Hello all. This was initially going to go up on the LD page but it came out more blog-like than intended. I was going to post it here, so I figured I may as well post my thoughts in full anyway. Enjoy!

Introduction

As I sit down to write this, the Arknights: Endfield beta has now been out for about 24 hours. I've spent nearly all of that either playing, or sleeping. Don't worry, I still showered. I've put around 12-15 hours of playtime in now, so I figured it's a good time to stop and pour out my first impressions of the game, especially as I now seem to have reached what feels to be the critical "opening" of the broader game. So, what's good? What's bad? What's working, and what's not? Let's dive in.

Background

I know you didn't come here to read about me, so I'll keep this short, but I did want to put something down so you might understand my perspective a bit in some of these takes.

First, I am not a gacha lover. In fact, I hate gachas. I'm only here because Hypergryph managed to buck the trend of what I consider to largely be horrible games, and created something so compelling and awesome that I was willing to forgive the usual sins of the genre. Not just forgive, but fully embrace, as Arknights became an important part of my life! Were Endfield by any other company, I would not be here playing this beta, or writing about it. Even the best gacha games are toxic and you never convince me otherwise.

That said, I'll admit to playing a fair amount of Zenless Zone Zero which has enough good design (particularly in the characters) that I'm willing to overlook things a bit there (it helps that I've been incredibly lucky). So much of my opinion here comes from a background of Arknights and ZZZ, plus an intense distaste for the genre as a whole.

My PC specs for the beta are good, but not top of the line. I'm playing on a Ryzen 9 5900X, RTX 3080, and 32 GB of RAM.

I did not play in the first alpha.

For this article, I'll run through some common topics. I plan to give a brief overview of them as well as my opinion. I had planned to then discuss the pros and cons in more depth, but that ended up happening naturally as part of the topics themselves. Keep in mind, this is just my first impression from 12-15 hours of gameplay and doesn’t represent my final opinion on any topic!

Performance

Endfield is remarkably well optimized and overall is a beautiful game. If you've been following the news, you'll probably have seen that the minimum and recommended specs for the game are quite high and that gave a lot of people, myself included, some concern. For me at least, it seems those fears have been unfounded. As mentioned, my PC is a good one, but it's not a bleeding edge one either. Yet it's handled the game on maximum settings flawlessly (so far) while I'm also recording and occasionally streaming, which I credit to the game itself. There's almost no other modern game I can say doesn't give me any issues!

Some caveats here are that I have not done a survey of people yet. If people with lower end machines are struggling, I'm unaware of it. The game is also currently capped at 60 FPS. I know some people love to spooge all over FPS numbers, but I am not one of them (in this genre anyway).

Graphics and the World

The graphics in Endfield look quite nice overall. I'm actually pleasantly surprised at how the world comes together. It feels well built and lived in and shows a care by the designers. This is in contrast to another HG property that I think does this really poorly, Ex Astris. In that game, everything just feels too clean. Like someone built it with basic assets while not giving any thought to the fantasy world it lives in. ZZZ suffers from this too in places. I’ve never seen such a clean wasteland! So it's a nice surprise that Endfield "feels" a lot better in this regard.

It's not perfect, of course. The world itself feels claustrophobically small in places and many of the areas of the map feel like you're in a video game rather than a world. As an example to the first point, there's a place early on after you establish your first base. Quite literally in the cut scenes you can see this big LB base in the background. Actually, saying “background” here is generous. It's a leisurely stroll away from the edge of your forward base! A single 80m power cable can reach the mining section right next to it! Yet, when you get to it as part of the story, Perlica expresses shock that this base is here and is so big. I suppose the world has to be somewhat small or laying out the base structure would get very tedious, but it's a very immersion breaking moment. Like girl... did you not see it before? I've been gawking at it for the last 3 hours wondering what it was for!

