Perhaps my coverage history is a dead giveaway, but I’m still quite smitten with Genshin Impact. Mihoyo’s gacha hit dominates most of my time at work and away from it, continuing my pattern of long stints with games like Fire Emblem Heroes, Epic Seven, Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, etc. I reckon by this point, I’m grossly in tune with the warning signs of what gacha features keep me hooked or send me packing, and when I think of Genshin Impact’s Resin system, I kind of just want to quit.
If you’ve stumbled into the comments of a Mihoyo blog post or checked out the Genshin Subreddit, you’ve probably gotten a whiff of the situation already. Folks hate the state of the Resin system, it’s not even satisfactory for more casual players. I can easily blow through the 160 Resin cap in less than half an hour and wind up with nothing to show for it. Attempting to fix the system by adding 40 to the daily cap is just a small quality of life improvement, and the company’s huge disconnect between its solutions and the actual root of the problem is alarming.
Every single resource is monstrously hard to come by in Genshin Impact’s endgame. Giving me two extra attempts in a domain or one stab at a boss fight hardly scratches the surface of a fix.
And I get it. It’s the endgame. Mihoyo can’t have it both ways though if they intend to keep me playing. I have to be able to either enter more domains for additional shots at artifacts with good RNG, or I need the domains to drop more artifacts per run so I can have a shot at something usable. Right now, I don’t have enough Resin to grind and everything I get is useless. I’m losing the incentive to keep trying.
Mihoyo also added Condensed Resin back in its first big update, but all it did was speed up the process of me blowing through resources for garbage. I could appreciate domain grinding took less time, but there’s nothing else gained from the process. Instead of the usual 20 Resin for one run, I spend 40 Resin for one run with double the rewards. If I can’t log in long enough one afternoon to spend my resources, then sure, that helps, but if I’m with friends on the weekend looking to play for a few hours, I’m out of luck. I have nothing to work with.
But again, these are just all quality of life improvements. None of this actually addresses Genshin Impact’s Resin problem in any meaningful way. When I look at some of my other gacha favorites, I had easy access to currency that acted as stamina systems serving the same purpose as Resin. There were events that gave stamina away, monthly packages with frequent allowances that hardly cost me the price of a coffee, in-game rewards, the list goes on. When I try to think of another gacha game that gated me out of grinding for resources as hard as Genshin does, nothing comes to mind. If I really wanted to, I usually had the ability to farm for a new weapon, piece of armor, whatever it may be until I was satisfied or exhausted from the hunt.
So, what’s the solution? Honestly, I’ll be real, I won’t pretend to understand what it takes to carefully balance something so complicated and assume I have the perfect solution. But what I can tell you is that I’m getting bored, that I know I’m not alone, and that I think Mihoyo can probably do better given their success. Perhaps the solution is as easy as increasing how quickly we accumulate Resin, so the new 160 cap feels a little more worth it. Maybe it’s something more drastic, like slashing the cost of domains, bosses, weeklies, or even all of them.
And I think what really feels the worst here is that, at the end of the day, Mihoyo has seemingly acknowledged this problem since launch, but really doesn’t seem eager to fix it. The small tweaks through cap increases and Condensed Resin just act as a bandaid on a big open wound.
For now, I’m still playing. I figure I will for a while to see where things go. This situation seems familiar though, and I can’t help but think of similar situations like Epic Seven and its auto-repeat system with pets. That saga drug on for months despite community demands for change, so I ultimately just left. Apparently, that’s all fixed now, but I’ll never know how it works since I completely lost interest. My hope is that Genshin Impact won’t suffer the same fate here. I love gliding around Teyvat, but if it starts to become a bigger source of frustration than it is fun, it’ll likely join my discarded pile of toys.