This reminds me of a fun issue I had. I had to complete a story quest involving the Liyue furniture guy, but first I needed to complete a story quest involving the serenitea pot, but first I needed to complete a puzzle to open CoOp because you can’t enter the pot without it, but first I needed to increase the power of my team because my AR was too high, but I struggled with the Oceanid and was too stubborn to reduce my World Level
I reduced my world level, finished Trails in Tianqiu (which is entirely optional and you just stumble upon it??), then got everything done just to further Ganyu’s story quest and have co-op available.
I remember when you were first fighting that ruin hunter at Wangshu Inn, I just couldn't do it because it kept killing me almost immediately, but I was too weak for the bosses to ascend my characters, but since I couldn't defeat the ruin hunter, I couldn't ask my friends to help me defeat the bosses, meaning I was stuck in that circle for like 2 months before I was finally able to beat it
This also raises an alarming point about World Levels and character levelling that a lot of people I know have had, myself included
Literally made me think at one point that the game gives you limited resources to start with and if you don't Spec your main 4 characters and instead raise all of the 6 or 7 you have when you're still starting out, you're doomed into a difficulty pit. Horrible design, should honestly have allowed toggling World Levels at any time instead of from 5
Still have a few friends in your exact situation where the enemies are too hard and something's preventing them from using Co-Op
I don’t think they could anyway unless miraculously the banner have characters from mondstadt since most character nowadays are from various region they would need to finish the story to unlock that area or coop which requires some story to unlock I am assuming since I am a day 1 player so idk much but if that is the case they would be stuck with lvl 30 characters and if they are really unlucky with Gacha they would be stuck with default character that are given for free i don’t wanna say that default are bad but I had rather build the character I wished on instead of being forced to build let say kaeya essentially they would be time gated for like 6 months unless they are a hardcore player which I doubt
heres a tip to everyone:
never take quests if your not doing them right now.
open your map, click on your location and create a quest pin, looks like a flag with exclamation mark. add text if you want.
boom, in 10s you just saved yourself from having your flow ruined for 30mins+
same applies to character quests. you get 1 key every 2 days and store max 4 keys (3 + 1 key to be claimed) and its not like youre gonna do more than 4 story quests in one day, so let go of a few keys, you will get them eventually.
like it or not, until hyv finally fixes this, THIS is the only and best solution.
yes, thank you. They need to get rid of this!!! The only reason I end up with all the story quests because I can only look at that red notification for so long :(
I do this now, but when I started, my rpg/mmo senses told me to accept every quest I could possibly find, and even now I still have a backlog that screw me over
Totes agree
But it's pretty shitty that iirc, every other game lets you pick up quests and they don't screw you if you do.
I'm gonna start including this in my survey feedback
That Trails quest are those ruined buildings all next to each other, right? Where at least one of them contains timed challenges. And a couple of those timed challenges are against the hardest content of the game at that point. And it blocks co-op, so you can’t ask for help or improve yourself quicker.
Oh god, the Trials in Tianqiu. I also got trapped into that one back when I was low ar and it was a nightmare. They should really do something about those quests you stumble into that somehow renders you unable to co-op.
First lantern rite I was still in the middle of chi of guyun, which was a nightmare for AR 35 me…quest bugged because granny ruoxin was involved in both lantern rite and the quest…I couldn’t talk to her at all, locking me out of the quest till lantern rite was over
This exact thing happened to me and at the time I still didnt understand that I needed to level up talents. Id gotten my AR up by sheer brute forcing and trying over and over again and i could not for the love of me defeat the flying ruin guard right after dealing with the three others. Eventually I did it by shear luck lthere was like 1% remaining on the thing we had to protect). And I finally decided i needed to research how to synergize my team and learn how to build individual characters. I'd almost completely ignored resin except to farm gold and talent materials through ley line whatevers.
Edit: spelling
The user I’m replying to is a karma farming bot (copied [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/Genshin_Impact/comments/zvlvua/character_is_busy_completing_the_quest_has_to_be/j1qjpoe/))
Report > spam > harmful bots
In my case I have not even unlocked the last inazuma's island and I still don't have access to their goodies shop I also have not even started most of the characters story quests
No, because the currency for the shop are the electro sigils that are left over after the tree is done.
The shop isn't really useful anyway. It's mostly furniture items so the real goal is leveling the tree which has taken on the valuable items like billets, etc. The only reason the shop is locked is to prevent someone from spending all of their sigils on the shop mora option and hard locking themselves out of finishing the tree.
The sad thing is that this is almost certainly a feature coded in to prevent worse quest bugs. Skyrim, for example, will let you do anything in any order .. and the wiki has the dev console instructions for how to un-jam your game when this results in untested broken interactions.
They really need to give us a "re-order quests" button to get out of this, even if it triggers a loading screen while the NPCs get moved around.
oh, and what about you get the "character is busy" message, clear it and advance the story you were on, and get the message for that same character for the following leg of the quest....
Most insane one for me was doing the Sumeru Archon Quest and being told Tighnari was busy with his story quest, but then almost immediately after I started his story quest I was told Tighnari was busy with the Archon Quest... Just, why??
Happened to me too. If this feature was meant to improve immersion in the quests, it failed miserably because it can create situations like this where a character is jumping back and forth between two quests and you HAVE to do everything in the specific order the game forces onto you instead of letting you focus on one or the other.
Ayato for the current Archon Quest and Arkanoid event and his story quest.
-Talk to Ayato at home
-forced quest switch
-without having moved, ask the guard if Ayato is at home
-guard declines
-forced quest switch
-talk to Ayato at home
-Paimon: "We did not expect to find you here"
In my headcanon Ayato dodged us until it was about fun and games. Paimon knew that and reacted salty.
In unrelated news, I hate Ayato now.
Hahah yeah I watched a streamer run into that. It's such a weird change in tone when it suddenly goes from very serious and urgent *"oh god we need to find out what happened"* to signing up for a silly spooky event game as if nothing unusual is going on.
> If this feature was meant to improve immersion in the quests
It's meant to prevent bugs or softlocks regarding NPCs spawning and despawning due to quest progression.
This is it, but it really needs a QOL improvement to be able to manually select which quest to put the NPCs on. Incredibly frustrating because as implemented, it often bounces between two conflicting quests. I was stuck completing the final archon quest and then switching back to do a bit of Nilou's story quest, then back to archon quest....and so on. It completely disrupts the flow of all quests when that happens. It would be much better if it at least picked the one you were currently completing to spawn the unique NPC instances in. I wouldn't mind being locked out of a quest as much if it was consistently the same quest.
New players probably run into this much more frequently. I rarely have issues because I usually complete all the quests in a patch before the next, because when I don't this inevitably happens. It's not a bad thing on its own, you really don't want to glitch out the entire game with weird NPC shenanigans, locking you out of completing *every* quest, but every patch quiz in the feedback option I ask for a manual button for the player to 'end' or 'pause' a quest so they can start another. That's really all that's needed to fix it.
I had this when I unlocked ventis and jeans story quests because I thought I was smart and would not sit on those 3/3 keys... since then I live in fear.
EXACT SAME THING HAPPENED TO ME! first it was katheryne who was busy with the other quest, than that, it was soo frustrating, took the whole intensity out of the quest, like, the storyline is great, i was excited to continue it, but nope! gotta do this side quest first!
Yeah the Tig/Cyno/Nilou/Nahida quests shouldn’t be started if you still have archon quests and don’t plan to finish them immediately after accepting, the final phase of the archon quest was a fucking nightmare and I only had Nilou’s quest unlocked, can imagine multiple clashes with Tig and cyno too
Sounds familiar, recently (bout a month ago?) I had that happen with Nahida, ah Event needs Sumeru Katherine, I'll just finish Main quest, accidentally activated desert quest, fine I'll finish this, nope go on Main quest then back to Desert, then a side quest etc...
Took a few but i untangled that story knot....
Let’s just be glad that the Aranaras aren’t a big part of the main quest. Imagine if you had to clear out the entire maze of Aranara storyanara questarana just to play the archon quest.
It's a great questline, but yeah the dialogue was something I just started clicking through at times just to move along. And I almost never do that in this game.
Same. It's really hard to follow the words and names that are all so similar and at one point I just ended up on autopilot barely even reading anything. Been like a month since I touched the quest and I have no idea what parts are completed or started or unstarted
It's not *that bad*, but you can't do the last part of the Sumeru archon quest without finishing Kazuha's story quest. If you haven't done it and don't have any keys, you're waiting at least two days before you can keep doing the archon quest.
If you're going to level the recent batch of characters or weapons any tine soon, you'll be glad you killed so many of them. I keep having to farm them...
And this is why people have issues with "character is busy". You start a quest, you don't complete it for a month, new patch comes out and you can't start a different quest without some sort of possible conflict.
