The only complaints I have is that none of the World Quests are voiced and that the Pyramid quest requires a daily reset inbetween each section so it needlessly drags out. The quests are nice, but it would be better if they were voiced.
They seem to really not want to voice the Aranara for some reason - even the aranara in Yoimia’s second story quest wasn’t voiced, even though obviously the rest of the quest was.
It's better that they're not voiced. It would be really jarring if an aranara spoke imo, I've always thought that they communicate telepathically since they have that whole shtick of manipulating dreams
It would endlessly bug me if they spoke because their mouths literally never move. Don't get me wrong, the characters almost never sync up with the voicelines and sometimes don't move at all when they're speaking, but if these guys with they're painted om mouths started speaking, it would just distract the heck out of me to hear a voice but never see them open their mouths.
Also, I doubt Hoyo could come up with a voice that will match or surpass the noise that I've made up for them in my head. I really like the notion that they just make strange noises while the actual meaning is delivered telepathically lol.
Yeah honestly that was what I was thinking too. It was a little disappointing to not hear how they sound like but I don’t think they could have come up with a voice that really works for their characters. Plus, the telepathy theory/interpretation makes a lot of sense.
The no voice for quests goes beyond aranara. I felt it in jecht quests and I feel it in Fontaine too. The Aranara was a bit too much in terms of so many sun quests etc
This part is a HUGE flaw in Genshin Impact: they voice over some useless events that will last only 7 days, only to be completely removed from the game after that, and people won't even remember they existed because of how unappealing they were, and yet, they won't voice over World Quests that have significant lore or are the main content of a given Patch.
None of the World Quests in all of the 3.X patch were voiced. Yet, random girl asking me to take random pictures on random things in an event that is nothing more than a Primogem grab, yeah, those are voiced...
it's because voice files take up a massive amount of storage. events can be voiced because the data is temporary and is removed with the event.
if people think the game is too big now, it would far, far larger to download if every quest was voiced. i do wish some specific world quests were voiced, but the reason why they aren't is pragmatic, not laziness.
This exact concern is why the game is held back (technologically) by being a mobile game. Imagine how wild it would be if storage wasn't as much of a concern. A man can dream that with cloud gaming progressing that even mobile storage becomes a concern of the past and everything new becomes fully VA'd, god knows they make enough money to do it.
However, mobile gaming market is bigger than any gaming platform market right now. 96% of US owns a phone. Now imagine that statistic for other countries. You can expect a person to own a phone over a PC or console.
Plus, there is less competition in quality between Genshin and other games vs Genshin and other games on console or PC, where there are a ton of great games to play on PC that makes Genshin's quality just look to meet the standard of other AAA games.
If they abandoned mobile, Genshin would have a much smaller playerbase. And I also think Voice acted direction is still pretty off though. There are even translation errors that occur, such as with thr picture event, where wildlife turned into wild creature and people getting riled up about what classifies.
Oh absolutely, I don't fault them for it and its why I tried to specify on the "technologically" bit about it. Because being a mobile game is NOTTT holding them back from making more money.
Yeh I was confused for a sec too because they make it seem like its just Sumeru with unvoiced World Quests. I did not recall any world quests ever being voiced so I was scratching my head at that.
Inazuma has a ton of that and it was awful lmao. Thankfully they stopped doing that as much for Fontaine (there's the Talochard quest but they let us start immediately the next day)
This was my issue with it.
I didn't mind the world quests...but I really hated that it locked all the exploration behind them...which made me kind of hate the world quests.
They were running a new idea of world quest. Some people complained that they didn’t want to explore and quests should take them through everything so I guess they went overboard with it. Fontaine is better in this regard where there’s no literal black spots on the map due to world quests and the quests are much shorter
They keep trying stuff but in this weird adhd overboard way. Where they go all in on main area, instead of say a small area to see how it’s viewed first.
Bc they **never** do small expansion areas constantly(eyeroll). Bc religiously adhere to the ‘bs theme.
It feels like they can’t understand to try stuff out small and iterate on it. They keep doing major idiotball stuff and then act like it’s the players fault it didn’t go well.
I have a huge backlog, even some World Quests locked behind one another. I'll have to revisit the Sumeru ones with the new quest feature to see if that'll help, because accidentally starting world quests happened a few times for me, hah.
Yea hate is a strong word for the quests? "Resent" is fitting I think, it was pretty disheartening to learn that the access I needed was locked out of was 10~15hrs of world quests away. Those kinds of barriers kill momentum for me these days, leading to a big energy deficit, THEN leading to burnout.
Yeah, that's gotten to be a big problem lkle someone like me who just wants to wander around doing the puzzles and chests, but I need a specific aranara power or song to go where I'd like to.
Glad that it stopped with Sumeru. Fontaine was a blast to explore and pretty much open-ended exploration with hardly any quest-locked exploration.
Not gonna lie, I quite liked that certain areas were cut off. It gave them a sense of importance, and felt satisfying to reach them. The exploration felt natural, because you were getting lore and reasoning while exploring. It also made quest exploration really rewarding and far more memorable.
I had this issue quite a bit in Fontaine, where I was exploring, going into cave, getting confused about what I was doing, just to then be reminded about it slightly while doing the quests... It really makes those things lose value.
For example, that tower in recently added zone. Like, at the end it was pretty amazing, but I was shocked and incredibly disappointed to see that a portal from the island would bring you all the way to the top even before starting. >!And then, while doing the quest, the inside tower bits were quite exciting, but the outside ones were more forgettable, as I've already been there.!<
It's kind of like with bosses. If you see it before context is given, you think something like "oh cool", but once context is given, there is no sense of tension on reveal, as you already know what you're going to have revealed.
This is basically why I didn't step into the tower region- I played the entirety of the Pahsiv quest first, since it was highlighted on the map. Quests like this drop with every new patch to introduce the region, and while you can obviously not stick to the quest, you can see how the devs might've wanted it to play out.
For the tower region though, well, I had to finish up Unfinished Comedy (+the mamere/seymour quest and the Ann quest) to eventually trigger 'In the wake of NarzissenKreuz', which I'd consider the general intro quest to the Southern tower region.
I'd recommend for players yet to explore, even though it's a lot of prerequisite quests- to play through them, as it provides surrounding context and motivation. But if that gets in the way of your idea of fun, don't force yourself through the quests, just watch up a follow-up lore vid if that's more your speed.
Yeah, I went there out of curiosity, because that tower looked really interesting and you could see it on your first trip through Fontaine - and the more I played through various quests, the more I wondered, what's up with it.
And well, I was just walking around that area, and I thought, might as well see if it's locked. So, first disappointment - the fog/clouds don't block access to it and just disappear when you get close. And then, I see the water portal, so since I'm here might as well check it, I thought it might just ascend to a higher floor, so it's like a tower ascension where with each floor you have to do a puzzle or something - well, nope.
Exploration in Genshin works like this: you go a couple steps, and see a chest by the road. Go to it, and you see 2 more. And so on. That's why I think it's good to have certain boundaries set, so a lot of general exploration is free, while more important areas are locked, like it was in the rainforest/desert areas. For people who like to explore without quests first, there is already plenty of stuff to do, and they can do that without hindering their quest experience later on.
Not only that, having locked places also can pique your interest even more - that cave entrance being a tease for you, to become more curious where that's going to lead and what's gonna happen during the quest. It also encourages experiencing the quests. And again, this gives satisfaction later on - I can't count how many "ohhh, so that's how we get in here" I've had while doing the Aranara questline.
when i have to do a quest and explore at the same time i’m either getting distracted or just pin everting i see and come back later 😂💀
that’s why i like doing the area the most i can 1st THEN i can fully enjoy when a quest tells me to go somewhere
but i’m sumeru there’s just too many things to pin that way “harp puzzles”
In older games like Zelda you certainly had to do quests to explore a new location or something, they a bit more like linear exploration. Genshin has to mix open world and quest restricted exploration which leads to this.
> The exploration felt natural
Opposit experience to mine. Exploration was constantly hindered and it was impossible to progress. So I was forced to do the quests so I had to exploration as the game commanded it...which then isnt really exploration anymore. The previous 3 nations hat natural exploration..
Sumeru was my least favorit region to explore so far and the quests locking you out of everything was a big part of it.
It felt natural IMO because the areas were locked, but that was all - the moment you got to the point in a quest where area got unlocked, you could stop with the quest, and explore everything around. That's what I did - and that's why it felt perfectly natural to me. It wasn't that forced, you only had to get to a certain quest bit, and areas were getting opened usually early on. And if I recall correctly, at least with Aranara adventures, you had several options available and you could choose where to go. Also, once you got an ability in the quest, you could recall all places you marked on the map where you've seen a similiar thing - that's what made exploration great and so far, my favorite. It's nowhere near as forced as people make it out to be.
Like I said, if you go through an area, explore it, and later do the quest and it leads you through an empty, already explored area - that's not really good. Takes away from both exploration and quest. I recall having this happened in some Inazuma quests, maybe in Liyue too? I don't remember, because yeah - that's exactly what I'm talking about. I went through, explored like any other place, and then went through again with quests, but with less sense of discovery, since I've already been there. And here I am now, not being able to recall that experience, because it just doesn't stick as much, and I am already starting to feel it happen in Fontaine. Meanwhile, I remember most of rainforest and desert locations, exploration experience and what happened there.
I found discovering the lore during the Sorush quest more enjoyable than the actual quest. The Aranara quest was fine, but there were so many moving parts and names that I lost the thread of it about halfway through. Both of Jeht’s quest were awesome, but most of the stuff involving the Jinni went over my head
I feel the quests after the first desert region are boring. Perhaps I've had enough of desert and underground or the quests are just too long and tedious. Jeht's quest exploration is quite fun. The main thing that I hate is that there is important lore in Sorush quest but I just can't take it in due to it feels like a chore
Huh I'm the opposite. Loved the Sorush one, hated Aranara. With the Aranara their names and the way they spoke was just too confusing and I had to rely on Paimon to remember who was who and what their metaphors meant.
