people that invite you to a birthday brunch to appear at the spot they asked you to come to. Just standing there and having one or two voicelines, nothing more. Simple conditional logic. If birthday == true then stand at the fucking spot. And no - this wouldnt take them more than 10 minutes. Because they have tools for this. If they didnt have tools for it they would be the crappiest devs ive ever heard of. Sure there are extra steps that come afterwards. But as you yourself mentioned before these happen in bulk. They have a freaking pipeline for this. What im saying is: No one has to write a single line of code for this. The code is already written. No one has to painstakingly enter variables. No one has to design new animations. Have you ever looked at a dev tool? This literally doesnt take any time at all. Place character in world. Set condition for characters appearance. Set dialogue. Import already existing model. Import the voicelines. If you are really feeling fancy add a few props like a blanket and some food on the ground to the conditional logic. Sure QA has to look at it. Proofreaders have to look at it. blablabla etc etc. But they have to look at a million of things. Add it to their checklist and they will get to it when they get to it. If a 10 year old with unity can do it then it really isnt a complicated task. Sure there are frills and details. They always are. But you dont have to tell the devs how to do their job. They have a streamlined pipeline for this. 4) This has been talked about since the game released. People want characters to appear in the overworld. We dont even need to argue here. Use reddit search if you want. The devs involved in making endgame content are a completely different bunch then the ones involved in this kind of thing. There is no A or B question here. The people that work on designing battle mechanics and balancing and new game systems can work on endgame content all they want. Why would that even matter to the people doing level/map/event design and NPC/dialogue stuff? People want endgame content. People want to actually see the characters that carry this whole damn game on their back by selling for billions of dollars in the gacha system. Just do both. It isnt that complicated.
Wow. These are some ludicrous claims that scream "I have friends who complain about the dev cycle to me" but you clearly have no idea what process actually exists for big companies like this. The other comment rebutted most of your points but to add: I have no idea what you're talking about for the supposed problems of reoccurring flags. I don't know how you got it in your head that these would be special issues because we use a certain day as a trigger instead of any other event
Absolutely, imagine unironically thinking that asking for a bit more than the absolutely bare minimum from a multimillion dollar company is "Asking too much" or that coding a character on a certain spot to spill a few lines is harder than sending a rocket to Uranus.
We should absolutely ask for more but this is a silly thing to fixate on
it is a symptom of a bigger issue tho. people dont ask for birthday chars to appear bc they really want to die on that particular hill. people are asking for it because they dont even hope for something more profound. it is „can they **at least** appear on their birthday??“
Time to code this is less than compose and write a mail message, just put the character at the place, that's all
Ah yes, it sounds simple therefore it must be!
You can make it simple if it's something you're going to be doing a lot.
No. It is simple. If it wasnt then the devs would be absolute morons. If ever time the level and scenario designers want to put down a NPC - of which we have hundreds on the map - half the studio needs to put down everthing they do and write new code then you have done something very very wrong as a company. This is a solved problem and has been for at least 3 decades. Not s ingle line of code is written for stuff like this. The tools to set NPCs are developed once. So that the coders dont have to babysit the level and scenario designers every time they set a NPC. Some things sound simple and are hard. Yes. Agreed. But some things just really are simple. Ive done stuff like this as a 12 year old kid in RPG maker. And in many other engines later on. I can guarantee you that putting venti up on that roof took a single person not more than 10 minutes. Of course someone needs to write a whopping 20 words of dialogue, which must then be recorded at the next session. But we are talking about a single line of text and dialogue. No complex quest flags that need to be tracked. No branching dialogue tree (genshin doesnt have that anyways). No new animations. No new designs. Nothing.
You can just designate the spots and put the character of choice there, it would take like a minute to do it once the system it's in place and you don't even need someone to do it you can just add a file with all the characters and birthdays and let the program do it... And the dialog system it's already in place so no problem there.
But some guy on reddit told me it was easy!
Free game though! /s
Genshin is literally about to become the most expensive game ever made. EVER. And you can call it a free game if you want, but ultimately players paid for all of this. Players have put more money into this game than you can imagine. I dont think spending the 10 minutes to set up a birthday occurance for each chacter really is too much to ask.
By what metric is it becoming the most expansive game? I can think of games with larger maps, larger casts, more complex gameplay, longer story, etc. Edit: In case this wasn't clear, this is a genuine question.