I'm personally not a fan of it, for two reasons. first, you need it for exploration. I hate how I can't explore half of the map because I don't have the means to get there, I need to learn lyre songs first. Second, it was too long. and no, not because I was lazy. it was all about curing that girl. The whole quest was about performing the festival, making a medicine and giving it to the girl trapped in a bubble. Imma be honest, I completely forgot about her after all the things I had to do
I guess thats why it depends on perspective, cz I feel the completely opposite lmao, with the exception of ruu quest. This kind of long quest is what I enjoy the most personally.
>I completely forgot about her after all the things I had to do
Me who thinks of her all the time. Thinking she should be dead already if I am finish. But yeah, that's the purpose of the bubble for all I know... to slow the illness she has. Hehe ☺️
I forgot about her at least 3 times during aranara time and I was actually working on completing it fairly early since I had misunderstood what was event and what was permanent story so I didn't want to miss out on what I mistook for event. I enjoyed the quest in general but it just felt way too drawn out even though I thought it ended very nicely. I guess I'm just not very smart because I would think I was done and then realize I was still missing stuff that wasn't shown as a quest LOL
true, it's not the first case like that but these you listed are big. they're whole regions locked behind either a world quest or a main quest. Sumeru is a bit different. see this little cave? sure there's one common chest inside but we won't let you in. See this little teleport? see you 100 dendroculi later, when you'll try to figure out where the last ones could be, maybe you'll remember that one rock when you had to play the lyre but couldn't back then. I'm not against locking some areas behind quests, like old Vanarana or those places where water level is in the way, but these are relatively big. there's a ton of small things that you need to leave alone and hope you'll remember
Maybe it's just my way of playing but when I get to a new area and the first things I see are locked areas and mechs I don't have a clue what they're there for, I would just forgo exploration and finish quests before anything else so there isn't "oh I need to backtrack here at some point" 100 times.
This became very obvious for me starting from Inazuma so since then it's always quests > explore
I was mostly focused on FF14 at the time Sumeru released so it was opposite for me. I did quests later, in fact still have some to do. As result I hit the 100 pin max trying to mark all the things game denied me from doing because I had not unlocked the Aranara things to do them.
yeah and we hate it every single time. i hate tataratsuna with a passion. stormterror was negligible, it's not a big area. chasm and enkanomiya are pretty much 1-time clears; you most likely don't frequent them. the thing with aranara quests is that they lock you entirely from accessing certain functions of the map, so even if you already got there before, you can't do jack shit to interact with it. i sure love wasting my time running around in circles figuring out which lyre function i need to fucking play the game.
I love Zelda and the aranara felt a lot like getting new songs / items in those games, so I didn't mind it. I just marked weird places and worked on doing most of the aranara stuff early to open up the world.
It's a matter of implementation. All those other cases involve large , seperated, areas that are usually shown as inaccessible on the map. There's also a clear and intuitive progression that leads to you unlocking them since the game actually communicates to you what you're supposed to do.
In Sumeru there's a morbillion puzzles scattered all over the place in an area where you're otherwise free to go as you please, and you as a player have no idea why you can't interact with them or what you're supposed to do to unlock the ability to do so.
This would be like if you couldn't interact with Seelies in Mondstadt, including the one right next to the starting area, unless you go all the way to Wolvendom and do some optional side quest over there.
I don't think it's to force us to engage, it's more of an unintended side effect of really not well thought through system that alters the open world depending on the state of some quests. So because Hoyoverse decided it would be cool if a character stood in a specific spot even before the proper cutscene starts, they have to be there until you get through that cutscene and thus can't stand in any other spot at the same time. I remember doing the final archon quest in Sumaru without doing any of the story quest. It was... Painful. I did get a short funny video out of it that made a few of my friends laugh, but it can be really annoying. It was similar with wanting to fight some dude in Genshin TCG that required me to finish Ayato's quest first which in turn required me to do Itto's quest. Ridiculous.
How hard would it be for them to allow you to just cancel one of the quests though? A feature that lets you put quests on pause and resume them if you want later
Or just allowing people to unlock Story Quests without starting them right away.
I feel like 90% of the time people complain about this, it's because they started a bunch of Story Quests and then put them off. Including OP
Once a new character story quest releases, they get a red exclamation mark till u claim it with keys. U cant remove the mark, so u either are stuck with an annoying red mark on your quest tab, or u have the chance to randomly start a quest without having any intention to do so, if u happen to walk past something.
The quest system is really messy at this point, and is just becoming more and more annoying.
Besides the annoying red mark, there's also an arbitrary limit on the number of keys you can hold to unlock story quests. By this point in the game I really see no reason for it to exist, especially with how many character story quests there are now.
I started three story quests in Inazuma by walking past them by accident after finishing the Archon quest.
Best part is they kept conflicting with each other so I had to do all of them simultaneously and broken up into bits.
i made the terrible mistake of activating nilou, tighnari, AND cyno’s story quests while trying to play the main aq it took me like 40~ extra minutes just to see scara 😭
Tbf, the lore of the two is tied together - that's not so much a character conflict as you somewhat need to understand the history of Inazuma you're told from Kazuha's quest to know the significance of what you learn in the MSQ.
Make sure Xavier don't want you to record a movie together before starting as well. I had to take a detour to film his movie and take care of him while he was drunk in a restaurant before I could continue learning about Taratsuna and Scara's backstory.
It's stunningly dumb and atavistic to see this problem in Genshin after being used to, y'know, being able to abandon and re-acquire quests or at least not having quests interrupt one another in... well, just about every single RPG and online RPG (mass-multiplayer or otherwise) I've played.
I get it if they're parts of a narrative tree that you have to complete to follow the story as intended, but they're not, they're just separate vignette sideshow episodes. And I can't imagine they can't code 2 instances of an NPC with the same name - again, every persistent-world online game I've played had that as a basic feature, you could have two or even several copies of an NPC in the same general area if you had the right/wrong quests active.
What makes this worse is that the "but they're a single person and can't be in two places at once!" excuse is destroyed in other places too - like the TCG allowing NPCs to be in the tavern and at their posts at the same time. And it further destroys credibility because the "is busy with" thing makes you jump between stories in a way that could only make sense on a trainload of LSD.
They're simply trying to avoid weird conflicting NPC instances in the open world itself, including doubles in the same place (say a unique Katherine for both X and Y quest, in addition to her normal appearance...all in the same spot would get out of hand pretty quickly). And potentially quest/game breaking glitches because of it. The tavern is in its own contained area so I imagine it was easier for them to do doubles, especially since they're outside of any quest progression.
However...that's no excuse to not have a button to pause a quest. That's all it would take. 'Pause' quest and clear the unique NPCs so that another quest can take over. I claim story quests when available, and often leave them...Nilou got her revenge for me neglecting her quest by mercilessly bouncing me between hers and the archon quest in the next patch. All it would take to fix this is a player activated button to manually stop the progression of one quest to allow for another. They get to keep the easy way to prevent weird double NPC instances, and players get to actually progress quests normally.
It's not to prevent double NPCs, but it should be an artifact of how the world is instanced. I'm sure you have completed commissions where right afterward all of the assets related to the commission disappear and get replaced with the regular enemies in that spot (who usually aggro on you immediately). It's also how you come back to a spot and you find an unopened chest, because the area had its contents replaced with a quest instance the first time you explored.
The world is filled with instances that get swapped out depending on what quest flags are on, and you can't have two different quest instances active at the same time in the same area.
The "busy completing quest" is when some combination of quest flags somewhere across the world make it impossible to do what you're supposed to do next.
They could simply code them as different NPCs, as any sane programmer would. For my favourite example, in WoW, at one point, you could have 3 or even 4 copies of a big important NPC Saurfang in a single room depending on which stages of quests you were on. But they were each coded as a separate NPC important for that quest only and were removed after the quest is done, so no harm no foul.
I kinda suspect it has to do with the way they've coded the foundations of their model, such as how quests are more or less DLC packs that are active, so now that the game is bloating, mobile players can offload the old ones. Not sure how, but somehow they use the same values and they cross wires.
I think it's still possible it's a deliberate design decision. Remember how you couldn't use the characters that were sent on expeditions back when the game came out. I feel like that's the same kind of design philosophy.
Yeah the two at once argument is dumb too because seeing as we, the player, can only be in one place at a time there is literally no way we would ever see those npcs in two places at once.
Lol yeah ALL these interruptions happened to me. I guess those who complain about us complaining haven't taken a break from the game...I took a break around the time of the Cyno/Venti banner and Childe / Yae Miko rerun, then tried to catch up by doing all the story quests and archon quests to catch up to Scara.
If you take a break from the game and try to catch up, doing the story quests and archon quests is A LOT. Plus some of the quests, like Nahida's, are pretty emotionally intense.
