How Much Work Goes Into Creating a Genshin Impact Character?

The playable characters are probably the single most important aspect of Genshin Impact.  The new 5 star released every 3 weeks is what brings a lot of players back to log into the game,  as well as how MiYoHo racks up millions of dollars. But one thing that this game can't  be praised enough for is how great the 4 star characters are. 

I know tBennett has his own cult,  but even the guaranteed free units are solid and can be made even better with some constellations.  With a 5% base pull rate as opposed to the 5 star’s 0.6%, it is extremely easy for free to play  players to get access to these powerful units. On the 1.1 banners with Tartaglia and Zhongli,  we were also blessed with Diona and Xinyan. I like both of these units a lot, so I was  pretty sad when I saw there would not be any new 4 star on Albedo’s banner, and there presumably  won’t be one on Ganyu’s. I couldn’t find where but I think I read somewhere that they still  don’t have any new 4 stars on the Chinese Beta server, so we really don’t have any idea if new  4 stars will even be coming in 1.3 when that comes out in 6 weeks. 

But anyways, the actual  point of this video is that I began to wonder, how much work exactly goes into the creation  of a new character? I have a feeling there’s a lot more than what you might initially think.The most general thing that characters share is their basic animations. Currently there are  5 body types that every playable character in the game falls under. A standard size male and  female (I say standard because this is the size that the main character is), a taller sized male  and female, and the small girls. Characters with the same body type share animations for walking,  running, sprinting, jumping, landing, rolling, climbing, falling, gliding, and getting hit. Out  of these, the one most unique to their body type is the landing animation. 

The tall males have this  cool superhero landing while the smaller males have this kinda silly looking stick landing. For  weapon animations, each character has a completely unique string of basic attacks. There are a few  rare cases however, where 4 stars from the same region share animations for some of their attacks.  Interestingly, all characters of the same weapon type have the same plunging Attack. 

I guess that  kinda makes sense though because I can’t think of that many different ways to do a falling attack.  Also, each character has a unique animation for making their weapon disappear, and I think these  ones look incredibly cool. Of course, every character has a unique animation for their  elemental skill and elemental burst. 5 star characters (and Barbara for some reason) have  a cinematic shot on their elemental bursts, and some have a background pop up. Character’s have  up to two different idle animations. A majority of characters got their second in the 1.1 update,  Xinyan got hers in the 1.2 update, and maybe one day Kaeya will get his. On the character menu there are quite a few unique animations you won’t see anywhere  else in the game. 

When you open the weapon tab, you’ll see a slick animation of your character  pulling out their weapon and holding it in a way where you can see it clearly.  When you go to talents there is also another pose which matches up to the character’s  personality. Some of my personal favorites are Noelle’s blush and Beidou’s hands-on-the-hips. For  both of the animations I just mentioned, some characters share them, but many are completely  unique. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like 5 star characters are guaranteed to have unique ones.Each character has a design with a crazy amount of fine detail. Each character has an official  full body portrait, although these do not show up in the game anywhere as far as I can know.  There is also a cool art with the character showing off their power, and you’ll see these  on the various banners as well as when you pull them. Each character has this design translated  to a well made 3D model. 

The characters in this game are all extremely different from one another,  but one thing that seems to be a recurring theme is flowy hair or clothing. I’ve seen some people  say that they think it’s boring and makes the characters look the same, but I think that’s  pretty ridiculous. I see it as a trademark of Genshin Impact character design at this point.  Last thing about visual design which I think has gone criminally overlooked is character eyes.  Some anime have characters with varied eye designs but some have  each one look exactly the same. I’m glad Genshin Impact falls under the former.You probably weren’t expecting this one, but it’s actually pretty important.  So each character has numeric values for their base HP, attack, and defense,  which scale with level. Each character also has their own unique stat which scales with ascension  level. This could include elemental damage, a crit stat, healing percentage, and so on.  

All characters have a base crit rate of 5 percent and crit damage percent of 50 at all levels.  In terms of attacks, there is a percentage value for each hit of a character’s basic attack combo,  their charged attack, and plunge attack, which determines how much damage they do in relation  to the character’s attack stats. Elemental skills obviously vary a lot, but most need to factor  in the skill damage, duration, cooldown, and energy particle production. For elemental burst,  you generally have the skill damage, cooldown, and energy cost. Of course,  for both of these abilities there are scalings for levels up to 15. Passive talents unlocked  through ascension often only change certain values or restrictions to character abilities,  but some also add minor changes to character mechanics. Such an example would  be Xiangling’s Guoba dropping a damage boosting pepper on despawn. 

Constellations work in pretty  much the same way. Characters also have that one passive talent that works outside of combat,  which can range from super useful, to pretty awful. All of these things are very important to  the cohesiveness of the character’s kit, which is why there is a Chinese Beta for players to  help MiYoHo make sure they adjust things right. I don’t know what happened with Zhongli, but usually  they do a good job of making characters feel strong while being pretty balanced.In terms of lore, each character gets a lot of love. On the character screen you can open  up the profile menu, which directly explains their lore. It starts with Character Details,  which gives a very brief general idea of what the character is about. Next they have 5 different  stories so you get to know quite a bit about that character’s past. 

There is one story that is not  about the character themselves, but is closely related to them. And last but not least, the  story of how they got their vision. I definitely recommend you go read these for your favorite  characters if you have them unlocked by increasing their friendship. But obviously friendship takes a  long time to increase, so you can just go on the wiki and read if you want. However, not  everyone wants to read, I get that, so thankfully Genshin impact also has story quests which focus  around a single playable character. In these you get to learn more about their personality  and motivations first hand. 

Unfortunately there are only 14 in the game right now, but new story  quests will be added for more characters, and there will be more acts added to old ones. So  that’s something very exciting to look forward to.This is also a great time to tell you that if you  don’t know, Genshin Impact has a manga. You can read chapters 1 to 13 on the official Genshin  Impact website, but for some reason chapters 14 to 16 are not officially translated to English.  So if you do decide to read you’ll need to look up the fan translations. I recommend it,  it’s a relatively short read, it’s interesting, and it makes Amber look extremely cute.The voice acting in this game is absolutely top notch. 

I mean, like 90% of the reason why I want  Xiao is because I want to hear the voice of Kirito. I personally play the game in  Japanese because I’m a huge weeb, but I think the English voice actors really do  a great job of portraying these characters as well. Each character has multiple voice  lines that you can hear while playing with them, but they also have a ton of voice  lines that you won’t really hear in game. These ones are about various random things,  but they are definitely interesting to listen to. I especially like the ones where you can  hear what the character thinks about other characters. It really makes the world feel real.

To make a new character,  you need: the character design, official artwork, the 3D model, weapon animations for  attacking and resetting, animations for the elemental skill and burst, idle animations,  character menu animations (may be reused), damage scalings (1-15 for attacks, elemental skill, and  elemental burst), passive talents (2 in combat and 1 out of combat), constellations (2 that upgrade  talents and 4 that don’t), lore (8+ stories), and fully voice acted voice lines (in 4 languages) I hope you see that there is a lot of work to be done to create even a single character,  so getting two of them every 3 weeks is kinda crazy.