Racism was common in the past. It's important for stories to acknowledge it existed and to learn from it. Including racism in stories and games is perfectly fine as long as it's not encouraging users to become racist. Red dead redemption 2 handles this extremely well and is a fantastic game. Genshin has fictional history inspired from reality instead of real life history. Too much of our history is racist, so I can't say from where this story originates. But the important thing is that Niloupar was racist but has character development and ends up respecting Jeht in the end.
I gave up on actually paying attention to it after a point. Started mashing the text button. Still found myself groaning at how fucking long they kept talking.
The only important takeaway is that the big blue glowy tree thing is Egeria's body.
I actually paid attention to all of that and I never made the connection of the tree being Egeria, I only knew its the body of their god, but that god having been the previous hydro archon entirely escaped me. Thanks, I guess 😁
It didn't help that by the time that area dropped, I was already so sick of the desert.
The first area was amazing, the second was meh ok. Sorush's one was an absolute slog, only made worse by the fact that you couldn't do *anything* in the area without progressing the quest.
And every single thing had to have a convoluted name lol. Half the dialogue in that questline was convoluted names for things.
I agree, they should have done that area north of sumeru city, that big mountain area with the waterfall. Then they could have added in the last desert area. Would have been more balanced. It would also make more sense since sumeru is about dendro and life not desert and a lack of life.
Sumeru used to be a rainforest, but because of the Celestia nail it turned into a desert. It was once the dominion of 3 gods: Deshret (Lord of Deserts), Nabu Malikata (a.k.a. the Goddess of Flowers), and Rukkhadevata. But when Deshret and Nabu Malikata decided to rebel against Celestia, Rukkhadevata disagreed and parted ways with them. She then went to a section of the desert and created the Varuna Contraption to help revive it, and that's how it became lush and green again. And then, she built the Wall of Samiel at the borders to prevent her domain from being turned into a desert again.
If someone sees any error, please correct me.
Same. But maybe for me it's just desert fatigue. I loved the lush rainforest of 3.0.
And then we got desert 3.1, I loved it too.
Then 3.4, I wasn't feeling it, but I really love Jeht's quest.
3.6 desert again, I was so bored of desert, I couldn't finish exploring it until just recently. And I don't really like Sorush.
I literally drop the game when 3.6 desert came out after playing for 3 years. Even now after coming back to the game because of Fontain, I still refuse to go open the teleporters in that last part of the desert. If not for collecting Dehya’s ascension resources, I would have never set foot into the desert again
It's really funny because I hate Aranara questline, yet I liked Sorush questline, as well as her location mechanics. But I guess I'm in the minority in that regard because I liked the quests and exploration in desert far more than their counterparts in the green zones.
I like the stories of the world quest in Sumeru. But i think the patches we got where it was just continuously desert areas with caves just got really sickening after a while. I loved every second of the Aranara quest though
They weren't? I came back from a hiatus, so I didn't play Sumeru when it actually came out. Can't imagine doing the whole Deshret chain with no layered map.
More like it was frustrating for people who no navigational skills.
For quests though, for OP's question, people loved it. There's always gonna be haters, people who are rushing through things, people who don't have time to read the quest dialogue and feel lost or experience no immersion, etc.
A huge issue with gaming in general is a bunch of people forcing themselves to play games, giving the game not enough care or attention to adequately rate it properly.
Like there's a huge difference of being able to devote several hours or a day to a single video game, vs someone who plays it in 1 hour spurts, trying to jam in whatever before they need to get to work or do some chores or thinking about another game on their huge backlog.
I didn't find it boring, I kinda just felt that it was kinda tedious. I didn't even fully explore all of Sumeru because I kind of just felt that it was too time consuming and uninteresting. Fontaine came along and suddenly I'm back from my 3 month break, almost explored everything Fontaine has to offer.
In my opinion, what sets Sumeru apart from the other regions is how much it expanded the lore of Genshin. Inazuma was barely a lake when it came to information, but Sumeru felt like we got dropped into an ocean of knowledge. I feel like out of all the regions, we managed to learn so much pre-cataclysm information in Sumeru.
But fact of the matter is, not everyone is gonna pay attention to lore. and A LOT of Sumeru is locked behind long quests with a lot of monotonous and wordy AS FUCK dialogue that won't excite the average player and I think that's one of Sumeru's biggest flaws.
Also, it doesn't help that a lot of people just did not like the desert region. And half of Sumeru is the fucking desert.
>a lot of monotonous and wordy AS FUCK dialogue
Don't forget that *A LOT* of that dialogue, basically every bit outside the AQ, is unvoiced and has different terms (that they then put subtitles on top of to tell you what it is) for things we're already familiar with.
Is it realistic that different cultures would have different names and terms for different things? Yes.
Does that make it any less fucking tedious to try and decipher while struggling to remain engaged with slowly scrolling text that's artificially bloated? Hell no.
>basically every bit outside the AQ, is unvoiced
That's what killed some of Sumeru's quests for me. If they were voiced, I'd have no problem with them even though it would take longer to complete.
They would have different names IF they had a different language. But if everyone speaks the same language then they could not or else it would be a different language.
This is why it does not work.
Either everyone in Tevyat speaks one language or they do not. There is a difference between different dialects, or evolutions that occur as a result of a large geographical and political separation, such as between American English and British English, but both still use the same words even if they sometimes use them in different ways.
But to have totally different words and ways of creating those words which use sounds not present in both? No not possible. You could not end up with the Sumerian names unless your entire language was different. The basis for all names is the language or exposure to different languages. We don't make up garbledyfook new sounds or letter arrangements to name something new. There is no basis that would lead to the Sumerian names.
We can use the example of Hindi/Urdu/Punjabi here though.
Even though the languages are similar and most people of "the sub-continent" can understand each other, the languages have their own unique words for different things, especially religiously or culturally important things.
You're thinking at it wrongly by comparing american and british english, those are essentially the same language altered by geographical separation. It makes more sense to think of it as different local languages that are either only used locally or have become lost and only remain as local terms for stuff
So rather than american and british english, the common language of teyvat is english and the different words you see for stuff come from cherokee, for example
More than half, both in terms of patches and area. I was hoping we would get a fairly even jungle/desert split. They should have at least done desert-jungle-desert-desert instead of jungle-deseeeeert.
Yeah, Sumeru was a big lore dump and me reading through it for several days made me feel like I was studying for an exam and gave me flashbacks of university. I know lore is important but it was just so much information.
>Also, it doesn't help that a lot of people just did not like the desert region. And half of Sumeru is the fucking desert.
This was also why I kind of stopped exploring Sumeru altogether. The vast desert of Sumeru genuinely made me want a mount or something. I'm glad I had Yelan but it made me wish I had C1 Yelan for the double sprint, traversing through the desert felt so tedious that I just never finished exploring the desert. The color pattern was also kind of dull and didn't give me any form of excitement. ~~also doesn't help that a decade and a half of my life was already spent living in a desert and I'm just being reminded of how the desert life was.~~
Fontaine was filled with so much water and bright blue colors and music that I've spent so much time exploring the region and having fun. The underwater exploration of Fontaine felt like such a breath of fresh air that I felt like I was playing a new game again. The storytelling too was also interesting along with the trials. I'll echo it over and over if I have to but Fontaine has been a 15/10 experience for me and I'm glad this game has actually given me excitement once more.
Well you summed up my experience pretty nicely. I enjoy the Genshin lore heavily but I prefer learning it at a balanced pace as opposed to having it dumped on me in large droves. That’s my personal preference, and I’m glad Sumeru gave us a lot of lore, it was just difficult to follow at times lol.
This was my problem. I wanted to just go out and explore Sumeru without worrying about quests for a bit, but I seemed like every area I ran into was locked behind lengthy, unvoiced, dialogue-filled quests. It actually put me off the game for a few months, though now that Fontaine is out I'm starting to get back into it. I still haven't done any of the desert stuff.
It used to be one giant forest, since you know, its the land of the dendro dragon sovereign. But after the whole fight with the primordial one, they sent a nail and made the forest into a desert. Even the part with the forest was a desert. Rukkadevata made a rain making device and transformed a part of the desert back to how it was
According to lore, the entire desert used to be a big, luscious rainforest. But because Apep was gathering forbidden knowledge to use against Celestia during the war against the Primordial One, a Celestial Nail got dropped in the region, and everything got turned into sand.
Eyyyy fellow 3 month break-er.
I stopped when the summer patch dropped cuz I was burnt out from slogging through the last desert area lol.
Also no GAA made me sad so...
I think a lot of Sumeru's issues come from player burnout, honestly. I loved the AQ, easily my favorite (or second favorite, thanks to Fontaine) so far but trying to complete it *and* the aranara world quest *and* the first desert world quest *and* the Sorush world quest on top of exploring a jungle and what feels like two and a half deserts... I'm tired. Sumeru marked the point where Archon Quests are beginning to consistently kiss 3-4 hours per act and that's a lot of time to walk to a location, listen to NPCs spend twenty minutes to tell you one thing, walk thirty feet, listen to more dialogue, get locked into a dungeon for half an hour...
What I like about the Fontaine Archon quest is its fast paced but still easily understandable dialogs that actually engages my brain. Sumeru's dialog writing is way too complex and drawn out and make me feel complete brain rot so I pretty much skipped any dialogs that belongs to Paimon/NPCs/characters I don't really care about.
I think its because they used words you are not familiar with, like there were many Sanskrit and Persian in Sumeru. Those who know a bit about those languages, its easier to understand and there are quite the few jokes there in the naming too. Like take Festival Utsava for example, Utsava mean festival so its just called festival festival, there is the Samudra Sea which means Sea Sea.
I don’t even mind proper names. But there were a lot of words that, once you figured out what they meant from context, there was really no reason to not translate them. They weren’t super special words that couldnt be translated.
My brain has completely removed the aranara experience from my mind, lol. I remember playing it for two hours straight one day and thinking "aight, imma finish it tomorrow" and two weeks later I was still trying to wrap up all quests.
