As we edge ever closer to Honkai Star Rail’s 2nd anniversary, we had the pleasure of sitting down with Chengnan An, HSR’s Lead Game Designer, at GDC 2025. We spoke with him about the inspiration behind Amphoreus, the maybe not-so-dead Annihilation Gang, and even asked where our quantum husbandos are?!
Before we dive in, make sure you grab some Honkai Star Rail codes and read up on the next Honkai Star Rail update so you don’t miss out on any of the anniversary festivities.
Pocket Tactics: Amphoreus is obviously influenced by Greek and Roman history. What attracted you to that era of time?
Chengnan An: Every year, we release a new world and a new theme for the players to experience. Take Penacony as an example. Penacony set the stage for the stars and the talents of the galaxy to come and shine. For this year’s theme, The Heroic Saga, we found inspiration from ancient civilizations with mythologies of ancient heroes, and the Greek and Roman civilizations really stood out as very suitable.
Ancient Greek and Roman mythologies are often built on a single character, and a story unfolds based on them; that’s an aspect we find to be very inspiring.
With the addition of the Remembrance path and memosprites, Honkai Star Rail’s gameplay seems to be constantly evolving. Is it hard to come up with new combat mechanics that don’t make new characters feel greatly overpowered?
For the Remembrance path, players are able to summon memosprites to help with their combat. But it doesn’t help with one single aspect of combat, and there’s no one single way of helping out. Instead, it works together with previous, older characters to create a new, fun, and interesting combat experience. The main character also unlocks the Remembrance path, and if players use them as part of an older team, they still get to experience all these new ways of combat.
Do you have combat mechanics in mind for all of the unplayable paths that we know about so far, such as Elation?
When we released the game, we only had seven paths, but players found out while playing the Simulated Universe or through the storyline that there are additional paths in the game. Remembrance was the first one ever that became playable. At this point in time, I cannot give you any spoilers, but this is something that we will continue working on in the future.
Dr Ratio looks like he’d fit in very well in Amphoreus. Does he have any ties to this region, or is it just a coincidence?
To answer this question alone, no, that’s just a happy coincidence. Based on the storyline of Dr Ratio, you can find that he’s not actually from Amphoreus.
It’s been about six months since we last saw a new four-star character. Why has it been so long?
The new characters are an integral part of the future storyline. So I cannot share any spoilers at this moment. Please follow us for more information.
Is there a reason why the Imaginary element is so dominated by male characters, and why there are no male Quantum characters?
[laughs] It was not intentional. It was another happy coincidence that we stumbled upon when we were creating the story ourselves. In the future, we will take into account the players’ feedback on this. The path and the attributes of a single character are interconnected with the combat mechanics, so it’s not like we intentionally create male Imaginary characters.
The Myriad Celestia trailer that featured the Annihilation Gang got a lot of people very excited to learn more about these characters. Will they ever make an actual appearance in-game, or are they really dead?
The Annihilation Gang is a very interconnected part of the galaxy storyline, and they also serve as an intro to many significant characters. There was mention of these gang members in the 2.1 storyline, so you see nods to it. So, for future versions, please stay updated and follow us.
I’m going to assume that means that they’re not dead! [laughs]
Stay tuned!
In a recent Developer Radio, some changes to older characters were mentioned. When can we expect more information on that? And is it likely to be buffs to kits, a new mechanic, or something else?
For the older characters, we will add buffs to them as part of the optimization process. The specific designs are still in planning, and I’m sure you will see an official announcement pretty soon. Adding buffs to the characters themselves is not the only way to keep them relevant; we created new combat environments and mix-and-match combos for the different characters to create new experiences for players.
For example, in version 2.7, you saw a new character, Sunday, and when he’s paired up with the 1.0 character Jing Yuan, they create a really powerful duo. Honkai Star Rail is a turn-based game where players make strategic decisions on the combos of their characters. We don’t want the players to focus on one single character, but rather experiment with different combinations of different characters.
There was recently some backlash about the use of black screens with white text in the story. How are you planning to combat this?
As a playable fiction, there are different ways to create narratives in the story. You see animations, you see dialogue, and you see the scenes change from one to the next. We use different arrangements of the three methods that I just mentioned, because all of them are very necessary to the storyline.
But sometimes players don’t get the best experience, and there’s feedback we’ll take into consideration in the future optimization of our story so that the players can have more fun and more excitement.
In your opinion, what was the most exciting moment during the development of Honkai Star Rail?
That’s a very broad question. I would say a sense of achievement comes from different things before and after the release of the versions. So, before a new version is released, we see multiple rounds of iterations and beta testing on our gameplay, and we get our sense of achievement through these. After we release a new version, we see players having all kinds of fun from experiencing the game, and we also get a sense of achievement from that.
Is the planet in the background of the Honkai Star Rail title screen Teyvat?
That planet is exclusive to the Honkai Star Rail universe.
There you have it, all of your burning Honkai Star Rail questions answered! I’d like to thank Chengnan An for taking time out of his busy schedule to speak with us. If you’re looking for more content like this, we recommend you grab some Genshin Impact codes and Zenless Zone Zero codes for extra freebies.