Production and Development Staff
The staff presented in the table are people featured in official Genshin Impact behind-the-scenes videos and Developer Insight articles.
| Name | Role | Featured Work |
|---|---|---|
| Xiaolong | Animation Department | Xiao |
| D | Art Department | Xiao |
| SS | Art Department | Xiao |
| Ziyuan | Art Department | Liyue |
| Cloud | 3D Character Design | Yun Jin |
| TT | 3D Character Design | Azhdaha, Yun Jin |
| Pai Daxing | 3D Effects | Azhdaha |
| Seeyu | Audio Production | Yun Jin |
| Aquaria | Combat Designer | Various |
| Hyze | Combat Designer | Inazuma |
| Nao Zhong | Combat Designer | Azhdaha |
| Jige | Combat Gameplay | Hypostases |
| Weiwei | Character Concept Artist | Yun Jin |
| Xiao Luohao | Head of Creative Concept and Writing Team | Various |
| CiCi | Creative Concept and Writing Team | Xiao |
| Dou | Creative Concept and Writing Team | Yun Jin |
| Manny Calavera | Creative Concept and Writing Team | Azhdaha |
| Zhongyuan | Creative Concept and Writing Team | Xiao |
| Haidi | Environment Art Director | Various |
| Cissie | Environment Art | Inazuma |
| Bu Yiding | Environment Concept Artist | Liyue, Dragonspine |
| Jef | Environment Concept Artist | Enkanomiya |
| Liu Yan | Environment Concept Artist | Liyue |
| Qiangge | Environment Concept Artist | Jueyun Karst |
| Shaoyou | In-Game Animation | Yun Jin |
| Xiaoxiong | In-Game Animation | Yun Jin |
| YIN | In-Game Animation | Azhdaha |
| Jason | Level Artist | Dihua Marsh, Mt. Qingce |
| Lin Zi | Level Artist | Jueyun Karst |
| Lu Yang | Level Artist | Guili Plains, Wangshu Inn |
| Maizi | Level Artist | Dragonspine |
| Yan Jiang | Level Artist | Mt. Tianheng |
| Yiyi | Level Artist | Enkanomiya |
| Xiao Ao | Level Designer | Dragonspine |
| Xue | Level Designer | Enkanomiya |
| A Le | Modeling Artist | Dragonspine |
| Lezhou | Monster Designer | Enkanomiya |
| Suisu | Monster Designer | Azhdaha |
| Helen | System Designer | Various in-game events |
| Hao Nan | Technical Artist | Dragonspine |
The Adventure Comes to PlayStation®4 on September 28
The Adventure Comes to PlayStation®4 on September 28 | Genshin Impact: Behind the Scenes
The wait is over, Travelers! Come September 28, Genshin Impact will be available to players all around the world on PlayStation®4, iOS, Android, and PC. Let's begin our new adventure together.
So how did miHoYo overcome numerous obstacles to finally bring this adventure in the massive yet detailed land of Teyvat to the PlayStation®4 platform? What ingenuity and thought processes went into the development of Genshin Impact? If you've ever been curious about such questions, Traveler, let's go behind the scenes of Genshin Impact in this video!
Forrest Liu, General President: Genshin Impact is our first open-world action RPG. It is aimed at players on consoles, mobile devices, and PC, and it is intended for a global audience. miHoYo was founded in Shanghai in 2012, and we released the mobile game Honkai Impact 3rd in September 2016. We supported and updated this game throughout 2017 and 2018 and we even published a PC version early this year, which proved to be immensely popular among players worldwide. But "out of imagination" has always been one of our first principles in making games. As such, we had begun thinking, even in 2017: "Wouldn't it be interesting if we could one day make a game that wasn't limited by platforms which you could play either alone or with friends, and in which you could explore a sprawling, beautiful open world rich with the poetry and style of many lands?"
Zhenzhong Yi, Technical Director: Creating a multi-platform open world is an exceedingly complicated undertaking. We need to take PC, mobile devices, and consoles into account and understand their strengths and weaknesses to ensure that the game we are designing will run smoothly on all of them while taking advantage of their unique hardware features. For example, when we were developing the graphics together with the art team, we had to first lay down a common procedure for solving problems across all platforms and look for the technical implementation method most suited to each individual platform, and then set graphical design specifications for each platform based on this procedure. Only then could we begin creating the game features and art assets. Once these were complete, we still needed to check and assess them, so we developed automated detection tools for multiple platforms.
Another aspect was the fact that our team lacked practical experience and was rather young, while the PS4 was quite ingeniously designed as a game-development-tailored platform. When combined with the very thin driver layer, this made for a lot of freedom in development, but also meant greater difficulty in efficient development and higher demands on developers. The practical matters of feature development were just the first step, Utilizing the PS4's hardware features to optimize the game took up even more time and effort. Fortunately, our team has always been full of vim and vigor, and they solved many problems that were reported to us during the beta test period.
