Swinging a baseball bat against destiny with Honkai: Star Rail’s Chengnan An

Released in 2023, HoYoverse’s Honkai: Star Rail had a near impossible task: It needed to show that the Shanghai-based studio didn’t stumble upon its worldwide success with Genshin Impact by pure chance, but by talent. That’s how it looked from outside, at least. However, HoYoverse’s developers had already begun working on Honkai: Star Rail in the first half of 2019,  over one year before the open-world RPG  that would make the company famous – and rich – beyond its wildest dreams, even launched. 

With regular appearances at the top of the monthly mobile gacha game revenue estimations and several award wins under its belt, Honkai: Star Rail managed to live up to its predecessor in any case, whether there was pressure to do so or not. In the studio, responsibility for the project had been given to Chengnan An, the combat designer of Honkai Impact 3rd, who I’m able to meet for an interview on a sunny afternoon in March 2025, ahead of the Version 3.2 special program.

Although HSR and HI3 share a common universe, the two titles couldn’t be any more different in terms of gameplay, one being turn-based and the other a real-time action RPG akin to the latest HoYoverse game, Zenless Zone Zero.

According to An, the allure of the turn-based formula is its approachability. “At that point, we’d already built up plenty of experience on how to create compelling characters and how to tell good stories, so we thought to ourselves, ‘Maybe if we try to make a turn-based game, instead of only making action games, that could be very attractive to new players.’”

His own role change from combat designer to lead designer was less drastic than one might be inclined to think, given the different job descriptions and project genres. “I actually started off by doing what I’m good at, which is working on the gameplay mechanics and combining various mechanics together to create a very attractive game for our players,” he tells me. There was a lot of learning-by-doing for him and his team.

“There is a huge difference between turn-based and action-based games,” he explains. “Players click differently, they operate the game differently, and they get their sense of satisfaction from very different sources. In an action game, it’s all about the immediate response, assessing the situation and picking out the most suitable skill for the current combat. However, in a turn-based game it’s more about the players making strategic decisions about the team combinations, and that decision-making process starts before combat even begins. This is where we kickstarted our design process, where we wanted to differentiate ourselves from the action games.”

No matter their exact genre, HoYoverse’s games generally keep their mechanics simple, down to featuring a similar amount of abilities for each character — usually a normal attack, one skill, and an ultimate. I ask if there hadn’t been any fears about a turn-based game being a little too shallow while adhering to that formula.

“For our game, the enriching experiences come from the different combinations of characters,” An says, suggesting that more skills would likely have made additional team compositions viable, but might’ve made the game too overwhelming: “In our game, the characters attack one by one, so by the time we finish one round and rotate back to the initial character, sometimes the players are like, ‘Wait, what was this attack about again?’”

Still, the developers shared my concerns when they started working on the game. “We actually experimented with giving the players three options in the prototype phase,” An reveals, “but then we realized that for that type of combat the third option feels kind of repetitive. So we decided not to proceed with that route.”

This isn’t the only experimental feature that got scrapped during development. “One of the original designs was that after a Weakness Break, the player was able to pick one character’s skill to unleash,” An describes.

The combat system took the team a while to get right with feedback from the first beta test singling it out as a point that needed to be improved. They kept “thinking about it non-stop” and finally tuned the mechanics to become the ones we know today. “It was at that time that we realized that the future holds great things for our game,” An says, adding that the team was sure of itself after the second test.

It was important to build a robust system with enough space to expand in the future, instead of making the game feel very “full” right from the start. An mentions Ultimate trigger conditions as an example. Until the release of Acheron in 2024, characters in HSR only activated their Ultimates in the same way, namely by gathering enough Energy. With Acheron, and other characters since, HoYoverse introduced special conditions to trigger Ultimates.

“This way, players experiment with different character combinations and they naturally set new goals for themselves to spice up the experience,” An says. 

Additional character classes like the recently added Path of Remembrance are another way of expanding existing systems, but the team is trying “to be very careful” about additions, trying to avoid doing so simply “for the sake of adding new mechanics.” As players have already figured out, events and mini-games are often used as testbeds.

Adding characters becomes harder over time, as “there are more factors we have to think about in creating them and, of course, sometimes that means that they get more complicated.”