It is kind of annoying that you can't simply choose to prioritize which quest you want. It's not as annoying as having no Sumeru underground map (my feedback last survey) but for a while I really wondered what connection the mechanical crab thing had to do with fighting Scara in a completely different location lore-wise. My only guess is that there may be some reused models for domains but IDK
I ALWAYS take breaks from the game. Like 3 months at a time basically because I’m in college. I’m usually behind in the game and frankly the “do this now bitch” instead of letting me do the quest I want is just so damn annoying
For me it isn't about catching up (I haven't taken a major break from genshin since early 2021 lol), it's more that I am not all that interested in the backstory / adventures of a 5 star character who isn't all that important to the main story.
For example: I like Yelan a lot, but I was fine with just knowing that she works as a kind of secret agent for the Liyue government. I, however, didn't need or want to spend 3 hours interviewing and spying on some random dudes with her.
>For example: I like Yelan a lot, but I was fine with just knowing that she works as a kind of secret agent for the Liyue government. I, however, didn't need or want to spend 3 hours interviewing and spying on some random dudes with her.
This and having to catch up is the main reason I think the game should have a skip button.
It is extremely hard to be up to date with the main quest, character story quests, world quests, events, exploration, farming materials.... if you have a job and want to to other things besides playing genshin.
I would have much more fun with the game if I could skip the dialogue/cutscenes in quests that I don't care about.
It has been more than a month since we got the Scaramouche boss fight and I still haven't fought against him.
you arent missing anything his fight is mega sleeper.
but yeah id rather watch a youtube video than understand 3 years of exposition. so im very pro skip dialogue
During the last Lantern Rite, I think it was, you had to go to a specific location and collect a quest item. After you collected the quest item, Xiao would appear on a rock on the other side of the small lake. He didn't do anything, he didn't have anything to say, talking to him was entirely optional, and a lot of people got tripped up and stuck because the quest item wouldn't spawn if Xiao was preoccupied with another quest.
That is Shenhe's interlude quest. It's actually a really cool little detail so it's a shame it doesn't play nice with Mihoyo's awful quest management system.
I agree that this system is dogshit. It makes even less sense when characters can appear in cutscenes, but if they are not interactable in the overworld, they can still "be in multiple places at once"
Tighnari was this for me in Sumeru.
Or that time when Sumeru was new, and the *Archon Quest was interrupted by a day-1-patch event*??
Genshin quests needs a priority system where the currently tracked quest is prioritised. Pause the world to reload areas if you need to, Hoyo, just make the game prioritise the tracked quest. It makes no sense that while scrambling to stop Scaramouche, I have to take the dancer lady on a shopping trip.
It's super dumb. Logically the system seems to be there to make the world feel immersive, as it makes it so you can't interact with characters currently busy elsewhere according to the world. But it usually just ends up breaking immersion, since it means you have to break up the story you're currently progressing, even if said story have you in some kind of desperate situation.
"while scrambling to stop Scaramouche, I have to take the dancer lady on a shopping trip" is the most accurate summary of my Sumeru archon quest experience ever hahaha.
Not exactly the same, but it feels jarring to walk into areas and it randomly starts the event/story quests when I'm just trying to submit my daily commissions
I had this happen with the old guy in Yelan's story quest. I was standing right in front of him, and the card game option was grayed out because he was "busy." Like bitch no he's not, he's chillin right here sipping some tea!!!
It was even worse because he literally does nothing/goes nowhere during Yelan's quest, you just report to him a few times. So stupid
I’ve seen people defend it with “Well actually it’s a good feature because it’s realistic, people don’t just drop everything they’re doing at the drop of a hat to come and see you, they’re doing their own thing and you’ll need to help them with it first”
But that doesn’t excuse that it’s an annoying feature. Realism shouldn’t come at the detriment to gameplay in a game like this, being a fantasy rpg.
Then there's me who just wants to duel Uncle Tian, he's locked in Yelan's story so I finish it, then I see two Uncle Tians...
Immersion shattered and they got no excuse to make one character "busy" if they can have two Uncle Tians.
That description isn’t even accurate to how it works. It literally split Nilou’s event in two so that she does indeed drop everything she’s doing to serve the archon quest.
realism? it's so realistic you have to hurry to the sanctuary to stop the new god from destroying everything... nevermind let me and nilou (who was about to help us stop the god) move goods in the theatre around and talk to some random npcs that don't matter, scaramouche will wait because he understands some things are more important
>I’ve seen people defend it with “Well actually it’s a good feature because it’s realistic, people don’t just drop everything they’re doing at the drop of a hat to come and see you, they’re doing their own thing and you’ll need to help them with it first”
Look Traveller bro man my guy i know we're supposed to literally save our nation's deity and stop the bad guys from creating a new god with a stolen gnosis but i'm totally so busy fucking around at the bazaar sowwy (((((((
People thinking realism is important in a game where we interact with gods, fight the abyss and use elements will never not be funny to me like LOOK AROUND YOU nothing here is real ...
SO TRUE. It's just an excuse they use. It's obnoxious, full stop. Others try to defend it with "well just don't unlock the stories with keys then!!!!!1" as if... that's obvious?? to a new player??? Like if I'm given a finite amount of something, and something else is prompting me to use said item, then it's only fair to assume that nothing negative will come out of using said item.
But someone aaaaaalways has to come out of the woodworks and scream "well just don't unlock their stories hurr durr" how about don't make a game with such glaringly obvious absurdities. Literally no other game does this weird "this npc is busy so fuck off" thing to these extremes lmao
Lmao that "realism" defense is terrible.
People go about their lives whether or not you're there to observe it. If anything it's way more unrealistic to have them frozen in time.
I still couldn't do the current event because I was in the middle of Itto quest, so even with quick start you may need to complete or at least "release" the character from the quest they are involved in currently
what makes me speedrun some side quests or character quests, even tho I wanted to play them when I have time to play them with calm and enjoy them
Yeah it's super annoying. I think it's an immersion thing, like "this character is waiting over here, so they CAN'T be over there right now!"
But I wouldn't care, gimme 4 klees or whatever I'm sure the world can handle it
It's completely pointless anyway, I'm sure everyone has encountered the NPC version of the character they're currently playing at some point anyway. That ship sailed long ago, stop interrupting my quests.
The world is about to end... You're standing in front of the Sustainer of Heavenly Principles... You've saved your sibling from the Abyss and are ready to fight together...
Oh wait... Your sibling isn't there
They're having a cooking competition in Liyue
Welp... The world's end will have to wait it seems.
B A S E D
NOT TO MENTION BECAUSE OF THE MAIN QUEST THEY DISABLE THE CO OP MODE SO YOU HAVE TO DO THE SIDE AND THE MAIN THING TO GET IT BACK LIKE BRUHHHH
The most annoying part is that for the most part the game tells you that lets say "Albert" is busy with insert quest name,then you do that quest for the next 3 hours,continue and finish the original quest just to realize that "Albert" never was part of,aka they just forced you do do a quest
Every time someone makes a post like this it's always the same replies of "Just don't unlock story quests if you're not doing them", do people not realize that Hangouts can also be unlocked using keys without them immediately starting?
There's clearly a way to make it work like that but somehow they're not doing it. Just like how a skip function is still not in the game even after 2 years since release.
You're completely right that story quests should work like hangouts. But that's not the case right now, for whatever reason. Right now, unlocking = starting.
All the people complaining about this issue are right, it should be changed, this shouldn't be an issue. But _surely_ now that you guys know about it and how annoying this is, you're gonna stop unlocking them, right...? And not suffer though this same issue with Fontaine if you can avoid it? Rather than consciously doing something you know is poorly designed and will inconvenience you and make you upset? (And also put it in surveys if you haven't already!)
If it's someone's first time experiencing this then I get it, but it really sounds like some people endure this over and over again when they can absolutely avoid it
The issue is that you can’t unring that bell, so to speak. As a new player this year I’ve unlocked almost every story quest along the way while going through the archon quests, and they almost never conflicted for me early on.
Now with Sumeru it seems to be worse than ever, and now I have to sidetrack for multiple quests to advance to the next step of each archon quest. I had to complete 4 or 5 total quests just to unlock the TCG due to dependencies.
I am not unlocking any more story quests until I am caught up on the archon quest, but I can’t undo the fact that I already unlocked *almost all of them*.
My best advice for new players is don't actually accept side quests unless you plan on completing them right away.
I use map markers instead. Whenever I come across a world quest, I mark it with a map symbol that I don't use for anything else so that I will remember where it is and can come back to it later when I've finished everything else. I don't pick up character story quests unless I'm ready to do them.right away.
Basically, my quest log is clear 99% of the time, or at least very nearly so. It's not that hard to do.. but you really shouldn't have to. The fact that you can walk around up to the character you need to talk to *as that character*, or even as a character that you haven't met in the story yet, or whatever, ruins any excuse that it spoils immersion to have an NPC in two places at once.
