The game Genshin Impact is an action roleplaying game set in the open world of Tevyat with anime stylization . It was released in 2020 by Mihoyo, a game company based in Shanghai, China. While it is a widely successful game for many reasons coming from the game itself, the community is what keeps everything lively. There is a prevalence of the community that is incredibly toxic, but as I’ve already highlighted some of its toxicity in my Research Seminar, I’ve decided to go more in-depth about the positive people in this community. As Genshin is a live service game, the beginning of the 42-day patch is usually exciting and filled with new content. However, normally after a week or so, the excitement dies down and things get very bland with basically nothing to do for older players who have completed both the permanent and limited content and events. The only thing the players can do daily is four daily quests and use up their resin that has accumulated over the past 21 hours to collect drops from bosses or domains to build their characters. The co-op feature in the game is quite bland in general as well since the unique co-op content is usually only available during limited-time events. This is where the online community steps in. The Genshin community consists of many groups of people that all contribute to making the game much more interesting during the bland days. There are artists, writers, lore analysts, theory crafters, coders, streamers, YouTubers of all sorts, cosplayers, and people who manage databases filled with information about the game. These are only to name a few as there are all sorts of other members involved in this community.
The creative type of community involvement is more generally known, but what do critical thinkers do? These types of people include theory crafters, coders, and the people who maintain the databases. Many people spend their own time and money to create helpful websites for the player base to utilize, often including tools that the developers still haven’t implemented into the game yet. Most popularly, Genshin Optimizer is a tool made that allows players to scan and input their items (artifacts and weapons) and automatically generates the best builds for your character according to the restrictions the user has added. Paimon.moe is another popular tool that allows you to scan in-game data to provide users with their current pity count (how many more pulls until you can get a five-star) There are also plenty of websites that compile information like the Genshin Impact Wiki for general information, Project Amber for character specific data, and various other sites like ShinShin.moe that allow users to plug in their game ID and generate infographics of their character builds. One of Genshin’s biggest theory crafting groups is called KeqingMains which began very shortly after the game was released (October 2020) What originally was a regular (“CharacterMains”) subreddit formed into something bigger when fans of the character Keqing found their beloved purple-haired girl was lacking in terms of DPS compared to other 5 star characters. They started doing the math to figure out how to improve her and started making guides for both her and her best supports and they now they have over 50 detailed guides on the game’s many characters.
The content creators are what keep the community active during the dry patches. There are plenty of people that provide exciting and unconventional content that brings new ideas to the player base. For example, speedrunners that use level 1/90 weapons and artifacts on their characters or make support or weaker characters into a strong DPS to clear the time and skill-based challenge in the game called spiral abyss. Sometimes some challenge themselves to not use teleportation points and walk far distances with their characters as an example of the strange things people do. Outside of the game people have created little communities and often host events as well. I’ve seen collaborated projects, contests, and overall lively discussions between community members on platforms like Discord, Twitter, Reddit and Instagram. When there are so many fan artists and writers that breathe life into characters outside of the game, no character is left unappreciated. In fact, some characters that rarely show up in the in-game story are loved solely because of the headcanons from the creative community. The culmination of new and strange ideas is what keeps players motivated to keep playing and perhaps try new things they’ve never done before due to boredom as the regular content gets repetitive fast.
All in all, the positive side of community improves the overall enjoyment of the game as they all contribute to turning everyday monotony into something unconventional and special. The creative and critical thinkers are the defining members that create content outside of the game for the player base in places the game lacks in providing. Older players really depend on tight-knit sub-communities of interest online to have a reason to keep playing and enjoy the game. Without it, there’s no doubt that the game wouldn’t be able to maintain the large number of people that play daily
( sources.✷ )
Genshin Impact. Mihoyo, 2020
Genshin Optimizer, @frzyc (Twitter), https://frzyc.github.io/genshin-optimizer/#/.
Accessed March 08, 2023.
Paimon.moe, @MadeBaruna (Twitter), https://paimon.moe/. Accessed March 08, 2023.
Genshin Impact Wiki, March 2020, https://genshin-impact.fandom.com/wiki/Genshin_Impact_Wiki. Accessed March 08, 2023.
Project Amber, @anonsbelle (Twitter), https://ambr.top/en. Accessed March 08, 2023.
ShinShin.moe, @Algoinde (Twitter), https://shinshin.moe/. Accessed March 08, 2023.
KeqingMains, https://keqingmains.com/. Accessed March 08, 2023
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