Climb the sheer, sloping, mountainous cliffs of a long-abandoned mine, jog through the dark, torch-lit rocky tunnel, and you’ll emerge into a lush green jungle in Genshin Impact’s new Sumeru region. Within your first steps of entering the region, the game will point out a small four-leaf icon hanging in the sky. The game prompts an image showing a tutorial, and if you press the right buttons, your anime-style character will transform into a glowing gold ball and zip toward the icon via a gold vine. After hearing my character grunt and pant from climbing and running, using this Four-Leaf Sigil makes me feel light for the first time.
The Four-Leaf Sigil, named for its clover-like shape, is a new feature of the 3.0 Sumeru update in the open-world exploration game. When you interact with it, it allows you to soar through the air and speed along a varied and twisting jungle path. As you fly, you can chain together moves from Sigil to Sigil, and experience an almost Spider-Man like rhythm as moving from point to point transforms from a time-sucking task to a mesmerizing delight. I got so into speedily following a curving river that I forgot to unlock a waypoint I had planned to stop by along the way.
The addition comes as part of a new patch that launched on Tuesday. The 3.0 Sumeru update has brought plenty of new features to the game — a lush new region to explore, new characters, and a new story. And while all the flashy additions are certainly welcome, flourishes like the addition of these Sigils feels like a true example of just how far the game has come.
Genshin Impact is a live-service, open-world game. The way this has worked historically is that as time goes on, we just get more and more regions. The game quite literally gets bigger, and what we get to play today feels like a constantly growing sprawl of regions to explore. As the game has expanded from its already ambitious start, we’ve seen the developers not just grow the size of the game but consistently refine mechanics from region to region.
Previous regions, like the stormy island chain of Inazuma, has a similar feature. It works similarly to the Four-Leaf Sigil in that it allows you to travel fast and soar into the sky, except it was more annoying because you had to collect another separate item, called an Electrogranum, before being able to fly. (Also, the item would disappear after 15 seconds.) The Four-Leaf Sigil doesn’t use a tiny time-restricted item that requires people to stress over managing the countdown. You can just fly.
I love it so much that I’ve even started fantasizing about other spots in old regions that could benefit from it. Of course, I wouldn’t expect developers to backtrack and add them to previous regions. However, it feels like a clear sign that even now, Hoyoverse is still committed to improving basic aspects about the game, including how to get around.
