Genshin Impact‘s 5.0 update – which takes players to the new region of Natlan – is probably the game at its most gorgeous. Inauma was pretty nice when it first came out, especially the walk up to Tenshukaku. Sumeru raised the bar yet again. But Natlan has shattered such expectations. For the first time ever, I’m playing Genshin Impact just to look around.
And that might sound strange to two groups of people – both the folks who are focused on the action and the people who have been looking wide-eyed at Genshin’s lovely vistas for years now – but I think Natlan has a certain vibrancy to it that takes it all to another level. Painted murals splayed alongside the sides of cliffs clashing against the brown of the stone and the green grass covering the top…it’s brilliant.
A lot of the world design in Natlan innovates on previous updates too. One of the first main locations you head to is a small town belonging to the Children of Echoes tribe in the North East corner of the map. It’s a little settlement built into the stone between two giant cracked stones. There’s a path along the ground that leads right through, but to actually reach the people there you must walk up hand-made bridges that forces your camera to get this picture-perfect image of the locale. Over the years the HoYoverse team has become especially good at framing, which is hard to do in open world exploration-heavy games like this.
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