I do love the implication of a traveller that has all these nations asking them to save the world tm and their first reaction is "...with THOSE roads?"
iirc according to a dialogue option at some point, at least one of the worlds that she's been to in the past is an effectively modern world. I don't remember exactly what the dialogue was about, and I'm having a hard time locating it again, but I'll keep looking (I hope I didn't just hallucinate this lmao). If that's the case, Teyvat roads have gotta be a serious downgrade for her.
There's no definite path to the Narukami Shrine and somehow people reach their, like the way to go is the vines stuck to the mountain side. They never game any reason for people go there. It's kinda funny to think that the shrine maidens mountain climb there everyday
An able-bodied human could definitely get there without tools like a wind glider or needing rock climbing. It takes a fair amount of looking around to find the ladders, and I'm still not sure how they manage people who need to be carried up, but there are paths other than the ones players normally use.
I live in Irelnd and let me tell you. When you get into the rural parts of the country this is really just how it is. Every day im scared that all of a sudden i will just have to deal with treasure horders on my way to my granny’s house
Real it's really giving genshin back when it first launched ppl where just making content on everything but now it's hardly entertaining stuff like before
As someone who plays "Walking Impact", as in... I just walk and don't teleport at all during quests :3 (during 4.4 Lantern rite, I literally walked from Liyue harbor to Qiaoying village, and took the boat/raft ride with Gaming to Yilong Wharf) This video DEFINITELY pointed out a lot of my mind-boggling concerns about the paths on the map when I did my "walk"through xD
Damn, i like to explore the game but not teleporting at all on quests is wild, if i would do that i allways get distracted by the most random shit i see
Okay but I've legit wondered about this. Like, there's so many places that make no sense for the average non Vision holding person to get there. There's so many paths infested with enemies or places where you have to scale a literal mountain to get there (looking at you Narukami Shrine)
@@randompersonontheinternet1038 isn't Gaming's job literally protection service to help transport goods, in that new Liyue expansion there's the main office lol
@@matnasrin3479 That's official government organisations. adventurer are like a smaller scale group doing their own things, the occasionally do big things like reoppening the chasm, fight monsters, explore ruins. You can commission them to do tasks for a cheaper price than hiring official knights or millelith to do it but comes a risk of less professionalism. Kind of like that
Stumbled across the vid, not a genshin player so idk if its consistent, but there are shrines that aren't exactly accessible as they're designed around spiritually important locations... like the top of mountains. Its also not normal, but certainly not unheard of irl. Though granted, those shrines also tend to have a "base shrine" in a more accessible location for the masses to visit.
In defence of Narukami shrine, there is an actual way which normal people could use to get there, but it's detoriated a lot with a broken bridge and collapsed stairs :(
i think a lot about how the fontaine research institute just exploded and all the hydrobus highways are wrecked and no one cares to fix it. also, the highways only fit one hydrobus. they'd have to go one way and back alll the way. can you imagine the waiting line for this?
Imagine being told you have to produce a plan for rebuilding an aquabus line in an area where water doesn't stay on the bottom, and instead flies around in cubes. And the rocks don't care about staying on the ground either.
@@wallacyryan8211 Yes. They had a proper aquabus line when physics was working properly. Now they either have to wait for the laws of nature to reassert themselves, or build something beyond confines of modern physics.
@@kotarouinugami1745 i dont know a lot of the lore but maybe some kind of tunel to keep the water in thill it recovers its normal behavior (if it does) and a submarine kind of thing so you can travel underwater (maybe this was not plausible while the archons quest of fontaine but also i dont know how the disolvable fontanians work tough)
I noticed that too, when you travel from Mond to Liyue for the first time you have a clear way with barely any enemies, but there is nothing like that ever since. All the ways to get to Sumeru and Fontaine are so convoluted they even had to unlock teleports. The world is still great but things like this kinda ruin the immersion a bit...
Reminds me of that one NPC going "Who would go through the desert to get to Fontaine" Well, do you know of any other complete roads between there and Sumeru?
Kind of expected since mond and liyue are kind of the most peacefull nations right now. I mean... Inazuma is full of jacked-up samurai. Sumeru is surrounded by angry wild life and giant trees.
@@negspirito Sumeru, Liyue, and Mondstadt all have harbors where you can take a boat to Fontaine, though when Fontaine released, none of them have been added yet (now the only one missing is Mond's)
i feel like this is a sister video to Any Austin's unemployment analysis of Mondstadt. idk what to call this genre of video but i love it. bureaucracy core.
@@aspirerl4807 It's said all the time in the game how people take days, weeks, months to get from one place to another this was also shown in the anime teaser, basically the whole teaser takes place in Mond but the green fields stretch for miles away the forests are huge and even the windrise tree is basically the size of Irminsul
To be honest, gavent the roads they have it wouldn’t surprise me if most of the NPC live only in their village and travel to their main town once in a while ( excluding merchants/adventurers). Every time a playable character show up in another region, one of my first question is "how the hell did you come here in the first place ???"
100%! The game would be so much more massive if it was even like a 10th of the size in lore. I just posted about this like 10 or so posts up XD I'll quote here for ref: "I also don't believe that the scale that we see each nation at in game is accurate to the canon world (the manga and anime landscapes are already much larger than in game). Parts have to be truncated to facilitate game mechanics. It's easy to suspend disbelief of these while playing but story wise, we know that travel from nation to nation takes much longer than the 10-20 stroll we can do in game. So it's part of the reason that when we try to look at these things logically in game, it breaks down. ^^;"
@@aspirerl4807 Please... In game world is tiny. Just a symbolic miniature. Do you really think world with a few nations could go across... a few km?... What about villages and agriculture? We see almost none, way too little for cities. Look at Wangshu Inn. It doesn't even have rooms... Dragonspine? In game it's only a small hill, get real. I don't know how people can even think that in-game world is nothing but symbolical.
OH MY GOSH. Someone who actually talks about the road issue.... I think about this often. Like weirdly often. When 4.5 rolled around and they showed Kirara going from nation to nation and her Sumeru to Fontaine route was the weird one WE took to get through the Pari land, I was like... how is that the normal trade route? Much less the one Kirara takes to get places quickly and efficiently. I once took a "walk" from Fontaine to Sumeru city using the... I don't recall what the harbor's name is but the one you first encounter using the teleport they give you. I just recall being so lost because HOW would any normal person take this route? Why aren't we hypothetically taking the boat across the part of the map we just got (could have done it like in Alcor part of Liyue quest until they were ready to give us the map). Then when I made it into Sumeru it was just... so many dead end roads that had me like "how would a normal person get back to the city???" Even when using the map I got lost because half the time the paths don't even match up with the map... Don't even get me started on the new harbor. They didn't add Layla's village which, based on the route we walk during her hangout, SHOULD have been north of the mushroom area, and would have needed farm space for sumpter beasts. Yet they not only didn't bother adding a new city / town to Sumeru, but made that whole new section bland af and lack any semblance of sensible road for travel. Like you I couldn't figure out any way a normal person would traverse it. I get that this wasn't a Sumeru patch but damn I would have preferred another small hole left in the map before I would have accepted the barren wasteland they gave us.
Kirara probably just hates water (as a cat youkai), and so she made sure her path across the water is slowest possible. Or maybe as a youkai, she can use the teleport waypoints. That would explain how she's so fast at delivery.
For real, the sumeru part of the new map is just a giant empty place with only like 3 chests in total. For a port that connects two countries, it's really small compared to the port that connects to inazuma. Heck, even the countryside of liyue has better looking port
Another thing on that note: particularly in Fontaine does it ever feel like the buildings aren’t to scale? Like they’re ever so slightly too big for the characters? Like I’m pretty sure traveler is exactly as tall as some of the guard rails and don’t even get me started on the opera epiclese
@@sindhu7582 the scaling problem already exists since mondstadt. Look how inconsistent most buildings are compared to favonius hq and the church. Or how dawn winery is so small on the outside and yet so big once you go inside
At least there's a convoluted way by boat. Problem is, Sumeru is said to trade with Fontaine via Chenyu Vale, but there is no way for Sumeru boats to go through there.
I love the newer regions, but one thing I have always liked about monsdat and liyue is that most of their roads makes sense and it makes the world feel more lived in to me. I feel like they stopped with making actual roads past liyue and monsdat.
The exploration being annoying is what made me quit genshin. Having to constantly switch characters and teams that have no synergy means I had to have a combat and exploration team that I would have to toggle between due to limited resources as a newish player. Why did everyone tell me the exploration is good in genshin when I feel like I'm constantly being stopped? And then I finally find something that looks interesting and Paimon tells me to turn back.
@@floofzykitty5072yeah sumeru is a giant pain in the ass in terms of exploration, you need dendro pyro and electro to do all the mechanics of the place. Fontaine gets better though, it's smaller but almost every place is interesting to visit
@@floofzykitty5072 exploration in regions after mond and liyue are all quite a hassle ngl Its like going from 'stress-free stroll' into full on parkour every 5 minutes
Last night I was thinking about new regions, and that led me to mapping out trade roads between all the regions that are available for now. And let me tell you, many of them don't make any sense. I think I spent about 20 minutes trying to understand how the people of Qingce village get goods from Chengyu valley. Because there is a guy that tells you that they do deliver stuff to Qingce, but after getting them to the other side of the river there is NO road AND some treasure hoarders nearby. They could simply add a bridge that leads to one of the rocks that already have bridges connected to them. And that road near Vanarana that you've mentioned in video makes even less sense to me.
broo I've been thingking the exact same thing! they could easily just add that one bridge that leads to that small dock from chenyu to qingce area. There's literally no roads that connect chenyu vale and the rest of the liyue too
in the lochfolk event the downstream was said to be pretty fast and the exchange location should actually be the shore area near the teleport waypoint with a raft. im guessing the treasure hoarder you mentioned is around the Chi Ruins? for normal people its definitely a no-cross zone especially since there's a Lawachurl there. and same reason the village bridge avoids that area aswell
I mean, we've also seen people use slimes as hot air balloons for transporting goods off the ground in Mondsdadt, and Sumeru, so that could also explain how they transport stuff around.