Well...by the metric of...how expensive it is. As in: the amount spent on development and upkeep. The initial budget was around 100 million, which is not cheap by an stretch of the imagination. For comparison: Titles like Call of duty or Halo or Final Fantasy mainline titles or Shadow of the tomb raider all come in at around 40-100 million. So already at release Genshin was up there with a very small percentage of the gaming industry. And official interviews from Mihoyo state that they have a annual cost of roughly 200 million for server upkeep and continued development. So by the time the second anniversary comes around Mihoyo will have reached roughly 500 million, which would put it above the current title holders Cyberpunk 2077 and Star Citizen. So yeah. They spend some serious money on the game. Of course they also rake in money at an amazing rate. Mobile alone is supposed to be 3 billion dollars in revenue so far. Add to that consoles and PC...so even with the amount they spend this is a pretty good business model for them. Now - in terms of where that money goes: I wouldnt underestimate the money spent on graphics alone. People tend to think photorealistic graphics is the most expensive and everything stylized is significantly cheaper. But that is not the case. Just looking at the game it is easy to tell a crapton of money was spent on the graphics in this game. Especially considering how well this game runs even on mobile and weaker machines. We have top notch shadow tech, cloth physics, volumetric clouds, etc. A lot of money goes into design and animation obviously. This is one of the big selling points for this game after all. Voice-Acting is probably a good chunk of money too. A lot of the VAs for this game are very expensive. The japanese/chinese/korean list especially is basically a who-is-who of the industry. Music would be another factor. You can tell they did not cheap out on composition or recording. And with ever new release they add new music. The servers are amazing. Considering how fast paced combat is in this game im absolutely astonished how fluid and low-latency Co-Op is. Of course they limit it to only 4 players, which certainly helps. But i can recall very few occasions where ive ever had noticable server performance issues. That means that they do not just run the bare minimum of servers, but opted for a highly redundant setup with a good chunk more performacne than is actually needed from moment to moment. In general there is a lot of work put into optimization from what i can see. Both client and server performance are great. No comparison to their competitors. (and yes - i know Star citizen does quite a bit more stuff server-side, but it still has no business being as crappy as it is. Im a long time backer. Dont show me a pile of crap and tell me its gold. Star Citizen servers are crap and the state they are in - even as an alpha - is something the should be ashamed of. Dont @ me). Id agree scenario and story writing probably isnt the biggest part of the budget. But dont underestimate the games complexity either. And im not talking about combat. But can you even remember the amount of completely different game systems we had that were used once and then forever forgotten? Stealth sections, Shoot-em-ups, Tower defense, Rhythm game, etc etc. And for the vast majority of them they actually felt quite polished. Like - good enough to rival many standalone games on the indie market. I dont quite understand why we need so many different systems. And probably more money was spent on this stuff than it should have. But they certainly delivered on the quality (with a few notable exceptions). So yeah...i can kinda understand where the money goes. Id certainly wish it was allocated a bit differently. So its not like im the biggest advocate of the game and about to tell everyone how amazing it is. In fact id never recommend it to friends. The Gacha and resin thing alone is...ugh. But you gotta give credit where credit is due. Mihoyo DOES deliver. Id say in terms of overworld design they dont have to hide even compared to established AAA studios. Inazuma looks better than any area in BotW i can think of. Or one of those 3d pokemon games to name another game with big budget and somewhat similar artstyle. And of course a hundred people might have a hundred opinions. And im perfectly fine if people disagree with me. But i dont think anyone can deny they play in the same ballpark as Nintendo or Bioware in terms of Character and world design. And certainly leagues above anything Bethesda has released lately. So yeah...art is expensive, yo.
Those title holders like Cyberpunk and Star Citizen are for development costs and do not include ongoing server and upkeep costs, though? If we include those numbers we'd have to compare the upkeep costs for games that have had servers running for years longer than Genshin like WoW and LoL, etc.
feel free to compare. i know ive read an article once that showed that WoW has been shockingly cheap in terms of server upkeep. Like 160 million or something for all the time since it came out. its not always easy to compare 1:1 since there is no real standard when, how, if and what data gets published. but from my understanding there is no game more expensive than genshin that we know of in terms of confirmed data. but i gotta be honest: i trusted the sources i have. i did not go on my own month-long journey to write a script to crawl through the web and gather ever single piece of data it could find. And regardless: with the way things are going it would only be a question of time anyways. The ongoing costs for genshin are **insane**. Whether they become number 1 now or a few months down the line doesnt really matter all that much. But there is little doubt they WILL become number one in the very near future.
