Gacha systems in games often generate mixed opinions and controversies due to their gambling-like nature, reliance on luck, and potential for encouraging excessive spending. While Genshin Impact has been well-received by many players, criticisms regarding the Gacha system and its impact on the overall player experience are valid concerns that have been voiced by a significant portion of the player base.
The Problem with Genshin Impact’s Character Gacha
Compared to other Gachas, Genshin Impact’s Gacha system is much more healthy and organic in a sense. While other Gacha games suffer from too many characters, unbalanced units and rampant powerceep, Genshin Impact’s characters and weapons are more or less well-balanced and there aren’t too many of them compared to other games.
While other games release premium characters every 2-4 weeks, Genshin Impact has an average of 8 new character releases per year. And to Genshin’s credit, it has also avoided the pesky problem of powercreep in its game where future characters are vastly more powerful than older ones until eventually the game becomes P2W (or Pay to Win).
That said, other Gacha games add their limited-time characters to the standard pool of characters after their event is over. This allows everyone a chance to get the new event character albeit the chances of it are significantly lowered as you might just get any random character from a huge list of characters. Genshin on the other hand has only a few characters in its Standard Banner and while this sounds like a good thing- it is not. Many players may miss a banner and they won’t get to pull for that character again until they have a rerun which can be anywhere from 3-12 months away- a case in point being Eula.
Some characters like Childe may get frequent reruns while others get reruns after long gaps of time. This waiting period itself is problematic as players should get the chance to spend their primogems whenever they want and not just hoard them until their favourite character has another rerun. While it’s unwise to add all released characters to the Standard Banner after their release event, the developers could at least add all characters which were released 1-2 years ago- except for the Archons and the ones that still have major plot relevance. And they could add a Wish system like they have for Honkai: Star Rail where players can choose one character they want and work towards it being a guaranteed pull.
According to recent leaks, Fontaine will feature Triple Banners going forward and while that is one way to deal with it- it’s only a stopgap measure and will only bloat over time if the real issue keeps getting ignored or overlooked. Hopefully, the developers already have something in mind and will only implement it when the time comes.
