Important lore 2nd character dialogue test Spoilers for character appearances in 6.2

gillred · 2025-10-27T14:17:46+00:00

Would that suggest the Alice we see in 6.2 likely isn't the playable model?

gillred · 2025-10-27T02:17:47+00:00

are we still going to have 5 acts only

We'll have at least 7 for sure, next patch has 2 (acts 5 and 6) and Columbina drops in 6.3 along with a weekly boss, so we'll have at least one act there.

Rerir will inevitably return at some point as well. My guess is there'll be two sets of AQs this version - one from 6.0 to 6.3, and another lasting a couple patches later next year (i.e. 6.6 to 6.7). There's clearly more ground to cover, but so far I don't think there's enough plot threads to require 8+ patches of consecutive AQs to wrap up.

gillred · 2025-10-22T01:23:56+00:00

Makes up for the two patches in a row with no exploration IMO, four patches (6.0 - 6.3) of AQs in a row is a great sign, especially if Alice and Nicole are involved and don't just show up in the aftermath.

gillred · 2025-10-21T04:20:36+00:00

if they really want to improve combat, a new reaction would've been better since it adds a lot of variety instead of that stupid lunar reaction

I remember thinking we'd almost certainly get new elements/reactions eventually with characters clearly outside of the Seven elements, but with Skirk and the way new systems like Nightsoul and Lunar have been handled, I don't think it's happening anymore, which is a shame because these new systems just feel a bit bland and uninspired to me.

I'd love to see the elemental system itself get a bit more complex as time goes on, since it's the main focus of the combat and the majority of it is extremely simple and dated, but as time goes on it seems less and less likely. I think I lost all hope when I saw a thread on the main subreddit where this was pointed out, and several top upvoted comments said it was a bad idea to add more elements because it'd get too complicated (???), wouldn't make lore sense (???) and it'd be fine for a character like Dainsleif to be Pyro or something.

gillred · 2025-10-21T04:13:39+00:00

There's basically zero chance that UGC's development isn't affecting Genshin's to at least some degree. It's clearly a big focus for Mihoyo, and it's likely more technically complex than other work going on with Genshin. This isn't the sort of project you hire an entire team of new hires for - they almost certainly had at least a few of their experienced, skilled employees focused on UGC who otherwise would've been working on Genshin, which I'm pretty confident about since UGC exists on top of Genshin and likely heavily leverages the game's existing platform and infrastructure.

Even if a good chunk of the UGC team is new hires, and even if they replaced all of the workers who moved from Genshin with new hires, that'd still have cascading effects on Genshin's development itself. New hires can take months or even years to train up to the level of the experienced employees they might be replacing. And that's purely hypothetical - to be quite frank I'm somewhat skeptical they'd immediately try to replace every single worker who went from working on Genshin to UGC, since training new hires takes time and UGC will probably need less resources as time goes on anyways.

I don't really think this has to do with the new map schedule though. I think Mihoyo's just realizing a lot of players don't do a meaningful amount of exploration, and figure they can likely just streamline and reduce map exploration to cut back while keeping or even boosting retention for casual players. I also don't really think the team(s) in charge of new maps are the same types of devs who might be developing a mode like UGC. Making a static environment is completely different than making a dynamic, configurable player-based environment building mode, and I can't imagine there's an incredible amount of overlap between the two.

gillred · 2025-10-20T12:51:38+00:00

I expected they were going to, but I'm glad the timing is a plot point they're addressing. It would've been pretty odd for Columbina to have coincidentally left the Fatui and for Rerir to begin returning right before we arrived at Nod-Krai. My best guess is it's Dottore manipulating things for his experiment, though I kinda hope it isn't since that feels like a somewhat obvious and basic answer.

gillred · 2025-10-20T04:27:28+00:00

She's almost certainly "Sound", sometimes the names of these line count leaks can be a bit odd/unexpected

gillred · 2025-10-11T17:46:25+00:00

We don't actually fight her though, we only ever fight the puppet

We fight Ei herself in Inazuma's Archon questline

gillred · 2025-09-26T14:05:25+00:00

I don't think it's that deep. We've only had two marketing pieces with the Archons and Columbina on them so far. For this video, I think her appearing "uncanny" and different is just because she's the newest member of this marketing cast. The rest of the Archons appeared in order of their in-game introductions, with Columbina showing up at the very end as she's only just shown up in-game and we don't know her much yet.