Forrest Liu, General President: That said, the PS4 R&D process also allowed us to continuously refine many details. For example, the PS4's outstanding GPU allowed us to experiment with more rendering processes and their implementation, all the better to build the immersion necessary for the open-world experience.
Zhenzhong Yi, Technical Director: We tried using different techniques to create rich dynamic lighting and shadows, through which we hope to faithfully display the abundance of natural and man-made beauty in Genshin Impact's environments. The game world has a 24-hour cycle, which is why we implemented a 24-hour dynamic lighting schema that presents different appearances of the same locations as time passes. The characters, architecture, and geography all have dynamic shadows. To enhance the three-dimensional feel of places in shadow, we used various techniques to achieve a high-quality ambient occlusion, allowing characters and objects to cast secondary shadows even when they were in the shade to prevent a more floaty look. We also used a mixed SMAA+TAA anti-aliasing technique to make the overall image look more exquisite.
In addition, different weather conditions change the lighting. We use volumetric fog of different densities in different regions or times periods to enrich the presentation of in-game land-forms. This fog forms hazy halos of spreading light when it comes into contact with local lighting, which increases the atmosphere of the scene. Objects blocking the sunlight or moonlight can also create beautiful "god ray" effects. Other than time, weather, and other natural factors, more man-made lighting details come into play in cities and streets. For example, we could have playable characters and NPCs cast different shadows under different light sources, and once our shading techniques had improved, we also wound up supporting up to a hundred sources of local light at once. The cluster deferred lighting technique further allowed us to render 500 lights at once on screen, which allowed us to highlight the unique, dazzling beauty of Liyue's Lantern Rite.
Forrest Liu, General President: After three whole years, and through the efforts of over 400 employees, we are very pleased to finally show Genshin Impact to you all this fall! Through Genshin Impact, we hope to display a world that is "grand yet fine." So far, we have developed a 20-30 square-kilometer wide map filled with all kinds of monsters, domains, puzzles, and resources, and this only includes the first two of the seven major cities in Teyvat. But the true charm of a large open world lies in the details and minutiae, and we have built upwards from there to make this world feel real. An example of this is our modeling of character and NPC behavior and lifestyles. A child playing alone on a bridge feeds the pigeons, and a lazy knight dozes off under the city walls. As evening comes, lamps light up everywhere and a bard comes to the cemetery behind the cathedral to sing for his daughter. Such peaceful but by no means ordinary lives are there for players to understand, discover, and even change. We hope to make Genshin Impact a beautiful and inviting fantasy world full of different cultural styles.
The first city players will encounter, Mondstadt honors freedom and chivalry, and its visual design incorporates many European elements. Liyue on the other hand is a marriage of "Eastern beauty" with the world of Genshin Impact, a romantic fantasy based on real scenery. Here, many Chinese scenes of antiquity intersect — the pine and bamboo gardens of Suzhou, the ancient canal towns of Huizhou, the otherworldly natural beauty of Huanglong, and even the symbolism of reeds, which often appear in period films and martial arts flicks. They give Liyue and its surrounding regions a dramatic sensibility and natural beauty, communicating a spirit of Eastern fantasy to the player.
To let players get a real feel for Genshin Impact's world, we also deepened the elemental reaction system within the game and organically combined the natural phenomena oft-seen in reality with swords-and-sorcery fantasy. We hope that players will be able to resonate more greatly with the world through observing their surroundings and integrating it with their abilities during exploration, combat, and co-op play. Changing characters during combat will allow each one's elemental skills to interact with one another and create some stunnng chain reactions. In co-op mode, players can further enjoy the combat experience based on other players and the environment.
How Genshin Impact differs from traditional console games is that ours is a long-term operation. We will continue to add fun and exciting content post-release, bringing players larger areas to explore and new game modes and events. At the same time, we will also continue to listen to player feedback and further improve the PS4 version, constantly optimizing and stabilizing the game to upgrade its technical performance and bring players a better single- and multi-player experience. Yet more features are in the development pipeline, such as an HDR display more suited to Genshin Impact's rendering style. A soon-to-come version will also greatly enhance the rendering of characters, and the scenery will also be improved. We are very proud to have invested Genshin Impact with many ideas. Genshin Impact will come to the PlayStation®4 on September 28, and will support 13 different languages. We have also prepared unique content and pre-registration rewards for PlayStation®4 players. We would like to invite all players to join us as "Travelers" — to experience and explore this lovely fantasy world!
The Adventure Continues on PlayStation®5 on April 28
The Adventure Continues on PlayStation®5 on April 28 | Genshin Impact
Zhenzhong Yi, Technical Director: Hi! I'm Zhenzhong Yi, and today I want to tell you a bit more about the PlayStation®5 release of Genshin Impact, coming on April 28! For anyone new to the game, Genshin Impact is an open-world action RPG that takes place in the vast magical land of Teyvat. You play as a Traveler from another world who has been separated from their twin. You embark on a journey to find them, and along the way you gradually discover the secrets and fate of this exotic world.