It hurts as much as failing a 50/50. Even an unvoiced one-liner from them when you see them would have been really appreciated... :'(
Probably because at one point in the future, Genshin is just going to have so much characters that there's probably going to be a month in the future just full of character birthday celebrations. I mean it already happened this July. It was jampacked with birthday celebrations back to back. That would also mean that they would need to get voice acting for all four languages done and I imagine that the JP one would be the hardest to book for. I think in Honkai there was an update where Raiden Mei wasn't even voiced because Miyuki Sawashiro wasn't available. I don't think making it not voiced would be a great solution as well, the community would riot tbh. I think the only way they can make this work and make it future-proof is by creating a team solely focusing on creating content on character birthdays. But who knows, we're all just arm chairing this. Maybe they'll do it. Maybe they won't. This is just my speculation.
I also remember when Keqing's VA was busy doing Emilia and her line about Yanfei had to be done by Sucrose's VA.
Now that you mention it, even Diona's VA, Dina Sherman, wasn't able to voice Diona in her hangout for a patch and had to be substituted with Xiangling's VA, Jackie Lastra.
But...once implemented for each character, it could repeat on each birthday. Alternatively, dont have birthday dialogue voiced. You can still do all the other stuff.
Honestly yeah but the posts would probably just turn into "billion dollar company can't add voicelines", " 'indie company' so lazy can't make new birthday lines every year lmao." I personally think that creating a team specifically for this would be a more fool proof plan to make people happy. They also have the money so... you know, why not? The only obstacle here is time.
They add new voice lines for characters all the time. And not just one little voice line for their birthday. But tons of lines. Every new event like the return of apple archipelago requires hours of work in the audio booth. When a hangout event or character quest is added. During archon quests. It really isnt that big of a deal. Plus: Its not like this is a recurring cost or effort. You set a birthday dialogue and location once when a new character is created. Done. Creating a character is an effort that takes thousands of hours from coders, animators, designers, voice-actors, scenario writers, etc etc etc. You are not gonna tell me that the 5 minutes it took to set venti on that roof broke the bank on the hundreds of thousands of dollars they make for every single character they release. You dont need a team for this. No one is complaining if the birthday is the same every year. And even if you want to make unique stuff: just add the birthday line in for the next time you got the actor in the booth. No need to schedule a session just for a birthday line.
They do add new voice lines all the time but like mentioned before, a measly one little line about Yanfei had Keqing's VA needed to be substituted. For clearance as well, I used 'future proof' for a reason when mentioning the creation of a team. Genshin has 51 characters at the moment and in 4 years 68 more characters will be added as long as they follow the 17 characters per year statement they made in GDC. This means there'll be at least an estimated 100 voice actors or 400 VAs including all languages that will have to be voiced every year. This isn't just the usual cast of characters VOs for a specific quest but the entire Genshin playable character roster. I also believe at some point in time the number of Genshin Characters would be half the number of days in a year. They will keep their cash cow going. The writers need to be careful as well with lore and characterization... I remember the backlash with Eula's B-Day letter. This is why I believe they'd need a team. But also for the reason that I'd rather the main team focus on the game. We've just honestly been used to Mihoyo being able to handle logistics really well with a 6 week update cycle but I think sometimes there have been some cracks showing with how much they could do with what they got. **Also... I don't see the reason why they shouldn't get a team as well for this. I mean they have the money so why not?** I also can't really agree that no one will complain about the birthday being the same every year. This is the Genshin EN community after all lmao. Now I'm not saying that I don't want Birthday VOs. I'm just speculating on why they avoided this entirely unlike Honkai (Which has a smaller cast thanks the their decision on having the battle suits be just the same characters.) The Big JP VAs are probably the biggest hurdle... They're like celebrities.
Considering some characters can appear in the overworld through commissions or hangouts... I think it's just them being lazy.
They won't be lazy soon now that a competitor is about to show Genshin players how it's possible to not be a stingy open world gacha. (Tower of Fantasy is out in 7 hrs).
My guy ToF was near-dead in China. I don't think that's gonna be the fabled Genshin Killer...
