Genshin Impact fans got a nice surprise earlier today when the teaser for the upcoming 6th region of the game Natlan was showcased at the end of the Version 4.8 livestream. In the clip three new characters were teased along with some of the environments players can expect to encounter in Natlan.
The first of these characters is a small girl with cat ears and paws similar to characters like Diona and Kiara, and is seen driving a small drill-like vehicle. She appears to be a geo character and will most likely be a Geo character based on color motifs in the character. The second seems to be a Hydro character with a shark companion to ride across the water. Her model seems to be the young woman model that is used by characters like Nilou. The final new character is a young man who is shown to wield a claymore. He also appears to be a Dendro unit.
However, something that is already being talked about on X is that the characters are all light skinned, with tattoos or markings on their faces and bodies. Natlan is based on the Mesoamerican and West African regions. Sumeru, which was based on the South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Egyptian regions, also received a fair share of criticism for having a mostly light-skinned, nearly white cast, even for the region’s Archon.
Since then the character designs of Hoyoverse games as a whole have come under fire for possessing little to no diversity, with the only tan characters in Genshin being Kaeya, Xinyan, Cyno, Candace, Dehya and the recently added Sethos. All other characters are light skinned or white depending on if they are from Liyue and Inazuma, or Monstadt, Fontaine, and Snezhnaya respectively.
As the game approaches its 4 year anniversary and enters its 5th year of storytelling, it’s a bit exhausting to keep asking for more diversity in character designs. This is further exacerbated when it’s clear how much research about each of these regions the development team has done. While many were upset by the lack of dark-skinned representation in Sumeru’s designs, there was attention given to the ways in which character designs reflected well researched, accurate references to specific cultures. Hopefully, in Natlan players can finally get both the representation they desire, and the accuracy they’ve come to expect.