Actually wrong! People travel with boats from Chenyu Vale to Wangshu Inn and then walk all the way to Liyue on foot, and the things they are delivering is most likely transported by carts or slime balloons.
This is something that actually kinda struck me as weird when I started the game. I came from Zelda BOTW, and one of my favourite things to do was gallop a horse along the many paths there. Not as possible in genshin, feels like a lot of paths just end randomly or some such, and I feel interconnect far less, though probably due to way map is made. Either way, hope for snezhnaya to scratch this itch of mine (since I love snow biomes) but that’s in far future
This reminds me how in the Teyvat, Inazuman people get to the Narukami Shrine? I have spent multiple hours trying to figure out paths to there from Inazuma city or even just Kamisato residence! Even if we agree that paths to shrine are meant to hard so they will give feeling of accomplishment to even make it to the shrine. How did sick people get there? How did that one person who had lost his mind in Inazuma Archon quest go up there from the City? Same with Adepti places in Liyue, I think one of the reasons Liyue people stopped believing in Adepti is cause, they make it super hard to even contact themself.
ikr narukami road shrine involve some rock climbing. adepti places, the one with amber trap seems to have pretty satisfying road, spiraling to the top. The other 2... you got me something to do tomorrow :D
Great video lol, ive also found teyvats roads to be extremely poorly made. About the aranara civilisation (New Vanarana) being not found though, they arent exactly hiding that much. The aranara are actually able to be seen by children, but they cant be seen by adults. You probably already know this, but what that means is that when someone walks into Vanarana, it just looks like a normal section of forest. In fact, the Vanarana where the aranara live is inaccessible without knowing the way to get into a dream, because the aranara exist in dreams. Its why you are able to play the vintage lyre in front of that rock and then all the aranara npcs disappear. Also, on another note, Narukami island has a great road, considering that there is a main thoroughfare that runs from the main port in Ritou all the way to the capital. Though there are hilichurls at the beach between Ritou and Konda Village, the Archon Quest implies that canonically, they are not actually there. The large amount of Nobushi and Kairagi on the side of the road are probably also not entirely normal, as the implication is that they are disaffected samurai that only started showing up in large numbers due to the civil war.
@@ravendesk9912 I'm no hydrology expert but even I can tell they don't make sense. In Sumeru you've got two massive waterfalls at 45° that eventually meet and the water gets reduced to a puddle, leading to nowhere. It makes no sense. Just follow the streams and their volume. Water needs to go *somewhere* (i.e. join another bigger river, ultimately end up in the ocean or some reservoir). Their pressure can't suddenly go down for no reason and water can't disappear into thin air.
@@darksylincits a magical world, chill out nerd. The water disappears straight into the air to balance out all the thirsty folks who didnt get to pull Yelan or Yae Miko
This is such a 'Any Austin' core. I am glad Genshin is getting audited like this because i am always baffled by their waterfall origin and how the roads don't make sense.
Right?! I’m really surprised that more people aren’t talking about Genshin’s roads. They drive me crazy, and I don’t even have any kind of background in road design/maintenance or any other kind of infrastructure. So many roads are totally impractical, way too steep or littered with giant rocks to drive a cart over them. Or they disappear into the grass suddenly as if they haven’t been used in years. Or they just straight up don’t even exist. Seriously, how is anyone supposed to get to the Narukami Shrine? Or Watatsumi Shrine? Or literally anywhere in Inazuma that isn’t the capital city or Konda Village? How does Bayda Harbor deliver goods to the rest of Sumeru when it’s perched at the top of a freaking waterfall with no paths around it? And Fontaine, oh god…Where’s the road into the Court of Fontaine? Not even one single route for land access? What happens if the other water bus canals are taken down? Are people just stuck inside/outside the capital? How did they get in or out before the waterways were constructed a couple decades ago? I get that it fits with the theme I’d being the nation of water, but it’s a major liability. The Court is extremely vulnerable to acts of terrorism because of this wrongheaded theme park design. Teyvat’s roads are more maddening than wishing at full pity and getting your 10th Qiqi.
No because this has genuinely started to bother me, it feels like roads and pathways have been getting less and less coherent since Liyue to the point that now Hoyo is having to add automatic waypoints to new regions because they just... don't want to add in proper roads or routes for some reason? The 4.x updates as a whole have had this problem REALLY bad, there's only one cohesive way to get into the Court of Fontaine and it's through a port that I specifically remember being the "smaller" of the ones we know about. There's a second path in from the left side of the city but that one makes even less sense, somehow(it takes you to the top of the wall around the city and then doesn't give you a complete path down unless you swim in the aquabus water. There's also a third entrance below the Clementine Line that isn't accessible at all to the player iirc). Chenyu Vale has basically zero walking accessibility for the player; NPCs have Lumidouce Harbor and Yilong Wharf but a waverider was never added there, AND no bridge or waverider was added on the Liyue - Chenyu Vale side so again, no easy crossing for the player(at least without characters like Kaeya or Wanderer). NPCs still have boats they're implied to use(some docks by the auto waypoint) but even then there's no path from the Liyue side? and you'd think there'd at least be a small port there since it seems to be the only way in. And on that note, I still remember one NPC in the middle of a route starting from Fontaine and heading to Liyue Harbor. He's in Jueyun Karst, and I remember him because when Chenyu Vale came out I intended to go through Jueyun Karst to get there only to find, guess what? There's literally no path through, and once I did get there, the quest that starts automatically teleported me onto the ""correct"" path to Qiaoying Village anyway! It really feels like the new regions have started to become "contained" if that makes sense, with one entry point being deemed as the "correct" one for the player and everything else getting ignored even if it would just be a nice addition to have in terms of worldbuilding(like a logical path between Chenyu Vale and Jueyun Karst or Liyue and Sumeru, or a more expansive Bayda Harbor with an actual road connecting it to Sumeru City). Anyways, I'll shut up now, but thanks for giving me the perfect excuse to ramble about this haha
I remembered sometime during the 2.x versions that I really enjoyed travelling on the road without teleporting from the beach that we started the game from, all the way up to Liyue harbour then up the ship to Ritou on Inazuma, then all the way up to the castle. It was great and very atmospheric, and at the end of it all, I started imagining how much more fun it would be to do the same thing when more nations come up. Tried it with Sumeru, was a bit disappointed but at least there's the lumberpick valley path (which was the path I took when I first visited Sumeru) But then more and more broken and illogical paths showed up, and it took me out of it.
FINALLY , SOMEONE MAKING A VIDEO ABOUT THESE ROADS, I KEPT SAYING TO MY FRIENDS THAT SOME OF THESE ROADS ARE DUMB AND DONT MAKE ANY SENSE, FINALLY, FINALLY SOMEONE ELSE ALSO THINKING THE SAME THING !!!!
broooo I legit always wondering about this. Also their waterways too, they have big ships from sumeu city yet the river from the city to anywhere is can get shallow and no way ship can get through there. The only way from sumeru city to port ormos is through Vimara village and the water there is to shallow and the river is too narrow. Also their fontaine. The lore said people rarely get to fontaine through the desert and there's no reason they build a waterbus that goes from romaritime instead of lumidoce which is seems like their main port to anywhere outside fontaine. Romaritime only connects fontaine with baida harbour maybe since yilong warf is on a more elevated water level. And one more thing. I can not figure out anyway that people in the court of fontaine can get in and out of the city other than through aquabus. How tf did they get anywhere??? there seems like no other reasonably easy way to get anywhere even poison. these tiny details bugs me sometimes hahah
There’s elevators down to the water level in the Court of Fontaine which implies they take boats to get around despite there not being an actual harbor at the base of the city
The uneven water level is the biggest issue with genshin world. How tf is it possible to have a waterfall on a sea, it's just geographically doesn't make sense
There is a road to the southwest of yilong warf that leads to the shore where there are smugglers' docks, so the smuggling route of lumidoce → yilong warf → baida harbour does exist
With Genshin's incredible attention to detail and lore building they still forget to make their roads logical. Heck, even eggs defy physics! I can't imagine how NPCs would cook them considering that even plunging on an egg would not break it!
I think all roads have at least one of the following purposes: -NPC pathfinfing -highlighting the way during a quest -making places look less empty -making the worldmap look better
I'm actually so glad someone else has noticed this, I've always wondered how the hell Teyvat functions with those roads. I've unironically tried following those roads before only to be brutally attacked by enemies, so it always bothers me seeing people of Teyvat act like they are completely safe to travel in cutscenes. Not to mention that road connecting Mondstadt to Liyue, you would think if the knights are so concerned about clearing monsters, they would focus on the MAIN TRADE ROAD and not the random forest camps.
