Since its release in 2020, what has drawn me to Genshin Impact is its story and lore. Beyond the main Archon Quests, it feels like every area has a story to tell. These are often told through in-game notes and documents; anything but an actual quest that you can easily digest and process. Even those that do have quests are long-winded and out of the way. As engaging as the story is, it is hard to follow unless you also follow around five lore YouTube creators.
For players like me, who only play for the lore, understanding the story is nearly impossible without said creators. In the past, this lore was also in limited-time events, which meant that you could miss something by simply not being around. The lore is scattered across these different quests and item descriptions, making it hard to make sense of everything. Even though I’ve done most World Quests myself, I still find that I need someone to tell me where it fits. It’s overwhelming to try to put the pieces together when there are so many of them.
These World Quests are often as long as an Archon quest. They’re often unvoiced and don’t clearly link to your main journey. The biggest offender is the infamous Varanara quest in the Sumeru region. It took me real-life days to complete. By the time it wrapped up, I’d forgotten where we even started. The worst part was that this quest unlocked a key gameplay function, so doing it didn’t feel optional. This isn’t the only quest like this, unfortunately.
Even when the quests have interesting elements, they’re still dense and hard to understand. In Fontaine, the Narzissenkreuz Ordo series of quests was a lot of fun, but that didn’t make them digestible. I remember having to look up summary videos for these quests I’d done because of how complicated they were. And they are necessary—without their context, you miss key reveals in the Archon Quests, all because you didn’t do a World Quest or read an item description.
In recent updates, they’ve tried to fix this. The Luna series of updates brought a lot of lore that had been hidden into the spotlight, meaning that reading these descriptions was no longer necessary. However, by introducing this lore into the main story, it assumes that every player has done every World Quest. This simply isn’t the case, and it implies that World Quests are becoming even less optional.
To help with this, they introduced a bank of key terms which you can refer to during dialogue in case anything you’re unsure of comes up. It means that if you’ve missed a World Quest that had this reveal, the game will explain it for you. They’re clearly trying to make the story more accessible as it comes close to eventually wrapping up. 7.0 was a further step forward, as its World Quests are shorter and clearly linked to one goal which itself is relevant to the main story.
However, it also came with a step back. Though they continue to flag where important World Quests are, they now seem very eager to make sure that you don’t miss any quest. While you’re exploring, the odds that you’ll walk right into a cutscene and start a quest are incredibly and frustratingly high. All kinds of players will be put off enough to continue what they were doing instead of following that quest. I’ve definitely skipped a World Quest just because it interrupted my exploring.
There’s nothing wrong with hiding parts of your lore, or making some side quests longer. The problem in Genshin Impact is that it did this in too many places. It’s fun to have to string things together yourself using those hidden clues, but this becomes overwhelming when there are simply too many strings.
The story of Genshin Impact is engaging, and I’m glad to see that Hoyoverse is trying to tie up the loose ends and streamline it. What they’ve done with the bank of key terms and the World Quests having a clear link to the Archon Quests is a massive step forward. I hope that this forward progress continues, even if it comes with the occasional setback.
