The accusations of Genshin Impact Zelda “Clone” development team have been crying

When the gacha game Genshin Impact was originally revealed to the world, there were a lot of comparisons to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Some have even accused it of being a “clone” of Link’s new open-world adventure.

Now, after several years, After the game has collected billionsMiHoYo’s president, Liu Wei, reflected on this stage in the game’s life, at the latest “Genshin Impact FES” event – stating how proud the team was when it initially launched the closed beta, but the comments and “misunderstandings” eventually had some colleagues in tears.

While not specifically mentioning Zelda, Wei referred to the early stages of the project’s unveiling – calling it an “unprecedented crisis.” As you may remember, a Zelda fan at the time of the reveal went so far as to smash his PlayStation 4 in protest of the similarities between Genshin Impact. Here’s what Wii said, based on a rough translation by @tokinohikaru_00 on Twitter (via Nintendo Everything):

“When I brought out the closed beta, I was very proud, full of hope and thinking that we did well, but the response to the closed beta was, as if it was different from our assumptions, it’s just different. So when we did the closed beta, we had an unprecedented crisis. Everyone just watched the closed demo video and said, “We really don’t understand what Genshin is trying to do.” He didn’t understand much, and there were a lot of misunderstandings. So at that time, in our team, everyone was really worried. I remember many young colleagues They cry and say to me: ‘Why is this happening? What did I do wrong?’ But this is the innocence of youth – you can say that we are not afraid. We thought and acted.

Developer miHoYo has previously admitted that it was inspired by the game Breath of the Wild, but has always insisted that it is a “completely different” experience. And while it wasn’t a very pleasant experience in the lead-up to the game’s launch, Genshin Impact has gone on to become a live-action force.

As for the promised Switch release, it appears to be lost in the works. An update from May last year indicates that the project is still in development for Nintendo’s hybrid platform, but since then there haven’t been any updates. A rumor in 2021 indicated that this version may have had some technical issues.