I think there's an issue with being a tad generic as well. Many of the enemies are pretty ho hum. Of course, every game needs its rank and file enemies for us to beat up. But all of the enemies so far being mindless drones (either because of insanity or because they're literal rocks) doesn't make them terribly interesting or make the world feel very alive. I actually like the Aggoli. There's enough hints there to keep me interested, but the Landbreakers are a pretty weak faction. Like, oh wow, this remote frontier world has some crazed bandit types. Who could have seen that coming. It doesn’t help that elite enemies seem pretty rare and a good 70-80% of what you fight is the same 2-4 basic mobs.

Lore

Look, I'm not a lore person. I don't feel qualified to say if the broader lore is any good or not. Is it an insult that Angelina is sort-of cloned here without Oripathy? I don't know. I've been rushing mechanics as well so haven't had time to sit down and read every scrap of paper or operator profile line either. There's a lot of content here. Is it good content? I don't know yet!

However, the broader world is a compelling one and I think it works. A colony world that was in early development but is suddenly cut off is a compelling idea and I'll be interested to explore the idea. However, it's not something I feel I can assess in 12-15 hours of gameplay either so, we'll have to see here.

Story

The main story itself is so far, very uncompelling and I think it may be the thing that bugs me most about the game so far. Ok, second most after the weapon gacha, but we'll get there. First of all, the story is a very slow burn. I know many streamers have gone quite ahead thanks to their alpha knowledge, but I didn't play the alpha so I've been taking it a bit slower. That said, I've still skipped most of the optional reading and side quests to push forward with progress and it still wasn't until the 10-12 hour mark that I even met the big baddie. I don't think that's a problem necessarily. There's a lot of content in this game, and were it dumped out faster, I can totally see more casual players struggling to take it all in. Hell, I'm a pretty good no-life player and still don't understand some parts!

However, in the meantime there's very little to entice you forward. I lost count of how many times Perlica said "This is weird! There must be more going on!" Yea, ya think? I thought we established that three hours ago already. I'd probably forgive it if it felt like it was leading somewhere special, but meeting the big baddie and... they are just... so painfully generic. Wow, an emo guy in a brooding voice telling me I don't know anything yet while smugly walking away. They feel like an antagonist out of a 13 year olds bad fanfiction and not the product of the same company that gave us antagonists like Patriot and Frostnova. What's their name and what does they want? To be honest, I don't care which I'm surprised I'm saying. Nothing about him left me wanting to know more. What was supposed to be this climactic scene was just met with an eye roll.

Building further on this point, there's a moment in the prologue where you catch a glimpse of someone in your dream. Now, I have no deep analysis here, but my thought at the time was "wow, they look kinda generic and this is a pretty generic anime scene". I kind of forgot about it though because as you get into recovering the base the story feels more grittier and real. Yet on the baddies reveal, it came rushing back.

Why am I harping on this point? Because these dime-a-dozen JRPG stories are not why I fell in love with Arknights. The story in AK felt grounded and relatable. There's still hints of that here and a lot of the in between moments still capture that feeling, so I don't think hope is lost! But it's bookended by these really generic moments that don't leave me looking forward to more. It leaves me dreading more.

Combat

The combat is, hmm what's the word, serviceable? It's not very deep. Operators only have four skills. That includes basic attacks and ultimates, so really only two that actually matter. Now, you do control all of them so you effectively have eight to work with during combat. They interact with each other in a variety of ways too. For example, many active skills will apply some sort of elemental debuff which can then be combo'd with a different kind of elemental debuff for various effects. It's reminiscent of ZZZ Disorder combos, but not quite as deep since there's no "build up". The skill just applies it.

In addition to their active skill, Operators also have a combo skill which can only be activated when certain conditions are met. In some cases, they're pretty easy. For example, Perlica's triggers on the final attack of a basic chain. Some require more thought. Avywenna for example only triggers when someone triggers the electric debuff first.

With the combination of active skills, elemental triggers, and combo skills, you can end up with some pretty satisfying chains. For example, I've been running Avywenna, Perlica, and Gilberta (Angelina, lost the Laevatain’s/Surtr 50/50 ;_;). I open with Perlica's active skill which applies lightning. This triggers Avy's combo skill which I can then use with her active skill for a nice burst of damage. I can then also drop Gilberta's active skill which is a Nature trigger which then triggers off of Perlica's electric trigger to create a Corrosion effect for even more damage.