As for Liyue and Sumeru trade I think they actually do it mostly by the sea. Port Ormos is Sumeru's trade centre, and there are even some NPC's from Liyue. Liyue is also a coast city, so the chance that they would mostly ships instead of roads to get to Ormos or Sumeru is quite possible. Especially that traveling there, to Sumeru, via land, would mean going between monster-and-ancient-evil-filled Chasm and ruins of old plagued by more monsters.
Yup I've been confused about this since the day the game told me to enter Sumeru via this really rundown and dangarous tunnel in Chasm and the Chasm itself is a pretty dangerous place for you average Teyvat NPC so there's no way trade and normal traversing happens via Chasm. Would definitely love to see a second part on the topic of roads in Genshin
when starting the sumeru questline, I got mildly lost because I couldn't find a road on the map to get me to the first statue. I still don't think I know where the official entrance is. I just offroaded over the mountains.
Worst part, theres no road between most places especially between nations. The only notable one being between mondstadt and liyue. There not one between liyue and sumeru or fontain. There's a water one but the only way on foot is through the wilderness, for sumeru you have to go through a cave in the recently opened chasm. For fontain you either need to go through juyun karst which is very taboo thanks to the adepti, or you have to get you a boat to drop you off in the wilderness or the harbor on the far side which is right next to fontain anyway. The roads make no sense because there aren't as many as there should be
Trade during the 1400-1800s (around the era of Teyvat tech in general) is mostly by sail. That means Port Ormos, Ritou and Liyue Harbor get thousands of ships moving large cargo and passengers across the ocean.
@@milesperhour9256 There should still be a path that interconnects as roads were the predecesor of large trading ships. And even then, carriages are clearly still being used yet paths abruptly end or lead to places that is nonsensical for horses or wheels.
It's hilarious to think you've made a video about something i've been thinking recently in genshin. Also, it's crazy that hostile mobs are literally outside or nearby villages/towns and NPCs don't care at all. Another one I was thinking was the bridge near Wangshuu Inn never been repaired. Anyway, great video!
Can’t wait to see if there’s a video on caravan ribat; it’s supposed to be a hub for getting into the desert and beyond, the utter state of the desert paths is something to behold. Big boat clearly has a chokehold over Teyvat international trade
I’m so glad I’m not the only person who thinks about this. For immersion during archon or story quests, when we’re canonically traveling with other people and only traveler knows how to use waypoints, I’m always trying to take the roads and paths that I feel are plausible for the character we’re traveling with. So I have definitely noticed this. And honestly, the Court of Fontaine is a whole frustration. But my biggest annoyance? How does anyone get to the shrine in Inazuma?
i think this is also why im so disconnected from sumeru. the roads just make 0 sense. i looove walking down the roads and make my exploring seem ''natural'' but theres no true connection through the whole nation and now fontaine too. how even did npcs use the old passage in the sumeru desert to fontaine its a tunnel that leads to a huge cliff..
Really feels like they cared more about making the areas "Interesting" to explore, completely removing any kind of logical civilization in the process.. And it's not like they can't make proper roads and such looking at Montstadt and Liyue, they just don't want to.
I think that expansion was the watershed moment because there's literally nothing there and yet they put in a port that does nothing and doesn't even function. If there were like a few npc and chests and world quests no one would really care but the lack of them throws it into sharp relief...
@@pr0ntab There are npcs and chests there tho?? I mean it's nothing special/groundbreaking but they are there. People in the harbor and chests along the road and coastline. As for quests, ur right, I don't think Bayda harbor has any. That I know of that is. But yeah, between the state of the road and the cutoff waterway really makes you wonder how the trade networks even work lol
@@enderphoenix11 it's just way fewer than even lumberpick Valley which was a smaller but more substantial crossing-over region with chests, churl camps, and some world quests.
@@pr0ntab True, though It was heavily connected / is just part of the Chasm so that probably helped. Maybe also because it connected Sumeru and Liyue, two of teyvats biggest nations, and was the only throughway (besides the intended Chasm entrance), whereas this is kinda just an addon, just to bridge the spaces. The focus was on the new fontaine area and subregion. Though i wish there was more yeah :/
This is helpful for game design because if your roads don’t make sense from a critical perspective then you see the plot holes and lack of practicality with them
I’m not sure if it’s just me but I’ve always found navigation difficult in Genshin, both when I’m simply just wandering around and when I do end up using a teleport waypoint. It’s genuinely embarrassing the amount of times I’ve teleported to the wrong area because it looks so similar to another area 😭
The direction the water flows through the rivers is also a physics defying thing as well. Try to figure out were the water comes from that feeds into the river around Sumeru City for example.
Finally someone made a video about this headscratching yet niche topic. You're right, this has not been covered about enough. There's so many egregious cases of this in each nation (such as the one going to Narukami Shrine the others mentioned) that you can make a series out of this. This issue and the general unrealistically small scale of most places in the overworld is such a worldbuilding flaw that bugs my immersion
Personally I found both this and your first video very interesting because I do find that when things like roads get proper treatment as to how theoretically an in universe person would use them, they can make the world feel more immersive... And while stuff like the lack of proper connection between Bayda harbour and Sumeru city isn't game breaking, it still feels like a very small negative in my opinion. Anyways small genshin road rant over. Great video once again!
I vaguely remember on the day 3.0 released I went to explore the region without doing the quests first and ended up going above/north of the Gandarha ville and having to pretty much climb to the city because I didnt really see any good path from there
no because i love to walk places when i'm doing archon and story quests and i always try to follow roads because i assume that's how we would walk somewhere ?? but they like never make sense anymore
No because you’re so real for this😭roads not showing up on the map has always pissed me off, I like to walk around when doing archon and story quests, which has been Quite the pain in Fontaine
It's like they just picked up a paintbrush and randomly drew strokes throughout the map, with no connection at all. As the nations are shown as not very advanced compared to our world, with no airplanes and trucks and stuff, they must rely heavily on trade for their economy. But if these are the roads there... ...how in heck are their houses and palaces and shops and stuff so grand when they can't even support their own means of transportation...?
The other major issue here with these regions, is how these people are surviving. You're going to tell me they live off fishing? The closest thing is Qince Village for actual agriculture. There's basically no farmland in Teyvat, which is like HOW?!?
Roads, rater paths, that stop randomly in some rural towns are like this because sometime ago this used to be a very popular route to people until a new one emerged or the old one got too dangerous. Sometimes it happens when there used to be fairs and small festivities happening. This is more my experience when visiting old relatives.
everyone i would like to nominate youtuber beerevity to be the new eighth archon of the long-masterless 'tevyat public safety and civil infrastructure maintenance' element
Looking too closely into these things makes you realize that Teyvat is just a post apocalypses nightmare world. Really glad someone *finally* pointed out how bad the roads are here.
oh i am SO GLAD someone has made a video about this, I THINK ABOUT IT SO MUCH LMAO. Environmental storytelling is one of my fave lil bits about open world games, and in some places genshin does it really well! And in others, it just makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE??? Like, where is Dornman Port supposed to go? Some people theorize past storm terrors lair, but that means people are passing through one of the most dangerous regions of mondstat for trade every day. Others say it should be past the stormbearer mountains, but theres no road through there at all??? its a whole city!!! Its GOT to go somewhere!!! and the nonexistant route into chenyu vale is also a perfect example, like, what road are people taking to get there? The one that makes the most sense is through Qingce village, but that road ends in a fairly large body of water and no docks/boats on the Qingce side of it. there IS a dock on the other side, but it doesn't make any sense that only one side would have that? We skipped right past that during the lantern rite travels with Gaming, which tells me the devs probably also don't know how we're getting there! We just APPEAR on the chenyu vale side, don't worry about how it happened i guess lol
I love your videos! This is the kind of channel the community needed. I've been streaming your videos to my boyfriend, he likes watching me play Genshin and he likes informative videos. I'm very much looking forward to more videos analysising things about Genshin's world. Covering Fontaine's land and roads would be interesting too considering it's been flooding over the years and that's why there are caves and buildings and stuff under water, so thinking about how all those would've connecting and reached one another in the past would require some thinking.
There's a video essay about this topic called "The Shandification of Fallout", if you want to read more. The original got deleted years ago, but still gets brought up in video essays about gameworlds.
nah you are by FAR not the first person to notice these absurd roads- people were reacting to them as they came out. by all accounts, it makes no sense! like, mondstadt is the ONLY nation with decent main roads! though with Fontaine you could theoretically give the excuse that most of the roads and stuff are now underwater because of the flooding, and then the aquabus routes are great, and most people just use boats in general
A super cool detail, would be if stuff like that first road actually getting cleared up when you get to Inazuma or Sumeru. Just to show that time is passing and this world isnt static unless the Traveler is around.
Yk that one question ppl ask if you’d rather have a vision but live in the real world, or live in teyvat without a vision?? Most ppl go for the 2nd option but I’d go for the 1st purely for this reason 😭😭 like living in teyvat without a vision id have to stay cooped up in one small city bc there’s monsters EVERYWHERE and id definitely die
the one leading to the new harbor in sumeru is WILD because what do you mean it's connected to a random jumping mushroom in the aranara forest?? like did the transport caravans just... parachute down the waterfall?