The PlayStation®5 hardware provides an ideal platform to experience Genshin Impact, making the world of Teyvat even more detailed, more vivid, and more immersive. That's why we wanted to bring the PlayStation®5 version to players as soon as we could. At the same time, we've been working to develop various functions to fully utilize this next-gen console in the long run. We created a graphics library completely from the ground up and we built a customized file-loading system to take advantage of the powerful SSD of the PlayStation®5. So in future updates, we will have much more potential to elevate the visual quality and game performance.
We are only scratching the surface. With Genshin Impact, we want to transport you into a visually stunning and culturally diverse world. The all-new graphics library allows us to pack even more details into the game world. Look closely at your surroundings, and the high-res texture will tell you a unique story in every tiny detail. Raise your eyes to the horizon, and the enhanced Level of Detail distance will bring you an impressive view of landmarks near and far. Even better, the PlayStation®5 allows you to run all these details in native 4K resolution. If you have an HDR display, with our HDR support, you can enjoy an even more vibrant look at the world.
Genshin Impact features massive and changing landscapes. So when you traverse the open-world and domains, faster loading will make your adventure so much smoother. With the PlayStation®5's SSD and our tailor-made file-loading system, teleporting from one place to another now takes just seconds. You can jump right into domains almost instantaneously, ready to explore and fight! We've also prepared an exclusive version of Qingyun Peak only for PlayStation®5 players! This mountain peak has been one of the most popular places in the game among both our players and team, so we've given this location a bit of a makeover. We hope you like the surprise!
The release of Genshin Impact on the PlayStation®5 is just the beginning of the new console experience. We've only been to two of the seven major cities in Teyvat so far, so there is so much more content to look forward to. Okay, Travelers, that's it for now! Don't forget to come check us out on April 28!
[원신 온라인 쇼케이스] 더 큰 모험의 세계로!
J.Hyun: Hello everybody, I'm J.Hyun from miHoYo's Overseas Operations team, and your host for today. We're very happy and very excited to bring all you players the latest news concerning Genshin Impact. A lot of players have been looking forward to this interview in particular, so we've been all the more excited to prepare it. Actually, this is my first time as host, so I'm rather nervous. If there's anything you feel is lacking, please do understand. Today, I am happy to invite miHoYo's General President, Forrest Liu, onstage to talk to everyone about the latest happenings in Genshin Impact and our future plans. First off, please introduce yourself to everyone.
Da Wei: Hello, everyone. I'm the one players call Dawei. I apologize that I was unable to go to Korea to meet with the players in person due to the pandemic, and that I'm only able to use online means to share a bit of the latest Genshin Impact content with you all.
J.Hyun: Well, let's now begin the interview proper. First, could you briefly introduce our product?
Da Wei: Genshin Impact is an original open-world action RPG developed by miHoYo. This game takes place in the fantasty world of Teyvat, where the seven elements converge. In this world, anyone can become a god, and those who are chosen by the gods are granted Visions, which allow them to control an element. You, the player, are a mysterious traveler who will embark on epic adventures in this world, where you will meet friends with unique personalities and abilities along the way. They will help you fight intimidating enemies, find your lost kin, and unravel all the mysteries of the world of Genshin Impact. Genshin Impact will have an all-new, independent story. In it, we have combined an open-world adventure, a wide variety of available characters, rich character enhancement systems, a play-style based on elemental reactions and the ability to play the game solo or in co-op mode. We hope that players will enjoy it.
J.Hyun: Very interesting! Although some players were able to experience Genshin Impact in advance during our several closed beta tests, there are many players who were unable to do so. Could you give the players some specifics as to the special features of the game?
Da Wei: Firstly, Genshin Impact is a brand new IP of ours, and has a very large world. The game is an open world composed of seven nations that players can explore. The main storyline is, as stated before, searching for lost kin and uncovering the secrets of the continent of Teyvat. At the same time, it also has rich character storylines that will help the player understand the experiences and combat styles of their companions. There are also a lot of interesting mini-games in the larger game, such as flying tests and cooking, which will add a lot of pleasant surprises to the player's exploration of the game.
Next, Genshin Impact blends an anime-inspired aesthetic with the culture of the various regions. Whenever players come to a new city, the characters, the setting, the scenery, and the music should all provide a completely new experience. For example, the first city is Mondstadt, the City of Freedom, which has a European aesthetic. The other is Liyue Harbor, which is inspired by scenic Eastern fantasy. There, we combined the pines and bamboos of Suzhou, the canal towns of Huizhou, the otherworldly beauty of Huanglong and the symbolism of reeds, which often appear in period films, to give the place a dramatic yet natural beauty, and communicate that spirit of Eastern fantasy to the player.
