Making Sense Of Neverness To Everness - or - The Genshin Impact

I've been having an interesting conversation with Mailvaltar in the comments to his recent post on Neverness To Everness. I had too much I wanted to say to fit into a comment thread so I told him I'd probably spin it up into a post of my own. And then he pointed out he'd already posted something very much along the same lines five years ago, back when Genshin Impact first came out.

I had a look through my back pages and it turned out so had I. It's quite hard to remember what an... er... impact that game had when it arrived. How strange and unfamiliar it seemed. In my own First Impressions piece, I said "just about everything in the game I've seen so far, is confusing". I'd never played a game quite like it although apparently millions of players, who'd made their way through The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, saw things a little differently. 

Breath of the Wild wasn't an MMO, of course, but then again, neither is Genshin Impact. Probably. There seem to be varying opinions on that. It was one of the things I was confused about. I'm not sure it's much clearer now. 

All of these games seem to live in a nebulous, undefined hinterland, somewhere in the liminal spaces of a Venn Diagram overlapping MMOs, RPGs, Visual Novels, Life Sims, Co-Op, Single Player, Open World and a bunch of other genres and playstyles. I'd say it's indisputably a genre but if it has a name anyone's agreed on, I don't know what it is.

Oh, wait... yes I do! We call them Gacha Games. That's the catch-all, isn't it? 

Except all that's gacha about them is their main source of revenue. As a descriptor, it's about as helpful as Subscription or Free To Play. It tells you how the company stays in business but it doesn't give you much of a clue about the type of game you're going to be playing.

Except it sort of does. As Mailvaltar observes, gacha games are "extremely alike mechanically...even if the actual gameplay hails from completely different genres." 

And that's especially true of the way they handle character progression. His almost six year-old post linked above, my own from a month before and the post by Tobold that provoked it, all deal with the way Genshin Impact requires a huge amount of grinding to sustain the progress needed to keep the combat as easy as it was when you were starting out. Without that, combat can eventually get too tough for casuals like me and Tobold.

As a general rule, this seems to be approximately how all the games that followed Genshin's huge commercial success roll. They also follow what's looking like a genre convention of odd, quirky, enigmatic names - Zenless Zone Zero, Honkai Star Rail, Noah's Heart, Wuthering Waves, Neverness To Everness.

The shorthand in use for all of those is "Gacha Games", so I suppose, by default, that is what the genre's called now. It might have made more sense to follow the gaming naming convention that gave us Roguelikes and Metroidvanias. We could have called them Genshinlikes. But we didn't. So gacha games it will have to be.

And as Mailvaltar explained in very helpful detail in yesterday's post, there's a very specific way to play a gacha game if you want your characters to be capable and your progress smooth as you work your way through the storyline. You'll have to get to grips with a number of quite complex systems and then, when you've figured out what you need and how to get it, you'll have to grind your finger-tips off, killing the right mobs and doing the right quests to get the gear you want. Just as though it was EverQuest in 1999.

That was enough to do for Tobold back in 2020. As he said " I'll be farming elite monsters for weeks. And I don't want to." And who can blame him? I don't think he's played a Gacha Game since. 

I also noped out of Genshin Impact the moment it got hard but unlike Tobold it didn't put me off trying again. And it's as well I did because subsequent entries in the genre have been far less demanding. There have been a few barriers to progress in some of them that I've had to make some effort to clamber over but nothing like the harsh, early roadblocks of Genshin Impact. 

I was stuck for a while in both Noah's Heart and Wuthering Waves before I did some work to improve both my teams and my tactics but in both cases, though, it happened much later than in Genshin. It was easier to fix, too. And as Mailvaltar suggests in his most recent post, that easing continues. Neverness To Everness may be the least-demanding gacha game yet.

The thing about Gacha games that I really wanted to  dig into a little, though, is the apparent disconnect between content and delivery. It's a dissonance that echoes what Jack Emmert was saying about the importance of knowing your audience and the dangers of feature creep. The Gacha game studios, hearing Jack talk, must be muttering "Hold our beer..."

One of the strongest drivers to engagement gacha games have is story. Right from the beginning, with Genshin Impact, the bar for storytelling was pushed through the roof. Back in 2020 I said "Genshin Impact is one of the best-written video games I've played.", something  I put down to "the tone, the very thing so few video games get right." 

