All sabotage aside, why does MHY do this? Imagine you just started Genshin and you're fucking around through Zhongli's grocery list and suddenly SKIP TO NOD KRAI NOW, ruining people's experience. Genshin really wants you to park your ass and sit through the story since they refuse to add a skip button, unlike their two biggest games and rival. So they want to waste your time keep you engaged but at the same time, invite people to skip ahead hours upon hours of lore.
Because they don't really want you skipping but have to compromise somewhere to satiate the people who complain about being stuck in old regions. (It's also a way for them to stop primogem per patch counts from freefalling as they add less and less explorable content).
As clocked by GamesFray, the USPTO issued the patent (No. 12,403,397) on September 2,2025, without any objection. Nintendo filed the patent application in March 2023.
That will be struck down the second a lawsuit involving a developer with money starts. There's plenty of prior art which will invalidate that patent, so Nintendo will use it as a club against smaller devs, but if they challenge Mihoyo or a similarly sized company with plenty of cash they will lose.
Easiest example is SMT which was released in 1992 and it has the summon and battle mechanic, years before Pokemon Red which was released in 1995.
Oh i totally believe this is bait to draw women and expect the waifus to take over very fast. But Hoyo seems to be a believer of "women only play autobattle games" so this will still release husbandos like star rail.
Watch me do it. I need Alhaitham. He's the other reason I started playing Genshin....after Wrio.
And Natlan plotwise so far is pretty boring. I love the world design if anything.
All sabotage aside, why does MHY do this? Imagine you just started Genshin and you're fucking around through Zhongli's grocery list and suddenly SKIP TO NOD KRAI NOW, ruining people's experience. Genshin really wants you to park your ass and sit through the story since they refuse to add a skip button, unlike their two biggest games and rival. So they want to waste your time keep you engaged but at the same time, invite people to skip ahead hours upon hours of lore.
It reminds me of the latest Lantern Rite that had some pretty big fucking spoilers for Natlan.
It's the same reason a bunch of games launch an expansion and give you a chance to skip everything to it. It's hard to sell the new content for new players if you have to put "btw you need to play months to acess this".
If you don't you get shit like this:
(Step 1: Make an account. step 2: Beat the entire MMO)
The devs said on stream (if to be believed) that new blood isn't coming in and i half believe it since many old domains are dead on coop and they keep making whale exclusive content. They marketed Flins pretty hard to bring back
It's a damned if you do damned if you don't because genshin's progression is permanently fucked by it's fomo greed. I can't believe we are 5 years in and Shenhe/Yae materials still require you to unlock inazuma then unlock enkanomiya then do the main quest there and then fight the boss (that isn't even easy).
At least previous archon quests were somewhat self contained but Nodkrai is fucked even more than paralogism as it's involves years of lore. For now it's ok cause you see a bunch of new people but at some point you're going to see Wanderer, Durin and Alice in the same room and a newbie will have zero clue who these fuckers are.
Wanderer's ark is at least inside the game and "early" (sumeru was 3 years ago guys don't let it sink) unlike Durin or Alice who were event exclusive until 5.7, that you can't do early anymore btw.
His problem is being a walking spoiler who is impossible to explain without ruining 2 different archon quests.
That happens to me every day. Also, is it bad I kinda like the new area? However, monsters there take huge chunks of HP out of all party members. What the fuck?
That would explain why a random YouTube video I was watching earlier had a Genshin ad/sponsor. Everytime random YouTubers that don't do gacha content suddenly start promoting the game with the new area, I automatically assume it's because they're looking for new players.
There's always a big marketing push around the x.0 patches to try and draw new players in. I'm kinda surprised they are trying the soft rebrand with the "Song of the Welkin Moon" stuff now. I was expecting it in 8.0/9.0 when they finish off what they were calling the "Teyvat Chapter" and move into Genshin 2 or something.
It's for catch up, hard to tell a new player "oh just spend a couple dozen hours doing archon quests to eventually reach the latest region where everyone else is having fun", and honestly nod-krai for now isn't too hard to understand even if you're not super catched up, the main issue would be not knowing who Columbina is and the fatui (you would still have a decent idea as you need to finish Liyue for the catch up mechanic), which isn't much in the case of Columbina since she was barely mentioned before outside of some dialogs of Childe and Wanderer, outside of that they simply wont be as hyped as old players as they don't have the build up for characters like Varka, Alice and just getting closer to snezhnaya, overall it's better to have the mechanic there for those who want to use it.
For example I did use it to get those nice primogems for doing the main quest and exploration of the Sacred Mountain a few versions back as I created a new account and rejoined the game while that event was still running (I did keep a bit up with the lore since I left though).
It's for catch up, hard to tell a new player "oh just spend a couple dozen hours doing archon quests to eventually reach the latest region where everyone else is having fun", and honestly nod-krai for now isn't too hard to understand even if you're not super catched up, the main issue would be not knowing who Columbina is and the fatui (you would still have a decent idea as you need to finish Liyue for the catch up mechanic), which isn't much in the case of Columbina since she was barely mentioned before outside of some dialogs of Childe and Wanderer, outside of that they simply wont be as hyped as old players as they don't have the build up for characters like Varka, Alice and just getting closer to snezhnaya, overall it's better to have the mechanic there for those who want to use it.
For example I did use it to get those nice primogems for doing the main quest and exploration of the Sacred Mountain a few versions back as I created a new account and rejoined the game while that event was still running (I did keep a bit up with the lore since I left though).