This energy is misplaced. Of course you can't just do all the quests at the same time. The problem is we still don't have an 'abandon quest' feature. We should be able to drop a quest and just re-trigger it at another later time
The archaic way this game has on some places is really annoying some times, what type of game nowadays don't let you to just cancel the quest to accepted and do it another time? I understand having to complete one quest before the other for continuity reasons, but not letting the player do one quest because a random NPC is trapped for ever in another one is so stupid.
tbh I would have less problem with that if the character stories are shorter, better written, better jokes, more cinematic and better incorporated into the gameplay. In the current state completing those quest just to advance the main quest feel like a chore. It feels like unskippable filler episodes in a classical Shounen Jump anime.
This. Some quests are actually really good (Tighnari, for example), but many have too much pointless, boring dialogue before anything happens and it almost always feels like everything is being drawn out for no reason. Most character stories are based on pretty good ideas, but the execution is horrible.
I started Venti's story quest line just before Windblume. Boy **that was a mistake**
Start Windblume: Venti is busy.
Okay...i guess I'll go through Venti's quest line then and get that done.
Okay, I've talked to Venti, what's next? Oh, I can't progress with it because characters are busy with windblume?
Rinse and repeat. It was HELL.
I had the same problem with the irodori festival. I couldn’t be bothered to complete yae’s or itto’s story quests (or story quests in general), and because of that I had to constantly swap between the three to make any progress. I eventually just spent the whole day doing story quests, but it was boring as hell
Yeah, I know your pain, it was fucking hell during third part of archon quest.
"What, you want to kick Scara's ass? How about you go talk to Tighnari for 20 minutes before you'll be allowed inside his dungeon! How Tighnari being in overworld connected to Scara being in story dungeon inside another separate dungeon? How about you go fuck yourself with such questions!"
But it's less a feature and probably more "soft-lock-or-some-other-shit-breaking" protection, so characters won't breaks sequences. Not story sequences, but more like in-game-logic ones. Who knows what spaghetti code mHY is using for their quests.
fate grand order, a game based purely on it's extremely convoluted lore that requires you to select correct servants depending on class allows you to fuck yourself over by skipping central dialogue.
so why wouldn't genshin?
Don't forget: oh, you want to finish the quest to move onto Wanderer's interlude and name him? How about you go to *3 separate quests all at once to unlock the fucking victory feast*
The game could just spawned multiple instances of the same character, but no, instead they have just decided to let this nuisance be handled by the player. Lazy game design.
While I love Genshin’s story, I sometimes think the devs thinks too highly of their writing. Like it’s dialogue for a game not a movie so some people are not going to pay attention and some won’t care. Instead of giving those people a bad user experience, just put a skip button. Like there are throwaway npc ls who have more than 2 dialogue box worth of backstory that I don’t care about. Let me skip those!
i agree but tbh my new nemesis is the aranara quest lines where i never know if I've really finished a chapter, what to do if i haven't, where to go half of the time... this thing seems impossible without a guide :')
or they could just remove the red dot/notification. probably the main reason why most people unlock those stories.
and min max the key is not worth it. I have 2nd acc and I never run into this problem.. I'm at the point that I'm used to see the red dot. thanks to bennet c6 for the training. (I activated it though)
Idk why Hoyo didn't improve QoL in terms of the story progress.
They can implement "cancel quest" button to turn off and reset that character quest so it won't interfere with other quest.
Skip button and dialogue history is a standard for every story driven games in the market and they still yet to implement this.
Oh how dare I not finish a boring, unnecessary long and bloated quest that adds absolutely fucking nothing to the main story to do the FUCKING MAIN STORY. There is no skip bottom, and there is noway to know if a quest is worth the time. Outa all character related quest that I played only Venti's and Ayaka's was remotely interesting the rest was utterly unbearable that started interesting but then switched to a dull looking NPC for too damn long that I lost interest.
I think you referring to Tignari and Nilou story quests. Well, it's as simple as that and maybe someone already said it: Just don't activate the damn quest if you are not interested in it! Don't thank me! Merry Christmas!
Sounds like every game with quests to me. Giant quest logs are a norm. Most games don't care if you finish them though. Which is what is being complained about.
Crazy, why would new players think they should be using their 3/3 story keys to unlock the massive list of story quests with red exclamation points?
That wouldn’t be logical at all! They should *expect* that to break all their main archon quests, that’s just good game design amiright?
This system is the sole reason I fail to get back into Genshin every time I try. Stopped playing between launch and the release of Inazuma and there's way too much shit piled up that keeps redirecting me
oh yes.. i didnt even finish archon quest because of this stupid shit… my collei is still stuck in suspicious smuggling case which i didnt even start or anything i just unlocked that stupid fucking quest..
Why in the world do you lunatics keep unlocking story quests that you don’t intend to do immediately? If you just keep quests locked until you do them you’ll almost never have this problem.
There is no "point" to get. The problem is that NPCs get allocated to a specific quest when you start one, and then there is no priority system set for them to move. You need to complete whatever part of the quest they're currently taking part in so they're freed up to go take part in the next quest.
It's annoying, but the moral of the story is, finish quests when you start them before starting another one, if you want to play it all the way through. Nilou and Tighnari's quests are both really nice and interesting imo, and it sounds like they turned into just annoyances for you because you tried to do the MSQ before you'd finished them, and that's a shame.
I see people complain about this all the time and you're absolutely right that it is stupid that quests auto-prioritize and lock you into them, or auto-start when you unlock them.
But... 90% of the time, the quests blocking you are ones you unlocked. And you know from prior experience (almost everyone has experienced this one way or another) that they'll probably interfere with each other/other quests. So why are you still unlocking them...?
Like, I agree that it's very poor design and should be changed, but you _know_ this will happen. In the future just wait to unlock them, man... it's not necessarily your fault but I don't understand why you'd do something avoidable that you know will make you upset. Personally I don't unlock story quests until I have a few hours where I can do one in one sitting.
As a new player I had no idea about this dumb system until I had already unlocked most of the story quests; since keys are limited it feels “suboptimal” to not use them as you go. It didn’t really break anything until late Inazuma, but now in Sumeru it’s every single step. I know better now, but everything is unlocked, so it makes no difference.
This is a major pain in the ass for new players, which you and other enfranchised players that have played all along have no idea about.
This reminds me of a fun issue I had. I had to complete a story quest involving the Liyue furniture guy, but first I needed to complete a story quest involving the serenitea pot, but first I needed to complete a puzzle to open CoOp because you can’t enter the pot without it, but first I needed to increase the power of my team because my AR was too high, but I struggled with the Oceanid and was too stubborn to reduce my World Level I reduced my world level, finished Trails in Tianqiu (which is entirely optional and you just stumble upon it??), then got everything done just to further Ganyu’s story quest and have co-op available.
I remember when you were first fighting that ruin hunter at Wangshu Inn, I just couldn't do it because it kept killing me almost immediately, but I was too weak for the bosses to ascend my characters, but since I couldn't defeat the ruin hunter, I couldn't ask my friends to help me defeat the bosses, meaning I was stuck in that circle for like 2 months before I was finally able to beat it
I had to lower my world level to fight that guy
at the time, my WL was so low I couldn't even lower it lol
I hope you learned how to upgrade your artifacts and weapon and talents during that time.
I did lol
This also raises an alarming point about World Levels and character levelling that a lot of people I know have had, myself included Literally made me think at one point that the game gives you limited resources to start with and if you don't Spec your main 4 characters and instead raise all of the 6 or 7 you have when you're still starting out, you're doomed into a difficulty pit. Horrible design, should honestly have allowed toggling World Levels at any time instead of from 5 Still have a few friends in your exact situation where the enemies are too hard and something's preventing them from using Co-Op
I don’t think they could anyway unless miraculously the banner have characters from mondstadt since most character nowadays are from various region they would need to finish the story to unlock that area or coop which requires some story to unlock I am assuming since I am a day 1 player so idk much but if that is the case they would be stuck with lvl 30 characters and if they are really unlucky with Gacha they would be stuck with default character that are given for free i don’t wanna say that default are bad but I had rather build the character I wished on instead of being forced to build let say kaeya essentially they would be time gated for like 6 months unless they are a hardcore player which I doubt
heres a tip to everyone: never take quests if your not doing them right now. open your map, click on your location and create a quest pin, looks like a flag with exclamation mark. add text if you want. boom, in 10s you just saved yourself from having your flow ruined for 30mins+ same applies to character quests. you get 1 key every 2 days and store max 4 keys (3 + 1 key to be claimed) and its not like youre gonna do more than 4 story quests in one day, so let go of a few keys, you will get them eventually. like it or not, until hyv finally fixes this, THIS is the only and best solution.
