Why Genshin Impact Needs a Skip Button… Badly

Genshin Impact has come a long way and so is its story. Its story has, well, a lot of impact, to the community, to the game developers, to the players and especially to the game. However, Genshin Impact is still missing one key component and HoYoverse is yet to add this despite the game being released for more than two years now. The key component I’m talking about is the one and only skip button.

Hear Me Out!

Now before you boo and throw eggs and tomatoes at me, hear me out. Genshin's story is phenomenal and you would really enjoy it if you took the time to read the dialogues and understand the story but in my case, I don't have the time to do that, I am a college student who has face-to-face classes and I also play other games like Destiny, Valorant and Overwatch. I don't have a lot of time to sit through Genshin's very, I mean VERY long dialogues. A lot of it in the game is also very unnecessary, so that just makes it even longer for no reason whatsoever. This is the main reason why I want a skip button implemented in the game and I'm sure you guys have your own reasons too.

Yes, I Had to Time It

Out of curiosity, I timed a set of dialogues once while playing a part of the story, and it took around seven to eight minutes, just for one set of them. I'm pretty sure it was just a world quest as well and not even a major quest that is generally part of a big update in Genshin Impact. This just shows how much dialogue the game has and how someone like me cannot sit through all of it as I have other better things to do. This is also why world quests can take up to an hour or an hour and a half, while major quests like archon quests or story quests can take up to four to 6 hours, yes, I said what I said. Heck, even event quests have very long dialogues from time to time. A game with hundreds of quests (and counting) should not contain long, unnecessary dialogues. This will generally make the player burned out and get bored from reading them (for me at least, if you like reading for that long then by all means). My best option right now is to press the auto button and let the characters speak while I do something else. 

Pointless Dialogue Options

Another thing that is bugging me is the dialogue options that appear at the bottom right part of your screen from time to time. This is basically your character (Traveler) speaking during the conversation because your character is not being voiced by someone. 90% of the time, these dialogue options are either a single option that you still have to click, two options but they mean the same thing (it's just phrased differently) and two options that 95% of the time lead to the same dialogue said by the other character in the conversation. How is this a big deal you may ask? Well these options are not automated. This means that you would have to press one of them to move on with the conversation, and with the auto button being my only option, I would have to press an option manually which usually does not change the story. So if I am doing something, and I let the game and its characters go off in a conversation for a while, I would have to pause with the task I am doing and press a dialogue option, which again, usually does not change the story whatsoever. To make matters worse, I sometimes forget that the game is running, so it just sits there with the option waiting to be pressed.

The Not-so Pointless Dialogue Options

While Genshin Impact contains, I want to say around 80% of useless, unnecessary dialogue options, it also does contain very important dialogues that can actually change the ending of the story (like games made by TellTale games). These dialogues can usually be found in all hangout quests, in some parts of specific archon quests, or maybe even several world quests. However, this does not really change the fact that only 20% of these them are important (very rough estimate). If most of them are actually important and each one can lead to a different ending, then the stories of Genshin Impact will be a million times more exciting and interesting. A simple fix for this issue is to remove the dialogue options that do not lead to a different ending and have the character simply say it as part of the conversation. This may counter my point in this article as it adds more dialogue, but the point of this fix is so that we do not have to click on an option that will lead to the same dialogue since like I said, our only option right now is the auto button. Now I understand that HoYoverse is not Telltale and they have to focus more on other aspects of Genshin Impact and their other games, but the least they can do is to implement the fix that was just mentioned.

Wrongly Placed Skip Buttons

Okay, Genshin Impact does have skip buttons, but guess what… all of them are in very wrong places. An example of this is the presence of the skip button when you are interacting with the domain tree before getting your artifacts or materials… CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT?! The time between interacting with the tree and getting your artifacts is only a matter of seconds, yet they still somehow decided on adding a skip button there, meanwhile they will not add a skip button on their very long dialogues. Another example is when the battle pass resets, the cutscene always plays at the beginning of a new battle pass and they also added a skip button there. I am not complaining about them adding skip buttons there , but I’m just saying that those skip buttons are in the wrong places and they can easily be added to dialogues, miHoYo simply chose not to for reasons I do not currently know.

A Few Suggestions

• HoYoverse does not need to add skip buttons to hangout quests, because these quests actually have different endings and your actions matter.

• They can add a confirmation screen when pressing the skip button so as to not let the player accidentally skip the scene. 

• They should prioritize adding skip buttons in world quests, and dialogues from commission quests. They can add skip buttons for the main quests next as this is not that important. 

• They should remove all unnecessary dialogues.

Final Thoughts

HOYOVERSE NEEDS TO ADD SKIP BUTTONS TO DIALOGUES IN GENSHIN IMPACT! And frankly, they can take their time in adding skip buttons because once they do add the skip buttons, I can finally do these quests with ease and not have to wait for the motivation to actually do the game’s very long quests.