This was supposed to for a playlist post where I talk about all the games I've been writing but I end up uhhh only writing part of it. Here's one part that can work as well on its own. Arknights: Endfield is one of those games I've been playing (one of...like 12).
Endfield is such a strange beast. It's like a very excited dog: it wants to take you in all these different directions—it wants you to build factories! it wants you to explore a world and claim your space on it! it wants you to solve little puzzles, to form a team and theorycraft their synergy, read and care about this planet and its people and their history—it wants to run! It'll wait for you, or it'll attempt to—its first-time user experience is a mixed bag despite how much effort you can tell they put into it—but to be where it wants you to be, you also have to make the effort to match its energy, to meet it halfway. If you do, this dog will take you to all sorts of wonderful places.
Hypergryph, its developer, is used to making gacha, a genre of live-service games consisting of (I can go into another whole essay for this so bear with this simplification) luck-based time-gated resource management mixed with facilitating character-centric attachment. They have tried to branch out to non-live-service games, but only with mixed results (see: my lukewarm reaction to Ex Astris). Endfield, I feel, is their way of accepting that they will never be able to free themselves from the genre trappings and its workflow, but they'll be damned if that stops them from making what they want to make, and they want to make this factory-building open-world character-upgrading chimera about how far technology can take you.
It ends up being a strange fit for the gacha model: there's not enough of a "daily content" for the time-gated resource, many of its gameplay is not tied to their main source of monetization i.e. getting new characters and weapons and using them, but they believe themselves capable of being free of that sort of llimitation. Looking at how good their sales are on the first two weeks, I want to believe in them too. Maybe this genre can evolve beyond its gambling-like beginnings.
It's also, I feel, a game about embracing friction. You don't just combine two ingredients into one usable item, you got to make a factory line for it. You can't just climb a hill, like you usually can in other open world games, you have to look around for a path to go up there. You can't just teleport to a place with materials to farm, but you can build a zipline network there. You can't just build a zipline tower out of nowhere, you gotta set up a powerline to it. And in the process of setting this up, you get a sense of the space you're occupying. There is satisfaction in seeing where you want to go and taking the steps to go there.
The journey this dog is taking you on is just as much worth it as the destination.