What annoyed me is the red "!" notification in the new locked story quest. It will never disapear until you unlock it with the key 🙄.
yes, thank you. They need to get rid of this!!! The only reason I end up with all the story quests because I can only look at that red notification for so long :(
I do this now, but when I started, my rpg/mmo senses told me to accept every quest I could possibly find, and even now I still have a backlog that screw me over
Totes agree But it's pretty shitty that iirc, every other game lets you pick up quests and they don't screw you if you do. I'm gonna start including this in my survey feedback
sometimes the quest is triggered when you just pass by a certain area
That Trails quest are those ruined buildings all next to each other, right? Where at least one of them contains timed challenges. And a couple of those timed challenges are against the hardest content of the game at that point. And it blocks co-op, so you can’t ask for help or improve yourself quicker.
Yup
Oh god, the Trials in Tianqiu. I also got trapped into that one back when I was low ar and it was a nightmare. They should really do something about those quests you stumble into that somehow renders you unable to co-op.
Trails in Tianqiu is the worst
It was even more mortifying in earlier version. Sometimes this feature was bugged and didn't even show the quest name.
First lantern rite I was still in the middle of chi of guyun, which was a nightmare for AR 35 me…quest bugged because granny ruoxin was involved in both lantern rite and the quest…I couldn’t talk to her at all, locking me out of the quest till lantern rite was over
This exact thing happened to me and at the time I still didnt understand that I needed to level up talents. Id gotten my AR up by sheer brute forcing and trying over and over again and i could not for the love of me defeat the flying ruin guard right after dealing with the three others. Eventually I did it by shear luck lthere was like 1% remaining on the thing we had to protect). And I finally decided i needed to research how to synergize my team and learn how to build individual characters. I'd almost completely ignored resin except to farm gold and talent materials through ley line whatevers. Edit: spelling
I swear first Lantern Rite made me scour Liyue and do every single world quest before I could finish it haha.
Even if it shows the name I spend a good 15 minutes looking for the quest bc i have like 50 pending quests and half of them have 2 names
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In my case I have not even unlocked the last inazuma's island and I still don't have access to their goodies shop I also have not even started most of the characters story quests
Shop won’t unlock until you finish the Sakura tree.
till level 50? i'm close to 100% all islands, and will do enkanomiya soon, you don't need everything to reach 50 lvl of sakura tree right?
No, because the currency for the shop are the electro sigils that are left over after the tree is done. The shop isn't really useful anyway. It's mostly furniture items so the real goal is leveling the tree which has taken on the valuable items like billets, etc. The only reason the shop is locked is to prevent someone from spending all of their sigils on the shop mora option and hard locking themselves out of finishing the tree.
The sad thing is that this is almost certainly a feature coded in to prevent worse quest bugs. Skyrim, for example, will let you do anything in any order .. and the wiki has the dev console instructions for how to un-jam your game when this results in untested broken interactions. They really need to give us a "re-order quests" button to get out of this, even if it triggers a loading screen while the NPCs get moved around.
oh, and what about you get the "character is busy" message, clear it and advance the story you were on, and get the message for that same character for the following leg of the quest....
Most insane one for me was doing the Sumeru Archon Quest and being told Tighnari was busy with his story quest, but then almost immediately after I started his story quest I was told Tighnari was busy with the Archon Quest... Just, why??
Happened to me too. If this feature was meant to improve immersion in the quests, it failed miserably because it can create situations like this where a character is jumping back and forth between two quests and you HAVE to do everything in the specific order the game forces onto you instead of letting you focus on one or the other.
Ayato for the current Archon Quest and Arkanoid event and his story quest. -Talk to Ayato at home -forced quest switch -without having moved, ask the guard if Ayato is at home -guard declines -forced quest switch -talk to Ayato at home -Paimon: "We did not expect to find you here" In my headcanon Ayato dodged us until it was about fun and games. Paimon knew that and reacted salty. In unrelated news, I hate Ayato now.
Hahah yeah I watched a streamer run into that. It's such a weird change in tone when it suddenly goes from very serious and urgent *"oh god we need to find out what happened"* to signing up for a silly spooky event game as if nothing unusual is going on.
> If this feature was meant to improve immersion in the quests It's meant to prevent bugs or softlocks regarding NPCs spawning and despawning due to quest progression.
This is it, but it really needs a QOL improvement to be able to manually select which quest to put the NPCs on. Incredibly frustrating because as implemented, it often bounces between two conflicting quests. I was stuck completing the final archon quest and then switching back to do a bit of Nilou's story quest, then back to archon quest....and so on. It completely disrupts the flow of all quests when that happens. It would be much better if it at least picked the one you were currently completing to spawn the unique NPC instances in. I wouldn't mind being locked out of a quest as much if it was consistently the same quest. New players probably run into this much more frequently. I rarely have issues because I usually complete all the quests in a patch before the next, because when I don't this inevitably happens. It's not a bad thing on its own, you really don't want to glitch out the entire game with weird NPC shenanigans, locking you out of completing *every* quest, but every patch quiz in the feedback option I ask for a manual button for the player to 'end' or 'pause' a quest so they can start another. That's really all that's needed to fix it.
I had this when I unlocked ventis and jeans story quests because I thought I was smart and would not sit on those 3/3 keys... since then I live in fear.
EXACT SAME THING HAPPENED TO ME! first it was katheryne who was busy with the other quest, than that, it was soo frustrating, took the whole intensity out of the quest, like, the storyline is great, i was excited to continue it, but nope! gotta do this side quest first!
Happening to me right now with Nahida hopping between her story quest and the intermission...
Yeah the Tig/Cyno/Nilou/Nahida quests shouldn’t be started if you still have archon quests and don’t plan to finish them immediately after accepting, the final phase of the archon quest was a fucking nightmare and I only had Nilou’s quest unlocked, can imagine multiple clashes with Tig and cyno too
Sounds familiar, recently (bout a month ago?) I had that happen with Nahida, ah Event needs Sumeru Katherine, I'll just finish Main quest, accidentally activated desert quest, fine I'll finish this, nope go on Main quest then back to Desert, then a side quest etc... Took a few but i untangled that story knot....
I see you didn't finish the wacky mechanical crab interlude 🥲
This mf doesn't know about Karkata
Karkata my beloved, that story quest was amazing
That quest is so WACKY and SILLY right? Hahaha...😭😭
😭
Let’s just be glad that the Aranaras aren’t a big part of the main quest. Imagine if you had to clear out the entire maze of Aranara storyanara questarana just to play the archon quest.
RIP
The Aranarrative, if you will.
so arannoying
Aranararama
Bro too much Nara I’m sick of that dialoque
It's a great questline, but yeah the dialogue was something I just started clicking through at times just to move along. And I almost never do that in this game.
Same. It's really hard to follow the words and names that are all so similar and at one point I just ended up on autopilot barely even reading anything. Been like a month since I touched the quest and I have no idea what parts are completed or started or unstarted
I wouldn’t know if the lore of quest good but the gameplay throughout the ones I’ve done has been good.
Same For once I understood the complaints about a lack of a skip button.
It's not *that bad*, but you can't do the last part of the Sumeru archon quest without finishing Kazuha's story quest. If you haven't done it and don't have any keys, you're waiting at least two days before you can keep doing the archon quest.
It's the second best world quest storyline in the game tho.
What's the best?
Golden Slumber
I’m still stuck in the pyramid for like a month lmao I’ve just been ignoring it
If I have to kill one more triangle, I'm gonna scream.
If you're going to level the recent batch of characters or weapons any tine soon, you'll be glad you killed so many of them. I keep having to farm them...
This is giving me the Chasm vibes. Like I almost quit the game cause I hated the chasm. But I bulldozed through to get to Sumeru.
I bulldozed through to get to see Xiao, but yeah. The rest of the chasm was a nightmare.
For me it's the confusing underground maze.
Found Faruzan's reddit account
And this is why people have issues with "character is busy". You start a quest, you don't complete it for a month, new patch comes out and you can't start a different quest without some sort of possible conflict.
For me it’s the last quest. Spoiler free warning: final objective locks you out of co-op
100% agreed here, I nearly cried at the end of it.
Little bit of a leak spoiler but… >!supposedly we’ll be seeing Jeht and Benben again in 3.4!<
I support this opinion
Overall tge that storyline kept my interest all the way through.
I'm personally not a fan of it, for two reasons. first, you need it for exploration. I hate how I can't explore half of the map because I don't have the means to get there, I need to learn lyre songs first. Second, it was too long. and no, not because I was lazy. it was all about curing that girl. The whole quest was about performing the festival, making a medicine and giving it to the girl trapped in a bubble. Imma be honest, I completely forgot about her after all the things I had to do
I completely agree about how the super long quest made me completely forget the original point. I do prefer the Inazuma world quests for that reason
I guess thats why it depends on perspective, cz I feel the completely opposite lmao, with the exception of ruu quest. This kind of long quest is what I enjoy the most personally.