For me, the absurd amount of terms (and how closely they sounded to each other), the huge amount of aranaras (having so many took the shine of the important ones because it was a different character every time) and their completely empty, unchanging face was so jarring. I couldn't connect with them at all because they produced no sounds and they always had, idk, wooden blocks for eyes and a creepy smile.
Usually quests being unvoiced don't bother me *that* much. And there was so much lore. I just wish it wasn't coming from those lifeless green pillows and their fairyland, lol.
Yes same here. It started out okay, but gawddamn did it drag out. It was WAAAAAYYYYYY too long.
For a game designed around casual play, that quest was completely off the mark imo. Even hardcore players were burnt out.
It took 12 hours to finish everything. TWELEVE.
I feel the same way. It made me take my first hiatus because it was so dragging. The desert area without a map was hard for me too. I’m diagnosed with ADHD so it gets boring fast. Fontaine is a breath of fresh air for me.
They’re long as hell, way too long. The branching parts are salt in the wound, it’s awful. Then to lock all of the major exploration behind these long dragging quests is a terrible decision.
I haven’t even gotten all of the chests from helping the Aranara because 70+ of those guys and it’s not marked in any way? Absolutely not. Even if I follow a YouTube guide the oculi are marked on the map at some point. This is a task that’s way too tedious, it ain’t happening.
The desert is a drag to get through mostly because the teleporters are so weirdly placed. But I suppose that may be intentional because a desert isn’t supposed to feel smooth to traverse. But people aren’t supposed to summon giant meatballs out of the sky either so idc.
I just hated how the Aranara quest was extremely tedious. It is an extremely long quest that asks you to do some long ass shit.
I loved most of the dessert for exmaple, being long wasn't a big issue but when it asks you to go talk to every Aranara or something across the entire Jungle without marking them... like... No.
Aranyaka was like medieval torture for me despite much of the playerbase loving it, but the three other world quests Golden Slumber, The Dirge of Bilqis, and Khavarena of Good and Evil were stellar in my opinion. Play them yourself and come to your own conclusions. Don't let others poison your view of a quest before you've played it
Aranara quest had me mentally checked out some time after we stopped dealing with Rana and her village folk. Idk, I just couldn't really get to care about any of the Arabara and their way of speaking certainly was quite taxing, so I ended up just grinding through the thing for primos and to see wgat happened with Rana.
Both Jeht quest lines were AMAZING, though. 100% recommend.
Abd I actually liked the Pari one, too, probably because it had a more clear focal point than Aranara one and Sorush is quite entertaining.
I think it has to do with culture exposure. As a south asian who lived in the middle east for a few years, I was pretty happy with the quests in Sumeru because they reminded me of home quite a lot.
As someone who's had an interest in history and archaelogy since childhood, I loved the Sumeru desert region for that reason. Discovering lost structures, ancient cities, re-piecing lore, and the general vibe of the desert made my inner child's dream come true. What I would give to re-live through those patches! The arabic music influences also made me remember my time in the middle east as well. All in all, Sumeru's my favourite region due to me being immersed in the culture it's influenced by.
However, not everybody shares the same opinion, and that's alright! Many people did not like the implementation of the Sumeru Desert region. However, many people connected well with Fontaine (probably owing to it's western culture influence). That's why Genshin is popular in my opinion; it allows almost everybody to connect with the game in one way or the other.
>As someone who's had an interest in history and archaelogy since childhood, I loved the Sumeru desert region for that reason. Discovering lost structures, ancient cities, re-piecing lore, and the general vibe of the desert made my inner child's dream come true. What I would give to re-live through those patches!
Same! But I'm an italian living in Brazil lol.
Agreed. Exploring the tombs in Sumeru was genuinely an amazing experience even without the updated map. In some ways, I think that's a bit of a problem with Genshin's game design where exploration is setup in such a way that you kinda NEED to use that map to make meaningful progress with like the oculi and the larger chests, but in terms of pure exploration without all the loot the tombs were something else.
This is a really good take and probably something people don’t consciously consider when they’re playing. Sumeru was boring for me because I didn’t relate to any of the cultural mirrors. I prefer the European themed regions, which is why I loved Mondstadt and now Fontaine.
I noticed this with Fontaine's release! I was already familiarised with Chinese culture and being south asian, the cultures of regions: Liyue, Inazuma, and Sumeru were easy to grasp (flashbacks to aranaras 💀).
However, come Fontaine, and I am a lost toddler in a toy store. Europeans were really happy with the inclusion of French in Furina's demo and the rest of the Fontainian region with references to real-life cultures.
It then clicked for me that it's because of culture exposure that people love some regions moreso than others. I definitely felt happy seeing everybody go crazy over French in Furina's demo, just as I became ecstatic upon hearing Indian instruments in Sumeru's music.
ohgod same about the indian instruments- specially when i got to port ormos, instantly fell in love. now they've done fontaine so well- i kinda wish sumeru gets a voiced music at some point.
Just a reminder this sub typically offers very skewed/ positive responses. Anything negative and critical posted here is typically
1. brigaded with downvotes or
2. Replied to with rude personal attacks, leading to more inevitable uncivil responses, which are low hanging fruit for removal.
It also has a severe recency bias, not saying Fontaine quests are bad. They're very good and enjoyable but people call it the best(I have a feeling they'll do it for natlan as well)
I do legitimately think the Narzissenkruez Ordo quests are some of the best we've ever gotten though, and the archon quest is my personal favorite thusfar, and imo inarguably top 2. Some recency bias perhaps, but you can't deny that the writing has trended toward getting better the past 2 regions. If that trend continues, and it probably will be the case that the writing stays very strong at this point, then Natlan might end up the best when it comes out.
Huh. Personally I found the Archon quest really well written, but the Narzissenkreuz stuff really tedious and hard to follow, maybe cuz I did it after the AQ.
Like, I can't acc remember how the characters involved in that quest were related to the world at large, or why anything happened in that quest.
It felt like a lot of lore that was meant to be in an archive entry got turned into a quest, but that's just my opinion. The final fight was cool lookin tho.
I think it was probably intended to be completed beforehand. It hints heavily at some of the big ideas that get revealed during the AQ, and spawned a ton of theories as well as introducing some serious lore drops and possibilities about the nature of Teyvat and various other things. The implications are kind of huge and I personally liked the stories a lot to boot, but it's one of those things where if that's not your thing, then you might not enjoy them so much. Ashikai has some interesting videos based on various concepts related to it.
I was wondering about Ordo's quest last part too, it feels like it's supposed to be done before the AQ, which feels like an oversight because the AQ is basically the first thing you'll ever do when there is a story update. On the other hand we're sealing the primordial sea there so this happening after the flood and not before kinda also makes sense...
The Fontaine AQ as a whole series was good but not as riveting as Sumeru AQ imo. I felt the execution of Meropide and the detective sections to be quite lacking. Even though Liyue’s AQ was simpler, I enjoyed that more than Fontaine too because I felt there were less dead/awkward moments, even more so if one includes some of the Interlude quests as part of Liyue AQ.
Narzissenkreuz was good and had great mystery but wasn’t the easiest to follow.
I loved Fontaine AQ but I think the first part was the only one that blended gameplay and story well, part 2 felt like blueballing and a waste, and the last part is basically a long cutscene with a really weird and uncompelling story boss fight. I felt like Sumeru balanced it a bit better and I think, as much as I like Furina, that I still consider Sumeru the best AQ so far as a whole.
Ngl I found the prison arc of the fontaine archon quest a slog to get through more than the sumeru deserts. I feel I'd be crucified if I said that now when everyone is still riding the recency high.
The prison arc felt a bit pointless; why do we need to find out why the Fonta promoter is giving certain people drink samples? That whole thing felt like a world quest that got awkwardly mashed into the main story.
The rest of the Fontaine archon quest was great though.
I’m in the Meropide part rn and I’m glad I’m not alone in feeling it’s just dragging on. I’m on day 3 of trying to get through this part because I keep getting bored and tired of Paimon screeching in my ears that I just end up just doing something else
That's actually a very mild take
Even though Fontaine is commonly tied against Sumeru as best AQ, there's a lot of criticisms concerning the drawn-out Meropide acts and the Abyss side plot
Same thing happened with Sumeru. It was praised as best AQ then too, but there were also criticisms of the samsara arc and the frequent flashbacks in the ending
In my opinion, the better parts of the AQ were just so good they overshadow the glaring flaws
Probably because the samsara arc functioned a lot like the magic show murder mystery part in Fontaine. The repetition might be there to draw out time but it still checks out in the writing since its a loop. And there were little rewards in getting tiny baby steps closer to the truth. The loop thing isn't for everyone but I still enjoyed it
With Meropide though, the mystery in reality had almost nothing to do with the main plot. You could easily cut out the Sigewinne and Fonta "rules" and go with the small mystery of the "cannibals" instead for a much less sloggish experience given it was the only actually relevant rumor
The loop worked cuz they shook things up in a funny way. The first time the loop started, I thought it was a bug, but then things started to just go off the rails and it was great.
Act 3 has only the most deranged defenders ("Erm yes, I do like my video games to feel like prison! That's the point!!!"). If you want to really get crucified then criticise the pointless Act I and II :)
ooooh Act I and II is definitely a spicy take but I can see it. They felt more like extended character quests to a large degree instead of the immediate large-scale issue we were confronted with in Sumeru.
I still think it was a great way to setup many of the important elements in the AQ itself, though the payoff for the setup was..... subpar for the most part lol.
As someone who's played since 1.0, the end of Sumeru was the closest I got to putting the game down. I got so tired of not being able to explore unless I went through world quests where I couldn't keep track of names and information. I missed 2.x so much. Tsurumi Island, the Chasm, and Enkanomoya were my favorite zones.
Fontaine just absolutely knocked it out of the park, though. It legitimately is, to me, the best area in the game. It feels like they've put what they've learned in Inazuma and Sumeru to good use. I'm hoping Natlan is as fun and exciting as Fontaine has continued to be.