I said at the time I might put a whole post together about why the writing was so good but then I stopped playing because getting to see any more of it got so hard and that post never got written. The story was great but the way it was delivered sucked. Who the hell wants to grind and grind and practice and practice just sot hey can see the next episode of their favorite show?

Since Genshin, that's never been quite the same problem but the underlying issue persists. The content gets ever better, which makes the hoops you need to jump through to get to it feel more and more inappropriate. 

And it is getting better and better. The writing in Wuthering Waves is better than I remember it being in Genshin and so is the voice acting. The animated sequences are more frequent, longer and approach cinematic quality. It's like watching high-quality anime with some awkward interruptions.

My impression of Neverness To Everness so far suggests the evolution of Gacha game story content into some kind of mass media entertainment format isn't over yet. In the four chapters of the main story the game shipped with, there's barely any combat at all. What little is there presents little challenge and doesn't appear to increase in difficulty as the story moves on. Instead, there are a variety of interesting non-combat mechanics that enhance the storytelling instead of getting in its way.

The "cut scenes" are longer and more sophisticated, too. It feels like playing a complex visual novel, complete with that same sense of watching a movie play out around you that sometimes leads people who like a bit more action to dismiss those games as "walking simulators". Not to say they don't have a point. I've seen more than a few comments on reddit and YouTube from NTE fans who'd like Hotta to go the whole way and make an actual anime based on the game and I have to say that it does often seem like that might be a better use of the material. 

In the case of Neverness To Everness it's not only the quality of the writing, acting and storyline that's competing for attention with the Gacha revenue stream. There's also that whole Life Sim thing they have going on. It's something that hasn't been nearly as well-developed in other gacha titles I've played.

Genshin had none of it that I can recall from back when I played but that was five years ago so maybe it does now. Noah's Heart had housing and affection bonds with your team but the whole game was a bit clunky and under-cooked so none of it had much impact outside of a dedicated few loyalists, of whom I was one. I don't know how common these features are in other gacha games because I haven't stuck with any long enough to find out but I can't say I remember any from the ones I've tried.

In NTE you have plenty of non-combat, non-story options. You can run a business, either behind the scenes as management or out front with the customers if you want. You can be a street racer in your car, go fishing or play mah-jong. You can deliver parcels around the city or moonlight as a taxi driver. You can date, go to the movies, hold hands and hang out with your imaginary friends. You can own multiple properties, decorate them and, if you can build up sufficient bonds of affection, have your friends move in and live with you.

None of this requires any fighting so the entire material grind that so upset Tobold back in the pandemic would seem to have no purchase here. It exists but you don't need to worry about it. You're not going to be punching anyone or anything. 

Or are you? I'm not so sure. All those characters I was talking about the other day plus all the others that will inevitably come into the game as time goes on, how will you meet and get to know them if you aren't pushing through the story? You can roll on the banners and you might be lucky but I'm a bit vague just now about how that works when it comes to interacting with the same characters in the world. I seem to have some I can team with but I can't get them to work in the cafe or come to my house. I think I might need to meet them in context before that can happen.

Or maybe I've just missed something. Gacha games are ferociously complicated. 

In his recent post, Mailvaltar does an excellent job of explaining some of the systems I've been struggling to understand. Not that I've really been trying. I have no real interest in learning how they work. I just want to figure out the bare minimum to get by and then never think about them again. But even if I was fascinated by the complexity of it all, I think I'd struggle to keep all the details straight. There's a lot to remember.

In the end, the best approach for anyone who doesn't enjoy the process is probably just to play the game and only worry about it when you get stuck. After all, if it isn't a problem, it isn't a problem, right? And a problem only becomes a problem when you can't fix it. 

Gacha games want you to be able to fix it. If you can't or if it looks like it'll be too much trouble, then like Tobold you might walk away and that's the one thing they really don't want you to do. Yesterday, when I uninstalled NTE, only so I could re-install it, Hotta responded with a heartfelt exit poll asking what they'd done to upset me and how they could make it better so I'd consider coming back.

They already have, I suspect. They've made everything easier. In retrospect, Genshin was quite an unforgiving game, expecting high levels of both performance and compliance from an early stage. In comparison,  Neverness to Everness positively welcomes slackers.

So far...