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It's no surprise that many of the most expensive video games ever made, from Red Dead Redemption 2 to Cyberpunk 2077 and, surely, soon GTA 6, are also some of the best open-world games. These are massive undertakings that crank many game development stressors to 11 and can drag them out for additional years. Exactly one of these games is free-to-play, and it's also what we know to be the most expensive one. Genshin Impact, according to figures shared in a November 2023 lawsuit by a subsidiary of developer HoYoverse, cost around $100 million to make and costs $200 million a year to maintain and grow. Genshin Impact will turn four this month, so its total development costs, assuming all of that is accurate, ought to be roughly $900 million at this point.
Even in an industry that's increasingly struggling with ballooning production costs at the AAA level, $900 million is a borderline obscene, imaginary-sounding number. It's made all the more extreme by another obscene, imaginary-sounding number: the $5 billion revenue threshold that Genshin Impact cleared faster than any other game. I say all this because these funny numbers have been lurking in the back of my mind as I've explored Genshin Impact's new region, Natlan, after its expansion-sized 5.0 update. This is what $900 million can buy you, it turns out: the greatest version of one of the best and biggest open-world RPGs ever made, simultaneously free to everyone and disgustingly profitable.
More than more of the same
Natlan already feels like the best region in Genshin Impact. We only have four sub-regions to explore and the central Archon quest currently ends with act two, but what's here is best-in-class. The soundtrack is an instant earworm rivaling the unforgettable tones of the Sumeru region, though its excellent integration of varied instruments and languages only makes the bizarrely fair-skinned people of Natlan, clearly based on African and Latin American countries and culture, seem even stranger by comparison. In the Archon quest and supporting world quests, Genshin's storytelling benefits from additional, always-stunning animated cutscenes, tighter voice direction, and a focus on details that actually add to the tapestry of the region rather than distracting from it.
The big win for me is in the world design. Natlan is a platforming playground, aided by new dinosaur-like Saurian transformations which let you dig and grapple and swim with bestial power in a way that improves on Sumeru's own grappling points and runs laps around the fun but limiting diving of Fontaine. It's a gorgeous mix of reds and oranges and contrasting greens and blues – mostly warm colors matching the rhythm and life that crawls over every inch of the land. Most importantly, it's the most organic region in the game.
If you'll accompany me back to 2020 for a minute, you'll find that Genshin Impact was, not entirely undeservedly, called a knockoff of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The game has always been more than that, and has become a lot more in the past four years, but Breath of the Wild and now Tears of the Kingdom are useful comparisons here. Breath of the Wild is fun to explore in part because it regularly shows you smoke and lets you find the fire for yourself. You notice something strange or out of place – misaligned stones, a circle of trees, a platoon of enemies, oddly detailed ruins – and follow it to a Korok or a chest or a cool weapon or even a permanent upgrade for Link. This trains you to be curious and observant, and the game rewards you for following your gut.
Genshin Impact, on the other hand, will often just show you the fire. Here is a treasure chest with a ring of red light around it, a blue bloom effect that's even more noticeable at a distance, and a group of enemies nearby. Put on your thinking cap, player, and see if you can't puzzle this one out. I'm being a little mean here, but only a little. Not all of Genshin's puzzles and encounters are this obvious, but a lot of them are. And this trains you to let the game do most of the thinking for you. The resulting journey feels less like an adventure and more like a Disneyland attraction. Still fun! But frequently predictable and unsurprising.
A better open-world experience
Thankfully, this is less true in Natlan, which is much more inventive and subtle about how it creates and places hundreds of little discoveries. How do you connect these gizmos? Where will you find the missing piece to this puzzle? What is this graffiti trying to tell you about your surroundings? Likewise, the Saurian abilities unlock new possibilities and even enable some sequence-breaking. My favorite cluster of discoveries is probably the new batch of Local Legends, souped-up bosses with combat challenges that unlock a special cosmetic name card. Finding and mastering all of these bosses is one of the most rewarding and motivating challenges in Genshin. It helps that a higher world level, which is basically a harder difficulty, was released with Natlan, meaning open-world enemies don't just instantly fall over anymore. Combat, like exploration, is more satisfying with a little more bite.
On a kinetic level, it's more fun to move through the world, especially if you have either of the new 5-star characters, Mualani and Kinich, who can surf and soar in a way that echoes and often beats the aforementioned dino suits. And experientially, Natlan is just a more thoughtful and engaging open-world game. There is more to find and it is harder to find because exploration requires more input from you. To put that into context, I'm at 97% completion for this first chunk of Natlan and already hungry for the next area.
The result is a region that, louder than ever, makes me wonder how this game is free when it is genuinely better than many premium open-world games. The answer, of course, is the inherently predatory gacha monetization behind the $5+ billion in revenue previously mentioned. But Genshin is still perfectly enjoyable without investing a dime and I still spend much less on it monthly than I did my Final Fantasy 14 subscription, so I'm not bothered by it. And if you do want to spend a little money, or play long enough to amass and spend free resources, the gacha system is actually more forgiving than ever thanks to slightly increased rate-up odds and a dramatically improved weapon banner. This is still a gacha game with free-to-play trappings, but Genshin Impact is also the game that caused a paradigm shift in the gacha space, and Natlan is an evolved version of that same vision.