Starting Genshin after playing hundreds of hours in BotW, the roads in Genshin confused me too, since there are no horses to have road pathfinding, and as stated, beyond Liyue and Mondstadt, the roads cease to work as means of marking transportation routes. To me the roads scream of BotW inspiration holdovers that they gradually lost grip of why they were there to begin with. It's small things, but them being misused leaves to a hollow experience as a lover of small details.
Has anyone else tried walking From Monstadt, to Liyue, to Sumeru, then to Fontaine, while sticking to the road as much as possible. (Why yes, I am resinless. How could you tell?)
Yeah it was pretty obvious to me Genshin was all kinds of messed up both in its world and game design few months after its initial launch so after complaining and suggesting improvements about 20 times on surveys they frequently asked you to fill back then I stopped caring about it and begun glitching the game whenever I felt like it. Maybe there's a given reason why the roads are the way they are somewhere in the main story I wouldn't know as I stayed at AR 25 and never made it past Liyue's quests, but I just assumed everyone uses the teleporters to get to places. After all you gain the blueprint for crafting one from Monstadt so even that backwaters "country" (lmao) knows how create a working teleport waypoint.
10:55 You forgot to mention how Traveler here is walking through Nara (at least I think that's how it's called, Its been a while since I've been in Sumeru like that). No one can walk through Nara without a vision or a concentration of Elemental energy flowing through them. And even then you can't stay in there for long, let alone all those fungi who reside in there. Sure, the Forest Rangers (specifically Tignari) appearantly clean them up sometimes, but I doubt they'd be able to leave their forest unattended for long enough to deal with all the nara outbreaks. And idk if Sumeru City can spare enough vision wielders to consistently clean the main roads, seeing how rare vision wielders appearantly are and how most probably don't know or care enough to do so or are too busy (think Cyno, Alhaithem, Kaveh, etc.)
didn't notice anyone mentioning this, but if some of you did - sorry, i have no eyes. as far as i remember, while going through the Chasm quest, one or two of the npcs did mention that the giant hole formed exactly where the main trading route between Liyue and Sumeru lay. but that happened whopping 500 years ago, so it doesn't really answer our question of how exactly overland trade is happening between the nations.
I 100% agree these👏roads👏 don't 👏make👏sense👏. Narukami shrine is hell to reach, theres a thought of a path but half of it is broken. Liyue - sumeru should be a lot easier, at least 1 road should be easy but even that one is a climb, and youd think they would connect bayda harbour to sumeru city a lot better, but they didn't and its so confusing. And i believe we(the traveller) are the only ones who use teleport waypoints? Which honestly is so strange becuase how can something so convenient exist, just for one person to use? In places where no one has been to in sometimes more than 1000s of years? Could it be our sibling's doing? Hoyoverse, we want answers
I'm glad someone pointed out the waypoints because the fact they are not used by anyone other than the traveler has confused me. it's very common during events for characters to just appear like it's no big deal despite the fact traversal time would be very long and ardous due to the roads. Not to mention times NPCs just casually mention going from point A to B. Like distance means nothing. Some of this would make more sense if Teleport waypoints was actually used, albeit with limitations.
now THIS is the kind of video content I need, as someone obsessed with the roads/rivers and general modes of navigation in these games. actually, I am really looking forward to Dornman port to be released, just so we can finally figure out WHERE it is, as well as how people actually sail out of Mondstadt lol
I've ALWAYS been wondering this, as someone who is into world building in games like Fallout where it's so important to have a good and believable world. How do nations conduct trade with one another? Where is the police force for these roads? Maintaining them? Like, Keqing's literal job is dealing with land...GIRL, THERE ARE SO MANY ROADS AND BRIDGES IN DISREPAIR!
I don't think it's THAT big of a deal to her since she's mostly working on construction, and real estate management. Her work may be more focused on established cities rather than maintaining the land throughout Liyue.
They aren't putting much effort into making the world believable. Sumeru and Fontaine have computers and electricity. Other nations don't for the simple reason that they were released earlier and in the original medieval setting of game it was accurate but they scrapped that setting to make new regions unique while simultaneously ruining game believability
To play devil’s advocate (teyvat’s advocate?), a dirt path being suddenly overtaken by grass near a statue of the god of plants kinda makes sense. I have no reason to believe that this was intentional on the devs part, but I like to think this is the lore reason.
If I remember correctly either when they expanded The Chasm or when Sumeru first game out, they explained that the Sumeru/Liyue trade route goes throught The Chasm into Gandharva Village, but that way still has pretty bad logistics, especially the cave into Sumeru where we first came into Sumeru at 4.0. There is also a cool map about Tevyat Trading Routes in the Genshin Reddit, but that is mostly speculation, it does explain some sea routes at least.
Liyue to Mondstadt isn't as safe as you think. In the early days of Genshin, I decided to do what it says on Noelle's Lore: walk from Liyue to Mondstadt (without attacking to see if it was possible) so I did. I had to preclear the entire path from Liyue to Stone Gate, and then met my demise as soon as I got past it cause there are Cryo Slimes just camping nearby. Most of these roads are definitely not safe, nor make sense ( I think there are even some paths shown on the map but don't actually appear in the world.)
There are A LOT of things that don't make sense in Teyvat. Not just roads, but also houses, facilities, man-made buildings waterfall, etc... Sure, you can say "Teyvat has its own laws" but at the end of the day, too many things that don't make sense add up and break the immersion of an open world with actual people living in it.
There’s just such a lack of infrastructure everywhere that the scale of the world isn’t properly communicated tbh. Like you would think the most advanced nation, Fontaine, would have more functioning settlements than one capital city and a dingy town
Genshin is full of things that make zero sense. Like Fontaine waterbus ways with just 1 traffic line. Giant cups and beds. Alot of cringe in story too. Etc. At this point, i seriously think that Mihoyo hates common sense.
I feel like I have gained some important knowledge about the roads and their safety in Teyvat. Thank you for imparting such wonderous knowledge unto me. Most entertaining educational Teyvat video ever.
Everybody run, the OSHA inspectors are here!!
Teyvat has its own laws. OSHA doesn't apply there lmao
@@felixleong61Never underestimate the power of OSHA, I once got killed by a Deconstructor in another game because I disregard OSHA regulations.
Celestia better wake up!
Your name is a lie!
THE OSHA DEATH SQUAD HAS ARRIVED
I do love the implication of a traveller that has all these nations asking them to save the world tm and their first reaction is "...with THOSE roads?"
Literally why would i save your world when you can’t even fix your roads??
iirc according to a dialogue option at some point, at least one of the worlds that she's been to in the past is an effectively modern world. I don't remember exactly what the dialogue was about, and I'm having a hard time locating it again, but I'll keep looking (I hope I didn't just hallucinate this lmao). If that's the case, Teyvat roads have gotta be a serious downgrade for her.
@@joeytabora1052 Traveler voiceovers
@@randompersonontheinternet1038 which one?
As they should
The roads in teyvat are literally the paths in my grandparent's stories of how they got to school
omg yes
Samee😂
@@Astrilin01 omisdsesgernt reader?
FRR
@@fredtheweirdo yas
There's no definite path to the Narukami Shrine and somehow people reach their, like the way to go is the vines stuck to the mountain side. They never game any reason for people go there. It's kinda funny to think that the shrine maidens mountain climb there everyday
Yeah I never understood that one
i just imagined they lived up there tbh
They are just built different, the maidens not the roads
I think the shrine is supposed to be difficult to reach on purpose
it's kinda like a sort of test for your will or something
An able-bodied human could definitely get there without tools like a wind glider or needing rock climbing. It takes a fair amount of looking around to find the ladders, and I'm still not sure how they manage people who need to be carried up, but there are paths other than the ones players normally use.
I live in Irelnd and let me tell you. When you get into the rural parts of the country this is really just how it is. Every day im scared that all of a sudden i will just have to deal with treasure horders on my way to my granny’s house
This. I often wonder I'd the people who make these kinda videos never went to the countryside or a less urban place lol xD
that's kinda cool
FELLOW IRISH PERSON!
HEH, ANOTHER TEST SUBJECT
@@plvto1 please no dont hurt me i have a family
I can't believe how entertaining it is to just watch a video about the roads in genshin
Real it's really giving genshin back when it first launched ppl where just making content on everything but now it's hardly entertaining stuff like before
Frr
Fr i didn't even think I'd finish the whole video in one go 😂
It reminds me of a Skyrim video where the guy tries to find watersources of all rivers, just as fun to poke holes at as the roads
@@AdalynnCaelgirien Exactly. It feels like it was inspired by Skyrim videos, and I'm not complaining)
The true safety hazard is trying to visit Grand Narukami Shrine on foot.
As someone who plays "Walking Impact", as in... I just walk and don't teleport at all during quests :3 (during 4.4 Lantern rite, I literally walked from Liyue harbor to Qiaoying village, and took the boat/raft ride with Gaming to Yilong Wharf)
This video DEFINITELY pointed out a lot of my mind-boggling concerns about the paths on the map when I did my "walk"through xD
Damn, i like to explore the game but not teleporting at all on quests is wild, if i would do that i allways get distracted by the most random shit i see
same, but i always do this when I'm bored @foxybr4610
I do this only during archon quests lol
I also like to do this, but only when I have a lot of free time
@@foxybr4610 cant let those treasure chest pass away XD
Okay but I've legit wondered about this. Like, there's so many places that make no sense for the average non Vision holding person to get there. There's so many paths infested with enemies or places where you have to scale a literal mountain to get there (looking at you Narukami Shrine)
Yeah, that's why being an "Adventurer" is an actual job in the game world. They do escort and stuff
@@randompersonontheinternet1038 isn't Gaming's job literally protection service to help transport goods, in that new Liyue expansion there's the main office lol
@@matnasrin3479 That's official government organisations. adventurer are like a smaller scale group doing their own things, the occasionally do big things like reoppening the chasm, fight monsters, explore ruins. You can commission them to do tasks for a cheaper price than hiring official knights or millelith to do it but comes a risk of less professionalism. Kind of like that
Stumbled across the vid, not a genshin player so idk if its consistent, but there are shrines that aren't exactly accessible as they're designed around spiritually important locations... like the top of mountains. Its also not normal, but certainly not unheard of irl. Though granted, those shrines also tend to have a "base shrine" in a more accessible location for the masses to visit.