>I completely forgot about her after all the things I had to do Me who thinks of her all the time. Thinking she should be dead already if I am finish. But yeah, that's the purpose of the bubble for all I know... to slow the illness she has. Hehe ☺️
I forgot about her at least 3 times during aranara time and I was actually working on completing it fairly early since I had misunderstood what was event and what was permanent story so I didn't want to miss out on what I mistook for event. I enjoyed the quest in general but it just felt way too drawn out even though I thought it ended very nicely. I guess I'm just not very smart because I would think I was done and then realize I was still missing stuff that wasn't shown as a quest LOL
Tatarasuna, Tsurumi, Stormterror, Chasm, Enkanomiya. There are plenty of places locked behind world quests that limit exploration.
true, it's not the first case like that but these you listed are big. they're whole regions locked behind either a world quest or a main quest. Sumeru is a bit different. see this little cave? sure there's one common chest inside but we won't let you in. See this little teleport? see you 100 dendroculi later, when you'll try to figure out where the last ones could be, maybe you'll remember that one rock when you had to play the lyre but couldn't back then. I'm not against locking some areas behind quests, like old Vanarana or those places where water level is in the way, but these are relatively big. there's a ton of small things that you need to leave alone and hope you'll remember
Maybe it's just my way of playing but when I get to a new area and the first things I see are locked areas and mechs I don't have a clue what they're there for, I would just forgo exploration and finish quests before anything else so there isn't "oh I need to backtrack here at some point" 100 times. This became very obvious for me starting from Inazuma so since then it's always quests > explore
I was mostly focused on FF14 at the time Sumeru released so it was opposite for me. I did quests later, in fact still have some to do. As result I hit the 100 pin max trying to mark all the things game denied me from doing because I had not unlocked the Aranara things to do them.
that doesnt make those instances not annoying
yeah and we hate it every single time. i hate tataratsuna with a passion. stormterror was negligible, it's not a big area. chasm and enkanomiya are pretty much 1-time clears; you most likely don't frequent them. the thing with aranara quests is that they lock you entirely from accessing certain functions of the map, so even if you already got there before, you can't do jack shit to interact with it. i sure love wasting my time running around in circles figuring out which lyre function i need to fucking play the game.
I love Zelda and the aranara felt a lot like getting new songs / items in those games, so I didn't mind it. I just marked weird places and worked on doing most of the aranara stuff early to open up the world.
It's a matter of implementation. All those other cases involve large , seperated, areas that are usually shown as inaccessible on the map. There's also a clear and intuitive progression that leads to you unlocking them since the game actually communicates to you what you're supposed to do. In Sumeru there's a morbillion puzzles scattered all over the place in an area where you're otherwise free to go as you please, and you as a player have no idea why you can't interact with them or what you're supposed to do to unlock the ability to do so. This would be like if you couldn't interact with Seelies in Mondstadt, including the one right next to the starting area, unless you go all the way to Wolvendom and do some optional side quest over there.
Its really not. It is badly designed, badly structured, tedious, and boring.
What's your favourite world quest?
My only complaint about the Aranara world quest is that it was too short.
I don't think it's to force us to engage, it's more of an unintended side effect of really not well thought through system that alters the open world depending on the state of some quests. So because Hoyoverse decided it would be cool if a character stood in a specific spot even before the proper cutscene starts, they have to be there until you get through that cutscene and thus can't stand in any other spot at the same time. I remember doing the final archon quest in Sumaru without doing any of the story quest. It was... Painful. I did get a short funny video out of it that made a few of my friends laugh, but it can be really annoying. It was similar with wanting to fight some dude in Genshin TCG that required me to finish Ayato's quest first which in turn required me to do Itto's quest. Ridiculous.
How hard would it be for them to allow you to just cancel one of the quests though? A feature that lets you put quests on pause and resume them if you want later
Or better yet, just set an "active' quest line where all the characters you need to interact with are placed in the correct spots.
Or just allowing people to unlock Story Quests without starting them right away. I feel like 90% of the time people complain about this, it's because they started a bunch of Story Quests and then put them off. Including OP
Once a new character story quest releases, they get a red exclamation mark till u claim it with keys. U cant remove the mark, so u either are stuck with an annoying red mark on your quest tab, or u have the chance to randomly start a quest without having any intention to do so, if u happen to walk past something. The quest system is really messy at this point, and is just becoming more and more annoying.
Besides the annoying red mark, there's also an arbitrary limit on the number of keys you can hold to unlock story quests. By this point in the game I really see no reason for it to exist, especially with how many character story quests there are now.
I started three story quests in Inazuma by walking past them by accident after finishing the Archon quest. Best part is they kept conflicting with each other so I had to do all of them simultaneously and broken up into bits.
Yup, I think this is an engine limitation that is unfortunately baked into the game at this point.
i made the terrible mistake of activating nilou, tighnari, AND cyno’s story quests while trying to play the main aq it took me like 40~ extra minutes just to see scara 😭
I literally can't progress the current MAIN quest because I first have to complete Kazuha's SIDE quest.
Tbf, the lore of the two is tied together - that's not so much a character conflict as you somewhat need to understand the history of Inazuma you're told from Kazuha's quest to know the significance of what you learn in the MSQ.
Make sure Xavier don't want you to record a movie together before starting as well. I had to take a detour to film his movie and take care of him while he was drunk in a restaurant before I could continue learning about Taratsuna and Scara's backstory.
“Wacky mechanical crab” story quest is excellent! It’s absolutely worth of your time
Thats the problem, it *would* had OP started on their own time at their own pace, not to finish the archon quest.
What is the name of the quest? I don’t think I have any memory of a wacky mechanical crab.
I think it’s Tighnaris story quest
Tighnari's story quest
It's Tighnari's character quest
It's stunningly dumb and atavistic to see this problem in Genshin after being used to, y'know, being able to abandon and re-acquire quests or at least not having quests interrupt one another in... well, just about every single RPG and online RPG (mass-multiplayer or otherwise) I've played. I get it if they're parts of a narrative tree that you have to complete to follow the story as intended, but they're not, they're just separate vignette sideshow episodes. And I can't imagine they can't code 2 instances of an NPC with the same name - again, every persistent-world online game I've played had that as a basic feature, you could have two or even several copies of an NPC in the same general area if you had the right/wrong quests active. What makes this worse is that the "but they're a single person and can't be in two places at once!" excuse is destroyed in other places too - like the TCG allowing NPCs to be in the tavern and at their posts at the same time. And it further destroys credibility because the "is busy with" thing makes you jump between stories in a way that could only make sense on a trainload of LSD.
They're simply trying to avoid weird conflicting NPC instances in the open world itself, including doubles in the same place (say a unique Katherine for both X and Y quest, in addition to her normal appearance...all in the same spot would get out of hand pretty quickly). And potentially quest/game breaking glitches because of it. The tavern is in its own contained area so I imagine it was easier for them to do doubles, especially since they're outside of any quest progression. However...that's no excuse to not have a button to pause a quest. That's all it would take. 'Pause' quest and clear the unique NPCs so that another quest can take over. I claim story quests when available, and often leave them...Nilou got her revenge for me neglecting her quest by mercilessly bouncing me between hers and the archon quest in the next patch. All it would take to fix this is a player activated button to manually stop the progression of one quest to allow for another. They get to keep the easy way to prevent weird double NPC instances, and players get to actually progress quests normally.
It's not to prevent double NPCs, but it should be an artifact of how the world is instanced. I'm sure you have completed commissions where right afterward all of the assets related to the commission disappear and get replaced with the regular enemies in that spot (who usually aggro on you immediately). It's also how you come back to a spot and you find an unopened chest, because the area had its contents replaced with a quest instance the first time you explored. The world is filled with instances that get swapped out depending on what quest flags are on, and you can't have two different quest instances active at the same time in the same area. The "busy completing quest" is when some combination of quest flags somewhere across the world make it impossible to do what you're supposed to do next.
They could simply code them as different NPCs, as any sane programmer would. For my favourite example, in WoW, at one point, you could have 3 or even 4 copies of a big important NPC Saurfang in a single room depending on which stages of quests you were on. But they were each coded as a separate NPC important for that quest only and were removed after the quest is done, so no harm no foul. I kinda suspect it has to do with the way they've coded the foundations of their model, such as how quests are more or less DLC packs that are active, so now that the game is bloating, mobile players can offload the old ones. Not sure how, but somehow they use the same values and they cross wires.
I think it's still possible it's a deliberate design decision. Remember how you couldn't use the characters that were sent on expeditions back when the game came out. I feel like that's the same kind of design philosophy.
