Well I think the Liyue festival hit at a bad time. It was mostly already built and set in stone in beta 2, I think it was, before the game even came out. Due to their content pipeline being 6 months from creation to release, roughly, I don't think there was a lot they could do about that festival, which is unfortunate. I think next year's rerun or the next Liyue festival will be massively improved.
I kinda feel like with as important of a continent as "not-China" is for them culturally, they should definitely have not made it a follow up to Mondstadt this early into the game. They should have taken us from Mondstadt to Sumeru or Fontaine where they could have seen how the game's success went, and then after they learned some lessons about what players want, and had some money to throw back in to development, then they do Liyue and make it a real "wow" location. Mondstadt had the charm of the characters really getting fleshed out in the game's opening chapters, which were all released and ready to go and polished by the time the game came out. It was a steady flow of quests that linked together nicely, had a nice buildup, and a nice payoff. At the end of the Mondstadt story, I felt like that could have been a 40 dollar single player RPG and I'd have been happy.
Liyue, we only got a chapter or two at first, then they drip fed us the last few story quests which really pissed with the perception of the area and the characters in my opinion. They also had no build-up to the Osial fight. We were just running around doing fetch quests and them bam we were flying over the ocean shooting canons at a revived mystic dragon god while fending off Fatui....and then immediately after it was "oh it was just a test bro, you weren't really ever in danger". Just the wort possible climax to that story that you could imagine. The flow for the whole Liyue chapter was just poorly done.
I think for Inazuma and beyond we're going to see a lot of content inspired by the feedback that we've been giving them for months now.