In defence of Narukami shrine, there is an actual way which normal people could use to get there, but it's detoriated a lot with a broken bridge and collapsed stairs :(
i think a lot about how the fontaine research institute just exploded and all the hydrobus highways are wrecked and no one cares to fix it. also, the highways only fit one hydrobus. they'd have to go one way and back alll the way. can you imagine the waiting line for this?
To be fair, Furina had more pressing matters than approving a road reconstruction.
Imagine being told you have to produce a plan for rebuilding an aquabus line in an area where water doesn't stay on the bottom, and instead flies around in cubes. And the rocks don't care about staying on the ground either.
@@kotarouinugami1745 I think it wasn't like that before the explosion, that's all the effects of the irradiation caused by that green rock
@@wallacyryan8211 Yes. They had a proper aquabus line when physics was working properly. Now they either have to wait for the laws of nature to reassert themselves, or build something beyond confines of modern physics.
@@kotarouinugami1745 i dont know a lot of the lore but maybe some kind of tunel to keep the water in thill it recovers its normal behavior (if it does) and a submarine kind of thing so you can travel underwater (maybe this was not plausible while the archons quest of fontaine but also i dont know how the disolvable fontanians work tough)
I noticed that too, when you travel from Mond to Liyue for the first time you have a clear way with barely any enemies, but there is nothing like that ever since. All the ways to get to Sumeru and Fontaine are so convoluted they even had to unlock teleports. The world is still great but things like this kinda ruin the immersion a bit...
Reminds me of that one NPC going "Who would go through the desert to get to Fontaine"
Well, do you know of any other complete roads between there and Sumeru?
@@negspirito you go by boat usually, from what I remember
@@negspirito they use boats from Baydha Harbor to Romaritime harbor, but most just go from Yilong Wharf to Romaritime Harbor
Kind of expected since mond and liyue are kind of the most peacefull nations right now.
I mean...
Inazuma is full of jacked-up samurai.
Sumeru is surrounded by angry wild life and giant trees.
@@negspirito Sumeru, Liyue, and Mondstadt all have harbors where you can take a boat to Fontaine, though when Fontaine released, none of them have been added yet (now the only one missing is Mond's)
i feel like this is a sister video to Any Austin's unemployment analysis of Mondstadt. idk what to call this genre of video but i love it. bureaucracy core.
BUREAUCRACY CORE IM CRYING
a worldbuilding analysis. maybe?
Off topic but thank you for commenting so that I accidentally clicked on your profile and witnessed the art that is Kerminetta
the continent in lore is like 50 times bigger than the one in game so maybe it makes more sense to think of it in that way
Wait, really? Where is this said? I'm curious about this if the map is just scaled really far down from what it actually should be
@@aspirerl4807 It's said all the time in the game how people take days, weeks, months to get from one place to another
this was also shown in the anime teaser, basically the whole teaser takes place in Mond but the green fields stretch for miles away the forests are huge and even the windrise tree is basically the size of Irminsul
To be honest, gavent the roads they have it wouldn’t surprise me if most of the NPC live only in their village and travel to their main town once in a while ( excluding merchants/adventurers). Every time a playable character show up in another region, one of my first question is "how the hell did you come here in the first place ???"
100%! The game would be so much more massive if it was even like a 10th of the size in lore.
I just posted about this like 10 or so posts up XD
I'll quote here for ref:
"I also don't believe that the scale that we see each nation at in game is accurate to the canon world (the manga and anime landscapes are already much larger than in game). Parts have to be truncated to facilitate game mechanics. It's easy to suspend disbelief of these while playing but story wise, we know that travel from nation to nation takes much longer than the 10-20 stroll we can do in game. So it's part of the reason that when we try to look at these things logically in game, it breaks down. ^^;"
@@aspirerl4807 Please... In game world is tiny. Just a symbolic miniature. Do you really think world with a few nations could go across... a few km?... What about villages and agriculture? We see almost none, way too little for cities. Look at Wangshu Inn. It doesn't even have rooms... Dragonspine? In game it's only a small hill, get real. I don't know how people can even think that in-game world is nothing but symbolical.
OH MY GOSH. Someone who actually talks about the road issue.... I think about this often. Like weirdly often. When 4.5 rolled around and they showed Kirara going from nation to nation and her Sumeru to Fontaine route was the weird one WE took to get through the Pari land, I was like... how is that the normal trade route? Much less the one Kirara takes to get places quickly and efficiently. I once took a "walk" from Fontaine to Sumeru city using the... I don't recall what the harbor's name is but the one you first encounter using the teleport they give you. I just recall being so lost because HOW would any normal person take this route? Why aren't we hypothetically taking the boat across the part of the map we just got (could have done it like in Alcor part of Liyue quest until they were ready to give us the map). Then when I made it into Sumeru it was just... so many dead end roads that had me like "how would a normal person get back to the city???" Even when using the map I got lost because half the time the paths don't even match up with the map...
Don't even get me started on the new harbor. They didn't add Layla's village which, based on the route we walk during her hangout, SHOULD have been north of the mushroom area, and would have needed farm space for sumpter beasts. Yet they not only didn't bother adding a new city / town to Sumeru, but made that whole new section bland af and lack any semblance of sensible road for travel. Like you I couldn't figure out any way a normal person would traverse it. I get that this wasn't a Sumeru patch but damn I would have preferred another small hole left in the map before I would have accepted the barren wasteland they gave us.
Kirara probably just hates water (as a cat youkai), and so she made sure her path across the water is slowest possible.
Or maybe as a youkai, she can use the teleport waypoints. That would explain how she's so fast at delivery.
For real, the sumeru part of the new map is just a giant empty place with only like 3 chests in total. For a port that connects two countries, it's really small compared to the port that connects to inazuma. Heck, even the countryside of liyue has better looking port
I was literally discussing this yesterday. Fontaine itself has so many infrastructure and transport problems that its even comedic
Another thing on that note: particularly in Fontaine does it ever feel like the buildings aren’t to scale? Like they’re ever so slightly too big for the characters? Like I’m pretty sure traveler is exactly as tall as some of the guard rails and don’t even get me started on the opera epiclese
@@sindhu7582 the scaling problem already exists since mondstadt. Look how inconsistent most buildings are compared to favonius hq and the church. Or how dawn winery is so small on the outside and yet so big once you go inside
The fact even Furina ordered a road reconstruction and no one still did it
Now someone needs to talk about how there is no physical way to walk into Chenyu vale.
At least there's a convoluted way by boat. Problem is, Sumeru is said to trade with Fontaine via Chenyu Vale, but there is no way for Sumeru boats to go through there.
I love the newer regions, but one thing I have always liked about monsdat and liyue is that most of their roads makes sense and it makes the world feel more lived in to me. I feel like they stopped with making actual roads past liyue and monsdat.
The exploration being annoying is what made me quit genshin. Having to constantly switch characters and teams that have no synergy means I had to have a combat and exploration team that I would have to toggle between due to limited resources as a newish player.
Why did everyone tell me the exploration is good in genshin when I feel like I'm constantly being stopped? And then I finally find something that looks interesting and Paimon tells me to turn back.
@@floofzykitty5072yeah sumeru is a giant pain in the ass in terms of exploration, you need dendro pyro and electro to do all the mechanics of the place. Fontaine gets better though, it's smaller but almost every place is interesting to visit
@@floofzykitty5072 exploration in regions after mond and liyue are all quite a hassle ngl
Its like going from 'stress-free stroll' into full on parkour every 5 minutes
Last night I was thinking about new regions, and that led me to mapping out trade roads between all the regions that are available for now. And let me tell you, many of them don't make any sense. I think I spent about 20 minutes trying to understand how the people of Qingce village get goods from Chengyu valley. Because there is a guy that tells you that they do deliver stuff to Qingce, but after getting them to the other side of the river there is NO road AND some treasure hoarders nearby. They could simply add a bridge that leads to one of the rocks that already have bridges connected to them.
And that road near Vanarana that you've mentioned in video makes even less sense to me.
broo I've been thingking the exact same thing! they could easily just add that one bridge that leads to that small dock from chenyu to qingce area. There's literally no roads that connect chenyu vale and the rest of the liyue too
in the lochfolk event the downstream was said to be pretty fast and the exchange location should actually be the shore area near the teleport waypoint with a raft. im guessing the treasure hoarder you mentioned is around the Chi Ruins? for normal people its definitely a no-cross zone especially since there's a Lawachurl there. and same reason the village bridge avoids that area aswell
I mean, we've also seen people use slimes as hot air balloons for transporting goods off the ground in Mondsdadt, and Sumeru, so that could also explain how they transport stuff around.