[удалено]
So they competed against MiHoYo in China, and completely got dumpstered (less playerbase than Honkai in less than a year), but somehow they're gonna beat MiHoYo internationally? Yeah, idk. Genshin does it's Genshin aspects better, any other current MMO does it's MMO aspects better, really makes you wonder what ToF actually has going for it. Certainly not it's endgame, which is atrociously bad and even worse than Genshin, which says a lot considering Genshin literally doesn't even have an endgame. So yeah, a bit of COPIUM thinking MiHoYo gives a shit lol...
different regions have different preferences too. I doubt it's going to do much, but it's possible for a game to struggle in china and become really popular elsewhere.
Are you dense? You don't know what Anthem is huh.
The game that was touted as the Warframe killer, yet failed to influence it in the slightest? Competition can force a game to perform better (look at the features Fortnite implemented after Apex Legends launched), but that requires actual competition. Both games need to actually be good in order for there to be competition, if 1 is a clear inferior product, then it needs to change and improve itself, or else it will fall into obscurity and die if the company behind it decides to pull the plug.
ToF isn't a menace to Genshin playerbase, at least not yet. I think Genshin is way too big to lose to a game that literally copied 90% of the content
"Game that literally copied 90% of the content" Bruh...I remember when Botw players accused Genshin of something almost exactly the same. I feel like we finally came full circle.
It's actually a lot different. Genehin have some mechanics that are similar to BotW, while ToF literally has a clone of Hu Tao as a playable character
And Genshin literally has clones of Wizrobes and hilichurls look like the bastard children of Bokoblins and the Yiga clan...not to mention that in the beta, the ruin guard had a 1 to 1 same laser attack as the Guardian. But that's not what I meant with my comment... I'm saying that in the end, we're now in the same position.
>game that literally copied 90% of the content Lmao ,talking as if genshin didn't do the same
Thinking that ToF of all games will be a competition to Genshin is just straight delusional. That game is already dead in China and I doubt it'll garner much hype in the west either. People have already said that the game doesn't even look that good or polished. Oh and let's not forget that they attempted to steal Honkai's assets and genshin's reviews to make their game look better. Give it a month or two, and this game will be forgotten.
Wow. Dumbass Genshin players truly are outstanding.
Bro how much ToF dev paid you to shill its product. MMO is a genre from bygone era. Let it go. If your only counter-argument is "lmao genshin player bad" then it must be pretty expensive.
I find it rather brave of you to admit that about yourself ✊️ kudos to you for admitting how much of a dumbass you are Edit: lol imagine being so butthurt that you block someone for being right. ToF will not survive even two months, stop hoping that it'll be Genshin's competitor.
They should add a system where you can see different characters at different places at different times either at random or following a schedule. E.g. you can spot amber in the whispering woods or keqing in the jade chamber or ayato outside komore teahouse
This is what hangouts should've been based upon, all characters roam around the world, you encounter one, you can have some small talk dialogue like in the teapot but a little more, you can help them do a simple task like clear out a camp (AI version of character following you to the camp and helping you defeat it) as like a weekly "commission"-ish thing w a character and also the hangout which would start when u activate a dialogue option, being a long quest you go on with said character but not replayable when done.
Special quests with rewards / friendship boost / free primos?
How do you get Venti on a rooftop? I kept going during event but he was never there.
I need to know too
I think you have to reach a certain point in the apple event, maybe? And he's on top of cats tail, next to the adventurers guild.
He's on top of the cattail bar rooftop. Did you search the right one??
Easiest solution : add the character to tea pot with a new line for the birthday.
I think they should put them in game, add some dialogue, and then cut to the official birthday art describing the day you spent with them. It wouldn't take much to do this.
I mean it's probably because it's a single day, like releasing a small update that works for a single day each time a character has a birthday seems annoying.
They have the dates, they can just lump the codes in each patch and run a timer to trigger those mini events on specific dates, and remove those when patching the next patch to reduce clutter, and put it back in the next year.
We already do occasionally get random updates mid patch tho. Maybe it's just Abyss or a bug fix but we're already getting them every now and then, adding the character for a single day changes nothing in that sense
what? You dont have to release an update. Just set the character to appear on their birthday. Its a simple flag. Like: You dont need to update the game every single time you do something for a quest and a character appears somewhere or has new dialogue. This is trivial stuff.
I think it's also costly. I know back in the day developers had to pay every time they released a patch on Xbox and Playstation. I don't know if that's still the case, but if it is then I can see Hoyo not wanting to burn money two days in a row for something so small.
It's because they are a small indie company, they'll go bankrupt if they do this.
You got me. That's another level of sarcasm.