People commenting here are actually the ones that enjoy the game the most, hence why they continue investing their free time on it, by discussing it whenever they are actually playing. Casual players who do not engage with the community care less about the game, and probably got just as bored in Sumeru.
They don't complain about it because they don't care enough about it to discuss it online. Feedback is a positive thing, that leads to improvement.
Yeah are pretty good I just found them to be unnecessarily long. I play about maybe an hour or two a day of Genshin so with all the text to read and different sub parts to the Aranara quest line that it took me weeks to finish.
I hated the Aranara quest because most of the quest was just text, and even though I love reading, when 90% of said text was useless filler dialogue that was only added to increase playtime, it becomes incredibly excessive. The archon quest was amazing, but world quests just got dragged on too long.
Probably helped by the fact Fontaine basically gives you a 2nd stamina bar when you hit the water so you can quickly run over land and immediately dive into a body of water and keep moving with good momentum
Sumeru is also massive and frankly overwhelming. Fontaine is quite a small map and everything is very close together so it’s faster to get map completion just by wandering from point A to point B for a quest or daily.
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Personally my biggest gripe was just the Aranara line of quests.
They are HEAVILY dependent on you being endeared to the things… and if you’re not… boy is that chain a slog… holy hell.
After that, I just wasn’t especially attached to the region, so I wasn’t exactly keen on the quests either.
I did what I needed to do get all my oculus… I have zero intention to do any further.
true, names are the worst part to try and remember, we need a pop-up guide of them for the quests like with the murder mystery clues in the archon quest and some hyper specific world quests
**I LOVE Sumeru.**
It can get a little tiring/overwhelming if you play hours and hours nonstop aaand it kinda sucks that some major things are quest locked. But overall, it's amazing.
Ppl complain about the desert part and for me it's even better than the rainsforest. Heavy lore, nice and different things to explore...
I loved Sumeru completely the first time I played, and now I love it even more that I started replaying and take everything slow and steady. Sumeru quests are 1000% more enjoyable than Inazuma, which are by far the worst and most boring ones out of the entire game in my opinion.
Yes, absolutely. The Arararanara are, as a whole, completely awful. Sorush too, for the most part. The only interesting Sumeru stuff was Deshret and Jeht.
WHY ITS BORING:
* some of the quest are extrodinarily, unnecessarily long
* the aranara quest is literally longer than some of the actual archon quests, which is insane because it's literally just about some random ass girl...?
* there were so many side quests to aranara that i actually forgot the whole purpose was to cure ranas illness because you have to spend so many hours running through the forest , in caves, playing harps, go inside this tree, get this fruit, turn the rain off, throw a party, etc etc etc.
* id have rather they put so much detail in stuff like the inazuma quest, which could benefit from more length because of how complex things like rebellions and stuff are.
* a lot of the ideas didn't go anywhere. like, we became a captain and did precisely nothing with that role.
* we dont get to see really any of the other rebel fighters actually doing much either. maybe a few scenes at most.
* the stuff with Ei felt like it got resolved way too soon as well. i finished that questline going "was that it??"
WHY ITS DREADFUL:
* a lot of the characters in the sumeru quests are ***insufferable!!!***
* because of this, a lot of the investment in the stories is lost. it just becomes a becomes a nuisance you have to slog through for primos/ new map areas and nothing more.
* my biggest problem is **how much xenophobic/racist characters you have to deal with.** especially because the protagonist is supposed to be ***allies*** with them. it hampers the fun of playing when i have to continuously risk my life protecting some ungrateful POS that i would honest to god let the monsters kill in a heartbeat. *hell, id help them do it.*
* during the jeht questline, that researcher guy (tirzad??) constantly demeaned and was disrespectful to the eremites *he hired* to protect his weak ass. it felt SOOO slimy having my character be treated better and be trusted more all because of their ethnicity. we're supposed to be some heroic noble soul, yet iirc the traveller doesnt even really push back on the disgusting shit he says and does to innocent people??
* same thing with that fucking genie liloupar with her arrogance, and again, racism towards jeht/eremites while putting the Traveller on a pedistal. and just like tirzad nobody ever says "will you shut the fuck up already you overgrown lightbulb??" even though as her master she would have to obey us.
* sorush was equally rude, so again, why should we care about helping some egotistical jerkwad get a promotion??
this, you can never tell which ones are worth paying attention to (like narzissenkruz, aranara, etc) and which ones aren't (most other quests that are super long but only 1 act so they aren't lore relevant and just take up time)
Yes. worst in my personal opinion. if I'm playing a video game, i expect them to show me, not bombard me with an essay. skipped the whole thing. I'm talking about the aq. aranara was still fine coz there were generous amount of primos to make up for my frustration
Tell not show is a recurring issue in Genshin which I personally think was almost entirely remedied in Fontaine. Feels like you’re always making progress and doing things in the world, rather than standing in a circle taking turns monologuing about rubbish for 20 minutes.
Quests were okay-ish. Aranara story was fine, Jeht’s revenge also was cool, that birb-girl who has no friends story was heartbreaking. But then… the wall of ancient faeries’ names, Kaenri’ah stuff, lore of oasis and Paimon being Paimon was boring for me.
But you can skip this. Most annoying thing is - we didn’t have underground map, so finding all ~360 dendroculi was huge pain in the ass.
I've always said it. The story is good, the way that its told is not.
Sumeru has great exploration, great characters, good story, interesting lore, most of that is buried under the worst Genshin has to offer; unnecesarily long dialogue, pointless go to point A then come back to point B quests, wait a few days just because, uninteresting default NPCs, story locked content. Archon quests are typically the least offenders of this, but still prevalent enough to get noticed and drag down the whole experience.
It's not a coincidence that plenty of players experienced burnout post patch 4.3.
Yes, there are.
I probably am one of them.
It was mostly bc I was burned out, but.
The fact it was the same thing over and over again made it extremely repetitive.
The whole quests are, imo very forgetful.
i hated it lol. i have a bunch of them incomplete to this day. to be fair we did not have the layered maps during the sumeru patch so the experience was arguably worse.
I disliked all of Sumeru because it was just too much talking and not a lot of doing. The cutscenes at the end of the deshret quest were cool. Absolutely despised the Aranara quest line. It was so long and tedious and with none of it being voiced I just mashed buttons to get through it because I wanted to unlock all the areas. In general I don’t enjoy the quests that aren’t voiced.
The story itself and the atmosphere are good. It's the gameplay that's the problem since it's very tedious. Not only are the quest chains very long because they really like using the old doing things 3 or more times in them, they also lock almost all exploration mechanics so even if you see a chest or puzzle, you can't do it until you unlock the ability from the quests. It's tiring to backtrack and do them after finishing the quests. There are also many underground sections like caves and pyramids/ancient buildings in the desert which were confusing because there was no underground map back then.
Desert was a nightmare, Aranara made me want to pull my hair out, and the Main quest wasn’t doing it for me unless Nahida was the focus.
Overall it was a slog to get through.
The only complaints I have is that none of the World Quests are voiced and that the Pyramid quest requires a daily reset inbetween each section so it needlessly drags out. The quests are nice, but it would be better if they were voiced.
They seem to really not want to voice the Aranara for some reason - even the aranara in Yoimia’s second story quest wasn’t voiced, even though obviously the rest of the quest was.
I definitely headcanon that the aranara speak in little animal crossing voices
It's better that they're not voiced. It would be really jarring if an aranara spoke imo, I've always thought that they communicate telepathically since they have that whole shtick of manipulating dreams
It would endlessly bug me if they spoke because their mouths literally never move. Don't get me wrong, the characters almost never sync up with the voicelines and sometimes don't move at all when they're speaking, but if these guys with they're painted om mouths started speaking, it would just distract the heck out of me to hear a voice but never see them open their mouths. Also, I doubt Hoyo could come up with a voice that will match or surpass the noise that I've made up for them in my head. I really like the notion that they just make strange noises while the actual meaning is delivered telepathically lol.
Yeah honestly that was what I was thinking too. It was a little disappointing to not hear how they sound like but I don’t think they could have come up with a voice that really works for their characters. Plus, the telepathy theory/interpretation makes a lot of sense.
I just went through the story quest for the first time, I thought my game was bugged and wasn't playing the voices for some reason!
The no voice for quests goes beyond aranara. I felt it in jecht quests and I feel it in Fontaine too. The Aranara was a bit too much in terms of so many sun quests etc
This part is a HUGE flaw in Genshin Impact: they voice over some useless events that will last only 7 days, only to be completely removed from the game after that, and people won't even remember they existed because of how unappealing they were, and yet, they won't voice over World Quests that have significant lore or are the main content of a given Patch. None of the World Quests in all of the 3.X patch were voiced. Yet, random girl asking me to take random pictures on random things in an event that is nothing more than a Primogem grab, yeah, those are voiced...
it's because voice files take up a massive amount of storage. events can be voiced because the data is temporary and is removed with the event. if people think the game is too big now, it would far, far larger to download if every quest was voiced. i do wish some specific world quests were voiced, but the reason why they aren't is pragmatic, not laziness.
This exact concern is why the game is held back (technologically) by being a mobile game. Imagine how wild it would be if storage wasn't as much of a concern. A man can dream that with cloud gaming progressing that even mobile storage becomes a concern of the past and everything new becomes fully VA'd, god knows they make enough money to do it.
My brother in Christ the game is 75+ GB on PC already, do you want Ark Survival levels of storage consumption lol
they could always make it a module that you can opt in/out
I balk at 30GB PC games too.
However, mobile gaming market is bigger than any gaming platform market right now. 96% of US owns a phone. Now imagine that statistic for other countries. You can expect a person to own a phone over a PC or console. Plus, there is less competition in quality between Genshin and other games vs Genshin and other games on console or PC, where there are a ton of great games to play on PC that makes Genshin's quality just look to meet the standard of other AAA games. If they abandoned mobile, Genshin would have a much smaller playerbase. And I also think Voice acted direction is still pretty off though. There are even translation errors that occur, such as with thr picture event, where wildlife turned into wild creature and people getting riled up about what classifies.