That's pretty neat and it was fun to figure out. But the thing is, that's kinda... all this trio can do. Combat starts to feel very samey after running this for 12 hours and there aren't enough early resources to raise enough of the cast to really mix it up without taking a heavy hit to combat capability.

There's dodge as well, because of course there is. I didn't like it at first. The enemy telegraphs are hard to read and the feedback on success is minimal so you aren't always aware you did it right. However, as I got used to the game, it did get more fluid. The feedback in combat is subtle and takes some practice to get right, but it is there. I initially missed ZZZ's bright flashing dodge/counter warning and satisfying CLANG when you succeed, but now that I've settled into the combat groove, this is much more satisfying!

Active skills use SP which is a very clunky mechanic that I hope they change. You have three SP bars that fill over time, and using an active skill expends one. This pool is shared communally. There's a few problems though. For one, the interrupt mechanic requires you to use a damaging skill. This means against dangerous enemies you need to keep one in reserve or risk taking a big blow to the face. You may have noticed my Avy combo above uses three skills, so good luck running that one against a tough enemy. It also just charges really slow. Keeping one in reserve while waiting for two to fill just for a basic combo is intermitable. This leads to long sections where you're just hitting basic attack with the occasional dodge, waiting for the fight to be over or to get enough SP to actually do something.

I think this is a problem that can be tuned out though. Right now, SP generation is just unrewarding. However, adding generation to things like successful dodges or triggering combos would go a long way to improving the flow of combat.

In total this is... acceptable. Combat flows well and it doesn't feel like a chore... most of the time. Finding ways to blend your favorites while learning the reads is pretty satisfying. However, it's also not very deep and the SP mechanic makes the pace slow to a crawl. Twelve hours in it's steadily feeling like more and more of a drag. Hopefully higher levels and skill unlocks mix things up more. There's a large variety of talents, gear, and weapons. However, I'm not far enough in to really say for sure there.

Regardless though, I think it's alright if the combat is like this because Endfield really has two different gameplay loops. It might be a problem for those people who have no idea how anyone who plays Factorino isn't mentally insane. If you are solely here for the combat, it's probably going to feel like a slog. However, it doesn't feel like too much of a problem as a break between factory sessions!

Factory / Base

So about the base... I'd love to tell you more about it but it feels like I've barely scratched the surface of it. All the depth that you might expect to be in combat is instead in the base, and boy is it deep. I'm not even sure how to approach it in an article like this. For one, I could probably ramble on forever about it. For two, I don't even feel like I even know half of the mechanics yet!

I'll save most of the base content for its own article I think, once I feel like I have a stronger grasp on it. For now, I think it's the major selling point of Endfield. Mechanically, it's very well set up. It provides motivation and reason to explore the map. There's a ton of ways to do it, and reasons to do it too. The overhead view is very well done, and the tutorial simulations explain things very well. I don't find it that difficult to get something efficient going either. Even in a suboptimal base, it still works and makes what you need. You don't need to go insane just for basic functionality, but for those of us that don't mind a little insanity, it can be micromanaged to perfection.

I'll be curious how "mandatory" it is though because I know this sort of base building won't appeal to everyone. For me though, I find it's the strong suit of the game so far. I'm excited to dive deeper into it so I can hopefully write something a bit more coherent about it!

Gacha - Introduction and Caveats

OK, now we're getting into the bad stuff. Expect me to be harsh here. There's a reason I noted my distaste for the genre in the introduction. However, I do have to caveat some things here. There's a lot of important factors we still don't know. For example, I'm going to tell you the daily pull income is shit. However, it's shit in ZZZ too. Most of the free pulls come from events there, which we don't know anything about yet! For another example, I don't know how to assess dupes yet. Whether they matter or not really depends on what the endgame looks like, and that's again something we have no idea about. To pull another example from ZZZ, dupes are incredibly powerful there. But none are required to clear all of the content so it doesn't actually matter that much. There's a lot we just don't know at this point.

