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Dual Universe Drama and Genshin Impact | MMORPG.com's Quick 5 | MMORPG.com
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Dual Universe Drama and Genshin Impact | MMORPG.com's Quick 5 | MMORPG.com
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I did not know that Genshin Impact had a Stamina resource. I only played it for like 10 minutes and uninstalled it due to the fact that there is no character customization and you operate multiple characters that switch on-demand instead of being visible like in Baldur's Gate or something.
That Stamina thing now adds another reason to why I don't like this game.
it's not stamina it's resin, it refresh 1 per every 8 minutes and you need at least 20 to do a dungeon and capped at 120, big boss dungeon is limited to once per week(this was put in place by China's government to limit addictive behavior and they have to comply or the game won't be released in china which is Mihoyo's target market). stamina is the game is more like mana, it depletes and refill during combat.
In a mobile game "stamina" or "energy" or whatever, they term it for that particular game basically limits the content you can do until it recharges.
The way resin works is a little different, but not... much. For example, you can kill as many world bosses as you want, but you can't get any rewards from them unless you have enough resin to open the pods.
So in that way, if you want to farm special gear or resources, you have to buy resin if you want to earn that stuff faster.
In that way, it works like stamina or energy in any other mobile game.
The main difference is, it doesn't stop you from playing. In many mobile games not having stamina effectively sidelines you from any worthwhile content, which isn't the case in Genshin.
Stamina systems existed in PC online games before there ever were such mobile games. Also stamina systems existed before the kinds of laws people keep claiming they are the result of.
Then basically all online games restrict your means of progression, so as to extend the life of their content. Stamina type systems, or limits on how many runs you can do of set content, over a given period is one method, grind is another. One restricts your access to content, the other restricts your access to rewards. The resulting difference between the two is that in games that use grind, you are expected to play long hours a day, while games that restrict your access to content tend to be comparably more casual friendly, so you go in, get stuff done, then log off, unless they have multiple characters per account, then you can usually just swap characters.
I don't believe people are pointing that stamina systems are the result of lootboxes or gacha mechanics, as those are two entirely different systems, that often coincide these days in mobile games.
But to say that PC games were using such tactics long before mobile games is kind of a tough call. You could make arguments that dailies or weeklies, or dungeon tickets are all parts of prolonging progress and forcing people to spend... but those systems are different than the way mobile and freemium games use stamina today.
Considering that we've had over a decade of these such systems, and the overarching MOG shift to free to play games started roughly around the late 2000s, the, now perfected, stamina systems in todays mobile games are far more aggressive.
Genshin at least masks this kind of system behind nearly 40 - 50 hours of gameplay. Most people hit the FOMO of obtaining special characters and powering them up long before they hit resin problems.
My personal outlook is that Genshin has done a pretty decent job at making a solid game that plays across a lot of different platforms, though still manages to keep that predatory gacha spirit, but only just enough so that you see people dropping thousands on characters that aren't all that important in the grand scheme of things.
My main wish is that Blue Protocol takes this general premise and opens it up to a wider MMO world.
Stamina systems, and gacha systems are two different things. While there may have been older games with it, one PC online game I do know that has always had a stamina system is Dungeon Fighter Online, that was released in 2005. I'm pretty sure the iPhone was the first mobile phone of its type, that allowed for the kind of games people think of when someone mentions mobile games, the first iPhone was released in 2007. The laws people keep referencing that they claim resulted in stamina systems, similarly came along years after 2005.
Gachas are just a RNG loot system, that is in no meaningful way different from loot boxes, and loot boxes have been directly, or indirectly (ex: the loot box is an in-game drop, but you need a key from the cash shop to open them) in free to play PC online game cash shops since pretty much the beginning of them (ex: again, Dungeon Fighter Online had them, it sold keys, while the boxes were in-game drops, but I'm sure there were others before it).
The point at which people hit the resin issue the most is at AR 35, since that is about when you'd also run out of story content to do, meaning you run out of planed content. Well, unless you've been playing the way I have, I've been taking my time, and still have some main story quests, and a bunch of other quests left to do, while am about AR 35. Although as those that are about AR 40-45+ have found is that at such levels, you'll being getting better loot from even non-resin mobs/bosses (ex: 4* artifacts), and resin content can offer better stuff too (ex: 5* artifacts), which opens things up some. Also once you're in such higher levels, the material costs get to be pretty high to upgrade things, so you'd need to really get a mess of things from those non-resin mobs, and collectible resources that people complaining about resin keep scoffing at. Getting such levels will become easier once there's more content, like I believe is planed for version 1.2. Version 1.1, and 1.2 could also add other non-resin content, and 1.2 could begin the process to lessen the restrictions on resin, by providing more of it. You can look at Honkai Impact to see how they handle stamina in a game that has a more substantial amount of content, since it has been out for about four years now.
Blue Protocol is a MMO, Genshin is a single player game, with some multi-player options. I'd rather not deal with all the BS that tends to come with a MMO, then I also expect it will be one of those games that uses grind to slow progress, which in turn means it will require extensive hours of daily play, I don't want that in a game either, so I'll stick with Genshin.