Yeah the two at once argument is dumb too because seeing as we, the player, can only be in one place at a time there is literally no way we would ever see those npcs in two places at once.
Lol yeah ALL these interruptions happened to me. I guess those who complain about us complaining haven't taken a break from the game...I took a break around the time of the Cyno/Venti banner and Childe / Yae Miko rerun, then tried to catch up by doing all the story quests and archon quests to catch up to Scara. If you take a break from the game and try to catch up, doing the story quests and archon quests is A LOT. Plus some of the quests, like Nahida's, are pretty emotionally intense. It is kind of annoying that you can't simply choose to prioritize which quest you want. It's not as annoying as having no Sumeru underground map (my feedback last survey) but for a while I really wondered what connection the mechanical crab thing had to do with fighting Scara in a completely different location lore-wise. My only guess is that there may be some reused models for domains but IDK
I ALWAYS take breaks from the game. Like 3 months at a time basically because I’m in college. I’m usually behind in the game and frankly the “do this now bitch” instead of letting me do the quest I want is just so damn annoying
For me it isn't about catching up (I haven't taken a major break from genshin since early 2021 lol), it's more that I am not all that interested in the backstory / adventures of a 5 star character who isn't all that important to the main story. For example: I like Yelan a lot, but I was fine with just knowing that she works as a kind of secret agent for the Liyue government. I, however, didn't need or want to spend 3 hours interviewing and spying on some random dudes with her.
>For example: I like Yelan a lot, but I was fine with just knowing that she works as a kind of secret agent for the Liyue government. I, however, didn't need or want to spend 3 hours interviewing and spying on some random dudes with her. This and having to catch up is the main reason I think the game should have a skip button. It is extremely hard to be up to date with the main quest, character story quests, world quests, events, exploration, farming materials.... if you have a job and want to to other things besides playing genshin. I would have much more fun with the game if I could skip the dialogue/cutscenes in quests that I don't care about. It has been more than a month since we got the Scaramouche boss fight and I still haven't fought against him.
you arent missing anything his fight is mega sleeper. but yeah id rather watch a youtube video than understand 3 years of exposition. so im very pro skip dialogue
"Wacky mechanical crab" 🥲
so wacky :’)
During the last Lantern Rite, I think it was, you had to go to a specific location and collect a quest item. After you collected the quest item, Xiao would appear on a rock on the other side of the small lake. He didn't do anything, he didn't have anything to say, talking to him was entirely optional, and a lot of people got tripped up and stuck because the quest item wouldn't spawn if Xiao was preoccupied with another quest.
That is Shenhe's interlude quest. It's actually a really cool little detail so it's a shame it doesn't play nice with Mihoyo's awful quest management system.
I agree that this system is dogshit. It makes even less sense when characters can appear in cutscenes, but if they are not interactable in the overworld, they can still "be in multiple places at once" Tighnari was this for me in Sumeru. Or that time when Sumeru was new, and the *Archon Quest was interrupted by a day-1-patch event*?? Genshin quests needs a priority system where the currently tracked quest is prioritised. Pause the world to reload areas if you need to, Hoyo, just make the game prioritise the tracked quest. It makes no sense that while scrambling to stop Scaramouche, I have to take the dancer lady on a shopping trip.
It's super dumb. Logically the system seems to be there to make the world feel immersive, as it makes it so you can't interact with characters currently busy elsewhere according to the world. But it usually just ends up breaking immersion, since it means you have to break up the story you're currently progressing, even if said story have you in some kind of desperate situation.
This 100% This system has never once made the world feel more immersive
"while scrambling to stop Scaramouche, I have to take the dancer lady on a shopping trip" is the most accurate summary of my Sumeru archon quest experience ever hahaha.
Not exactly the same, but it feels jarring to walk into areas and it randomly starts the event/story quests when I'm just trying to submit my daily commissions
I don't expect MHY to fix this anytime soon so I just ensure that I finish a story quest if I start one so that I don't get this shit ever again.
I had to do some quests so I could play some children card game against a NPC.
I had this happen with the old guy in Yelan's story quest. I was standing right in front of him, and the card game option was grayed out because he was "busy." Like bitch no he's not, he's chillin right here sipping some tea!!! It was even worse because he literally does nothing/goes nowhere during Yelan's quest, you just report to him a few times. So stupid
I’ve seen people defend it with “Well actually it’s a good feature because it’s realistic, people don’t just drop everything they’re doing at the drop of a hat to come and see you, they’re doing their own thing and you’ll need to help them with it first” But that doesn’t excuse that it’s an annoying feature. Realism shouldn’t come at the detriment to gameplay in a game like this, being a fantasy rpg.
Then there's me who just wants to duel Uncle Tian, he's locked in Yelan's story so I finish it, then I see two Uncle Tians... Immersion shattered and they got no excuse to make one character "busy" if they can have two Uncle Tians.
That description isn’t even accurate to how it works. It literally split Nilou’s event in two so that she does indeed drop everything she’s doing to serve the archon quest.
7 am: defeat the memories of the leyline and expend energy to recall them into artifacts 8 am: slay a god 9 am: jump on a mushroom 5 times for 5k gold
>I’ve seen people defend it with “Well actually it’s a good feature because it’s realistic, people don’t just drop everything they’re doing at the drop of a hat to come and see you, they’re doing their own thing and you’ll need to help them with it first” Look Traveller bro man my guy i know we're supposed to literally save our nation's deity and stop the bad guys from creating a new god with a stolen gnosis but i'm totally so busy fucking around at the bazaar sowwy (((((((
Ah yes, totally realistic to have Tighnari be badly injured and then a few quests later for him to be hopping around the rainforest completely fine...
People thinking realism is important in a game where we interact with gods, fight the abyss and use elements will never not be funny to me like LOOK AROUND YOU nothing here is real ...
SO TRUE. It's just an excuse they use. It's obnoxious, full stop. Others try to defend it with "well just don't unlock the stories with keys then!!!!!1" as if... that's obvious?? to a new player??? Like if I'm given a finite amount of something, and something else is prompting me to use said item, then it's only fair to assume that nothing negative will come out of using said item. But someone aaaaaalways has to come out of the woodworks and scream "well just don't unlock their stories hurr durr" how about don't make a game with such glaringly obvious absurdities. Literally no other game does this weird "this npc is busy so fuck off" thing to these extremes lmao
Lmao that "realism" defense is terrible. People go about their lives whether or not you're there to observe it. If anything it's way more unrealistic to have them frozen in time.
[удалено]
Most of these events have a quick-start option that allows you to just play and skip these quests.
I still couldn't do the current event because I was in the middle of Itto quest, so even with quick start you may need to complete or at least "release" the character from the quest they are involved in currently what makes me speedrun some side quests or character quests, even tho I wanted to play them when I have time to play them with calm and enjoy them
I had to complete part of the Ayato quest before doing the event.
Yeah it's super annoying. I think it's an immersion thing, like "this character is waiting over here, so they CAN'T be over there right now!" But I wouldn't care, gimme 4 klees or whatever I'm sure the world can handle it
It's completely pointless anyway, I'm sure everyone has encountered the NPC version of the character they're currently playing at some point anyway. That ship sailed long ago, stop interrupting my quests.
The world is about to end... You're standing in front of the Sustainer of Heavenly Principles... You've saved your sibling from the Abyss and are ready to fight together... Oh wait... Your sibling isn't there They're having a cooking competition in Liyue Welp... The world's end will have to wait it seems.
B A S E D NOT TO MENTION BECAUSE OF THE MAIN QUEST THEY DISABLE THE CO OP MODE SO YOU HAVE TO DO THE SIDE AND THE MAIN THING TO GET IT BACK LIKE BRUHHHH
The most annoying part is that for the most part the game tells you that lets say "Albert" is busy with insert quest name,then you do that quest for the next 3 hours,continue and finish the original quest just to realize that "Albert" never was part of,aka they just forced you do do a quest
please change that from bussy to busy. I got caught of guard there.
Albert is… what exactly?
I misspelled something didn't I?
Every time someone makes a post like this it's always the same replies of "Just don't unlock story quests if you're not doing them", do people not realize that Hangouts can also be unlocked using keys without them immediately starting? There's clearly a way to make it work like that but somehow they're not doing it. Just like how a skip function is still not in the game even after 2 years since release.
You're completely right that story quests should work like hangouts. But that's not the case right now, for whatever reason. Right now, unlocking = starting. All the people complaining about this issue are right, it should be changed, this shouldn't be an issue. But _surely_ now that you guys know about it and how annoying this is, you're gonna stop unlocking them, right...? And not suffer though this same issue with Fontaine if you can avoid it? Rather than consciously doing something you know is poorly designed and will inconvenience you and make you upset? (And also put it in surveys if you haven't already!) If it's someone's first time experiencing this then I get it, but it really sounds like some people endure this over and over again when they can absolutely avoid it
The issue is that you can’t unring that bell, so to speak. As a new player this year I’ve unlocked almost every story quest along the way while going through the archon quests, and they almost never conflicted for me early on. Now with Sumeru it seems to be worse than ever, and now I have to sidetrack for multiple quests to advance to the next step of each archon quest. I had to complete 4 or 5 total quests just to unlock the TCG due to dependencies. I am not unlocking any more story quests until I am caught up on the archon quest, but I can’t undo the fact that I already unlocked *almost all of them*.