At the same time, Genshin Impact has a great number of characters for the player to choose from and has a very well fleshed-out character enhancement system. You can increase their fighting strength or strengthen their elemental skills by leveling them up, switching their weapons, and more. Every character corresponds to one of the seven elements: Hydro, Pyro, Electro, and so on. By switching between characters, you can start elemental reactions, which will give you greater variation in combat styles and deal greater damage to enemies. The elements can also interact with the environment. For example, when Hydro meets Pyro, it Vaporizes, and when Cryo meets Pyro, it Melts. You can use the elements to unlock secrets, explore further, and accomplish all sorts of other goals.
Finally, players can switch between single-player and multiplayer modes as they please. Players can choose to explore Teyvat solo and have a more immersive gaming experience, or they can invite friends to challenge tougher domains (by this we mean dungeons) and bosses together. Overall, Genshin has a lot of special features that players will have to experience more deeply for themselves.
J.Hyun: We've heard about quite a few of the game's main special features. Now, you said earlier that Genshin is an open-world action RPG. Our previous game, Honkai Impact 3rd was an action RPG as well, so that could be said to be familiar territory, but the "open-world" part, by contrast, is unfamiliar to miHoYo. How did the thought come to try this rather challenging genre? We'd like to hear about the story behind the development of this game.
Da Wei: This can be traced back to our company's creative philosophy. When I and two university classmates created this company in 2011, our motivation for making games came from our love for the ACG (Anime, Comic, and Games) genre. From the beginning, we had one core starting point for game development: "something new, something exciting, something out of imagination." Every time we sit down to develop a core product, we will think about how to create a game that will surpass user expectations.
When Honkai Impact 3rd went online and achieved a measure of results in September 2016, we began to think — and continued to think for around half a year — about what our next product was going to look like. For most of the first half of 2017, we were very anxious. What sort of product would we find "exciting" and "out of imagination?" So we returned to the beginning, to the question of "what sort of game would we want to play?" During that period, the thing we were playing most was open-world games, and these games all featured huge worlds and exploration experiences that surpassed our expectations. So, since we want to play these games, and are willing to make this sort of game, why don't we just do it? It was with this simple feeling that we began working on this project in 2017. But we realized later on that we had greatly underestimated the difficulty of creating an open world.
J.Hyun: Did many unexpected difficulties and challenges present themselves during development?
Da Wei: That's right. Designing the open world was our most foundational issue. Whether it was the people in charge of the Genshin Impact project, or the average miHoYo employee, our understanding of open-world development was very shallow compared to our familiarity with what we had done before. If you consider the open-world games that everyone is familiar with in today's market, whether it be Grand Theft Auto, The Witcher 3, The Elder Scrolls, or Zelda, the studios behind these games are some of the finest in the world. They have developers who have been in the industry for over 30 years, development teams that have been working together for a decade, maybe even two. They have the tools, the experience, and an understanding of those games that we could not match. Every piece of an open world is intricately linked. For example, if the team in charge of terrain systems optimizes something just a little, they will find that everything up the chain has been thrown into chaos. As such, there is a lot of content that the team has to constantly communicate with each other to hash out.
J.Hyun: So, returning to Genshin Impact itself — if you were to describe the basis of Genshin Impact's world in a short phrase, how would you do it?
Da Wei: Grand but fine.
J.Hyun: Can you elaborate on that, specifically?
Da Wei: The "grandness" is self-explanatory. At present, we have already developed a 20-30 square-kilometer wide map that is filled with all kinds of monsters, domains, puzzles, and resources, and we are only at two out of the seven great cities. The "fineness," however, is how we begin building a believable world starting from minute details. We reckon first with the lifestyles and behavioral standards of characters and NPCs, and we engage in further development from there. For example, in Mondstadt, a child plays alone on a bridge by feeding the pigeons, and a knight dozes off under the city walls. As evening comes, the lamps light up everywhere and a bard comes to the cemetery behind the cathedral to sing for his daughter — the peaceful but by no means ordinary lives of the people of Mondstadt are there for players to understand, discover, and even change.
J.Hyun: So will future cities and maps also follow this same "grand but fine" principle?
Da Wei: They must.
J.Hyun: Thank you. Now, we've introduced the main features of Genshin Impact as a game, talked about the backstory behind its development, and also about our president's development philosophy. Genshin is highly anticipated by many players for its beautiful, high-quality artwork, and many journalists have also asked us a wide variety of questions. We will now begin to answer these questions.
J.Hyun: The first question concerns future content releases. Recently, Honkai Impact 3rd had a version update. Will Genshin Impact do something similar by adding content at fixed intervals via version updates?
