Hoyovers has released version 5.0 update Genshin Influence on Wednesday. While players are excited about the flashy additions to the game, like novel characters and regions to explore, this major update also includes more quality-of-life features. The developers have lowered the requirements for players to play late-game content and added a gadget that will shorten the time it takes to earn certain items. But not everyone is thrilled, and some long-time Genshin Influence Players lament the changes.
Genshin Impact 5.0’s update, dubbed “Flowers Resplendent on the Sun-Scorched Sojourn,” introduced several updates that ease the grind in the game. The developers made the novel Natlan region and its Archon main quests available to all players in the early and mid-game, so now players don’t have to grind through dozens of hours of quests to play a novel story or play in the region. Additionally, the addition of a novel gadget makes building robust characters in the game much less tedious. In the latest version of the game, players can now craft items called artifacts, which are gear items that assign stats to characters, instead of simply replaying the game until they come across an artifact optimized for their character.
Now dedicated players who have worked tough in Genshin Influence mines over the years seem to be a bit salty. In one viral videoa person overlaid text over gameplay of the character Kazuha jumping off a cliff to say “how I feel knowing I can now customize artifacts.” The top comment under the video, liked over 13,300 times, was “these new generations will never understand what I went through to get my Xiao artifacts.”
Another movie, viewed over 1.6 million timesshows a person looking cheerful, with text saying, “Genshin Impact: ‘You can now choose your Artifact substats! No more endless farming!'” After a moment, the tone of the video changes to muted sound and we see a person crouching over a table with the text, “OG Genshin fans who have spent countless hours farming for the ultimate artifact.”
In the comments sections of these videos, some argue that these changes “make Genshin easier to play.” Here’s my take: I don’t think that removing the grind and time invested in the game makes it “easy,” but I can at least understand it. Depending on my luck, it could take me weeks or months to get the right combination of items for a single character. The process can be tedious and seemingly endless, and it often left me wondering why I played the game in the first place.
But even then, I’m still glad the devs are making these changes. If anything, it shows why the devs should have shipped these features sooner. If people hadn’t slaved away all these years — and the team had shipped these changes sooner — the bitter sting of what could have been wouldn’t have been so bad.
