There's never been a better time to hop in to Genshin Impact

We were obviously big fans of Genshin Impact when it launched last year, so much so that it grabbed our Game of the Year award. Since that time, though, the game (and our enthusiasm fo it) had gone somewhat quiet.

You see, Genshin Impact is a service game, but since last winter there had been precious little added to the experience. Post-Dragonspine, a couple of story quests showed up and a trickle of new characters came and went, but there was nothing really new and exciting for players to latch onto--regardless of whether they played daily or dropped off months ago. This summer showed a glimpse of excitement with a temporary archipelago being added to the game, but the whole experience felt like stopgap effort designed to prevent more of the player base moving on to something else.

This week has been a flurry of excitement for players, though. Genshin Impact is now officially at version 2.0, which marks the addition of a whole new, permanent landmass to the game. This region, the isolationist isles of Inazuma, provides a playground for exploration, environmental puzzle-solving, open-world skirmishes, and more story progression, all of which come together to make Genshin Impact feel like the splashy crossover gacha game it was at launch. On top of that, miHoYo has gone full-tilt on character reveals, providing their longest list of upcoming characters to-date for players to save their precious primogems for.

For these reasons, Genshin Impact almost feels like a sequel to itself, but only if you can access this new content already. Obviously, if you are behind on the game's main story, you have to complete prerequisite quest lines to gain access to this new landmass. Some of these story quests are also locked behind your account's adventure rank. This is to say that if you abandoned Genshin Impact well before running out of story content, you'll have a long road ahead of you before you can see what is happening over at this new location.

I've been a daily Genshin Impact player since shortly after the game's launch, so I dove straight in to Inazuma, but I imagine lapsed players could find some excitement in returning to the game. Before now, the only thing to look forward to after completing the main story thus far was building up characters for Spiral Abyss. Although this is still largely true, having a longer runway before you get there, tons of announced characters and weapons to look forward to, and some new domains and enemy types for more varied challenges should sound pretty appealing.

It's unclear whether miHoYo plans to keep this firehose of content and announcements going, but if they do, now is the time to hop in to catch up and keep up. I imagine this pace will at least continue through to the game's one year anniversary in September, but if it goes longer than that, I'll have plenty of reasons to keep logging in to the game daily for a long, long time.