Honkai Star Rail Version 3.0 was released on January 14, 2025. Geekly has had some time to play the new patch, and we have some initial impressions.

Hey, hey! Kyra Kyle here. I finished the first chapter of the new planet Amphorius. Yes. Honkai Star Rail (HSR) introduced a brand new planet. Any HSR patch that includes a new planet is a massive one, but HSR Version 3.0 tops most other HSR patches because it introduces a brand new path, Remembrance.

For those who may not know, Honkai Star Rail paths dictate which playstyle a character will have. Abundance heals. Preservation shields characters. Harmony buffs. Speaking of Harmony, one of the latest new characters, Sunday, suggested that a certain playstyle would see more play: summons. As a Harmony character, Sunday buffs, which becomes a stronger buff if the character he’s buffing has a summon.

Since Sunday had an interesting game mechanism that we had yet to see, I expected any new path or characters to feature summoning. I anticipated Propagation. Instead, HSR added Remembrance. Turns out, Remembrance focuses on summoned creatures.

The following is conjecture. Judging from Remembrance Trailblazer (they receive a new path and element this patch) and the upcoming Aglaea, Remembrance will focus on summons that support, while Propagation (which will most likely be released at some point) may focus on summons that deal damage. Enough conjecture. Let’s return to the first impression. What I’ve seen of Remembrance is fun and provides more design space. Honkai Star Rail developers added a new path before the game’s formula grew stale. Remembrance does give hope for the future.

Everything I’ve said is positive or explains the state of Honkai Star Rail. If you haven’t noticed, I’m stalling. I wanted to like Amphorius and the new patch, but unfortunately, Version 3.0 is the worst.

The latest Honkai Star Rail patch features wooden characters, a derivative storyline that an Edge Lord thinks is unique, voice acting for equally Edge Lord characters, and HSR’s answer to Paimon. No. That insults Paimon. Mem is worse than Paimon. I didn’t think it was possible, but Hoyoverse has unleashed a character far worse than a character so annoying it’s become a meme. Any one of these reasons could be why I say Version 3.0 is the worst Honkai Star Rail patch, but the patch suffers the most from level design.

Bear with me. This will be relevant. I conducted an experiment. Each HSR planet has a unique currency that players can turn in at a shop (or some other venue) for upgrades. I fast traveled to the closest space anchor (fast travel location) and ran to each shop to see how long it would take me to reach the upgrade shop. Every other planet (including the Herta Space Station) took an average of 2 seconds to go from the space anchor to the shop. It took me almost 19 seconds to go from the closest space anchor to Amphorius’s upgrade shop. Amphorius increased the time to do a simple task ten-fold.

You may think that 19 seconds to visit an upgrade shop isn’t bad, but Amphorius does this with almost every task. Everything in Amphorius takes 8-10 times longer to complete. It turns HSR into a walking simulator. A five minute action on any other Honkai Star Rail location would take you between thirty minutes to an hour on Amphorius. Yes. You can smash some flying pigs and double your speed, but even after the speed boost, you’re speed is still (effectively) nerfed, and that’s if you remember to smash a flying pig or one’s available. Ugh!

Some of you may say that Amphorius’s scale is larger-than-life. This increase in size makes sense for the space. Sure. I didn’t lead with this, but I like Amphorius’s art design. When I say design, I mean level design as a game designer. Make no mistake, this shift in Honkai Star Rail’s game design philosophy marks a naked attempt to keep gamers logged into HSR longer. The design team could’ve done anything to denote the size of Amphorius. Keep the vaulted ceilings. Design options like this makes a space seem bigger.

Heck. You could keep the stages the same size. But if you insist on increasing the stages by ten, include ten times more chests. Each stage has the same number of chests, which makes Amphorius seem empty. There’s a whole lot of nothing.

Okay. Rant over. I want to enjoy Amphorius. Despite the poor level design choices, I have hope that Honkai Star Rail Version 3.1 will be better, and I’m excited to see what the developers will do with the new path Remembrance.

That’s all I have for now. Thank you for reading. And wherever you are, I hope you’re having a nice day.