When I first set my digital feet into the world of Genshin Impact, I was astonished at the game’s beauty, overwhelmed by the vastness of its playable landscape, and excited about the prospect of grinding my way through another action RPG (that’s totally not an MMO). Even though I winced at the ridiculous amount of currencies, the early game was largely a really satisfying experience, filled with wonder and discovery.
I even grit my teeth through the game’s gacha system, which has you gambling for the chance to earn new characters and more powerful weapons. Genshin Impact gives you enough free characters to build a party early on, and it also rewards you with additional free characters for participating in certain events. So while you might not get the game’s top-tier characters without some astonishingly good luck, you’ll at least be able to build a party that does what you need an in-game party to do. And when you do get super lucky, it feels great.
But at this point, I’ve seen most of the game’s current world (though it will be expanding in December), and I’ve done a good chunk of the story quests (though more story sequences can be unlocked as you push your Adventure Rank deep into the 30s). I’ve activated every fast-travel location, and have almost completed my collection of Oculi. I’ve even done just about all of the dungeons in the game’s current version.
So the one thing driving me to keep playing is that carrot-on-a-stick rhythm of leveling up the world, then Ascending my characters and weapons and leveling them all up in turn. This is a huge undertaking when you have a dozen characters (like I do), and it’s enough to keep me playing for tens of hours longer. After all, the grind is what I wanted from this game in the first place.
But there comes a certain point (usually as you reach the upper 20s in your Adventure Rank) where Genshin Impact starts actively punishing you for playing it this way. This is because of its horrendous Resin system.
In case you’re not familiar, Original Resin is a currency that you must spend to receive rewards from elite bosses, certain special events, and Ley Line challenges. So not only do you have to defeat an elite enemy or complete the requirements of a challenge to earn rewards, you also have to pay an additional currency on top of successfully doing those things.
You earn Original Resin over time, whether you’re logged in or not, at a rate of one Original Resin every eight minutes. There’s a hard cap of 120 Original Resin, so unless you log in every day, you won’t be passively earning it.
If you’re feeling impatient, you can also speed things along by using an item called Fragile Resin, which will restore 60 Original Resin. You can, of course, buy Fragile Resin with Primogems, which you can buy with Genesis Crystals, the game’s premium currency. (If these currency exchanges sound confusing, check out my full guide to currency in Genshin Impact.)
The hard Resin cap won’t roadblock you in the early portions of the game, but later on, it renders the game virtually unplayable except in short daily bursts. In order to level up your characters past a certain point (there are soft level caps at 20, 40, 50, 60, and so on), you’ll need to Ascend them. Ascension typically costs resources that can be farmed from elite enemies, though you must spend Original Resin to collect those resources.
Weapons are similar — you’ll need to Ascend them to level them up beyond a certain level, which requires resources earned via specific dungeons that rotate their rewards on a daily basis. So not only do you need to log in on specific days to get the materials you want, you also need to spend Original Resin to collect them.
To make matters worse, there are certain bosses that can only be defeated once per week (Stormterror and Andrius, Dominator of Wolves), and collecting rewards from these bosses will cost you 60 Original Resin. It’s absolutely ludicrous, as there’s already a system in place to prevent you from farming some of the best rewards in the game, since these bosses only respawn once a week. The additional Resin requirement just feels like a slap in the face.
At this point, even if I want to grind my character levels up for a while, my progress is roadblocked by this Resin system. It’s not making me want to spend additional money on this game (I would feel super dirty paying real-world money for Resin in Genshin Impact, so I’m straight-up not going to do it). In fact, it’s just making me feel kind of burned out. Genshin Impact is starting to feel like a chore.
I’m not alone in my hatred for the Resin system. Check out the comments on this recent blog post on miHoYo’s offical website. Resin is becoming a huge problem in this game, and it’s potentially causing players to leave it behind, frustrated and angered.
I don’t really understand why this is necessary, as Resin isn’t the game’s main revenue stream. The gacha system, which has you gambling for high-tier weapons and new characters, will definitely keep players spending their hard-earned money. I mean, I even eventually caved and dropped some cash just to see what I would end up winning.
But the Resin system completely undermines this. What’s the point of getting a new S-tier character or massively powerful weapon if I’m not allowed to even use it without spending even more money to level it up? I’m starting to stockpile items and characters that need to be levelled, and at this point, I don’t know that I’ll ever get around to working on those. My party characters must come first, so I typically spend all my resources on them before logging out for the day.
Really, all I want is to be able to spend time playing Genshin Impact. I don’t mind the actual grind part of late-game at all. However, I’m simply not allowed to spend a day grinding for advancement because of the Resin limit, and this has me wondering what the point of all of this even is.
Seriously, miHoYo needs to fix this system. At the very least, there should be a way to raise the hard cap and to increase the rate at which Original Resin is generated. Even better, why not remove the system entirely? There are already daily rewards to log in for, as well as daily challenges. I will keep logging in daily for as long as the game continues to be enjoyable. But the Resin system is killing my enjoyment of Genshin Impact.
For now, I’m sticking with it to see how the next couple updates affect the game, but I have a feeling that my time with Genshin Impact is probably coming to an end very soon. It’s a shame, because there’s so much to love here. But when the game actively punishes me for playing the way I want to play it, I start wondering why I’m not doing something else instead.