Da Wei: All of our products will continue with a long-term operation module. Honkai Impact 3rd has had its 3rd anniversary, and we are still constantly adding content to it. For example, every month and a half, it will receive a version update that includes new stories, new heroes, new ways to play — in essence, this is almost the same as making a TV drama. We have continued to do this for the past few years, using an updated version of that TV drama thought process to update our games and continuously putting out high-quality, novel, and interesting content. Our investment in our products will only increase once they come online, not decrease.
J.Hyun: For the players who are watching the video right now, could you reveal some small part of the plan for Genshin Impact's future updates?
Da Wei: The game hasn't been released yet and we're already asking for new content, huh? Well, first off, we will take player suggestions and feedback once the game is released, and continually optimize the game. In the future, we will add more characters and stories, in addition to creating more avenues for social gameplay and various other gaming experiences. Examples of this would be a "home" system, co-op activities that allow even more people to participate, and the optimization of the experience of farming Domains. As new content is added into the game, we will add the various enhancement resources to the open world, and extend that open-world experience to as many aspects of the game as we can. We will also be adding dynamic mechanics to gameplay within Domains to keep them fresh and emphasize both the excitement of clearing stages and the strategic nature of party setups. Future versions will also add the home and costume systems.
J.Hyun: That's a lot of new content you have prepared. Other than gameplay, this closed beta test period also saw the release of the Lantern Rite event in the Liyue region. This event was very popular among closed beta test players. Will there be similar large scale festivals of this kind in the future?
Da Wei: Definitely. We were very pleased to see that Lantern Rite was well-received by the players. In the future, we will organize large in-game events based on the game universe or on important festival days in the real world.
J.Hyun: I'm excited already! From what you've said, I can already feel Genshin Impact's beautiful, peaceful, and therapeutic gameplay. But perhaps mobile players prefer systems of a more competitive bent. Are there any plans to add competitive content in the future, such as Honkai Impact 3rd's ranked competitive mode?
Da Wei: Our original intention was to give players an immersive open-world experience, and so we have provided a solo mode as well as a co-op mode for players to invite their friends to go on adventures together with them.
J.Hyun: Other than taking up the new challenge of creating an open-world mobile game, this new concept of creating a cross-platform game that can be played on mobile devices, PC, and the PS4 has attracted some questions from journalists. Why has Genshin Impact chosen simultaneous development across multiple platforms?
Da Wei: For this, we need to go back to our original intention for creating miHoYo. We wanted to create something that would surpass the player's expectations, and to let players from more platforms experience the game we made. Actually, Honkai Impact 3rd slowly began to come to PC toward the end of last year. To our company, developing games for consoles was at once a challenge and our dream, and that dream has finally come true.
J.Hyun: In that case, what challenges did you face while developing this game for multiple platforms?
Da Wei: Genshin Impact is the first of miHoYo's projects to be developed for PC, console, and mobile platforms simultaneously. Our lack of experience with consoles and the huge workload and resource management that came with a multi-platform release were the main challenges that we encountered in the development process. Fortunately, a multi-platform release has always remained the team's unwavering objective. This was the core component of our ability to overcome all such difficulties.
J.Hyun: Up till now, you've told us a lot of things. Now, for the moment all the players have been waiting for, when can we expect to be able to play the game? Is there anything you can tell us about this much-anticipated piece of news today?
Da Wei: Genshin Impact will be released on PC and mobile platforms on September 28, 2020. The release date for PS4 will be announced at a later date.
J.Hyun: Thank you. Genshin Impact's pre-registration page should already be up. This pre-registration will be global, and all servers will receive certain prizes if certain pre-registration milestones are met. Additionally, our official website and social media platforms will hold various events, which we hope that players will take part in. Finally, do you have anything else to share with all the players?
Genshin Impact: Crafting an Anime-Style Open World
Differentiating from the photorealistic game world, Genshin Impact presents a non-realistic anime-style open world. Haoyu 'Hugh' Cai, the Producer of Genshin Impact and CEO of miHoYo, shares some essential thoughts on the significant difference of composition and execution in these two art styles. The presentation covers a range of ideas behind Genshin Impact including the fundamental logic of choosing the anime art style and art core pillars, the path of character and setting design, the pipeline of creating an anime-style open world, and the key features helping game design. The Producer of Genshin Impact reveals more details of crafting this global hit as his debut at GDC 2021.
Hello everyone. Hope you are all doing well today. It is an honor to be here at the Game Developers Conference to present you on the topic, "Genshin Impact: Crafting an Anime Style Open World." So before we start, please allow me give you [sic] a brief introduction about myself. My name is Haoyu Cai. I'm the Game Producer and CEO of miHoYo. So you can find my contact here. So feel free to email me if you have any questions after today's presentation. So today, I'm going to cover these topics in the presentation. First of all, I'm going to give you a brief history of Genshin Impact, and talk about the core philosophy of the game. After that, we are going to dive into why we think characters are so important for an anime style game. As most of you may know that we have a lot more playable characters in Genshin Impact. And I'm going to tell you how we create and design our characters. And lastly, I will explain how we go about building this anime style NPR world.