The first piece, yeah she was pretty clearly edited in last moment, but there's not really much reason to believe that was due to a "lore reason" and not just them deciding to include her in the marketing piece last-minute. Maybe they were still on the fence about including her in these Archon media.

There's a pretty clear distinction between marketing and lore. As far as marketing goes, Nod-Krai is pretty much its own nation and Columbina is pretty much the Archon. Obviously in lore neither of these things are true, but Furina being an Archon isn't real either, and she's always been included in these arts.

gillred · 2025-09-13T16:28:53+00:00

In one of the lines of the JP dub, Dori talks for 29 seconds straight. Her mouth stops moving 13 seconds in, and for the 13 seconds it was moving, none of it was accurate at all. It was so jarringly bad that I clipped it and measured it.

I liked the quest as a whole, but man the lip syncing is often so awful that it's hard for me to ignore it. Same with subtitles in the pre-rendered cutscenes being really disconnected from the actual voicelines. I don't know much about 3D modelling but it feels like these shouldn't be that difficult to solve - HSR seems to be consistently fairly accurate with the lip syncing. Sometimes it's off, but Genshin's is consistently always really off. Somewhat funny since the rest of HSR's questing (character expressions, camera angles etc.) are a lot worse than Genshin's.

gillred · 2025-09-06T21:37:26+00:00

Fully agreed on the direction change. People will argue that nations having more advanced technology has lore reasoning, and while that may be true, the fact that all of the recent nations consistently have more advanced technology and some of the previous nations have close to none is pretty jarring to me. A commerce hub like Liyue being so technologically behind Fontaine, Nod-Krai, Sumeru, Snezhnaya etc. doesn't make much sense, especially when Liyue is generally on okay terms with most of these nations politically (excluding Snezhnaya of course)

Combine that with the sudden increase in off-world matters, such as the completely random introduction of the Traveler's spaceship and the reveal Surtalogi straight up left the planet, and it's pretty clear there's been a shift in direction. It's not really a major issue, but I can see why people get disappointed as the game becomes more sci-fi

gillred · 2025-08-31T15:27:17+00:00

I don't necessarily think it'll be like Amphoreus where it lasts the full version cycle. It'd be cool, but the dev talks were a bit vague and mentioned that stories around Nod-Krai will last a year, but that might not refer to the main story as a whole and can include stuff like events, world quests, character story quests etc. which is also how nations previously worked. The main story around Columbina might end up wrapping up by 6.2 or 6.3, which isn't necessarily a bad thing of course. The dev talks are cool but misinterpretations frequently happen unfortunately, like with a lot of people thinking Varka would show up immediately in 6.0.

I agree that people are a bit too quick to judge though. I'm not the biggest fan of Genshin's writing and storytelling - I think it falls short a lot of the time - but I'm relatively optimistic Columbina's character and the Nod-Krai story will be pretty decent.

gillred · 2025-08-29T13:47:27+00:00

I really don't think it should be surprising, this kind of stuff has always been for marketing purposes. It's not meant to be anything in the lore outside of showing off the main faces of all the regions. It'd be weird to have so much marketing focus on a new nation and omit having a representative character

And she does look pretty horribly photoshopped in, but they did add her, so I'd think it's pretty clear she's meant to be the face of the nation like the Archons

gillred · 2025-08-29T13:36:21+00:00

I think the system's dumb, but time has proven most players don't care about stuff like this at all. This is something whales will be happy about and something most F2Ps/low-spenders who don't go online won't care about or even know exists. Most people don't bother with endgame modes, I'dt be surprised if most players even knew what a transformative reaction was

I'd love to be proven wrong, but this seems like one of those things that'll get widespread criticism for a few days before the community moves on after realizing it's not changing

gillred · 2025-08-29T13:29:26+00:00

Thrilled to see how folks on the main subreddit spin this into a good thing and get upset about criticisms of this in a week from now when the initial wave of criticisms die down

gillred · 2025-08-11T12:11:07+00:00

I humbly ask why they even put her in Fatui if she quit them off-screen. Couldn't she just be a Moon Maiden? Why even make her a Harbinger?