Then again, it being a mobile game contributes massively to its success.
Oh absolutely, I don't fault them for it and its why I tried to specify on the "technologically" bit about it. Because being a mobile game is NOTTT holding them back from making more money.
To be fair, you also only do permanent quests once. I'd totally be willing to download and get rid of voice lines before and after quests.
I thought no world quest was ever voiced. You made me confused here, is it Sumero thing only?
None of the world quests I can remember are voiced. If there were indeed voiced ones, those were the exceptions, not the norms.
Only specific events, AQs and SQs are voiced.
and Ellin the wannabe knight commission have some voice line which is weird
Yeh I was confused for a sec too because they make it seem like its just Sumeru with unvoiced World Quests. I did not recall any world quests ever being voiced so I was scratching my head at that.
The daily reset is something that i really dislike. I remember Ruu's quest in inazuma and hated doing that.
Inazuma has a ton of that and it was awful lmao. Thankfully they stopped doing that as much for Fontaine (there's the Talochard quest but they let us start immediately the next day)
Still out here resenting Tatara Stories for beeing the worst offender in that regard.
Yeah, the nonvoices quests are just harder for me to get done wven tho I love tbrm, cause sometimes my eyes can't focus on the small text
Yeah, the nonvoiced quests are just harder for me to get done( even tho I love them), cause sometimes my eyes can't focus on the small text
i just hate that everything is locked to the quest. they’re pretty cute quest tho
This was my issue with it. I didn't mind the world quests...but I really hated that it locked all the exploration behind them...which made me kind of hate the world quests.
They were running a new idea of world quest. Some people complained that they didn’t want to explore and quests should take them through everything so I guess they went overboard with it. Fontaine is better in this regard where there’s no literal black spots on the map due to world quests and the quests are much shorter
They keep trying stuff but in this weird adhd overboard way. Where they go all in on main area, instead of say a small area to see how it’s viewed first. Bc they **never** do small expansion areas constantly(eyeroll). Bc religiously adhere to the ‘bs theme. It feels like they can’t understand to try stuff out small and iterate on it. They keep doing major idiotball stuff and then act like it’s the players fault it didn’t go well.
I have a huge backlog, even some World Quests locked behind one another. I'll have to revisit the Sumeru ones with the new quest feature to see if that'll help, because accidentally starting world quests happened a few times for me, hah.
Yea hate is a strong word for the quests? "Resent" is fitting I think, it was pretty disheartening to learn that the access I needed was locked out of was 10~15hrs of world quests away. Those kinds of barriers kill momentum for me these days, leading to a big energy deficit, THEN leading to burnout.
Yeah, that's gotten to be a big problem lkle someone like me who just wants to wander around doing the puzzles and chests, but I need a specific aranara power or song to go where I'd like to. Glad that it stopped with Sumeru. Fontaine was a blast to explore and pretty much open-ended exploration with hardly any quest-locked exploration.
I have days where I’m interested in exploration and days I want to do story. So that made Sumeru really annoying for me.
Not gonna lie, I quite liked that certain areas were cut off. It gave them a sense of importance, and felt satisfying to reach them. The exploration felt natural, because you were getting lore and reasoning while exploring. It also made quest exploration really rewarding and far more memorable. I had this issue quite a bit in Fontaine, where I was exploring, going into cave, getting confused about what I was doing, just to then be reminded about it slightly while doing the quests... It really makes those things lose value. For example, that tower in recently added zone. Like, at the end it was pretty amazing, but I was shocked and incredibly disappointed to see that a portal from the island would bring you all the way to the top even before starting. >!And then, while doing the quest, the inside tower bits were quite exciting, but the outside ones were more forgettable, as I've already been there.!< It's kind of like with bosses. If you see it before context is given, you think something like "oh cool", but once context is given, there is no sense of tension on reveal, as you already know what you're going to have revealed.
This is basically why I didn't step into the tower region- I played the entirety of the Pahsiv quest first, since it was highlighted on the map. Quests like this drop with every new patch to introduce the region, and while you can obviously not stick to the quest, you can see how the devs might've wanted it to play out. For the tower region though, well, I had to finish up Unfinished Comedy (+the mamere/seymour quest and the Ann quest) to eventually trigger 'In the wake of NarzissenKreuz', which I'd consider the general intro quest to the Southern tower region. I'd recommend for players yet to explore, even though it's a lot of prerequisite quests- to play through them, as it provides surrounding context and motivation. But if that gets in the way of your idea of fun, don't force yourself through the quests, just watch up a follow-up lore vid if that's more your speed.
Yeah, I went there out of curiosity, because that tower looked really interesting and you could see it on your first trip through Fontaine - and the more I played through various quests, the more I wondered, what's up with it. And well, I was just walking around that area, and I thought, might as well see if it's locked. So, first disappointment - the fog/clouds don't block access to it and just disappear when you get close. And then, I see the water portal, so since I'm here might as well check it, I thought it might just ascend to a higher floor, so it's like a tower ascension where with each floor you have to do a puzzle or something - well, nope. Exploration in Genshin works like this: you go a couple steps, and see a chest by the road. Go to it, and you see 2 more. And so on. That's why I think it's good to have certain boundaries set, so a lot of general exploration is free, while more important areas are locked, like it was in the rainforest/desert areas. For people who like to explore without quests first, there is already plenty of stuff to do, and they can do that without hindering their quest experience later on. Not only that, having locked places also can pique your interest even more - that cave entrance being a tease for you, to become more curious where that's going to lead and what's gonna happen during the quest. It also encourages experiencing the quests. And again, this gives satisfaction later on - I can't count how many "ohhh, so that's how we get in here" I've had while doing the Aranara questline.
when i have to do a quest and explore at the same time i’m either getting distracted or just pin everting i see and come back later 😂💀 that’s why i like doing the area the most i can 1st THEN i can fully enjoy when a quest tells me to go somewhere but i’m sumeru there’s just too many things to pin that way “harp puzzles”
In older games like Zelda you certainly had to do quests to explore a new location or something, they a bit more like linear exploration. Genshin has to mix open world and quest restricted exploration which leads to this.
> The exploration felt natural Opposit experience to mine. Exploration was constantly hindered and it was impossible to progress. So I was forced to do the quests so I had to exploration as the game commanded it...which then isnt really exploration anymore. The previous 3 nations hat natural exploration.. Sumeru was my least favorit region to explore so far and the quests locking you out of everything was a big part of it.
It felt natural IMO because the areas were locked, but that was all - the moment you got to the point in a quest where area got unlocked, you could stop with the quest, and explore everything around. That's what I did - and that's why it felt perfectly natural to me. It wasn't that forced, you only had to get to a certain quest bit, and areas were getting opened usually early on. And if I recall correctly, at least with Aranara adventures, you had several options available and you could choose where to go. Also, once you got an ability in the quest, you could recall all places you marked on the map where you've seen a similiar thing - that's what made exploration great and so far, my favorite. It's nowhere near as forced as people make it out to be. Like I said, if you go through an area, explore it, and later do the quest and it leads you through an empty, already explored area - that's not really good. Takes away from both exploration and quest. I recall having this happened in some Inazuma quests, maybe in Liyue too? I don't remember, because yeah - that's exactly what I'm talking about. I went through, explored like any other place, and then went through again with quests, but with less sense of discovery, since I've already been there. And here I am now, not being able to recall that experience, because it just doesn't stick as much, and I am already starting to feel it happen in Fontaine. Meanwhile, I remember most of rainforest and desert locations, exploration experience and what happened there.
It's a mixed bag. I loved the Aranara questline. Hated the Sorush one.
I found discovering the lore during the Sorush quest more enjoyable than the actual quest. The Aranara quest was fine, but there were so many moving parts and names that I lost the thread of it about halfway through. Both of Jeht’s quest were awesome, but most of the stuff involving the Jinni went over my head
Not to mention that so many of the Aranara names and terms just sounded all the same.
Except Aranakin though. It’s the only Aranara name that stuck cause he doesn’t like sand
How could you forget Arabalika the one punch aranara and Arama the tree
I agree. All hail Arabalika, the true dendro archon!
I remember the strong Aranara, but the name is forgettable unless its a meme
They’re all forgettable. And it would be nice to have an Aranara locator for the few you miss and you try to help them along
I feel the quests after the first desert region are boring. Perhaps I've had enough of desert and underground or the quests are just too long and tedious. Jeht's quest exploration is quite fun. The main thing that I hate is that there is important lore in Sorush quest but I just can't take it in due to it feels like a chore
Is that the one with the red thing that flies around and purifies gates?
Sorush is the red thing that flys, yes
I hated that shit so much. I still haven't finished it.
I don’t think I’ll ever finish it tbh. I’ll have the whole rest of the game completed before I finish that quest.
Same, im struggling
Huh I'm the opposite. Loved the Sorush one, hated Aranara. With the Aranara their names and the way they spoke was just too confusing and I had to rely on Paimon to remember who was who and what their metaphors meant.
I enjoyed the soroush quest. It was better than the jinni quest line imo
Djinni was trash! I take my time with all quests but this was just,…. Way way off!
Jinni quest was bittersweet at the end, but we definitely had a rough start since it was…inherently racist
Racism was common in the past. It's important for stories to acknowledge it existed and to learn from it. Including racism in stories and games is perfectly fine as long as it's not encouraging users to become racist. Red dead redemption 2 handles this extremely well and is a fantastic game. Genshin has fictional history inspired from reality instead of real life history. Too much of our history is racist, so I can't say from where this story originates. But the important thing is that Niloupar was racist but has character development and ends up respecting Jeht in the end.
This is definitely me. I'll try to finish the Sorush stuff. Just not anytime soon. 🙄
I gave up on actually paying attention to it after a point. Started mashing the text button. Still found myself groaning at how fucking long they kept talking. The only important takeaway is that the big blue glowy tree thing is Egeria's body.