Hm, well there are also some hilichurls near the road that you've mensioned, so Idk. But it's most likely the correct pass!
Actually wrong! People travel with boats from Chenyu Vale to Wangshu Inn and then walk all the way to Liyue on foot, and the things they are delivering is most likely transported by carts or slime balloons.
This is something that actually kinda struck me as weird when I started the game. I came from Zelda BOTW, and one of my favourite things to do was gallop a horse along the many paths there. Not as possible in genshin, feels like a lot of paths just end randomly or some such, and I feel interconnect far less, though probably due to way map is made.
Either way, hope for snezhnaya to scratch this itch of mine (since I love snow biomes) but that’s in far future
According to the schedule, Snezhnaya is set to release literally next year (Natlan is this year after all). Not that far off! :O
You're in luck because you don't need to wait until snezhnaya. In natlan you can play as saurian vishaps to travel around
This reminds me how in the Teyvat, Inazuman people get to the Narukami Shrine? I have spent multiple hours trying to figure out paths to there from Inazuma city or even just Kamisato residence! Even if we agree that paths to shrine are meant to hard so they will give feeling of accomplishment to even make it to the shrine. How did sick people get there? How did that one person who had lost his mind in Inazuma Archon quest go up there from the City?
Same with Adepti places in Liyue, I think one of the reasons Liyue people stopped believing in Adepti is cause, they make it super hard to even contact themself.
ikr narukami road shrine involve some rock climbing. adepti places, the one with amber trap seems to have pretty satisfying road, spiraling to the top. The other 2... you got me something to do tomorrow :D
Great video lol, ive also found teyvats roads to be extremely poorly made. About the aranara civilisation (New Vanarana) being not found though, they arent exactly hiding that much. The aranara are actually able to be seen by children, but they cant be seen by adults. You probably already know this, but what that means is that when someone walks into Vanarana, it just looks like a normal section of forest. In fact, the Vanarana where the aranara live is inaccessible without knowing the way to get into a dream, because the aranara exist in dreams. Its why you are able to play the vintage lyre in front of that rock and then all the aranara npcs disappear. Also, on another note, Narukami island has a great road, considering that there is a main thoroughfare that runs from the main port in Ritou all the way to the capital. Though there are hilichurls at the beach between Ritou and Konda Village, the Archon Quest implies that canonically, they are not actually there. The large amount of Nobushi and Kairagi on the side of the road are probably also not entirely normal, as the implication is that they are disaffected samurai that only started showing up in large numbers due to the civil war.
No that its the Travelers business but I thought we would get quests to fix some broken roads/bridges like the one on Wangshu Inn.
Don't even get me started on Teyvat's hydrology.
Please please get into it
Wait no continue
@@ravendesk9912 I'm no hydrology expert but even I can tell they don't make sense. In Sumeru you've got two massive waterfalls at 45° that eventually meet and the water gets reduced to a puddle, leading to nowhere.
It makes no sense.
Just follow the streams and their volume. Water needs to go *somewhere* (i.e. join another bigger river, ultimately end up in the ocean or some reservoir). Their pressure can't suddenly go down for no reason and water can't disappear into thin air.
@@darksylincits a magical world, chill out nerd. The water disappears straight into the air to balance out all the thirsty folks who didnt get to pull Yelan or Yae Miko
@@alexandermader1168 Perfectly scientific explanation. Makes sense.
This is such a 'Any Austin' core.
I am glad Genshin is getting audited like this because i am always baffled by their waterfall origin and how the roads don't make sense.
funnily enough, this was recommended to me after Any's Skyrim rivers video lol
waterfalls yeah
reason why Watatsumi soil is infertile for crops is because the water flowing into the island is fucking seawater
@@jomybaby22-gaming that and because of the magic god thing that happened when the snake god took watatsumi island/people to the surface
@LilySiti I think they were talking about a more practical explanation...
@@mcbill7352 İ did not spend an abnormal amount of time in Enka doing that month long event just for it to be forgotten
Right?! I’m really surprised that more people aren’t talking about Genshin’s roads. They drive me crazy, and I don’t even have any kind of background in road design/maintenance or any other kind of infrastructure. So many roads are totally impractical, way too steep or littered with giant rocks to drive a cart over them. Or they disappear into the grass suddenly as if they haven’t been used in years. Or they just straight up don’t even exist. Seriously, how is anyone supposed to get to the Narukami Shrine? Or Watatsumi Shrine? Or literally anywhere in Inazuma that isn’t the capital city or Konda Village? How does Bayda Harbor deliver goods to the rest of Sumeru when it’s perched at the top of a freaking waterfall with no paths around it? And Fontaine, oh god…Where’s the road into the Court of Fontaine? Not even one single route for land access? What happens if the other water bus canals are taken down? Are people just stuck inside/outside the capital? How did they get in or out before the waterways were constructed a couple decades ago? I get that it fits with the theme I’d being the nation of water, but it’s a major liability. The Court is extremely vulnerable to acts of terrorism because of this wrongheaded theme park design.
Teyvat’s roads are more maddening than wishing at full pity and getting your 10th Qiqi.
No because this has genuinely started to bother me, it feels like roads and pathways have been getting less and less coherent since Liyue to the point that now Hoyo is having to add automatic waypoints to new regions because they just... don't want to add in proper roads or routes for some reason? The 4.x updates as a whole have had this problem REALLY bad, there's only one cohesive way to get into the Court of Fontaine and it's through a port that I specifically remember being the "smaller" of the ones we know about. There's a second path in from the left side of the city but that one makes even less sense, somehow(it takes you to the top of the wall around the city and then doesn't give you a complete path down unless you swim in the aquabus water. There's also a third entrance below the Clementine Line that isn't accessible at all to the player iirc). Chenyu Vale has basically zero walking accessibility for the player; NPCs have Lumidouce Harbor and Yilong Wharf but a waverider was never added there, AND no bridge or waverider was added on the Liyue - Chenyu Vale side so again, no easy crossing for the player(at least without characters like Kaeya or Wanderer). NPCs still have boats they're implied to use(some docks by the auto waypoint) but even then there's no path from the Liyue side? and you'd think there'd at least be a small port there since it seems to be the only way in. And on that note, I still remember one NPC in the middle of a route starting from Fontaine and heading to Liyue Harbor. He's in Jueyun Karst, and I remember him because when Chenyu Vale came out I intended to go through Jueyun Karst to get there only to find, guess what? There's literally no path through, and once I did get there, the quest that starts automatically teleported me onto the ""correct"" path to Qiaoying Village anyway! It really feels like the new regions have started to become "contained" if that makes sense, with one entry point being deemed as the "correct" one for the player and everything else getting ignored even if it would just be a nice addition to have in terms of worldbuilding(like a logical path between Chenyu Vale and Jueyun Karst or Liyue and Sumeru, or a more expansive Bayda Harbor with an actual road connecting it to Sumeru City). Anyways, I'll shut up now, but thanks for giving me the perfect excuse to ramble about this haha
I remembered sometime during the 2.x versions that I really enjoyed travelling on the road without teleporting from the beach that we started the game from, all the way up to Liyue harbour then up the ship to Ritou on Inazuma, then all the way up to the castle.
It was great and very atmospheric, and at the end of it all, I started imagining how much more fun it would be to do the same thing when more nations come up.
Tried it with Sumeru, was a bit disappointed but at least there's the lumberpick valley path (which was the path I took when I first visited Sumeru)
But then more and more broken and illogical paths showed up, and it took me out of it.
FINALLY , SOMEONE MAKING A VIDEO ABOUT THESE ROADS, I KEPT SAYING TO MY FRIENDS THAT SOME OF THESE ROADS ARE DUMB AND DONT MAKE ANY SENSE, FINALLY, FINALLY SOMEONE ELSE ALSO THINKING THE SAME THING !!!!
broooo I legit always wondering about this. Also their waterways too, they have big ships from sumeu city yet the river from the city to anywhere is can get shallow and no way ship can get through there. The only way from sumeru city to port ormos is through Vimara village and the water there is to shallow and the river is too narrow. Also their fontaine. The lore said people rarely get to fontaine through the desert and there's no reason they build a waterbus that goes from romaritime instead of lumidoce which is seems like their main port to anywhere outside fontaine. Romaritime only connects fontaine with baida harbour maybe since yilong warf is on a more elevated water level. And one more thing. I can not figure out anyway that people in the court of fontaine can get in and out of the city other than through aquabus. How tf did they get anywhere??? there seems like no other reasonably easy way to get anywhere even poison. these tiny details bugs me sometimes hahah
For Fontaine to everywhere else, we travelled via boat in Navia's story quest.. so they get to islands like that
There’s elevators down to the water level in the Court of Fontaine which implies they take boats to get around despite there not being an actual harbor at the base of the city
The uneven water level is the biggest issue with genshin world. How tf is it possible to have a waterfall on a sea, it's just geographically doesn't make sense
There is a road to the southwest of yilong warf that leads to the shore where there are smugglers' docks, so the smuggling route of lumidoce → yilong warf → baida harbour does exist
With Genshin's incredible attention to detail and lore building they still forget to make their roads logical. Heck, even eggs defy physics! I can't imagine how NPCs would cook them considering that even plunging on an egg would not break it!