Brief History and Core Philosophy of Genshin Impact
So first, let me give you a simple overview of why we want [sic] to make Genshin Impact. Definitely it's not because we have been mentioned and we have noticed that open world games are popular. It is because our company has a goal in mind, and which is to create the Honkai Universe. Something like meta universe we mentioned recently, I guess. But we first had this idea in 2014, long before we start [sic] Genshin Impact. It is not difficult to see our goal if you look at our history. To see the games we made, from Guns Girls to Honkai Impact and Genshin Impact, which I am the producer of all three till they launch. [sic] From our first side-scrolling action shooter game, to our first third-person action game, and finally, to our first open world game, Genshin Impact. We strive to create a more immersive gaming world.
When we start [sic] the Genshin Impact project, we want [sic] to create a new IP based on what we learned from Honkai Impact, and build a more user-friendly world. As you can see, Genshin Impact is available to a broad range of audience. For example, in early year [sic] of Honkai Impact, there was no availability of male characters, but you can do so in Genshin Impact since the very beginning. Also, rather than having a sci-fi or hardcore themed setting, we hope to create a visually stunning and beautiful world instead, as you can also tell with Genshin Impact. As you know, they [sic] are seven nations in Genshin Impact. So let me take Liyue as an example. Here is the concept art of Lantern Rite, which is a festival in Liyue. I guess maybe some of you already joined this event during the [sic] February.
In Genshin Impact, when we create different nations in the game, we try to integrate elements from various cultures in reality. Under the fantasy world concept, we have a motivation to enrich the world with diversity of different culture styles. So players from all around the world may find something fun and interesting in the game. For instance, in Liyue, although it is heavily inspired by Chinese culture, we hope that not only can Chinese players feel connected to Liyue, but also the players from different backgrounds enjoying the ancient and living culture from a fresh perspective. So for those who might not be familiar with Chinese culture, when they think about China, I guess panda, maybe Kung Fu, or the Three Kingdoms may come first to their mind. With Liyue here, we want to present something different, something new. Obviously, in my point of view, Chinese culture has much more than these popular concepts mentioned above. So we integrated some iconic Chinese landscapes into the schematics of Liyue. Such as Guilin, with its hues and waters. You can find the similar things in Liyue. And the Zhangjiajie, with its picturesque peaks and rocks, like the mountains in Liyue. we want to build a fantasy world that contains these beautiful things, which is our goal to let players may [sic] find their inner peace when they play in Genshin Impact. And for global players, we hope that everyone can feel the common beauty together. Of course, most of our developers are born and raised in China, and we immersed ourselves in Chinese culture. We want to refine what we are familiar with into something that is easy to understand, and then deliver it to global players. We hope that global players, they will also enjoy and share the beauty of Liyue and the culture elements that we integrated, even without much knowledge of Chinese culture. So, for example, like Liyue, it is a nation with agriculture civilization. We used the [sic] Geo as the element of it to reflect the characteristic of the city and its pursuit of peace.
So for now, we only released Mondstadt and Liyue so far, two of the seven nations in Teyvat. The third city, Inazuma, will come available in a few days. As said, we want to create a fantasy world filled with culture diversity. We believe that anime art style allows us to collaborate and integrated [sic] more culture element into a visually stunning world.
Why Character Design Is So Important for an Anime Style Game, and How We Make It
The characters and the world of Teyvat are indeed important carriers of the concept of the diversity. So, next, let's talk about the character [sic] in Genshin Impact. Before diving in, let me answer a question. How many playable characters in Genshin Impact? I think maybe you know the answer, actually. For now, the answer is 33, exclude the amount of the player. So I don't have enough space in this page to show you all of the characters. And in a few days, after we update to version 2.0, there will be 36. And we expected to add about approximately 17 characters per year. So for an open-world RPG game, it really seems a lot.
In this chart, it is easily [sic] for you to see all the characters in different element categories. Character is one of the most important aspects of the game. Not only because each character carries the unique gameplay and the element, but also, it represents culture characteristics. So why are characters so important in Genshin Impact, and why is it so important to keep up the consistence [sic] of our character updates? I will list several very important points here. First of all, characters are one of the most desired content for our players, which makes it essential for us to keep updates, to fulfill our players' demands. No doubt, the multi-characters gameplay. This form is inherited from Japanese card games. Before we launched the game, we were also worried about whether Western players would accept this form. The result exceeded our expectation. It shows that both Eastern and Western players in Genshin Impact, they like to collect multi-characters. And secondly, in Genshin Impact, the world and the storytelling revolved around characters, which has a different focus from some triple A games that emphasize highly on cinematic narration. Based on my understanding of the triple A games, or including some popular TV series, and animes, those productions prioritize the plot line. The characters are serving the development of the plot. But from the very beginning, when we start Genshin Impact, we are trying to create it with parallel and multi-narratives to this, to dissipate the stories of characters in a massive, vast world. Which is quite different from those examples I mentioned above.
