Drip Marketing news for the upcoming Xianzhou patches

[tanithryudo]

I am guessing the upcoming Xianzhou tournament update will encompass at least 2 patches.

At the very least, we know the next patch has Xianzhou characters for the limited banner: Yunli & Jiaoqiu. (As an aside, I previously planned to pull for Jiaoqiu because foxboy cook with Zhuge Liang aesthetic...but the leaks reddit indicate his kit has been nerfed to the ground, so now on the fence about getting him.)

Now we are getting drip marketing for the next batch after them, and the first one is Feixiao. See:
https://weibo.com/7643376782/OnNRKFHdR
https://www.reddit.com/r/HonkaiStarRail/comments/1e4f91e/extraterrestrial_satellite_communication_feixiao/
https://www.reddit.com/r/HonkaiStarRail/comments/1e4j79w/fun_facts_about_feixiao/

A wind element damager! Finally! Since I skipped Blade (due to not being all that fond of the Stellaron Hunters as a whole) and Black Swan (who's DoT). This is the main element I am most lacking in having a good main damage dealer. Even though I find Feixiao's aesthetic a bit meh, I will take what I can get. (Unless leaks indicate her kit is bad...in which case I may end up just getting Black Swan on her rerun...)

After that is a fire/healer. I really like this design, especially if that pink eevee wannabe will be present in game. Though, I am really not hurting for healers, so mechanically she's not really necessary. :/

https://weibo.com/7643376782/OnXihaq49
https://www.reddit.com/r/HonkaiStarRail/comments/1e58re5/extraterrestrial_satellite_communication_lingsha
https://www.reddit.com/r/HonkaiStarRail/comments/1e5f6gv/lingsha_and_dan_heng_possible_narrative_connection/
Also an Impact 3rd expy: https://honkai-impact-3rd-archives.fandom.com/wiki/Nuwa

Comments

[cashew]

Do we know for sure that the next arc is going to be the sword tournament? From what I was reading, it sounded like they're heading to a new planet...

[tanithryudo]

The new planet won't happen until next year, because Hoyo's update schedule is one planet per year. Before then, we'll continue to revisit old worlds or have short interludes (like the one that introduced Argenti).

It is confirmed that the next few patches will be a tournament hosted on the Luofu. The next 4 banner characters are all Xianzhou people (and from other ships than the Luofu). We're also getting an alt-form for March in Xianzhou dress, with accompanying background story saying she's doing swords training to participate.

[cashew]

Could this mean that with each Xianzhou chunk that gets released, a star rail unit will get the 5-star upgrade? (Excluding the protag who already is 5-star.) Is this how miHoyo plans to win fans back after the first Luofu story flop? >.< (Not sure about US reception, but it seems the Chinese fandom overall was not very happy with the Luofu arc.)

[tanithryudo]

March's new form is still 4 star, so not technically an upgrade. However, her original kit is pretty outdated, so it effectively is an upgrade.

If she ever gets a 5 star upgrade like Dan Heng did, it would probably be part of her backstory exploration, which is probably not gonna be Xianzhou related. But that's pure speculation anyways.

The Luofu story failed because they spent too much on setup and not enough on actual telling of the story. As well, the mechanics of story telling were all over the place, and thus sometimes people did things out of order and were missing chunks of the story in the right order. By comparison, Belobog and Penacony had all the required (and sometimes un-required) narratives shoved into a linear progression that told everything up front without having to go searching for supporting info in the game. The updates in-between planets are great for adding to setup and lore, but generally don't have a major narrative to them. At least, that was for the updates we had between Luofu and Penacony. We'll see what happens with the tournament arc.

[cashew]

That's the same criticism from Chinese fans, so I guess both sides of the Pacific didn't like having to dig for clues on the story. Not that I blame them, either, because it honestly sounds like a freaking pain to put the story together, and it sounds like some of the critical info was literally hidden away in gacha character descriptions and voice clips. So like...that sucks.

Hopefully they've learned their lesson and deliver a more straightforward story for Luofu in the future. A lot of people hated the resolution to the Quintet arc, and I can't say I'm not also a bit annoyed that we still have no idea what their interaction looked like before the mess. Like, I'm pretty sure everyone was waiting to see how the Quintet interacted when they were still normal people, but instead we just got the tragic "oh look, everyone is going off in their own direction" with zero build up to get us to like this group first. The emotional gut punch of a bunch of friends splitting up after tragedy is a lot less gut-punchy if we don't have "happy times" for comparison.

[tanithryudo]

The writing for the Quintet portion is definitely subpar. There's excuses that can be made, but the lack of quality compared to other character arcs is...well, unexcusable.

I guess part of it is that they built up the hype for the Quintet, which is why the actual story we got felt like such a let down. Another part is that due to having to sell each character on separate banners that spanned multiple updates, they had to chop up the story and tell it in multiple patches, making the whole narrative feel stilted for those playing through the updates (it's slightly better for new players who can play through it all in one sitting, I guess). And yet another part is that Xianzhou is obviously a continuing meta-story arc, so they kept a lot of stuff back from the story, I guess to maintain mystery or some shit for future arcs, but that just made the existing arcs feel incomplete and wasted a lot of buildup.

*shrug*

But overall, it wasn't as bad as a lot of detractors say it is either. It gets flak from being compared to better story telling arcs. But in and of itself, it did manage to tell a coherent narrative when properly played through.

[cashew]

I feel like the biggest letdown about the entire arc is the fact that we got so little actual depiction of "before times". Like, why set up this giant backstory for it to barely matter in the current story moving forward? I guess it all depends on how much you trust miHoyo not to drop the ball as the meta-arc moves forward with the need to release more new characters every time story is released.

If we see some re-visiting of the Quintet with the new story, I might have a little more confidence, but as it is, it seems like miHoyo is just gonna barrel forward with the sword championship tournament and new dungeon map while ignoring basically the entire Quintet's story. Especially when they ended Dan Heng's arc with him more or less washing his hands of everything and he's our window into the entire Luofu side of the story. Unless the fleets are a lot closer in relationship, I don't foresee more plot-relevant stuff from the Quintet's personal relationships, which is kind of a bummer.