I think all roads have at least one of the following purposes:
-NPC pathfinfing
-highlighting the way during a quest
-making places look less empty
-making the worldmap look better
I'm actually so glad someone else has noticed this, I've always wondered how the hell Teyvat functions with those roads. I've unironically tried following those roads before only to be brutally attacked by enemies, so it always bothers me seeing people of Teyvat act like they are completely safe to travel in cutscenes. Not to mention that road connecting Mondstadt to Liyue, you would think if the knights are so concerned about clearing monsters, they would focus on the MAIN TRADE ROAD and not the random forest camps.
As for Liyue and Sumeru trade I think they actually do it mostly by the sea. Port Ormos is Sumeru's trade centre, and there are even some NPC's from Liyue. Liyue is also a coast city, so the chance that they would mostly ships instead of roads to get to Ormos or Sumeru is quite possible. Especially that traveling there, to Sumeru, via land, would mean going between monster-and-ancient-evil-filled Chasm and ruins of old plagued by more monsters.
Yup I've been confused about this since the day the game told me to enter Sumeru via this really rundown and dangarous tunnel in Chasm and the Chasm itself is a pretty dangerous place for you average Teyvat NPC so there's no way trade and normal traversing happens via Chasm. Would definitely love to see a second part on the topic of roads in Genshin
when starting the sumeru questline, I got mildly lost because I couldn't find a road on the map to get me to the first statue. I still don't think I know where the official entrance is. I just offroaded over the mountains.
Worst part, theres no road between most places especially between nations. The only notable one being between mondstadt and liyue. There not one between liyue and sumeru or fontain. There's a water one but the only way on foot is through the wilderness, for sumeru you have to go through a cave in the recently opened chasm. For fontain you either need to go through juyun karst which is very taboo thanks to the adepti, or you have to get you a boat to drop you off in the wilderness or the harbor on the far side which is right next to fontain anyway. The roads make no sense because there aren't as many as there should be
Trade during the 1400-1800s (around the era of Teyvat tech in general) is mostly by sail. That means Port Ormos, Ritou and Liyue Harbor get thousands of ships moving large cargo and passengers across the ocean.
@@milesperhour9256 There should still be a path that interconnects as roads were the predecesor of large trading ships. And even then, carriages are clearly still being used yet paths abruptly end or lead to places that is nonsensical for horses or wheels.
Npc probably dont go to the statue, they just wanted the berrys XD
I think they leave their carts and beasts of burden at the end of the road, and climb to the statue on foot.
I have sent a complaint about it in the past.
Will you put them in game jail?
It's hilarious to think you've made a video about something i've been thinking recently in genshin. Also, it's crazy that hostile mobs are literally outside or nearby villages/towns and NPCs don't care at all. Another one I was thinking was the bridge near Wangshuu Inn never been repaired. Anyway, great video!
Can’t wait to see if there’s a video on caravan ribat; it’s supposed to be a hub for getting into the desert and beyond, the utter state of the desert paths is something to behold. Big boat clearly has a chokehold over Teyvat international trade
3:30 my sibling did a single pull here for sentiment sake, and they got Ningguang, so they would joke that the building there is Ningguang's house
I’m so glad I’m not the only person who thinks about this. For immersion during archon or story quests, when we’re canonically traveling with other people and only traveler knows how to use waypoints, I’m always trying to take the roads and paths that I feel are plausible for the character we’re traveling with. So I have definitely noticed this. And honestly, the Court of Fontaine is a whole frustration. But my biggest annoyance? How does anyone get to the shrine in Inazuma?
That time I got reincarnated as Teyvat road inspector
i think this is also why im so disconnected from sumeru. the roads just make 0 sense. i looove walking down the roads and make my exploring seem ''natural'' but theres no true connection through the whole nation and now fontaine too. how even did npcs use the old passage in the sumeru desert to fontaine its a tunnel that leads to a huge cliff..
Really feels like they cared more about making the areas "Interesting" to explore, completely removing any kind of logical civilization in the process..
And it's not like they can't make proper roads and such looking at Montstadt and Liyue, they just don't want to.
the dendro energy from three statue of the seven instantly regrows the grass so there is no road /j
The Bayda harbor expansion bugs me so much, both the harbor and roads.
Great editing and funny visual gags as always !
I think that expansion was the watershed moment because there's literally nothing there and yet they put in a port that does nothing and doesn't even function. If there were like a few npc and chests and world quests no one would really care but the lack of them throws it into sharp relief...
@@pr0ntab There are npcs and chests there tho?? I mean it's nothing special/groundbreaking but they are there. People in the harbor and chests along the road and coastline.
As for quests, ur right, I don't think Bayda harbor has any. That I know of that is.
But yeah, between the state of the road and the cutoff waterway really makes you wonder how the trade networks even work lol
It was probably rushed to push out Petrichor and Remuria in time for 4.6
@@enderphoenix11 it's just way fewer than even lumberpick Valley which was a smaller but more substantial crossing-over region with chests, churl camps, and some world quests.
@@pr0ntab True, though It was heavily connected / is just part of the Chasm so that probably helped. Maybe also because it connected Sumeru and Liyue, two of teyvats biggest nations, and was the only throughway (besides the intended Chasm entrance), whereas this is kinda just an addon, just to bridge the spaces. The focus was on the new fontaine area and subregion. Though i wish there was more yeah :/
This is helpful for game design because if your roads don’t make sense from a critical perspective then you see the plot holes and lack of practicality with them
I’m not sure if it’s just me but I’ve always found navigation difficult in Genshin, both when I’m simply just wandering around and when I do end up using a teleport waypoint. It’s genuinely embarrassing the amount of times I’ve teleported to the wrong area because it looks so similar to another area 😭
The direction the water flows through the rivers is also a physics defying thing as well. Try to figure out were the water comes from that feeds into the river around Sumeru City for example.
Not me frantically pulling up the map of my fantasy world to make sure the roads make sense
the lack of path between sumeru and liyue actually started bothered me right away
Finally someone made a video about this headscratching yet niche topic. You're right, this has not been covered about enough. There's so many egregious cases of this in each nation (such as the one going to Narukami Shrine the others mentioned) that you can make a series out of this. This issue and the general unrealistically small scale of most places in the overworld is such a worldbuilding flaw that bugs my immersion
I find it funny how obsessed you are with roads in this game. I also find it scary how obsessed you are with roads in this game.
Personally I found both this and your first video very interesting because I do find that when things like roads get proper treatment as to how theoretically an in universe person would use them, they can make the world feel more immersive... And while stuff like the lack of proper connection between Bayda harbour and Sumeru city isn't game breaking, it still feels like a very small negative in my opinion. Anyways small genshin road rant over. Great video once again!
I vaguely remember on the day 3.0 released I went to explore the region without doing the quests first and ended up going above/north of the Gandarha ville and having to pretty much climb to the city because I didnt really see any good path from there
no because i love to walk places when i'm doing archon and story quests and i always try to follow roads because i assume that's how we would walk somewhere ?? but they like never make sense anymore
not a road, but the way up from narukami shrine, shorten my lifespan
I have the same feeling for the longest time that the roads and the parts in the map which indicate roads are just weird sometimes 😆
No because you’re so real for this😭roads not showing up on the map has always pissed me off, I like to walk around when doing archon and story quests, which has been Quite the pain in Fontaine
For game with such big and interesting world 4.6 part of Sumeru is criminally low-grade
It's like they just picked up a paintbrush and randomly drew strokes throughout the map, with no connection at all. As the nations are shown as not very advanced compared to our world, with no airplanes and trucks and stuff, they must rely heavily on trade for their economy. But if these are the roads there...
...how in heck are their houses and palaces and shops and stuff so grand when they can't even support their own means of transportation...?
A reward on the ro-
Is this, a gift from this world?
The other major issue here with these regions, is how these people are surviving. You're going to tell me they live off fishing? The closest thing is Qince Village for actual agriculture. There's basically no farmland in Teyvat, which is like HOW?!?
roads irl also stop randomly you know, especially ones far away from civilization
Roads, rater paths, that stop randomly in some rural towns are like this because sometime ago this used to be a very popular route to people until a new one emerged or the old one got too dangerous. Sometimes it happens when there used to be fairs and small festivities happening. This is more my experience when visiting old relatives.
Interns in HYV:
Inspector, our superiors did not pay us enough to work on this issue. We were just told to code commission quests.
I can't wait for you to review Natlans roads
0:21 I love how the paving is not aligned with the road direction...
everyone i would like to nominate youtuber beerevity to be the new eighth archon of the long-masterless 'tevyat public safety and civil infrastructure maintenance' element
Looking too closely into these things makes you realize that Teyvat is just a post apocalypses nightmare world. Really glad someone *finally* pointed out how bad the roads are here.
oh i am SO GLAD someone has made a video about this, I THINK ABOUT IT SO MUCH LMAO. Environmental storytelling is one of my fave lil bits about open world games, and in some places genshin does it really well! And in others, it just makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE??? Like, where is Dornman Port supposed to go? Some people theorize past storm terrors lair, but that means people are passing through one of the most dangerous regions of mondstat for trade every day. Others say it should be past the stormbearer mountains, but theres no road through there at all??? its a whole city!!! Its GOT to go somewhere!!! and the nonexistant route into chenyu vale is also a perfect example, like, what road are people taking to get there? The one that makes the most sense is through Qingce village, but that road ends in a fairly large body of water and no docks/boats on the Qingce side of it. there IS a dock on the other side, but it doesn't make any sense that only one side would have that? We skipped right past that during the lantern rite travels with Gaming, which tells me the devs probably also don't know how we're getting there! We just APPEAR on the chenyu vale side, don't worry about how it happened i guess lol
I love your videos! This is the kind of channel the community needed. I've been streaming your videos to my boyfriend, he likes watching me play Genshin and he likes informative videos. I'm very much looking forward to more videos analysising things about Genshin's world. Covering Fontaine's land and roads would be interesting too considering it's been flooding over the years and that's why there are caves and buildings and stuff under water, so thinking about how all those would've connecting and reached one another in the past would require some thinking.