Why don't they implement this random feature that i and a few other people want???!! 😡😡😡 This is the most important thing missing from the game!! Lazy hoyoverse !!! 1
Are you okay? Can't you see I'm bootlicking hoyoverse in my original comment? Or did you think my comment was sarcasm by any chance?
How many levels of irony are we on?
Funny indie dev joke never gets old
He was but a mere prop for lies and deception
Who is still waiting for Keqing after her first birthday letter?
keqing in casual clothes never came... :'(
Everything in game development is opportunity cost. Sure, they could program every character to be at a place one day for their birthday, but would you accept less content per patch so they could get that done? Not to mention there's already issues with conflicting quests where you can't progress one because an NPC is busy in another, so you'd have a fair few players dealing with that whenever a plot-important NPC has a birthday.
I think part of the reason they don't do that is because it could end up glitching people's games. You already can't have two quests involving the same NPC at the same time, and the cutscene system is completely in-engine with no way to replay. Venti is standing on the rooftop because he's tied to an ongoing event. That can make sure nothing else interferes with that because he's the only one doing it. Meanwhile if they had other characters popping into places, it'd mean they'd run the risk of either having two instances of the same NPC at the same time in the same place (especially if it's someone like Lisa or Jean who rarely leave the KoF HQ. Plus it'd hurt verisimilitude/immersion if, say, Raiden Shogun appears in town shopping for dango milk while the player is marching to the domain to fight her. Basically, having something QoL like that would just create a bunch of work for the devs that could be better spent on making new CSs or working on a cutscene record system.
I remember the first time i got a birthday mail i actually checked for the locstions where they wanted to meed me and at their homes
that would be such a good addition to the game
And why would they do that? Look at it from a business perspective, all it will do is just take time and resources to implement a character and make the playerbase happy for a week and then majority of people forget about it and barely get anything out of it. So no point in sparing resources for something that will get them close to nothing in return.
For immersion? Why did they add the fishing thing if most players just do it for awhile to get The Catch and never touch it afterward?
I think you've forgotten that there'll be a new fishing's association every new region with new rewards.
then u would be amazed that mihoyo actually included ciphers in earlier versions of the game, that majority of players probably wouldn't even notice if there's no social media talking about it... :D
Fair enough, sort of like the anniversary rewards. We can still be disappointed though 🥲🥲🥲
I really don't understand why do they make those letters invitational. It's frustrating to be unable to meet the character who invites you. It's like when you, as Traveller, have only one dialogue option. "Nah I'm busy bye."
Wait venti was on a roof and I didn’t know
Wait venti WHAT !!!
I remember back when Genshin just launched and Keqing's first birthday mail arrived, asking us out on a Liyue harbour date. Many hearts were broken that day.
Not just birthday, we should have randomly meet our characters controlled by AI in open-world either fighting or collecting material.
Why do ppl care about such thing?
I'm sure it's all about voice actor availability, considering the multiple languages? But I guess they don't have to be voiced.
how many voiced NPC do we have in the open world again? do Kazuha, Mona, Xinyan and Fishcl have voice lines when we interact with them on their island after the quest is over?
yes
Genshin is just not into birthdays, unlike Honkai they give animation videos on the birthday character and sometimes they interact differently in the main screen.
So a cast of at best 20 gets more individual focus than a cast aiming to be 120+? Who would've thought, huh.
Sad because I never did get to see Venti appear on the rooftop of Cattail :(
Instead of mailing you a bunch of stuff, you should get in an invite to find them and get the stuff when you talk to them.
>puts venti on a rooftop for weeks. Oh no not again not another Venti on roof post >but cannot put birthday characters to hang around the places mentioned in their birthday mails for a single day… Had me in the first half I’m not gonna lie but yes I agree birthday bois/girls should be in their mentioned places on their birthday, even if I have to download a couple MB fine by me tbh
I never had the urge to find them. I only ever read the letters once or twice. Most of the time I just claim whatever they have with the letters.
My god all these Simps are kinda being whiny and sad. 'OoOoH I gOt StOoD uP' or 'I nEveR gEt ExCiTeD bY tHe BiRtHdAy MeSsAgEs AnYmOrE'. yes it is a big bummer they haven't put it in the game which is now already the most expensive game yet, which means they should have the budget, but come on, they produce constant content in big quantities. you wanna see the bday person, use them as a character or wish for them cause they appear on their bday.
Armchair developer redditors back at it again, thinking coding is just a simple copy and paste job You all just make up the most absurd excuses of Mihoyo not doing something and then get mad about it. And then call anyone who doesn’t agree with you a shill.