I will 100% admit, I have sort of tuned out of Genshin's lore and story so I blitzed through the Nod Krai archon quest arc 1, so I only have a vague idea of what's happening currently. It's not helped that they seem to have shoved the character quests into the main story so shit gets bloated as hell. I sort of dread doing chapter 2 due to length but Flins softens it. He's a lot more jovial than initially thought, which is nice. He's cool as fuck.
This is not the lesson from HSR, you should take, MHY.
I will say that the presentation has stepped up quite a bit. Not perfect, still a lot of yap, but they put more into animation and facial expressions. Jadoha has grown on me for that reason.
And Nod Krai design-wise is really REALLY pretty, the music is fantastic and I love exploring it, but I don't love the moon cube puzzles or anything that requires aiming. It feels clunky, but I will cut it some slack since we're at 6.0 and something-something patches.
A kiwi mentioned this feels like a "soft rebrand" of Genshin, and I got that same feeling when we came across the Statue of the Sev-I mean Statue of the New Moon. Gave me a weird feeling.
Same with the moment where Traveler tells Lauma that the moon is fake because that was part of Enkanomiya, and another event that I was not privy to. So I suppose I can see where people are coming from when they say Nod-Krai feels like an "exposition filler area."
Thank you, I'll try not to get gray hair too much.
Ah, my lousy luck. At least make the fucker come early. That way, I can get him to C1 for free!
Edit: I will say I am quite excited for Varka and Alice. Varka got a lot to explain to Jean and the other knights as to why he has fucked off for so long.
Oh that's normal, even I tend to mostly skim and just have an overall idea when I do the archon quests, sometimes complementing with like a youtube video or so, sadly genshin like most gacha games suffers from having such absurdly long dialogues, it's fine at times but sometimes you just want to know the principal and what matters the most, indeed I read some other players saying how they seem to be pushing character quests (or the information/development we would expect from those) into the archon quests, I'm somewhat mixed regarding how I feel about it, to some degree I do enjoy it, for example I did read quite a bit of the second part of the main quest thanks to Flins, as I find his character to be really fun and his interactions with Traveler/Paimon are a treat, but honestly I can't say the same about Lauma on the first part, not like I hated her character but honeslty I preffered Neffer and Aino/Ineffa, doesn't help that Lauma symbolizes a bit my problem with many current female characters of MHY whenever it comes to design, but that's more me being autistic I guess.
The presentation indeed has gone up by a lot, as someone who initially left the game back during the introduction of the Desert of Sumeru it has been upgraded by leaps and bounds, the characters look way more alive and active during the dialogues nowadays and that certainly helps a lot to keep it fresh despite the long winded yap fests.
Agreeing completely regarding Nod-krai, I'm completely pleased with it design-wise, I like the three islands a lot and I feel all of them represent their faction/people really well, especially in love with Hiisi Island, it looks really "moon-like" so it fits perfectly with the Frostmoon Scyons and Columbina, oh I'm loving the info dumping too, I love world building and this current patch certainly delivered on that (for me at least), I did like the puzzles but the aiming is definitely kind of finicky to say the least, they have to fix it a bit.
I'm super excited for the mondstadt characters too, mostly Varka for me, everyone has nothing but praise for him so I really need to see if he lives up to the hype, he even was like "P.S I'm totally tougher than Capitano", maybe he was just putting a tough front but from what we know so far, he does sound like the kind of crazy guy who would actually fight someone like Capitano,
hell, the last we read in the archon quests up to date is Varka just straight up showing in front of Rerir, like "what's up, it's me Varka", this guy is outrageous and I love that.
Anyways, I'm honestly really happy with the current state of the game and the latest patch, now I just hope they maintain the quality, which shouldn't be too hard with how good we have it currently lorewise, lots of things they can do on Nod-krai even just with the current characters on the island, oh I do pray that Columbina turns out to be a main DPS, my account still needs a second team (for abyss and IT) and I would love for Columbina to fill the role of main DPS there, though who knows, we still have no idea about her kit, and probably won't know till the start of 6.2
Finished the 5.7 & 5.8 Archon quests now that most of the voices have been patched in, and I quote enjoyed them, the spaceship thing was a bit odd, but considering all the game has said before about their arrival was "they fell from the sky" I'll grant them some slight leeway in the retcon, Everything else does line up however.
Omfg Alhaitham is not even included in the free con event either! What is this selective bullshit? I mean I'm still gonna pull for him but how shite it is that the two characters I got from chronicled wish that I really wanted, Kaz and Alhaitham, are not part of the free con quest.
Omfg Alhaitham is not even included in the free con event either! What is this selective bullshit? I mean I'm still gonna pull for him but how shite it is that the two characters I got from chronicled wish that I really wanted, Kaz and Alhaitham, are not part of the free con quest.
I still can't get over the whole spaceship thing that was revealed in Nod-Krai. Traveler and everyone just seems pretty chill with it. And I'm wondering how the fuck this ties into the very first opening scene with gold eyed white hair dragon-I mean waifu. I always understood that we came to Tevyat when we were encased in a black fuck you cube and woke up on a beach with fragmented memories.
The spaceship has according to Columbina been there for a while and sibling left but we didn't.
I'm possibly missing some crucial information here, part of it being by my own doing by half assing interest in the plot and more beyond a surface level and part of it being due to lore being fucking hidden behind events that are no longer available (fake sky) so where does the fucking Apollo 13 fit in?
Hell maybe I'm just super wrong because I don't recall if the game mentions Apollo 11 is actually on Tevyat. I just assumed it was since the background for that scene looked like it would be on Hisii island.
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