This is why i hate sumeru map...
They focus on adding more obstacle to make exploration more challenging but forgot the logic and accessibility
There's a video essay about this topic called "The Shandification of Fallout", if you want to read more. The original got deleted years ago, but still gets brought up in video essays about gameworlds.
nah you are by FAR not the first person to notice these absurd roads- people were reacting to them as they came out. by all accounts, it makes no sense! like, mondstadt is the ONLY nation with decent main roads! though with Fontaine you could theoretically give the excuse that most of the roads and stuff are now underwater because of the flooding, and then the aquabus routes are great, and most people just use boats in general
newest isekai Transported to Another World But I’m a Road Inspector just dropped
💀💀💀
You are truly the Lord of All Roads
A super cool detail, would be if stuff like that first road actually getting cleared up when you get to Inazuma or Sumeru. Just to show that time is passing and this world isnt static unless the Traveler is around.
Teyvat has it's own laws, even logic.
Bee: "Main road problems!"
Venti: "Wouldn't flying be faster?"
Yk that one question ppl ask if you’d rather have a vision but live in the real world, or live in teyvat without a vision?? Most ppl go for the 2nd option but I’d go for the 1st purely for this reason 😭😭 like living in teyvat without a vision id have to stay cooped up in one small city bc there’s monsters EVERYWHERE and id definitely die
the one leading to the new harbor in sumeru is WILD because what do you mean it's connected to a random jumping mushroom in the aranara forest?? like did the transport caravans just... parachute down the waterfall?
Starting Genshin after playing hundreds of hours in BotW, the roads in Genshin confused me too, since there are no horses to have road pathfinding, and as stated, beyond Liyue and Mondstadt, the roads cease to work as means of marking transportation routes. To me the roads scream of BotW inspiration holdovers that they gradually lost grip of why they were there to begin with. It's small things, but them being misused leaves to a hollow experience as a lover of small details.
what do you mean there are no horses, there are, just we don't see them in game
You Nintendo fanboys are truly insufferable.
@@MarionFR cavalry captain of mondstadt speaking
Has anyone else tried walking From Monstadt, to Liyue, to Sumeru, then to Fontaine, while sticking to the road as much as possible. (Why yes, I am resinless. How could you tell?)
Yeah it was pretty obvious to me Genshin was all kinds of messed up both in its world and game design few months after its initial launch so after complaining and suggesting improvements about 20 times on surveys they frequently asked you to fill back then I stopped caring about it and begun glitching the game whenever I felt like it.
Maybe there's a given reason why the roads are the way they are somewhere in the main story I wouldn't know as I stayed at AR 25 and never made it past Liyue's quests, but I just assumed everyone uses the teleporters to get to places. After all you gain the blueprint for crafting one from Monstadt so even that backwaters "country" (lmao) knows how create a working teleport waypoint.
8:47 Arakanta in the perpetual state of running around in the same spot until the end of times because of the roads
10:55 You forgot to mention how Traveler here is walking through Nara (at least I think that's how it's called, Its been a while since I've been in Sumeru like that). No one can walk through Nara without a vision or a concentration of Elemental energy flowing through them. And even then you can't stay in there for long, let alone all those fungi who reside in there. Sure, the Forest Rangers (specifically Tignari) appearantly clean them up sometimes, but I doubt they'd be able to leave their forest unattended for long enough to deal with all the nara outbreaks. And idk if Sumeru City can spare enough vision wielders to consistently clean the main roads, seeing how rare vision wielders appearantly are and how most probably don't know or care enough to do so or are too busy (think Cyno, Alhaithem, Kaveh, etc.)
i think you mean Mara, Nara are people, which is Rana in reverse
they call it marana!
Marana, or the Withering
didn't notice anyone mentioning this, but if some of you did - sorry, i have no eyes.
as far as i remember, while going through the Chasm quest, one or two of the npcs did mention that the giant hole formed exactly where the main trading route between Liyue and Sumeru lay. but that happened whopping 500 years ago, so it doesn't really answer our question of how exactly overland trade is happening between the nations.
I 100% agree these👏roads👏 don't 👏make👏sense👏. Narukami shrine is hell to reach, theres a thought of a path but half of it is broken. Liyue - sumeru should be a lot easier, at least 1 road should be easy but even that one is a climb, and youd think they would connect bayda harbour to sumeru city a lot better, but they didn't and its so confusing. And i believe we(the traveller) are the only ones who use teleport waypoints? Which honestly is so strange becuase how can something so convenient exist, just for one person to use? In places where no one has been to in sometimes more than 1000s of years? Could it be our sibling's doing? Hoyoverse, we want answers
I'm glad someone pointed out the waypoints because the fact they are not used by anyone other than the traveler has confused me. it's very common during events for characters to just appear like it's no big deal despite the fact traversal time would be very long and ardous due to the roads.
Not to mention times NPCs just casually mention going from point A to B. Like distance means nothing.
Some of this would make more sense if Teleport waypoints was actually used, albeit with limitations.
@@Jardrinthen by that logic you could use the easy road to travel and not be given way points by hoyo
now THIS is the kind of video content I need, as someone obsessed with the roads/rivers and general modes of navigation in these games.
actually, I am really looking forward to Dornman port to be released, just so we can finally figure out WHERE it is, as well as how people actually sail out of Mondstadt lol
I've ALWAYS been wondering this, as someone who is into world building in games like Fallout where it's so important to have a good and believable world. How do nations conduct trade with one another? Where is the police force for these roads? Maintaining them? Like, Keqing's literal job is dealing with land...GIRL, THERE ARE SO MANY ROADS AND BRIDGES IN DISREPAIR!
I don't think it's THAT big of a deal to her since she's mostly working on construction, and real estate management. Her work may be more focused on established cities rather than maintaining the land throughout Liyue.
Remeber that lore wise, Genshin's world is like 50x bigger
@@flyingorange2482sooo, that's an excuse how?
They aren't putting much effort into making the world believable. Sumeru and Fontaine have computers and electricity. Other nations don't for the simple reason that they were released earlier and in the original medieval setting of game it was accurate but they scrapped that setting to make new regions unique while simultaneously ruining game believability
@@dinte215 Omg you are so annoying, you are the only one who got a problem with this
To play devil’s advocate (teyvat’s advocate?), a dirt path being suddenly overtaken by grass near a statue of the god of plants kinda makes sense. I have no reason to believe that this was intentional on the devs part, but I like to think this is the lore reason.
Y'know it never really hit me until this video that yeah, these roads must be so confusing for the NPCs.
If you think roads are weird, wait till you see the the rivers.
If I remember correctly either when they expanded The Chasm or when Sumeru first game out, they explained that the Sumeru/Liyue trade route goes throught The Chasm into Gandharva Village, but that way still has pretty bad logistics, especially the cave into Sumeru where we first came into Sumeru at 4.0.
There is also a cool map about Tevyat Trading Routes in the Genshin Reddit, but that is mostly speculation, it does explain some sea routes at least.
Liyue to Mondstadt isn't as safe as you think. In the early days of Genshin, I decided to do what it says on Noelle's Lore: walk from Liyue to Mondstadt (without attacking to see if it was possible) so I did. I had to preclear the entire path from Liyue to Stone Gate, and then met my demise as soon as I got past it cause there are Cryo Slimes just camping nearby. Most of these roads are definitely not safe, nor make sense ( I think there are even some paths shown on the map but don't actually appear in the world.)
There are A LOT of things that don't make sense in Teyvat. Not just roads, but also houses, facilities, man-made buildings waterfall, etc... Sure, you can say "Teyvat has its own laws" but at the end of the day, too many things that don't make sense add up and break the immersion of an open world with actual people living in it.
6:57 they haven't been discovered because few people know the song that reveals the populated vanarana, road proximity be damned
Plus they can't be seen by humans (like jazari)
for an open world game, genshin world infrastructure is disappointing.
There’s just such a lack of infrastructure everywhere that the scale of the world isn’t properly communicated tbh. Like you would think the most advanced nation, Fontaine, would have more functioning settlements than one capital city and a dingy town
maybe theres an explanation to that especially when they said sky of teyvat are fake or sumshiet
Its just path, Im sure 99,8% of people do not care at all
@@flyingorange2482I care!
@@lesocloud6773 You are the 0,2%
im pretty sure trade between Liyue and Sumeru are done via maritine routes like how ships from Liyue Harbor travel to Port Ormos
Genshin is full of things that make zero sense. Like Fontaine waterbus ways with just 1 traffic line. Giant cups and beds. Alot of cringe in story too. Etc.
At this point, i seriously think that Mihoyo hates common sense.
I feel like I have gained some important knowledge about the roads and their safety in Teyvat. Thank you for imparting such wonderous knowledge unto me. Most entertaining educational Teyvat video ever.