While complexity isn’t a big topic in the community, the fact that newer characters oftentimes are inherently more powerful than their older counterparts is — and this is especially obvious when it comes to bigger shifts in the meta focusing on certain playstyles, such as 2024’s shifts to Break and Follow-Up metas. These periods made players feel like their older characters had no more value, as new content largely centered around the mechanics of the latest releases.

An’s goal is to have new characters fit into as many combinations as possible in an organic way, but concedes that the “timing of releasing characters sometimes doesn’t come as very intuitive to the players and that’s a challenge that we’ve been experiencing.”

“We want new characters to always bring new possibilities when teamed up with older characters,” he continues, citing Sunday buffing Jing Yuan as an example.

HoYoverse also caused a lot of excitement in the community by announcing its intentions to buff the PC, PS5, and mobile game's older characters and I try to squeeze a little more information on what these buffs might look like out of the lead designer — though, naturally, An remains vague on the details. He does tell me that the team is “currently working on designing the content for that” and teased an imminent announcement, which came during the Version 3.2 livestream. Kafka, Blade, Silver Wolf, and Jingliu will be the first beneficiaries of these plans in Version 3.4.

Whenever the team is designing a new character, it has to keep in mind two chief aspects: “There is of course the artistic expression, which has to be reflective of the character’s own personality and style. Then there is the character’s combat system, which has to work together with other characters.” 

From there, they ask one key question: “How do we combine the two aspects together?” 

“That’s the question we’ve kept thinking about since day one of creating this game,” An explains. “We want to start by thinking about the background story of a character and ask ourselves ‘How do we create the experience of a player playing as that character that’s both fun and reflective of the characteristics of Honkai: Star Rail?’”

When it comes to the Trailblazer, Honkai: Star Rail’s main character, the team has earned itself a lot of praise by the community. Both the Harmony and Remembrance forms of the character have become powerful units that everyone gets access to and that heralded some of the shifts in the meta mentioned above. Not a coincidence, says An.

"Our characters have a baseball bat in their hands and swing the baseball bat when confronted by destiny."

- Chengnan An

“By having the first character related to the Remembrance being the main character, the players can spread out and build a new team based off of that. In this way we enable our players to fully experience the game and the new mechanisms,” he explains.

The Trailblazer is essentially a gateway drug that gets players hooked on Super Break DMG and Memosprites — not that anyone will complain about that. What’s with the baseball bat, though?

“Simply put: lineage,” An explains. “Our characters have a baseball bat in their hands and swing the baseball bat when confronted by destiny. It’s just like the quote of our main characters when they use their Ultimate: ‘Rules are meant to be broken.’”

I have one more question to ask about characters that I anticipate will be a little sensitive, given the recent criticism about it inside the community, so I try to lighten the mood first by asking the lead designer where all the aliens are in this space game. As I’d hoped, I get laughs from every corner of the table and An gives me a jovially philosophical answer to match the vibes: “Aren’t we all aliens, in some way?”

I did secretly hope for a sincere response, but that wasn’t the main goal. I quickly follow up with the question the community wants an answer to: “Where are all the 4-Star characters?”

A bit of a mood killer, that one. As expected. He hesitates for a good while before he gives me an answer, the translation of which seems to be carefully weighed between the translator sitting at An’s side and a member of HoYoverse’s press team further up the table.

“We’ve launched many popular 4-Star characters in the past, such as Qingque or Misha, but for character releases we also have to follow certain trends. We understand that people want more characters in different versions and as for this part we can’t reveal too much information right now, so please stay tuned for more. But one thing that’s for sure is that we have and will always listen to our players’ feedback and will release more interesting characters in the future.”

That does at least sound like 4-Star characters aren’t exactly canned for good and while I’d like to know more about the topic, I get the sense that pressing the point wouldn’t yield any results.

I touch upon another point that’s been discussed to death in the community and that HoYoverse has tried to address in the past: the Relic system. Honkai: Star Rail uses a fairly streamlined and strict system allowing characters to equip six items – four Relics and two Planar Ornaments – to gain additional stats as well as set bonuses. However, the stats on the items are mostly random, so players often need to spend copious amounts of time and energy on farming gear to get stuff suited for their characters. While Genshin Impact and Zenless Zone Zero run similar systems, a few small differences give players a little more flexibility in their arrangements, which mitigates the RNG-induced frustration a bit. I’m interested in why the Honkai: Star Rail team didn’t go the same route.

