‘Genshin Impact’ Reveals Fontaine Images, Here’s The Possible Release Date

It’s about that time for Genshin Impact to dramatically expand its map once again. After adding Sumeru in 2022, it’s time for the live service gacha game to crank out another sprawling zone and add to the main storyline.

This time, it’s Fontaine, a more modern, industrial type city with shining buildings and murkier sewers, at least judging by these first images. This nation is in service to Focalors, the Hydro Archon, joining Wind, Electro, Geo and Dendro before it. Once Fontaine arrives, there will be only two regions left until the map is “complete” with all seven major nations. The remaining two are Natlan, the Pyro region, and Snezhnaya, the Cryo region.

The possible release date is August 16, 2023, when it’s believed the 4.0 patch will hit for the game based on patch timing, as new regions are always entered with the patch turns over to a new number. Sumeru was released on August 24, 2022, so it would be pretty close to exactly a year between them. Hoyoverse, if nothing else, is committed to making the live expansions to the game hit their dates hard, with only COVID briefly interrupting a patch or two, but only for a little while.

Here’s how Fontaine is described:

“Of the regions of Teyvat, Fontaine prides itself as the hub of culture and the arts; or in the words of Francis, a traveling merchant from the region, "true beauty and elegance." The newspaper The Steambird is the main newspaper of the Court of Fontaine; Mona is a columnist on it, suggesting that they have writers from all across Teyvat.

Fontaine boasts its immersion in the development of technology, as referenced in multiple story points — such as the Mikage Furnace, designed by Fontaine engineers, including Xavier; and limited events — such as in Fabulous Fungus Frenzy, where the Wisdom Orb is a Fontaine-local-designed equipment designed to suppress specific behaviors in organisms.”

Like all upcoming regions, Fontaine has already been teased in various storylines for a while. It will be home to Archon Quest Chapter IV: Masquerade of the Guilty, the next main storyline. The Chapters in Genshin Impact usually have 3-5 Acts or so within them that will unfold over time. With new regions, the majority of new characters added are from that region, and the Archon is generally a hugely powerful, highly sought-after character when it arrives, which is likely to be the case with Focalors. The overall theme here appears to be “Judgement.”

New regions dramatically expand the game and even if the story unfolds over time, there’s loads to explore when each new one drops, immediately. Here, there’s also going to be an explorable underwater region, given its Hydro focus. It should be just about a month until it gets here, so stay tuned for more info before then. Here are the rest of the images, below:

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