Like all good automation games, I was up until 2am last night redesigning my factories from the ground up to be more efficient and produce more profitable products. So naturally today I opened the game and saw my entire factory had ground to a halt, power had run out, and my batteries had dwindled to zero.
So now I had to spend two hours fixing everything I broke by reverting it back to what I had before and then trying to fix random problems that occurred for some reason despite it being the same as what I had before I screwed everything up the first time. 50% of my playtime today was looking at this screen, monitoring production metrics in realtime, and flipping back and forth in a notebook I have in front of me with notes on production formulas. This is the most I’ve felt like I’ve been doing engineering in years.
After being F2P gacha abstinent for several years, I decided to try out Arknights Endfield on a whim. I have played this 4-5 hours a night, for a little over a week. I think there’s a lot that can be said about how this game’s design sense and structure feels more like playing an old PS3 RPG than it does playing a F2P gacha game, but a large part of that is because the factory building feels more important than the combat. More of the game’s quests can be tied to improving your factory rather than killing X enemies with element Y weakness, so you level up your element Y team to grind out the drops from those enemies.
Instead, every time the game wants you to collect a new resource to progress the story, you’re introduced to new factory mechanics to produce that resource, with new machines or tools to integrate into your factory and opening up ways to re-design your manufacturing chains. And eventually you’re incentivized to re-work the efficiency and power usage of your entire operation to produce an ever-growing list of possible products, which be fed into the in game simulated stock market and trading economy. It’s just a regular old automation game.
And none of that has anything to do with the gacha or micro-transactions. I have played well over 30 hours and probably only 10-15% of that playtime involved actual combat (and actually a lot of open world jumping/platforming exploration as well). The gacha is to acquire and improve characters for combat, but because combat is such a minor part of the game until you reach whatever the endgame/complete your dailies situation looks like, if you do not care about any of that then it feels like you’re just playing a regular RPG.
On the anime side of things, the characters in this game have the most insane eyes.
please I’m begging you optimize the runs off of the depot unloaders, you can cluster and run 2-3 thermal banks for each using splitters and short belt runs and save yourself on space until you throw bills at upgrading the area and depot bus
also keep in mind that every bridge, converger and splitter creates stress points that can slow down runs and cause backups, which really is only an issue if your yields are smaller than your usage
but I know you care because the game touched your brain hard enough for you to commit to paper
also also abuse blueprints. not using those by other players or the prefab ones unlocked from training but creating small loops based around the depot bus that you can just copy-paste and save yourself some time when you decide to shift to manufacturing a new item
do the eyes in ark nights have weird animations like in Nikki I have two different colored eyesand one is a purple blossom blooming non stop. or the black ones with constant fire in them. the irises in nikki I think make everything else look completely normal
it’s interesting how the paypal fuck up didn’t make this game fail. I feel like gacha games have so much more room for error cuz they’re always sending apology messages with free money
No cool animations on any eyes, but it’s fair that all gacha game eyes are messed up at this point.
I wonder if it would feel insulting to get some apologems for that because stuff is probably lawsuit worthy. That said I don’t think Endfield sent out apology gems, and I remember seeing people getting mad that they didn’t send out the customary apologems, so there’s that. I think lots of people are upset at the gacha rates and currency accrual as well, and I’ve never naturally pulled a 6-star (my three 6-stars were the freebies and one pity pull after 60-80 pulls using the beginner tickets and currency), but because they only matter for combat, there’s not a lot of draw there for me. Typically I’d ration any and all gacha tickets/premium currencies you accrue via normal play, but combat related activities are so far out of my sight with the way the gameflow has ended up for me that new characters feel more like cosmetics for avatars I can use to build stuff.
I only recently realized I could use protocal stashes, so my entire factory line was built to run back to the central PAC or a handful of loader depots. I kept having to place machines such that I had enough space to cross belt lines to reach the PAC loaders or other machine inputs.