And finally, and the most importantly, characters serve as the foundation for our commercialization. Genshin Impact is a free-to-play title. In addition to some characters, a large portion of the game's content, including the world exploration, quests, all the quests, and various events can [sic] with no charges. While some players have a relative most can play [sic] experience, we also heard someone may complain that they are getting stuck in certain adventure levels, which comes down to the issue of insufficiency. Insufficiency with our content production. So this situation can be improved if we are more effective at creating new contents. And of course, we are working on it right now.
So to illustrate how we design characters, let me take Xiao as an example. This is Xiao. Yeah. Xiao is an important playable character in game. He is an adeptus, and the only remaining member of the five yakshas dispatched by Morax to subdue the demonic spirits that plagued Liyue. According to our character pipeline, first, we confirm the world setting and where the character live [sic] in. And then any member from any team, maybe our team, design team, NRP [sic] team, IP team. And our team means writers. Yeah. If any of them have ideas from, for the new characters, they can bring it up for group discussion during the production. We always insist on collective creations, especially in the early stage. The final decision of a character's design was not from any single person. It's made by group. Honestly, we don't have a typical art director or creative director in our team. And I guess that that [sic] is why I am here today to give the lecture.
So in the group, we evaluate the idea from aspects, including but not limited to art, settings, gameplay, and starting with player's preference. Afterwards, we follow the same procedure to proceed with character creation. When the character's concept is settled, we started to implement it. Our goal is to ensure the characters look as good as the original character concept while in game. This picture is the drawing of a character in three views. Xiao's— Drawing of Xiao in three views. And, this is a character with finalized 3D model and texture assets. We review the model from an orthogonal perspective in game to make sure it looks exactly the same as the original concept. As well as having reasonable tessellation, topology, and follow our texture standards. Following in that, we will continue with combat and movement design, action designs, and also integrating with gameplay design to ensure the ultimate visual effects in the game world.
Okay. In order to achieve this goal, many technical and artistic details must be confirmed. And the following are a few of the most important. First and foremost, as I mentioned before, the models and textures must be authored as perfectly one-to-one recreations of the concept art. This is the basic requirement. And, secondly, given the anime art style we created, determinator, you can see this in the video, determinator between light and shadow on the face must be good-looking enough. And the normal physical base, the shading cannot accommodate this. So as a result, we created hand-dependent shadow masks, specifically for the face, which can be adjust [sic] automatically based on the direction of them in light. This is the effect of the dynamic light map. In the video, you can see that. The artist can control the shape of the shade on the [sic] every light directions. From the front, or from the side, the artist can totally control the shape of the shade on the face. So we can make sure the shadow on the face could be good-looking anytime, from any direction.
And, another point worth mentioning is that in game, the characters and scenes are rendered independently using two different render pipelines. There [sic] are rendered separately. We used the different rendering pipeline for the scenes. Of course. Because taking into account time of the day, weather changes, and the complexity of the environments. However, because there are many complicated NPR stylization requirements for the characters, we decided to continue to use the forward rendering pipeline to ensure that the character can always show the effect that the artists want in the games. So, because this allows us to control all the lighting effects and the impact that they have easily. Maybe render the character and the scene separately sounds a little weird, but we can show you an example later. For example, while character shadow is primarily determined by one single light source, the transition of the shadow can be artificially set based on material settings, light intensity, and mass curvature in order to achieve the best shadow transition performance. The color— The color in the darker areas can also become shown based on the color of the environment and the artist's preferred preference. [sic] Let me show you the light of the scenes first to better support our 24-hour cycle and dynamic render system. We don't use any fixed lighting in Genshin Impact. All light are dynamic. The video shows how our image-based lighting and ambient lighting component changes throughout the day and night. And as you can see, when local lights turn up at night. Yeah, we can see there is a lamp. The local light turned on. They also make contributions to both direct and indirect light as well in the video. Okay. And for character shading, our character shading has a very unique style. While keeping a cartoonish look, we also apply real time lighting onto characters. But environmental light condition changes, characters will also get affected. You can tell from the video. You can tell from the video. When Eula— Here— When Eula walk [sic] in, walks under the tree, the tree leaves cast the shadows on her body. Yeah. Okay. That's it again.
