A chat with Honkai: Star Rail’s Lead Game Designer, Chengnan An

The main attraction I was at Game Developers Conference 2025 for was an interview that is both exciting for me as a journalist but also as a gamer. I had the extremely lucky opportunity to sit down and talk with Honkai: Star Rail’s Lead Game Designer, Mr. Chengnan An.  Covering HoYoverse products has been a blast, and being able to sit down and interview the Lead Game Designer for a game I have played daily since release was amazing. I was able to ask questions both from a player perspective but also from a journalism perspective, so I got to really cover bases.

As a player, I had at least a few questions in regards to character balancing and even stuff with name translations to EN from CN. I was curious as to how they might approach buffs in the future via a previous release discussing future buffs to characters like Blade, especially after the release of Mydei who is in a similar drain and Destruction character niche.

Blade and Mydei are two different characters with similarities but we do pay attention to older characters and we did mention that there will be an official announcement soon, so you can expect that to happen.

Of course, we have an idea of who will be changed now with the most recent Special Program for Version 3.2 officially announcing that Blade, Kafka, Silver Wolf, and Jingliu will be getting changes in the near future. As for the details of these changes, we’ll just have to wait and see.

I followed this up by asking where they get inspiration for all the planet designs, because we’ve had some gorgeous variance so far. Starting off in Belobog and moving to the Xianzhou followed by Penacony and at the time of the interview, Version 3.1 had just been released so we got our first expansion into Amphoreus. The example given back was in regards to how Penacony was created, which is as follows:

We settled on the idea of jazz music and the concept of a dreamscape, so we went with that. We think of each planet as a stage for the characters and the story, so we want it to be attractive for players. Of course, building on that, we seek inspiration from a lot of places all over the world.

Following my question about where the team pulls inspiration for planets, I figured it was a great opportunity to ask where they get ideas for new gameplay additions such as the Memosprite mechanic introduced in Amphoreous. According to Mr. An, they like to figure out what spices up the gameplay and adds new depth to the combat, keeping things fresh but exciting. You would think it’d be hard to come up with ways to keep turn-based RPGs fresh, but Star Rail manages that with the elemental weakness system and its implementation as well as the “summons” that act like additional party members on the battlefield. They think about how the summoner actively interacts with and summons the “summon”, whether they’d like the summoned entity to stick around for multiple turns or not, and how having a summon on-field interacts with the rest of the team during combat.

Being unfamiliar with the detail and level of planning that goes into such a frequently updating game like Honkai: Star Rail, I asked Mr. An how the planning of versions goes and what that entails. I mean we all know it’s a lot of content to push out as frequently as it happens, right? I was informed that the team behind Star Rail does, in fact, have to plan multiple versions ahead for story cohesiveness and how they want to introduce new characters. They really want players to have a coherent experience with new content as it’s released, so it’s a big focus point for HoYoverse when creating this content.

The real kicker for planning ahead is how major updates like 3.0 are handled. Updates like that with plenty of new stuff to introduce and lay out for players to get excited for can take upwards of nearly an entire year! I can only imagine the kind of work that has to go on behind the scenes to create an update like that all the while still working on the patches that are actively releasing even before a new planet is released for the playerbase.

 

From a gameplay perspective, we know that some characters have different ways of activating their ultimate ability. We have the traditional method via hitting energy levels, a unique method like Acheron and Feixiao who build stacks to unleash their ability without energy, and characters like Yunli and Argenti who do use energy but have two different meters enabling them to use their ultimate attacks earlier than other characters reliant on energy. From a player’s perspective, I was curious as to what determines the kind of activation requirements that each character gets.

In regards to a character like Acheron, she is a Memokeeper of Nihility, so we wanted to make her stand out in that role. When paired with other characters of Nihility, it helps make her a very powerful combo with others. And take a character like Yunli, we wanted to make sure it doesn’t get boring, so we made it to where you can use her ultimate even if the meter isn’t completely full.

As a random bonus question I wanted to ask was if there were responses to things in-game that surprised the team behind the scenes, especially with all the jokes that the community grabs a hold of and runs with. If you’re involved with the fandom, you’re probably plenty aware of all the community memes and jokes that get brought up all the time online or at events. Naturally, the answer is just as entertaining as I’d hoped it would be.

Of course there are certain things that take us by surprise. There were things we even knew before launch from beta testing, such as the trash can joke. And when we moved onto the third beta test, we learned there was this huge discussion about the trash cans and players were more accustomed to the idea of a space comedy. I believe the first viral character we got was Herta. During the second closed beta, we found out Herta spinning was so popular, and that gave us more confidence to let us be more liberal when designing future characters.

In a pseudo-follow up to that question, I inquired about how fan feedback or interest affects future decision making in regards to things like character banners, story, etc. They said that of course if there’s large discussions about characters, they’ll keep that in mind when creating new content or bringing existing characters back. This led into a brief exchange about what inspired the choice to release the character Dr. Ratio for free in regards to winning awards for being the best mobile game of 2023. Mr. An said they were just grateful to be celebrated by so many people around the world and wanted to show his and the rest of the team’s gratitude, hence the free 5-Star character given out to all players for a period of time.

A huge part of the gacha game atmosphere tends to be limited time events and banners and the like, so one of my biggest questions was about the decision to include limited-time events and rewards in a permanent manner once their initial run is completed. In the case of Star Rail, they wanted to keep major events available for everybody because of how they are implemented into the story and what you get to learn about the world and its characters via these events. It was adamant for them to make sure players don’t miss out on unique story beats contained within events, especially if there’s a newer player that was not around when these things were originally released. In regards to events, they did tease that more player interaction events such as the Radiant Feldspar bejeweled-like event will happen in the future! When it came to releasing event rewards like Light Cones via the Simulated Universe reward shop, it came down to a similar thought process of not wanting players to feel like they missed out for not playing at a given time or for new players to think they got into the game a little too late.

My final and closing question was what kinds of aspirations or goals that Mr. Chengnan An had for Honkai: Star Rail going forward. In my mind, I like to think that everybody in charge of a piece of media has some kind of goal or aspiration they’d like to hit, regardless of what form of media it is. You can feel the passion this team has for their game, so it only made sense to close out such a wonderful interview opportunity on a note like this. His response was as follows:

I wouldn’t say huge aspirations, but in the past we’ve released so many characters. In order to tell a good story, these characters only make an appearance in part of the story, so moving forward with this Trailblazing mission across the galaxy, how do we see previous characters come back together? This is something we’d like to look more into as the game goes on.

Basically, they’d like to see how to bring back characters that may have played their part in the story and give players more opportunities to interact with them or learn more about said characters. I for one would like to know what other random activities Blade has gotten up to amidst his time in the Stellaron Hunters, especially after a scene in Penacony featuring him seemingly having a driver’s license out of nowhere.

This was such an incredible opportunity to sit down and have the chance to interview Mr. An, the Lead Game Designer for Honkai: Star Rail. It was my second time ever conducting an interview, and to have the chance to interview someone responsible for one of my (current) favorite games made me a bit nervous.

Overall, I was very thankful for the invite to San Francisco, and they were kind enough to even provide a merch bag full of goodies for a whole slew of characters. Working with and alongside HoYoverse, especially the Honkai: Star Rail team, has been an absolute blast, and I look forward to whatever else we see from Mr. An and the rest of the team in the future.