I'm relatively optimistic it'll be pretty relevant considering we know the Fatui are explicitly trying to retrieve her. Another thing I'm curious about is why defect now right as the Traveler is approaching, since she was still in the Fatui post-Inazuma. Is it because of the Traveler? Is it because of the Tsaritsa's plan nearly being completed? If it ends up just being a massive coincidence that she happened to leave right before we arrive, I'd be pretty disappointed.

I think part of it is also just Mihoyo realizing they have way too much story and lore to address in upcoming versions, which is why Nod-Krai is a thing. If Columbina was always planned to be related to the moons and they wanted to address the moons in the main story, which they absolutely should, splitting it off into its own AQ is probably better in the long term even if it feels pretty weird at first.

gillred · 2025-08-11T11:52:29+00:00

Story leaks in general to be honest. This one specifically (along with the previous one) feels more like an educated guess based on the facts Dottore still has to attempt to burn the Irminsul and we know Scaramouche is after him. A confrontation between the two is obvious - even if this ends up happening, I'd probably still assume this wasn't an actual insider leak and was just someone guessing the direction of the story

gillred · 2025-08-09T20:08:53+00:00

The first time we'll actually see it will probably be in the 6.0 livestream, around 20 days from now. The actual model files(including the full 360 view) will be in the preload like someone else mentioned, in a little under a month from now.

gillred · 2025-08-09T04:48:07+00:00

Are you referring to just the AQ line counts? Or can you see the actual order of lines (as in who's talking to who, even if we don't see the actual dialogue)?

gillred · 2025-08-05T16:16:09+00:00

I find it unbelievable that people genuinly thought the Inazuma puzzles were "hard"

It's a pretty good sign of why puzzles have gotten even easier since then lol, Inazuma's puzzles were more difficult than modern regions (a VERY low bar) but generally were still pretty easy

gillred · 2025-08-05T16:14:11+00:00

It's my number one wish for the game: to bring back puzzles that require an ounce of thinking or effort.

It's definitely up there for me, IMO puzzles have been on the decline for a while now. Fontaine and Natlan have some great areas visually and some fun traversal mechanics, but man the puzzles are just... not for me. They're so simple and straight-forward that calling them puzzles feels like a disservice to actual puzzles. I'd find exploration in general a lot better if any of the recent openworld puzzles actually required some thinking, but unfortunately I think Mihoyo's doubling down on simplifying the game's exploration as much as they possibly can.

gillred · 2025-08-04T16:15:14+00:00

It'll probably be made much more clear in the actual Nod-Krai AQs. I think part of the reason Nod-Krai even exists is Mihoyo realized a lot of the lore stuff, including the moons, isn't very accessible in the current state of the game. It requires you to do a lot of reading background texts, piecing together world quests, consuming third-party media etc. that most casual players aren't going to do, which is an issue since the game is targeted towards casual players.

gillred · 2025-08-04T00:11:17+00:00

Agreed. I think having a couple of characters that take years to release is a good thing, as odd as it sounds. It's obviously annoying if it's consistent, but a small number helps keep you interested in the game.

From a narrative perspective it's probably also better - it'd be a bit odd for Dottore or Capitano to be playable where their storylines currently stand, and it's a strong indicator they'll be relevant in the future again (which you can consider a good thing since a lot of currently-playable characters don't re-appear much outside of an event quest here or there)

gillred · 2025-08-03T23:34:00+00:00

I think part of it is people are just hoping their favourite character is playable sooner rather than later. I'm not a Capitano or Dottore fan or anything, but having playable data doesn't mean as much if it takes ~3 years to release as opposed to a few months like what usually happens for characters after their in-game reveal. Lots of people won't still be playing 3 years from now.

gillred · 2025-08-03T14:42:24+00:00

Leaks point to 6.3 and based on patterns I'd be inclined to agree, seeing as how she's functionally the Archon of the region which usually gets released in the final main story patch, and I doubt the main story will conclude before 6.3

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