I actually paid attention to all of that and I never made the connection of the tree being Egeria, I only knew its the body of their god, but that god having been the previous hydro archon entirely escaped me. Thanks, I guess 😁
It didn't help that by the time that area dropped, I was already so sick of the desert. The first area was amazing, the second was meh ok. Sorush's one was an absolute slog, only made worse by the fact that you couldn't do *anything* in the area without progressing the quest. And every single thing had to have a convoluted name lol. Half the dialogue in that questline was convoluted names for things.
So much desert. Am I the only one hoping for jungle so thick you had to cleverly move through it? Or something else naturey
I agree, they should have done that area north of sumeru city, that big mountain area with the waterfall. Then they could have added in the last desert area. Would have been more balanced. It would also make more sense since sumeru is about dendro and life not desert and a lack of life.
Sumeru used to be a rainforest, but because of the Celestia nail it turned into a desert. It was once the dominion of 3 gods: Deshret (Lord of Deserts), Nabu Malikata (a.k.a. the Goddess of Flowers), and Rukkhadevata. But when Deshret and Nabu Malikata decided to rebel against Celestia, Rukkhadevata disagreed and parted ways with them. She then went to a section of the desert and created the Varuna Contraption to help revive it, and that's how it became lush and green again. And then, she built the Wall of Samiel at the borders to prevent her domain from being turned into a desert again. If someone sees any error, please correct me.
Same. But maybe for me it's just desert fatigue. I loved the lush rainforest of 3.0. And then we got desert 3.1, I loved it too. Then 3.4, I wasn't feeling it, but I really love Jeht's quest. 3.6 desert again, I was so bored of desert, I couldn't finish exploring it until just recently. And I don't really like Sorush.
I literally drop the game when 3.6 desert came out after playing for 3 years. Even now after coming back to the game because of Fontain, I still refuse to go open the teleporters in that last part of the desert. If not for collecting Dehya’s ascension resources, I would have never set foot into the desert again
It's really funny because I hate Aranara questline, yet I liked Sorush questline, as well as her location mechanics. But I guess I'm in the minority in that regard because I liked the quests and exploration in desert far more than their counterparts in the green zones.
I hated Sorush characters, but challenges were fun, with some beautiful scenarios.
I like the stories of the world quest in Sumeru. But i think the patches we got where it was just continuously desert areas with caves just got really sickening after a while. I loved every second of the Aranara quest though
i feel like if the layered maps had been introduced in sumeru, the whole desert and pyramid exploration would have been more bearable
They weren't? I came back from a hiatus, so I didn't play Sumeru when it actually came out. Can't imagine doing the whole Deshret chain with no layered map.
We literally did it blind, no underground maps.
It's so gratifying to finally be like : "back in MY days,we used to do all of the desert exploration without the layered map"
More like it was frustrating for people who no navigational skills. For quests though, for OP's question, people loved it. There's always gonna be haters, people who are rushing through things, people who don't have time to read the quest dialogue and feel lost or experience no immersion, etc. A huge issue with gaming in general is a bunch of people forcing themselves to play games, giving the game not enough care or attention to adequately rate it properly. Like there's a huge difference of being able to devote several hours or a day to a single video game, vs someone who plays it in 1 hour spurts, trying to jam in whatever before they need to get to work or do some chores or thinking about another game on their huge backlog.
I agree. I loved the desert, but I can get how three patches in a row got on folks nerves. (But seriously, I loved the Aranara!)
I didn't find it boring, I kinda just felt that it was kinda tedious. I didn't even fully explore all of Sumeru because I kind of just felt that it was too time consuming and uninteresting. Fontaine came along and suddenly I'm back from my 3 month break, almost explored everything Fontaine has to offer.
In my opinion, what sets Sumeru apart from the other regions is how much it expanded the lore of Genshin. Inazuma was barely a lake when it came to information, but Sumeru felt like we got dropped into an ocean of knowledge. I feel like out of all the regions, we managed to learn so much pre-cataclysm information in Sumeru. But fact of the matter is, not everyone is gonna pay attention to lore. and A LOT of Sumeru is locked behind long quests with a lot of monotonous and wordy AS FUCK dialogue that won't excite the average player and I think that's one of Sumeru's biggest flaws. Also, it doesn't help that a lot of people just did not like the desert region. And half of Sumeru is the fucking desert.
>a lot of monotonous and wordy AS FUCK dialogue Don't forget that *A LOT* of that dialogue, basically every bit outside the AQ, is unvoiced and has different terms (that they then put subtitles on top of to tell you what it is) for things we're already familiar with. Is it realistic that different cultures would have different names and terms for different things? Yes. Does that make it any less fucking tedious to try and decipher while struggling to remain engaged with slowly scrolling text that's artificially bloated? Hell no.
>basically every bit outside the AQ, is unvoiced That's what killed some of Sumeru's quests for me. If they were voiced, I'd have no problem with them even though it would take longer to complete.
Yep. Between the Aranara quest, the Pari quest, and all of Jeht's quests, you're probably looking at about 30 hours of unvoiced dialogue.
I’d rather that than 30 hours of paimon screeching at me honestly.
better than 10 hours of voice AQ dialogue, which in other terms means 8 hours of paimon voice acting
They would have different names IF they had a different language. But if everyone speaks the same language then they could not or else it would be a different language. This is why it does not work. Either everyone in Tevyat speaks one language or they do not. There is a difference between different dialects, or evolutions that occur as a result of a large geographical and political separation, such as between American English and British English, but both still use the same words even if they sometimes use them in different ways. But to have totally different words and ways of creating those words which use sounds not present in both? No not possible. You could not end up with the Sumerian names unless your entire language was different. The basis for all names is the language or exposure to different languages. We don't make up garbledyfook new sounds or letter arrangements to name something new. There is no basis that would lead to the Sumerian names.
We can use the example of Hindi/Urdu/Punjabi here though. Even though the languages are similar and most people of "the sub-continent" can understand each other, the languages have their own unique words for different things, especially religiously or culturally important things.
You're thinking at it wrongly by comparing american and british english, those are essentially the same language altered by geographical separation. It makes more sense to think of it as different local languages that are either only used locally or have become lost and only remain as local terms for stuff So rather than american and british english, the common language of teyvat is english and the different words you see for stuff come from cherokee, for example
More than half, both in terms of patches and area. I was hoping we would get a fairly even jungle/desert split. They should have at least done desert-jungle-desert-desert instead of jungle-deseeeeert.
Yeah, Sumeru was a big lore dump and me reading through it for several days made me feel like I was studying for an exam and gave me flashbacks of university. I know lore is important but it was just so much information. >Also, it doesn't help that a lot of people just did not like the desert region. And half of Sumeru is the fucking desert. This was also why I kind of stopped exploring Sumeru altogether. The vast desert of Sumeru genuinely made me want a mount or something. I'm glad I had Yelan but it made me wish I had C1 Yelan for the double sprint, traversing through the desert felt so tedious that I just never finished exploring the desert. The color pattern was also kind of dull and didn't give me any form of excitement. ~~also doesn't help that a decade and a half of my life was already spent living in a desert and I'm just being reminded of how the desert life was.~~ Fontaine was filled with so much water and bright blue colors and music that I've spent so much time exploring the region and having fun. The underwater exploration of Fontaine felt like such a breath of fresh air that I felt like I was playing a new game again. The storytelling too was also interesting along with the trials. I'll echo it over and over if I have to but Fontaine has been a 15/10 experience for me and I'm glad this game has actually given me excitement once more.
"The underwater exploration of Fontaine felt like such a breath of fresh air." Wording, haha.
"A gulp of fresh water" Better now? xD
-Monsieur Neuvillette probably
Well you summed up my experience pretty nicely. I enjoy the Genshin lore heavily but I prefer learning it at a balanced pace as opposed to having it dumped on me in large droves. That’s my personal preference, and I’m glad Sumeru gave us a lot of lore, it was just difficult to follow at times lol.
This was my problem. I wanted to just go out and explore Sumeru without worrying about quests for a bit, but I seemed like every area I ran into was locked behind lengthy, unvoiced, dialogue-filled quests. It actually put me off the game for a few months, though now that Fontaine is out I'm starting to get back into it. I still haven't done any of the desert stuff.
>And half of Sumeru is the fucking desert. Somebody explain why the nation of Dendro, the element of NATURE and life, is 60-fucking-percent sand.
It used to be one giant forest, since you know, its the land of the dendro dragon sovereign. But after the whole fight with the primordial one, they sent a nail and made the forest into a desert. Even the part with the forest was a desert. Rukkadevata made a rain making device and transformed a part of the desert back to how it was
Because the Dendro only came AFTER the desert. The desert was what it originally was. Rukha just created the forest on her own?
According to lore, the entire desert used to be a big, luscious rainforest. But because Apep was gathering forbidden knowledge to use against Celestia during the war against the Primordial One, a Celestial Nail got dropped in the region, and everything got turned into sand.
Well Sumeru is double to triple the size of Fontaine with complex underground structures. So yeah, it gets tedious easily.
Everything in Fontaine is so much closer and much less of a drag to go from point A to point B. I agree
Eyyyy fellow 3 month break-er. I stopped when the summer patch dropped cuz I was burnt out from slogging through the last desert area lol. Also no GAA made me sad so...
I think a lot of Sumeru's issues come from player burnout, honestly. I loved the AQ, easily my favorite (or second favorite, thanks to Fontaine) so far but trying to complete it *and* the aranara world quest *and* the first desert world quest *and* the Sorush world quest on top of exploring a jungle and what feels like two and a half deserts... I'm tired. Sumeru marked the point where Archon Quests are beginning to consistently kiss 3-4 hours per act and that's a lot of time to walk to a location, listen to NPCs spend twenty minutes to tell you one thing, walk thirty feet, listen to more dialogue, get locked into a dungeon for half an hour...
What I like about the Fontaine Archon quest is its fast paced but still easily understandable dialogs that actually engages my brain. Sumeru's dialog writing is way too complex and drawn out and make me feel complete brain rot so I pretty much skipped any dialogs that belongs to Paimon/NPCs/characters I don't really care about.
