This is stretching things a bit, but I’d like to throw in Skies of Arcadia if you like retro games. They’re also fantasy Sky-ships instead of real ones.
Kind of along the same lines are Air Buccaneers and Guns of Icarus. Both are kind of like Sea of Thieves but with air ships. I don’t know how active the communities are for either these days.
Yes! studies have found that increased hours of gameplay can be associated with higher feelings of loneliness and anxiety, potentially indicating a substitution of social interactions with gaming
I really think Genshin is awful on mobile. Even with a high end phone I had extremely bad performance. I haven’t played Honkai so can’t say anything about that.
To be fair I wouldn’t recommend Genshin at all, I’ve been playing since launch and there’s a lot of FOMO, so just by starting now you already missed many things that will never return (like weapons, events, etc).
I really liked the Nier Reincarnation game and played full f2p. The story telling and the soundtrack is beautiful. The game will be closing in the next months though, which is really sad. :(
Genshin Impact is my main game, I prefer the really polished open world combat, and down to earth stories with an amazing emphasis on being culturally accurate.
Also the game literally has no grind, so idk wtf the other user is saying. 95% of the content is done non-repeatable. Character’s are time gated by an energy system, but there game is incredibly easy and it’s nothing worth worrying about.
Good for you running Domains and Ley Line Blossoms 4 to 8 times a day in 5 minutes. But if you are doing that, then you definitely put a lot of time into farming artifacts already. I wish I could simply run it a couple times per character and be kitted out for good, but they gotta pile up random stats over random stats to get people farming forever.
I'm saying it does take me significantly more than 5 minutes, and that's not even counting getting around the map or Daily Commissions or regular events that also take time, which one might want to do if they want more characters and weapons without paying.
I'm also saying that to have your characters so optimized that it only takes you 5 minutes now, it means you likely grinded much more than 5 minutes a day for a long time, because fast clear times aren't trivial to get, and in this game skilfull play doesn't make up for raw stat numbers as far as clear time goes.
I am saying that solely counting daily grind, my playtime has surpassed hundreds of hours, and this is not hyperbole. I have played for more than a year, so over time even short daily playtime can ammount to that, but lets not downplay how many times you need to run the same XP Leylines, the same Talent Book Domains, the same Artifact Domains, the same Bosses over and over to gather materials to get new characters up to speed with the rest of your team, meaning, usable in gameplay.
God, if I didn't like the game's story so much I'd probably have dropped already from how repetitive and tiresome the grind gets. Like many live service games, it's not even like this is earned naturally by playing however you want, no, you need to go out of your way to grind the same repetitive challenges. Maybe you know games that are even more griindy and tiresome... but I wouldn't exactly say that this means Genshin is free from grind. Not at all.
I would say just don’t start one, these gacha games are probably not the best to start with from the beginning with it’s fomo gacha mechanics and at the same time they want the player to login every day.
But if i have to say something. I don’t know Honkai Impact or the boy game. Between Genshin and Hokai Star Rail, i would say the second one is a better game, but at the same time they quite different. Genshin is an open world exploration action game and Honkai Star Rail is liniar and Turn based. All of these gacha games are extremly grindy.
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