In short, the developers wanted to provide a “clearer structure” for equipment sets to make it “easier for players to figure out how to gear up effectively.”

“This not only reduces the mental load for players,” An says, “but also makes our future system optimizations easier and much more straightforward.”

Following up on this, I ask whether the developers anticipated the frustrations that might spring from this system, as reasonable as their argument of better approachability is. Once again, the translation is supplied by a member of the press team instead of the translator.

“Everything related to RNG is sometimes going to be traumatizing, to be very honest. We listen to our players’ feedback a lot and we understand that especially OG players simply want to get the equipment they’d like and equip their new characters to experience those other wonderful aspects of HSR, such as the combat,” An says. “Although we can’t change this RNG feature fundamentally, because that’s the basic logic of our game, we can give players more chances to get the equipment they’d like.” He brings up Variable Dice as an example, which allows players to reroll the sub-stats of an item. To him, this is going in the right direction.

With the clock ticking away, I want to pivot towards Amphoreus a little, but I’ve always wanted to talk to a developer about the one scene that arguably led to Honkai: Star Rail’s breakthrough, at least in the west: the Wildfire scene at the climax of the Belobog arc. Trailblazer shaking off their death, Cocolia unleashing the power of the Stellaron with a kickass song coming in — it’s such a powerful moment and went viral on the internet.

“A game is like a vehicle for narration,” An tells me. “If we have certain moments in the game that are able to trigger a lot of emotions, then we’ll have some pleasant surprises at the end.” 

“Belobog is the first destination after the Astral Express leaves Herta Space Station, so we felt like it was a good stage for us to reveal the story of the Stellaron and how it influences different worlds,” he continues. “The scene of the main character fighting Cocolia is not only necessary, but it’s a stage for this whole story of the Stellaron. It’s not just the song that the players are captivated by, it’s about the entire build-up that leads to that moment — it’s the story that happened before, it’s the main character having to face this big boss all by themselves, it’s navigating different Paths, and achieving a new Path in that process. It’s a single moment, but it’s actually the fruit of all the moments before.”

Amphoreus, then. Honkai: Star Rail started out by being dubbed a “space comedy” and it never lost that humorous side, but how far can the developers stretch that, especially now that we’re in the opening stages of a Greek tragedy?

“The space comedy theme will stay true throughout the entire game,” An confirms. As for future challenges, the primary one is to bring together the stories of all the characters added to the title so far.

Asked about the role the Honkai IP will play in that process, he says that its role is more so its worldview than anything else.

Amphoreus is the first story arc in Honkai: Star Rail that will play out over an entire year instead of only three or four versions. What’s the greatest challenge for An and his team under this new approach?

“The challenging part is ‘How do we keep our players curious?’ Because if we save all the climaxes for the final version, the players might become impatient during that process,” he explains. The solution is to split the story into two parts, each with their own highlights.

Bringing up one final community concern at this opportunity, I ask if the recent lack of events in the game is connected to that new approach. An confirmed that “the main storyline is the focus of our attention as of right now,” but seemed confident in the situation normalizing. Again the Version 3.2 livestream somewhat confirms this, with an uptick in events being evident.

Time is nearly out, so I end by asking An’s feelings on the upcoming Fate crossover, even though I know I won’t get any substantial details — but I’m a fan, so I’ll take the crumbs.

“We do have a lot of Fate fans in our team and are very excited about the upcoming collaboration,” An responds. “We want to recreate some of the experiences of Fate, but of course I can’t spoil anything at the moment, so please stay tuned for our Q3 launch.”

I, for one, am very tuned. ‘Recreating some of the experiences’ certainly implies a lot more than just adding a few skins to the game — and I can’t help but wonder if the free 5-Star character teased during the Version 3.2 livestream might not be part of this collaboration.

Honkai: Star Rail has been in a tough spot recently with lots of criticism – some deserved, some undeserved – being hauled at it, while its siblings very much thrive. I get the impression that the team is very aware of and alarmed at the situation and works to address all the points brought up by the community, but simply can’t fix everything all at once. Too much has gone wrong at the same time. What the look back at the game’s development history shows to me, though, is that players will eventually get the improvements they want, as they did in the early days — perhaps not exactly in the shape they envision or as fast as they’d like, but they’ll come.

Happy birthday, Honkai: Star Rail, and here's to the imperfect tomorrow!

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.