Brightcrown Mountains run along Mondstadt’s most northwestern path. In the area’s most central location, a towering spire juts from the earth – it’s a monolith that takes ages for Genshin Impact’s Traveler to climb. In my earliest days with Mihoyo’s mobile adventure, it took me days of adventuring in the sprawling open-world before I could make it up to Stormterror’s Lair. Looking into the horizon, seeing that tower, and then conquering it captured the best parts of its Breath of the Wild inspirations. It’s moments like this that always leave me eager to see how Mihoyo will implement systems typical of other smaller-scale mobile games into Genshin Impact and its world. Now, that’s why I can’t stop thinking about Genshin Impact and how perfect classic mobile gaming staples like world boss challenges would be for its open world.
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For those of you who only know Teyvat, Mihoyo’s incredible marriage of Breath of the Wild’s open world, mobile game loops, and its own cleverly crafted worlds stand out against most of its cousins on the platform. Even for a game that runs on both PC and PS4, Mihoyo incorporates systems and ideas we’re accustomed to seeing from mobile games like Granblue Fantasy, Exos Heroes, and Epic Seven, but maintains the scale of a bigger project. Plenty of typical mobile ideas still remain absent, but the idea of a World Boss still feels like a concept that belongs in Teyvat.
Yes, Genshin Impact does indeed already have its own boss system, but it’s not the same thing. For instance, in Epic Seven, this idea takes shape in guild-based fights. These massive monstrosities, simply known as a World Boss, are the biggest in the game and will require you and your fellow guildmates to cycle your parties in and out of combat. Over time, you’ll use teams of eight to 12 players to whittle its HP down to nothing. Your group’s performance determines what rewards you get, and Epic Seven incentives everyone to band together for better prizes.
Epic Seven’s big, community-based monster challenge is just one example, but most mobile games iterate on it in some similar way. In Genshin Impact, we don’t really have fights that incentivize teamwork or make use of how big its map is, and that feels like a bit of a shame. We have flashy fights like Stormterror, a massive dragon that makes any character you choose feel small and insignificant, but he’s a bit of a pushover when you get into the groove. While it looks big, his arena is static, and you never get to challenge him out in the open fields of Teyvat. He’s just there, waiting to challenge you in his little corner.
There’s a disconnect there. Mihoyo has all of this space to explore, but our biggest boss challenge remains corralled to this one space. It makes me long to see him tearing down mountainsides outside of Mondstadt, or speeding alongside rivers in sights that would make me stop and stare – not unlike the Dragons in Breath of the Wild.
I want something as big as Stormterror that I can fight with my friends. No more boring cube-like enemies we destroy in less than a minute. I want weekly, big roaming boss that I can instance into with more than the current party cap, doing my best to make an impressive dent in an impossibly long HP bar. If the entire community participates, we get more Primogems, and so it becomes an obsessive challenge for everyone in each region. Mihoyo certainly has the world and the game designed for it, I just hope we see it.
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