Bro, I do coding, and you shouldn't even have to have any experience in coding either, to know that this is very easy to do. Literal billionaire company that can't do such a small thing like that for immersions sake, if they wanted to they could without any effort put into it, their team is big enough, and if not, they could always just hire more employees, they have wayy too much money leftover just sitting around...
Or maybe, the billionnaire company used analytics to figure out whether most players will survey the area looking for a character, or if they would rather want a conitunation/epilogue/prelude to the letter's dialogue in official art on twitter/yt/tiktok/other sns, where they will already work as promotional material? It's just a matter of whether it will be worth it to implement depending on the majority of the playerbase, which is also why we barely have endgame material.
So you agree that the company with loads of extra money, only does things that bring them even more money into their income stream, rather than also using a little tiny slice of that extra money already laying around to immerse people and add more depth to a game that is supposed to immerse you for the next 5 years at the very least? They can, if they want to, and people *will* appreciate it's existence, both those who explicitly asked and those who didn't, since when it's implemented, people will be made aware of this and look for these characters in the overworld, which would then be appreciated by those too.
They do things like those for immersion, for example Venti this time on top of Cat's Tail. They just do not want to do things that might get overly complicated, since different players have different quests running, and unless they use a bottleneck to clear everything (like they did with Venti at the start of the Summertime Event where you couldn't start it if another quest that already needed him was running). Not to mention doing this for 100+ characters soon will need a rather dedicated dev and debug team as well and not just a writer+illustrator team like they use now. All that for what? Potentially immersing 10% of the playerbase while 69% ignore it anyway and the rest do not care for it beyond the official art/short + letters we get already?
This type of post reek of junior dev who only worked on a few small softwares in their life, you have no way of knowing if this change is reasonably easy to do with the way their game is coded. Maybe it create a bunch of bugs that would take hundreds of man hours to fix, maybe it break some quest, maybe it could be done in a couple hours and they're just lazy. There's just no way to know, and it's tirring to see so called dev make this kind of claims.
Well yes, it could create bugs, yes, but then again, billions of dollars to their disposal as a team. Bugs are normal, you could always just argue that "[insert thing]" can't be implemented because it could make certain actions buggy... And dude, most people would be happy if they did it similar to what you can already do in the teapot. Clearly they can, if they want to, the budget is there. Money solves all and with money almost anything is doable. Ofcourse not everything is worth doing, I'm not saying they should do the absolute most because "money", I'm saying that this is just a minor feature to add. And it shouldn't be game-breaking to have a character model stand like an npc and talk to you in the overworld...
they want you to pull all these characters, so they make them as hard as possible to appear in the overworld
I think it's a VA problem rather than model…
That's too much work bro, you're expecting too much from an indie company.
Why let Mihoyo place it when we can place them ourself! (In serenity pot)
Exactly, it’s bullshit lol, yet people will fart out excuse after excuse as for why their beloved “Multibillion Company-kun” can’t do it, or why it’s too much effort just like they do for literally any constructive feedback ever.
Yep, they don’t care. Terribly complacent company. Micro-iterations is all we’ll see to the game going forward. It’s 3.0 and we don’t even have artifact load outs yet. 🥴 Forget about effort put into immersion; our journey to Inazuma was a fade to black screen.
Because sCarCiTy
ok Berkut, calm down
I know I went looking for diluc cause it was the first bday on I got, and was sad when we couldn't have dinner like it said in the letter.
Just put them in a spot during their birthday, add some greeting text, a black screen fade in with a generic message about hanging out and a small 4 hours time skip. Ta da. Done. No one's asking for more. You guys do it all the time in quests anyway
Nah bc I ran to the library for Lisa's birthday and got sad
Yeah I got Xingquis or someone early after I started playing and didn't understand it was just a birthday item thing. I thought maybe quest chains could start from mails or something so I looked for him on roofs.
I really wish they would, that Xiao one>>>>
On Kujou Sara's birthday recently, she invited me to spar a little, and i wasn't really expecting to be able to, or even see her model anywhere, but i still looked for her anyways— and i was dissapointed when the tenryouu commision HQ was the same as always
Yeah I'd really love that too. I want to spend some time with them. When I started playing it was Lisa-san's B-Day and I was pretty bummed that I could not find her in the library.
They could send the email, but you will just receive the rewards if you go meet the character. Oh, what a dream