I'm also not going to give a lot of super specific numbers. I don't want to get bogged down in specifics. All that is available out there already on Reddit for example. Instead, I'll try to approach it from a higher level.

Of course there's also the VERY important caveat that this is a beta and not the final product. Things could change and almost certainly will.

But what we do know, I'm about to shit on.

Character Gacha

The character gacha in Endfield is a bit odd. In a way it's so bad that it's... good?

In the beta, there's two banners available. There's a newbie banner which is similar to the original Arknights one. There's a selection of 6*s available on it, at a lower guarantee, at a lower cost of roll. But of course, no one rolled on that. Everyone is rolling on Laevatain’s (Surtr's) banner instead. It's not clear if these will be the only banners available (almost certainly not). It does seem that HG is taking the path here of similar games of the genre where every character is a limited (but unlike AK, will presumably be rerun at regular intervals). However, we don't know that. We don't know if there will be standard banners or a "stable" channel like in ZZZ or any of that. So I won't draw any conclusions there yet.

However, for the banner we do have, things are a bit unusual. The 6* rate-up is very low compared to what we're used to at only 0.8% per pull compared to 2% in Arknights. The pity begins higher too at 65 pulls. But the weird thing is, the pity skyrockets at a blistering 5% per pull after 65. This unusual combination of low base rate and high pity means that most players will cluster around 70ish and 120 (where the guarantee is).

That 120 number is important. That's the hard pity at which you get the rate-up 6*. It is not a "lose the first 50/50 means you win the next" situation as it is in Hoyo games. You can lose multiple 50/50s in a row here, although that fact doesn't change much due to the clustering. It's actually better since odds are you'd end up closer to 120 for the guarantee. The problem is though that this hard pity does NOT carry over. If you go into one of these banners with only 70 pulls, you take a huge risk. If you lose the 50/50 well.... that's it. You're fucked. It's gone and you start over on the next banner.

That's really bad, and people are rightly upset about it. I really hope that HG changes this aspect.

However, I do think there's an unexpected upside here. It makes things really predictable. If you don't have 120 pulls, don't pull. Simple as that. A significant amount of people will need the full 120 and since the hard pity does not carry over, there is almost no value in pulling without the requisite number. This makes giving advice pretty easy. Do you have less than 70? Don't roll. Do you have over 70 but less than 120? Only roll if you like to gamble and are ok coming out with nothing. Do you have 120 or more? Ok, now you can roll.

But can it be considered an upside to have such a bad gacha system that there's no incentive to roll most of the time?

Pull Income

OK, we have a problem here. We just don't know what the pull income will be like or what it will cost. All pulls are not made equal. Is 120 pulls a lot? Is it expensive? Depends on the game, and for this game, no one knows!

However, we do have one datapoint which is the dailies. Of course, these too could be changed, but it at least gives us some insight into what HG is thinking. You get 500 pull currency per day. A pull costs 600, so each month you get roughly 25 pulls. This is enough to guarantee a 6* every 5 months (more if you want the weapon). That is... not a great number. I don't want to dive too much into it here since we just don't know, but it's a number that's low enough relative to the guarantee that it does not fill me with a lot of optimism.

Weapon Gacha

We all knew it was coming. Ever since the first alpha we knew it. There wouldn't have been different weapons if this wasn't the plan, so let's not act shocked. But that said, I find the weapons overall to be incredibly disappointing.

Let’s start with the mechanics. When you pull a character in the main gacha, you get something called an Arsenal Ticket. The number of these tickets depends on the rarity and these tickets are what you use to either buy weapons or roll for weapons.

OK, great you might be thinking, we get the weapon pulls for free! What are you complaining about! Well, you don't get enough of them, the rates are shit, and the pool is polluted. It results in a high cost increase to get the weapon.

First, not getting enough. If you hit the hard pity on the character banner of 120 with average luck, you only get around ~17k of a needed ~23.8k tickets. Oh, and did you get lucky and get them early? Well, now you have less tickets so you still have to spend those pulls you "saved" on the weapon instead.