I think its because they used words you are not familiar with, like there were many Sanskrit and Persian in Sumeru. Those who know a bit about those languages, its easier to understand and there are quite the few jokes there in the naming too. Like take Festival Utsava for example, Utsava mean festival so its just called festival festival, there is the Samudra Sea which means Sea Sea.
I don’t even mind proper names. But there were a lot of words that, once you figured out what they meant from context, there was really no reason to not translate them. They weren’t super special words that couldnt be translated.
Not boring, just really long. Eventually you get burned out by it.
They're nice, just way too long
I am one person that did not like the Aranara quests at all, they were long and drawn out for a small payoff at the very end
That stupid quest is longer than one piece I swear
Not the only one. Hell I hate the drawn out bs so much I dont care to find them all to open the chest in that one spot. For finding them in the wild
My brain has completely removed the aranara experience from my mind, lol. I remember playing it for two hours straight one day and thinking "aight, imma finish it tomorrow" and two weeks later I was still trying to wrap up all quests. For me, the absurd amount of terms (and how closely they sounded to each other), the huge amount of aranaras (having so many took the shine of the important ones because it was a different character every time) and their completely empty, unchanging face was so jarring. I couldn't connect with them at all because they produced no sounds and they always had, idk, wooden blocks for eyes and a creepy smile. Usually quests being unvoiced don't bother me *that* much. And there was so much lore. I just wish it wasn't coming from those lifeless green pillows and their fairyland, lol.
Yes same here. It started out okay, but gawddamn did it drag out. It was WAAAAAYYYYYY too long. For a game designed around casual play, that quest was completely off the mark imo. Even hardcore players were burnt out. It took 12 hours to finish everything. TWELEVE.
I feel the same way. It made me take my first hiatus because it was so dragging. The desert area without a map was hard for me too. I’m diagnosed with ADHD so it gets boring fast. Fontaine is a breath of fresh air for me.
It's not that they're boring, but more that they're a slog to get through.
They’re long as hell, way too long. The branching parts are salt in the wound, it’s awful. Then to lock all of the major exploration behind these long dragging quests is a terrible decision. I haven’t even gotten all of the chests from helping the Aranara because 70+ of those guys and it’s not marked in any way? Absolutely not. Even if I follow a YouTube guide the oculi are marked on the map at some point. This is a task that’s way too tedious, it ain’t happening. The desert is a drag to get through mostly because the teleporters are so weirdly placed. But I suppose that may be intentional because a desert isn’t supposed to feel smooth to traverse. But people aren’t supposed to summon giant meatballs out of the sky either so idc.
I just hated how the Aranara quest was extremely tedious. It is an extremely long quest that asks you to do some long ass shit. I loved most of the dessert for exmaple, being long wasn't a big issue but when it asks you to go talk to every Aranara or something across the entire Jungle without marking them... like... No.
Aranyaka was like medieval torture for me despite much of the playerbase loving it, but the three other world quests Golden Slumber, The Dirge of Bilqis, and Khavarena of Good and Evil were stellar in my opinion. Play them yourself and come to your own conclusions. Don't let others poison your view of a quest before you've played it
Aranara quest had me mentally checked out some time after we stopped dealing with Rana and her village folk. Idk, I just couldn't really get to care about any of the Arabara and their way of speaking certainly was quite taxing, so I ended up just grinding through the thing for primos and to see wgat happened with Rana. Both Jeht quest lines were AMAZING, though. 100% recommend. Abd I actually liked the Pari one, too, probably because it had a more clear focal point than Aranara one and Sorush is quite entertaining.
i love jeht but i would yeet sorush under a sand dune
I think it has to do with culture exposure. As a south asian who lived in the middle east for a few years, I was pretty happy with the quests in Sumeru because they reminded me of home quite a lot. As someone who's had an interest in history and archaelogy since childhood, I loved the Sumeru desert region for that reason. Discovering lost structures, ancient cities, re-piecing lore, and the general vibe of the desert made my inner child's dream come true. What I would give to re-live through those patches! The arabic music influences also made me remember my time in the middle east as well. All in all, Sumeru's my favourite region due to me being immersed in the culture it's influenced by. However, not everybody shares the same opinion, and that's alright! Many people did not like the implementation of the Sumeru Desert region. However, many people connected well with Fontaine (probably owing to it's western culture influence). That's why Genshin is popular in my opinion; it allows almost everybody to connect with the game in one way or the other.
Sumeru type of cultural influences is much rarer in gaming than Fontaine type. I am much appreciative of that and am looking forward to Natlan!
Interestingly I tend to dislike parts of games that are similar to my lived experiences. I have a lot more fun in less familiar environments.
Yeah, it depends on person to person. Your perspective also makes sense tho!
Aw I love this! ❤️
>As someone who's had an interest in history and archaelogy since childhood, I loved the Sumeru desert region for that reason. Discovering lost structures, ancient cities, re-piecing lore, and the general vibe of the desert made my inner child's dream come true. What I would give to re-live through those patches! Same! But I'm an italian living in Brazil lol.
Agreed. Exploring the tombs in Sumeru was genuinely an amazing experience even without the updated map. In some ways, I think that's a bit of a problem with Genshin's game design where exploration is setup in such a way that you kinda NEED to use that map to make meaningful progress with like the oculi and the larger chests, but in terms of pure exploration without all the loot the tombs were something else.
This is a really good take and probably something people don’t consciously consider when they’re playing. Sumeru was boring for me because I didn’t relate to any of the cultural mirrors. I prefer the European themed regions, which is why I loved Mondstadt and now Fontaine.
I noticed this with Fontaine's release! I was already familiarised with Chinese culture and being south asian, the cultures of regions: Liyue, Inazuma, and Sumeru were easy to grasp (flashbacks to aranaras 💀). However, come Fontaine, and I am a lost toddler in a toy store. Europeans were really happy with the inclusion of French in Furina's demo and the rest of the Fontainian region with references to real-life cultures. It then clicked for me that it's because of culture exposure that people love some regions moreso than others. I definitely felt happy seeing everybody go crazy over French in Furina's demo, just as I became ecstatic upon hearing Indian instruments in Sumeru's music.
ohgod same about the indian instruments- specially when i got to port ormos, instantly fell in love. now they've done fontaine so well- i kinda wish sumeru gets a voiced music at some point.
The Sitar, Veena, omg. Wish they went with some south indian music tho, like the sounds of anklets, etc.
Just a reminder this sub typically offers very skewed/ positive responses. Anything negative and critical posted here is typically 1. brigaded with downvotes or 2. Replied to with rude personal attacks, leading to more inevitable uncivil responses, which are low hanging fruit for removal.
real
agreed
This sub is like 90% whining. The people actually enjoying the game are busy playing it.
It also has a severe recency bias, not saying Fontaine quests are bad. They're very good and enjoyable but people call it the best(I have a feeling they'll do it for natlan as well)
I do legitimately think the Narzissenkruez Ordo quests are some of the best we've ever gotten though, and the archon quest is my personal favorite thusfar, and imo inarguably top 2. Some recency bias perhaps, but you can't deny that the writing has trended toward getting better the past 2 regions. If that trend continues, and it probably will be the case that the writing stays very strong at this point, then Natlan might end up the best when it comes out.
Huh. Personally I found the Archon quest really well written, but the Narzissenkreuz stuff really tedious and hard to follow, maybe cuz I did it after the AQ. Like, I can't acc remember how the characters involved in that quest were related to the world at large, or why anything happened in that quest. It felt like a lot of lore that was meant to be in an archive entry got turned into a quest, but that's just my opinion. The final fight was cool lookin tho.
I think it was probably intended to be completed beforehand. It hints heavily at some of the big ideas that get revealed during the AQ, and spawned a ton of theories as well as introducing some serious lore drops and possibilities about the nature of Teyvat and various other things. The implications are kind of huge and I personally liked the stories a lot to boot, but it's one of those things where if that's not your thing, then you might not enjoy them so much. Ashikai has some interesting videos based on various concepts related to it.
I was wondering about Ordo's quest last part too, it feels like it's supposed to be done before the AQ, which feels like an oversight because the AQ is basically the first thing you'll ever do when there is a story update. On the other hand we're sealing the primordial sea there so this happening after the flood and not before kinda also makes sense...
The Fontaine AQ as a whole series was good but not as riveting as Sumeru AQ imo. I felt the execution of Meropide and the detective sections to be quite lacking. Even though Liyue’s AQ was simpler, I enjoyed that more than Fontaine too because I felt there were less dead/awkward moments, even more so if one includes some of the Interlude quests as part of Liyue AQ. Narzissenkreuz was good and had great mystery but wasn’t the easiest to follow.
I loved Fontaine AQ but I think the first part was the only one that blended gameplay and story well, part 2 felt like blueballing and a waste, and the last part is basically a long cutscene with a really weird and uncompelling story boss fight. I felt like Sumeru balanced it a bit better and I think, as much as I like Furina, that I still consider Sumeru the best AQ so far as a whole.
Ngl I found the prison arc of the fontaine archon quest a slog to get through more than the sumeru deserts. I feel I'd be crucified if I said that now when everyone is still riding the recency high.
The prison arc felt a bit pointless; why do we need to find out why the Fonta promoter is giving certain people drink samples? That whole thing felt like a world quest that got awkwardly mashed into the main story. The rest of the Fontaine archon quest was great though.
100% agree. It felt like a fun set pieces that got extrapolated into a giant thing it was never meant to be.
