Luxia Le

HoYoVerse’s Genshin Impact has reached the fifth nation on Teyvat, Natlan, and continues to receive updates with new characters and re-run banners. However, is the game still worth playing in 2024? Let’s look at the most recent updates to the game and see if it’s worth picking up.

Genre

Genshin Impact is primarily an action RPG. However, the game has gacha elements that cannot be ignored.

Payment Model

Genshin Impact is free-to-play and funded by microtransactions done in the game client. Transactions can be done using the PC client, console client, or mobile clients. Different clients have different rules and fees applied.

Consumer Friendliness

The biggest problem with Genshin Impact is that HoYoVerse is notoriously stingy with free rewards. The game naturally is funded by engagement. However, those who do not have droves of time to invest in farming and doing events. Pulling for characters can get quite expensive and there is no set schedule for characters banners to run. So, there’s no way to determine how long you have until the character you want to get comes out.

The game’s “hard pity” is at 90 pulls and the first 90 have a 50% chance to give you the banner character. If the character you pull on the banner isn’t the banner rate-up 5-star, then the next 5-star you receive is guaranteed to be the banner character. The Constellation system rewards you for pulling duplicate characters by passively powering up characters that you pull duplicates of. Some Constellation rewards can be received through other means. However, many are unique to the Constellation feature. To get a character with maxed out Constellation rewards, you’ll need to pull the character 7 times.

Consumer issues compound further when it comes to weapons. Not only do 5-star characters need to be pulled from the gacha, but their signature weapons need to be pulled too. Weapons can be refined five times, meaning you’d need 7 copies of the character and 6 copies of their weapon to get a fully-powered-up version of the character.

However, it’s also worth noting that every character is playable. Obviously some characters are better than others and different characters excel at different content. Still, you can get by with almost any character if you invest in them. So, you don’t have to play to the meta if you don’t want to. You can use the characters you like.

Events

Events in Genshin Impact have gotten progressively better with time. They used to be kind of middling, especially compared to other, more generous games. However, as of update 5.0, players are getting 20 free Intertwined Fates over the next month or so, a free standard-banner five-star character of their choice, and can complete events for a large amount of Primogems.

Is the Story Any Good?

The story of Genshin Impact is engaging. It’s not the best written story out there, but it’s fun to read and with a little suspension of disbelief, the game’s story is quite enjoyable. It’s engaging, has tons of content, the characters are likable, and it’s interesting. The story falls under the Imaginary Tree universe, like Honkai: Star Rail, and Honkai: 3rd Impact. However, it’s important to note that while these stories take place in the same overarching universe, they are not connected in any way.

Are the Events Worth It?

As we mentioned above, events in Gensin Impact have gotten better. The rewards are more generous, allowing players to get more returns on their time investments. Overall, at this time, events in the game seem to be more than worth their time investment, even if the situation was a bit rocky at the game’s release.

Is It Worth Playing?

Genshin Impact remains to be a game worth picking up if you like action RPGs. The best way to play it is to view the gacha as tertiary to the main game. All the characters are playable. So, unless there’s a specific character you want, you shouldn’t feel like you have to pull for every single character just to “keep up.” Story and progression content will still be doable with non-optimal, non-C6 characters.