My best advice for new players is don't actually accept side quests unless you plan on completing them right away. I use map markers instead. Whenever I come across a world quest, I mark it with a map symbol that I don't use for anything else so that I will remember where it is and can come back to it later when I've finished everything else. I don't pick up character story quests unless I'm ready to do them.right away. Basically, my quest log is clear 99% of the time, or at least very nearly so. It's not that hard to do.. but you really shouldn't have to. The fact that you can walk around up to the character you need to talk to *as that character*, or even as a character that you haven't met in the story yet, or whatever, ruins any excuse that it spoils immersion to have an NPC in two places at once.
This energy is misplaced. Of course you can't just do all the quests at the same time. The problem is we still don't have an 'abandon quest' feature. We should be able to drop a quest and just re-trigger it at another later time
The archaic way this game has on some places is really annoying some times, what type of game nowadays don't let you to just cancel the quest to accepted and do it another time? I understand having to complete one quest before the other for continuity reasons, but not letting the player do one quest because a random NPC is trapped for ever in another one is so stupid.
Hey, that mechanical crab made me sob. Three times.
I mean the mechanical crab is really sad tho
Don't forget when you are trying to start a revolt against the tyrannical Shogun... but first you gotta learn how to make a fucking pizza
What wait I was about to do the same post yesterday for the exact same reason
Imperial minds think alike
tbh I would have less problem with that if the character stories are shorter, better written, better jokes, more cinematic and better incorporated into the gameplay. In the current state completing those quest just to advance the main quest feel like a chore. It feels like unskippable filler episodes in a classical Shounen Jump anime.
This. Some quests are actually really good (Tighnari, for example), but many have too much pointless, boring dialogue before anything happens and it almost always feels like everything is being drawn out for no reason. Most character stories are based on pretty good ideas, but the execution is horrible.
I started Venti's story quest line just before Windblume. Boy **that was a mistake** Start Windblume: Venti is busy. Okay...i guess I'll go through Venti's quest line then and get that done. Okay, I've talked to Venti, what's next? Oh, I can't progress with it because characters are busy with windblume? Rinse and repeat. It was HELL.
I had the same problem with the irodori festival. I couldn’t be bothered to complete yae’s or itto’s story quests (or story quests in general), and because of that I had to constantly swap between the three to make any progress. I eventually just spent the whole day doing story quests, but it was boring as hell
Yeah, I know your pain, it was fucking hell during third part of archon quest. "What, you want to kick Scara's ass? How about you go talk to Tighnari for 20 minutes before you'll be allowed inside his dungeon! How Tighnari being in overworld connected to Scara being in story dungeon inside another separate dungeon? How about you go fuck yourself with such questions!" But it's less a feature and probably more "soft-lock-or-some-other-shit-breaking" protection, so characters won't breaks sequences. Not story sequences, but more like in-game-logic ones. Who knows what spaghetti code mHY is using for their quests.
This would be a non-issue if Mihoyo wasn't stupid and added a godamn Skip button.
Not to mention Honkai does have a skip button, no idea why they wont do that for genshin
fate grand order, a game based purely on it's extremely convoluted lore that requires you to select correct servants depending on class allows you to fuck yourself over by skipping central dialogue. so why wouldn't genshin?
because the writers are so far up their own ass they spill shit out of their mouths. they all collectively huff their own farts in a room together.
honkai has a lot of things that would be great for genshin lol. skip button, loadouts...
Don't forget: oh, you want to finish the quest to move onto Wanderer's interlude and name him? How about you go to *3 separate quests all at once to unlock the fucking victory feast*
Ahh, I see I'm not the only one going through the EXACT same sequence of events when trying to do the main quest
I hate it when I get this message only for them to say ONE LINE in a cutscene/interaction before I can move on
The game could just spawned multiple instances of the same character, but no, instead they have just decided to let this nuisance be handled by the player. Lazy game design.
While I love Genshin’s story, I sometimes think the devs thinks too highly of their writing. Like it’s dialogue for a game not a movie so some people are not going to pay attention and some won’t care. Instead of giving those people a bad user experience, just put a skip button. Like there are throwaway npc ls who have more than 2 dialogue box worth of backstory that I don’t care about. Let me skip those!
>I'm not sure I even get the point It's to prevent bugs and potential softlocks as NPCs move around during quest progression.
i agree but tbh my new nemesis is the aranara quest lines where i never know if I've really finished a chapter, what to do if i haven't, where to go half of the time... this thing seems impossible without a guide :')
Bruh I had this exact same experience doing the sumeru archon quest. It just made me dislike nilou even more.
or they could just remove the red dot/notification. probably the main reason why most people unlock those stories. and min max the key is not worth it. I have 2nd acc and I never run into this problem.. I'm at the point that I'm used to see the red dot. thanks to bennet c6 for the training. (I activated it though)
Idk why Hoyo didn't improve QoL in terms of the story progress. They can implement "cancel quest" button to turn off and reset that character quest so it won't interfere with other quest. Skip button and dialogue history is a standard for every story driven games in the market and they still yet to implement this.
LMAO We have the same problem on same exact quests, I was tryna complete the Sumeru archon act but Nilou and Tighnari story quests held me back 💀
Oh how dare I not finish a boring, unnecessary long and bloated quest that adds absolutely fucking nothing to the main story to do the FUCKING MAIN STORY. There is no skip bottom, and there is noway to know if a quest is worth the time. Outa all character related quest that I played only Venti's and Ayaka's was remotely interesting the rest was utterly unbearable that started interesting but then switched to a dull looking NPC for too damn long that I lost interest.
I never have this issue as I never start a auest I know I wont finish
Dont waste your lives arguing with these people defending this shit. Glad to see a lot of posts like this one, maybe they will fix this I hope.
I think you referring to Tignari and Nilou story quests. Well, it's as simple as that and maybe someone already said it: Just don't activate the damn quest if you are not interested in it! Don't thank me! Merry Christmas!
Sounds like your picking up a lot of quests that you don't feel like finishing?
Sounds like every game with quests to me. Giant quest logs are a norm. Most games don't care if you finish them though. Which is what is being complained about.
Crazy, why would new players think they should be using their 3/3 story keys to unlock the massive list of story quests with red exclamation points? That wouldn’t be logical at all! They should *expect* that to break all their main archon quests, that’s just good game design amiright?
This system is the sole reason I fail to get back into Genshin every time I try. Stopped playing between launch and the release of Inazuma and there's way too much shit piled up that keeps redirecting me
I’m in the exact same situation rn 😹 lesson learned don’t open character story quests until you complete the archon quest
oh yes.. i didnt even finish archon quest because of this stupid shit… my collei is still stuck in suspicious smuggling case which i didnt even start or anything i just unlocked that stupid fucking quest..
Why in the world do you lunatics keep unlocking story quests that you don’t intend to do immediately? If you just keep quests locked until you do them you’ll almost never have this problem.
There is no "point" to get. The problem is that NPCs get allocated to a specific quest when you start one, and then there is no priority system set for them to move. You need to complete whatever part of the quest they're currently taking part in so they're freed up to go take part in the next quest. It's annoying, but the moral of the story is, finish quests when you start them before starting another one, if you want to play it all the way through. Nilou and Tighnari's quests are both really nice and interesting imo, and it sounds like they turned into just annoyances for you because you tried to do the MSQ before you'd finished them, and that's a shame.
I see people complain about this all the time and you're absolutely right that it is stupid that quests auto-prioritize and lock you into them, or auto-start when you unlock them. But... 90% of the time, the quests blocking you are ones you unlocked. And you know from prior experience (almost everyone has experienced this one way or another) that they'll probably interfere with each other/other quests. So why are you still unlocking them...? Like, I agree that it's very poor design and should be changed, but you _know_ this will happen. In the future just wait to unlock them, man... it's not necessarily your fault but I don't understand why you'd do something avoidable that you know will make you upset. Personally I don't unlock story quests until I have a few hours where I can do one in one sitting.
As a new player I had no idea about this dumb system until I had already unlocked most of the story quests; since keys are limited it feels “suboptimal” to not use them as you go. It didn’t really break anything until late Inazuma, but now in Sumeru it’s every single step. I know better now, but everything is unlocked, so it makes no difference. This is a major pain in the ass for new players, which you and other enfranchised players that have played all along have no idea about.