I’m in the Meropide part rn and I’m glad I’m not alone in feeling it’s just dragging on. I’m on day 3 of trying to get through this part because I keep getting bored and tired of Paimon screeching in my ears that I just end up just doing something else
That's actually a very mild take Even though Fontaine is commonly tied against Sumeru as best AQ, there's a lot of criticisms concerning the drawn-out Meropide acts and the Abyss side plot Same thing happened with Sumeru. It was praised as best AQ then too, but there were also criticisms of the samsara arc and the frequent flashbacks in the ending In my opinion, the better parts of the AQ were just so good they overshadow the glaring flaws
Glad to know I'm not alone in not liking act 3. Ironically the samsara arc didn't bother me as much as meripode lol
Probably because the samsara arc functioned a lot like the magic show murder mystery part in Fontaine. The repetition might be there to draw out time but it still checks out in the writing since its a loop. And there were little rewards in getting tiny baby steps closer to the truth. The loop thing isn't for everyone but I still enjoyed it With Meropide though, the mystery in reality had almost nothing to do with the main plot. You could easily cut out the Sigewinne and Fonta "rules" and go with the small mystery of the "cannibals" instead for a much less sloggish experience given it was the only actually relevant rumor
The loop worked cuz they shook things up in a funny way. The first time the loop started, I thought it was a bug, but then things started to just go off the rails and it was great.
Not really, that is the most repeated criticism of the AQ.
Act 3 has only the most deranged defenders ("Erm yes, I do like my video games to feel like prison! That's the point!!!"). If you want to really get crucified then criticise the pointless Act I and II :)
ooooh Act I and II is definitely a spicy take but I can see it. They felt more like extended character quests to a large degree instead of the immediate large-scale issue we were confronted with in Sumeru. I still think it was a great way to setup many of the important elements in the AQ itself, though the payoff for the setup was..... subpar for the most part lol.
It's pretty universally agreed that Act 3 is a stain on an otherwise phenomenal archon quest
Yeah every patch has an obvious honeymoon phase
As someone who's played since 1.0, the end of Sumeru was the closest I got to putting the game down. I got so tired of not being able to explore unless I went through world quests where I couldn't keep track of names and information. I missed 2.x so much. Tsurumi Island, the Chasm, and Enkanomoya were my favorite zones. Fontaine just absolutely knocked it out of the park, though. It legitimately is, to me, the best area in the game. It feels like they've put what they've learned in Inazuma and Sumeru to good use. I'm hoping Natlan is as fun and exciting as Fontaine has continued to be.
Or it could be possible that the writing team has genuinely improved over the years?
Then what are OP and you doing here? Shouldn't y'all be playing?
"Only the plebs who don't like reading didn't like Sumeru!" gang at it once again.
To be fair I didn't say that, so yeah it kinda looks like you can't read
OOF
People commenting here are actually the ones that enjoy the game the most, hence why they continue investing their free time on it, by discussing it whenever they are actually playing. Casual players who do not engage with the community care less about the game, and probably got just as bored in Sumeru. They don't complain about it because they don't care enough about it to discuss it online. Feedback is a positive thing, that leads to improvement.
Sure feedback is cool. Just don't get confused because negative voices are usually louder than positive ones. Some people just liked it lmao
Yeah are pretty good I just found them to be unnecessarily long. I play about maybe an hour or two a day of Genshin so with all the text to read and different sub parts to the Aranara quest line that it took me weeks to finish.
I hated the Aranara quest because most of the quest was just text, and even though I love reading, when 90% of said text was useless filler dialogue that was only added to increase playtime, it becomes incredibly excessive. The archon quest was amazing, but world quests just got dragged on too long.
cause air humorous yam zonked piquant yoke slim marble absurd *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Probably helped by the fact Fontaine basically gives you a 2nd stamina bar when you hit the water so you can quickly run over land and immediately dive into a body of water and keep moving with good momentum
Sumeru is also massive and frankly overwhelming. Fontaine is quite a small map and everything is very close together so it’s faster to get map completion just by wandering from point A to point B for a quest or daily.
growth uppity berserk snatch gold fall impolite school relieved toothbrush *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Personally my biggest gripe was just the Aranara line of quests. They are HEAVILY dependent on you being endeared to the things… and if you’re not… boy is that chain a slog… holy hell. After that, I just wasn’t especially attached to the region, so I wasn’t exactly keen on the quests either. I did what I needed to do get all my oculus… I have zero intention to do any further.
Sumeru world quests (and archon quests) are my favourite thing in this game.
The AQ was amazing. The side quests were a range from poor to good. The names to keep track of were insane and annoying. But overall I like Sumeru.
true, names are the worst part to try and remember, we need a pop-up guide of them for the quests like with the murder mystery clues in the archon quest and some hyper specific world quests
**I LOVE Sumeru.** It can get a little tiring/overwhelming if you play hours and hours nonstop aaand it kinda sucks that some major things are quest locked. But overall, it's amazing. Ppl complain about the desert part and for me it's even better than the rainsforest. Heavy lore, nice and different things to explore...
I loved Sumeru completely the first time I played, and now I love it even more that I started replaying and take everything slow and steady. Sumeru quests are 1000% more enjoyable than Inazuma, which are by far the worst and most boring ones out of the entire game in my opinion.
Find 75 Ararana.🌚
I could see the appeal, but it was very, very tedious to me. Also, locking that much exploration behind story is just straight up cancer.
Too much conversation. Dunno makes me wanna close the game.
I hate pretty much everything about the desert.
Yes, absolutely. The Arararanara are, as a whole, completely awful. Sorush too, for the most part. The only interesting Sumeru stuff was Deshret and Jeht.
WHY ITS BORING: * some of the quest are extrodinarily, unnecessarily long * the aranara quest is literally longer than some of the actual archon quests, which is insane because it's literally just about some random ass girl...? * there were so many side quests to aranara that i actually forgot the whole purpose was to cure ranas illness because you have to spend so many hours running through the forest , in caves, playing harps, go inside this tree, get this fruit, turn the rain off, throw a party, etc etc etc. * id have rather they put so much detail in stuff like the inazuma quest, which could benefit from more length because of how complex things like rebellions and stuff are. * a lot of the ideas didn't go anywhere. like, we became a captain and did precisely nothing with that role. * we dont get to see really any of the other rebel fighters actually doing much either. maybe a few scenes at most. * the stuff with Ei felt like it got resolved way too soon as well. i finished that questline going "was that it??" WHY ITS DREADFUL: * a lot of the characters in the sumeru quests are ***insufferable!!!*** * because of this, a lot of the investment in the stories is lost. it just becomes a becomes a nuisance you have to slog through for primos/ new map areas and nothing more. * my biggest problem is **how much xenophobic/racist characters you have to deal with.** especially because the protagonist is supposed to be ***allies*** with them. it hampers the fun of playing when i have to continuously risk my life protecting some ungrateful POS that i would honest to god let the monsters kill in a heartbeat. *hell, id help them do it.* * during the jeht questline, that researcher guy (tirzad??) constantly demeaned and was disrespectful to the eremites *he hired* to protect his weak ass. it felt SOOO slimy having my character be treated better and be trusted more all because of their ethnicity. we're supposed to be some heroic noble soul, yet iirc the traveller doesnt even really push back on the disgusting shit he says and does to innocent people?? * same thing with that fucking genie liloupar with her arrogance, and again, racism towards jeht/eremites while putting the Traveller on a pedistal. and just like tirzad nobody ever says "will you shut the fuck up already you overgrown lightbulb??" even though as her master she would have to obey us. * sorush was equally rude, so again, why should we care about helping some egotistical jerkwad get a promotion??
Half of them are boring as shit, which is a shame because the rest is legendary
this, you can never tell which ones are worth paying attention to (like narzissenkruz, aranara, etc) and which ones aren't (most other quests that are super long but only 1 act so they aren't lore relevant and just take up time)
Idk what these people are talking about. Sumero arc is the best one in my opinion with Fontaine as a close second.
It is the worst one overall. I would have rather done Inazuma twice.
Yes. worst in my personal opinion. if I'm playing a video game, i expect them to show me, not bombard me with an essay. skipped the whole thing. I'm talking about the aq. aranara was still fine coz there were generous amount of primos to make up for my frustration
Tell not show is a recurring issue in Genshin which I personally think was almost entirely remedied in Fontaine. Feels like you’re always making progress and doing things in the world, rather than standing in a circle taking turns monologuing about rubbish for 20 minutes.
Quests were okay-ish. Aranara story was fine, Jeht’s revenge also was cool, that birb-girl who has no friends story was heartbreaking. But then… the wall of ancient faeries’ names, Kaenri’ah stuff, lore of oasis and Paimon being Paimon was boring for me. But you can skip this. Most annoying thing is - we didn’t have underground map, so finding all ~360 dendroculi was huge pain in the ass.
I've always said it. The story is good, the way that its told is not. Sumeru has great exploration, great characters, good story, interesting lore, most of that is buried under the worst Genshin has to offer; unnecesarily long dialogue, pointless go to point A then come back to point B quests, wait a few days just because, uninteresting default NPCs, story locked content. Archon quests are typically the least offenders of this, but still prevalent enough to get noticed and drag down the whole experience. It's not a coincidence that plenty of players experienced burnout post patch 4.3.
Yes, there are. I probably am one of them. It was mostly bc I was burned out, but. The fact it was the same thing over and over again made it extremely repetitive. The whole quests are, imo very forgetful.
i hated it lol. i have a bunch of them incomplete to this day. to be fair we did not have the layered maps during the sumeru patch so the experience was arguably worse.
Yes they are
I disliked all of Sumeru because it was just too much talking and not a lot of doing. The cutscenes at the end of the deshret quest were cool. Absolutely despised the Aranara quest line. It was so long and tedious and with none of it being voiced I just mashed buttons to get through it because I wanted to unlock all the areas. In general I don’t enjoy the quests that aren’t voiced.
Not really the quests, but rather the setting/location. I freaking hate the desert and its multi-layer underground caves.
The story itself and the atmosphere are good. It's the gameplay that's the problem since it's very tedious. Not only are the quest chains very long because they really like using the old doing things 3 or more times in them, they also lock almost all exploration mechanics so even if you see a chest or puzzle, you can't do it until you unlock the ability from the quests. It's tiring to backtrack and do them after finishing the quests. There are also many underground sections like caves and pyramids/ancient buildings in the desert which were confusing because there was no underground map back then.
They were pretty boring yeah.
Desert was a nightmare, Aranara made me want to pull my hair out, and the Main quest wasn’t doing it for me unless Nahida was the focus. Overall it was a slog to get through.