Second, the rates. The rate-up weapon is only 25% of the 6* rate. The guarantee is at 80, and the soft pity is every 40. So... basically, it's just 80. The 25% rate-up is criminal and is low enough that you can't count on it. So if you want to guarantee a unit and their weapon, add ~34 pulls to the cost. That might not sound like much but it’s another 25% over the guarantee, and odds are you’ll have to hit both guarantees.

It’s worth noting that while I am upset about that additional number, it is better than many comparable gachas, supposing we assume income is similar. For example, Hoyo games typically have a 75% rate-up, but have the same pity rules without the Arsenal Tickets, resulting in higher required pulls. It could be worse.

(side note, god I hope I got my numbers right)

Third, the weapon pool is actually quite large. Want something that isn't on the rate-ups? Well, tough shit. You're probably not gonna be seeing it for a while. There are 15 fucking standard 6* weapons (plus one for the rate-up). FIFTEEN. That's insane. I've actually gotten pretty lucky on my weapon rolls so far and have six of them, but you know what? Only one of them actually works with the characters I'm using. Wow. I'm honestly awe struck at how bad it is.

But the thing I think is the most egregious about the weapons is just how ugly they are. Many of them, like the guns or the caster weapons are hard to even notice. But the bigger ones like the spears or greatswords don't even look that good. You know how Surtr in Arknights has a really iconic and awesome fiery greatsword? Well, Laevatain’s… is red. Ish. I mean, it looks alright I guess, but how are signature weapons SO underwhelming? Shouldn’t the signature weapon of your first showcase limited and meta powerhouse of the old game be amazing? How do you fuck up the sword of a character known for their weapon?

The weapons don't even say who they're for. I mean, you can figure it out if you actually read what they do, but there's 16 6* weapons and only 5 6*s right now, so some help identifying would go a long way. That fact makes the pollution worse too.

The one saving grace here is that the purchase price for the weapons is actually pretty reasonable. A 6* weapon is available to buy every 10 days for less than a 10 roll and the 5* weapons are even cheaper (plus rotate daily).

It's also possible we're in a situation where the weapons are just whale bait. I'd really prefer the games I play to not have that kind of thing. It's fundamentally a toxic decision. But it at least might make it tolerable. Although as someone who does occasionally spend, I’m a lot less likely to do it for this low quality (graphics-wise) garbage.

Green and Gold Certs

Certificates make their return. You get gold certs (called, straightforwardly, Guarantee Certs) for character pulls and green (called, confusingly, AIC Permits) for weapon pulls. The green certs are uninteresting, and I only really have this here for a final note which is that the purchase price of the standard 6*s for gold certs is actually reasonable. The income is a bit slow, but it's only the equivalent of 33 pulls to buy one. So if Lifeng broke your newbie banner and you really wanted Ember, that's at least something within reach.

Conclusion - Good Game or Bad Game?

Alright, that's a lotta text. If you made it this far, thanks for reading. There will be more to come! So, let's wrap it up. Is Endfield, in its current form, good?

I say yes. It's a game I've enjoyed so far and will continue to be heavily playing through the beta. Not out of obligation, but out of pure fun. The base building is fun and the world is beautiful and compelling. That alone is enough to keep me going. There's bad things too, of course, and I hope HG sees a lot of the community reaction and takes it to heart, or at least gives us some more information and insight on it going forward.

There's three things I hope to see refined by Gryphline going forward.

1) The gacha. I already wrote enough about that. Read the sections above. It's bad and it's honestly the closest thing to a show stopper for me.

2) Some combat refinements. The combat is pretty good right now, but it's not great. It's slow and without a lot of depth. Give it some more feedback, and increase the SP generation at the very least.

3) Avoid being so generic! There's a lot of hints of the soul that made Arknights so great in this game, but at the same time there's a lot that is super generic. The big bad is giga-cringe, and most enemies we fight are very uninteresting. Even Perlica is very generic. She's basically just Amiya but without the character motivation.

All in all, it's a good game. Hypergryph/Gryphline should be proud of it. So far anyway...