Honkai: Nexus Anima devs aim to make a real player choice-driven story within the live-service format, despite inherent challenges

Genshin Impact publisher HoYoverse will release Honkai: Nexus Anima, a brand-new open-world creature collector RPG in the Honkai series, in Spring 2027. Last week, the studio opened applications for the title’s final beta test, which is set to start on November 25.  

As reported by Dengeki Online, in a recent developer presentation for the South Korean leg of the HoYoverse Media Tour, Honkai: Nexus Anima producer David Jiang discussed the background of the game’s development.

Talking about the game’s approach to storytelling, a noteworthy detail Jiang mentioned is that Honkai: Nexus Anima aims to feature player choices that directly affect the world.

For a live-service title, where the story and content are updated gradually over the course of the service, creating branching storylines is an extremely difficult feat. With each update, the script’s volume would increase exponentially to account for all the branching paths, posing a huge challenge for the writers. This is especially true if, for example, choices made in the first year of services were to impact events that are revealed in its third year. Jiang argues that due to such difficulties, most live-service games do not feature branching storylines in the true sense of the word.

“However, we have decided to confront that challenge head-on with Honkai: Nexus Anima,” Jiang says. “While inheriting the high standard of storytelling the Honkai series is known for, we want to take it a step further and allow players to actually change the world through the choices they make.”

According to Jiang, the way character-specific stories end; who appears and in what part of the story; what the characters say; and even how the overall narrative comes a close will depend on the decisions you make throughout the game. Other than the branching choices, your character’s stats, such as intelligence, will influence dialogue options and the clues they can discover. Different stat combinations will lead to different storylines, Jiang explains.

“While this is a concept often seen in single player games, and especially TRPGs, our biggest challenge is to make it work naturally within the frameworks of a live-service title,” Jiang says. It will be interesting to see how these mechanics work out in a live-service game in the long run, and to what extent the players will be able to change the course of their own story.

Honkai: Nexus Anima is set to release in Spring 2027 for PC, iOS, and Android. 

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