How We Build an Anime Style NPR World
Yes. So, after talking about the character, following that, let's move on the creation of Genshin Impact world. [sic] We built a world composed of seven nations from the start of the project. And the world will be updated on a long-term, based on an annual agenda. As a result, how to create a stylized world? That becomes critical. So, after settling on the basic concept of the world, we encountered some hardships creating the art style. This is the concept art of Inazuma. As you can see, we intend to create a world with anime rendering style. Following this idea, our artists create many concept [sic] on their own, like this picture. Yes, this is the concept art of Inazuma. So now when we have this concept, our job is to recreate it in game. However, considering the TOD [time of day], weather changes, lighting, and environment, as well as the procedural content generation and production, and asset sharing, we found it is really difficult to perfectly recreate the effect in the original art concept during the actual production process. And to be honestly, [sic] to recreate a character is much more easily than recreate [sic] the scenes. So— But if the methods for creating stylized art cannot be standardized, our pen test, they will create different art styles from their own strokes and which makes massive productions impossible. So how to solve this problem? Yeah. Finally, after more than a year of struggle, we viewed our world. First, the PPR pipeline, and then tweak it to achieve the stylized look that we desired. So thanks to— And we have a very clear idea of our character style. So we have at least one standard to adhere to. So that is match the style of the scenes with our characters, and make it harmonious and beautiful.
To achieve the stylized effect we want, we need to make some hacks on the real rules in nature. As for, there are too many examples and our time is limiting this presentation. So I only list a few of them here. First, as an open world game, filling the huge landscapes became an important job for Genshin Impact. When made some specialized designed terrains to fulfill the stylized art effects we want. Because each block of terrain has an art per cap of mixing eight layers. We can mix eight layers at most. So our art effects production has this limitation. For this, we made customized tint functions for the terrain material. We can't get color variation without adding layers. Then we fill it with grass feature, same color tone, and to add color variations on the land surface. As an important element in the world, grass is used a lot, naturally. In order to avoid the repetitives of just using a single model, we used a VAT [Vertex Animation Texture], or variety of grass counter models. These models have randomized densities, size, and orientation. At the same time, we grouped multiple sets of grass, LODs [Level of Detail], and even prepared simplified models for mobile platforms. As you know, Genshin Impact is available on mobile platform and console platforms. So to maintain the overall color of the picture, each grass counter has only one color, but the color can be changed. The color of the grass corresponds to the color of the terrain by default, but everything can be joined by artist. [sic] The artist can also modify the color again.
And next, in Genshin Impact, cliffs and mountains occupy a big proportion of the scenes. And when you play this game, the players can climb all kinds of hills as they wish. So in order to make stylized [sic] the rock, we need to recreate some of the brushstroke effects. We use substance painters plus low filter to stylize each layer of the texture of our rocks and mountains, and then mix three different textures together at the same time to show different details and textures at different distance. The three pictures below shows [sic] the rock effect from different distance, from the near, to medium distance, to far. So we also consider the re-usability of rock assets, making the details of rocks change when zoom in and zoom out.
Another thing is worth to be mentioned, our trees. Trees are also an important element in the world. Unlike realistic trees, trees in Genshin Impact uses [sic] lots of shading tricks to blend in with the surrounding environment while retaining the details. So, let me list some key points about how we make trees. First, we use a spherical normal for leaves. You can tell the differences between these two tree pictures here. And next, we have to weaken the specular and the shadow between leaves in order to make it more like an anime style. And for tree shading, we set a minimum value for min light intensity. This prevents tree [sic] from looking too dark, too black, when the min light intensity is pretty low in dawn and dusk. But, after doing all of these things above, they're [sic] still have a very critical problem. The size of the leaves cause [sic] are still looking too obvious, like you're showing on the right picture. So we clicked the leaf out by dot production of the leaf and cart normal [sic] and the view of the direction.
Okay. So, at last, there is another thing very interesting I want to show you. It's about the style-wise, the dynamic cloud production. Let me give you a brief introduction about it. This video shows the stylized dynamic clouds in the game. You can see the clouds, the shape can change as the cloud will grow, and the color of the clouds changes according to the weather change and the time change. So we made this cloud in the following steps. First, the artists that draw the cloud silhouette and the growth animation of the cloud's key frames. And next, according to these key frames, we have a tool to interpolate the cloud key frames into a gradient map, as shown below. And then, we use two basic light map and a rim highlight map to realize the 24-hours light effect. Last, when we finish this, we used generated gradient map with some noise to realize the dynamic changes of the clouds. Due to the stylized art style of the game, the dynamic lighting effects mentioned here refers [sic] to the 24-hour color gradings was preset by our artist, too.
So, well, that is all I want to share with you today. Although Genshin Impact has been online, we are still developing future contents. We just finished the tree nations in seven and the third one, Inazuma, hasn't been updated yet. It will take us another four years to finish all the seven nations in Teyvat. I believe that in the future, we will encounter many more problems, and I also hope that— I also hope that in addition to the content update, our team can continue to make improvement in technology. So thanks for listening today. If you have any questions, please contact me by email.