I recently discussed the importance of having repeatable and scalable endgame content in Genshin Impact, and I stand by it. Players need this, desperately. It’s one thing to ask for something, though, and another thing entirely to outline how it could be done, so that’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to explain what endgame content should look like.
In order for endgame content to be worthwhile, the most important factors are that it’s repeatable, challenging, rewarding, modular, and fun. There are limits to this, though, and we’ll get into those.
First, it needs to be repeatable. When there’s nothing to do in a gacha game because you’ve run out of stamina, players leave. They just do, because running around an empty overworld with no content is boring. So any endgame content needs the player to be able to jump right back in and do another run the moment they are done with the previous one, and it needs to always be available.
Endgame Content
- As for the challenge, this is the endgame stuff, so the content would need to be balanced towards players who have already accomplished everything else the game has to offer. These players are committed; they’ve raised their talents, weapons, artifacts, and made their characters buff as hell.
- It’s appropriate to make the endgame content a challenge that feels good to overcome. Like the Hypostasis event, allow players to scale the enemies up, increasing their parameters to a competitive level, until they could potentially feel nearly unbeatable (up to what each player wants for themselves).
Meaningful Rewards
Rewards-wise, Mihoyo needs to be careful. The rewards for playing need to be meaningful, but they can’t break the gated progression model by too much. Remember though, that these players have already accomplished everything else, so if there’s nothing to do and no rewards for doing it, they’ll leave.
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If the event itself takes a long time to complete, and the rewards are appropriate but not progression-breaking, players will want to do this activity repeatedly, because even if it’s a small reward, they’re still working towards something. Start with something like a few talent books, XP books, and artifacts, and go from there.
As for modular and fun, that’s a bit harder to pin down. The Labyrinth Warriors event did it best, using modular rooms and randomly-generated enemies to make the experience slightly different each run.
Repeatable Content
Rogue-like games have been doing this for years, so keeping the experience fresh by making each run slightly randomized would go a long way to making repeatable content different and entertaining every time. As long as the thing we’re beating up is a bit different each time, like randomly selected enemy types per room, and a randomly seeded boss at the end, I’m sure players will be happy.
It’s time that players that have nothing left to do get something to do. They’ve earned it. You’ve got the tools, let’s get it done, Mihoyo.
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