I did actually uninstall Arknights Endfield last week after writing my post about it. I was determined not to keep playing it because I really wasn’t having fun. All of the fun bits were gated behind plot progress and it was just so dull and poorly written that I wasn’t able to enjoy any of it. One of my friends started playing it, though, and started having a fun time with it. Curious, I talked to them about my experience and asked how they coped with the problems I identified. Turns out the secret to enjoying the game was skipping most of the cutscenes and dialogue moments AND turning all of the voice acting to a language I didn’t understand (Japanese). Now, I don’t feel compelled to engage with the plot any more than I’m interested in, I don’t feel as trapped behind slow-talking characters as I once did, and I can actually focus on the parts of the game I anticipated enjoying and a few of the surprisingly fun parts of the game that I didn’t expect to enjoy. There’s been more than a few of those, to be honest, but it took more plot than I liked to get to them, and some of them are now so expansive an activity that I’m struggling to engage with them, even if they are kind of fun. This game is definitely one meant to take up most of your time, to engage all of your play hours, and I can see how the daily grind and routine of the game could make a compelling case to give it just that. Unfortunately for this game–and very fortunately for me–I just don’t get any kind of joy or pleasure from this kind of gameplay loop or loot boxes, so all I need to worry about hooking me is the constant rewards for doing daily acitivities. I’m not exactly a sucker for daily accomplishments and rewards, but they are something I enjoy enough that I am willing to consider picking them over something that feels a bit more long-term rewarding.

First of all: now that I’ve progressed far enough to really unlock what the system is capable of, the factory stuff really sets itself up to be incredibly complex if you want to take it that route. You can build things simply, of course, with quick resource-out-to-refined-material-in loops, but if you have stuff that needs to go through multiple steps, you can build quite labyrinthine factories that move all of your base materials out and then deliver something like five processiong/assembling steps later, along with all of the excess bits and bobs made along the way. You’ve got a factory report thing that shows your “Theoretical” numbers versus your “real” numbers (what your factory could produce at maximum production capacity versus what your factory actually produces based on any limitations in the process) which makes it really easy to see where there’s inefficiencies in your process that could use some work. It takes a while for the numbers to iron themselves out properly, for your changes to be fully reflected in the “real”numbers, but the “theoretical” ones update instantly and all you need to do is wait for things to settle down one way or another. And while you’re still pretty limited by the story in what you can produce, there is usually something for you to do with the stuff you’re making. It’s not always super impactful, of course, but you still get to turn all that excess into something concrete that you’ll eventually need.

I’m really starting to miss the granularity of games like Satisfactory, though. It’s difficult to properly tune things to maximal efficiency, but most of that work isn’t even needed since almost every bit of crafting that fits into single, double, or even trip inputs of the same materials. To make that stuff faster, you don’t increase your efficiency or rate of production, just your volume of production. It really adds to the labyrinthine feel of the factories, but I don’t really feel like I’m managing things so much as just doing basic addition or subtraction. I can probably get some of this fix if I completely re-do my factories in some kind of better-organized manner, but I’m not sure it’s worth doing that since, again, no amount of reworking existing facilities is going to change the nature of what I’m doing. I could maybe reduce the time items spend on conveyor belts and the number of times items enter and leave storage, but doing it that way means I wind with giant material stockpiles when something backs up, rather than clogged machines. Which is generally preferable for the assembly-side of things since I can either turn that stuff in or stave off the slowdown of production that will happen because my consumption of some materials is currently higher than my production of those resources.

Aside from the factory side of things… There’s a lot of stuff to do. I think I’m barely scraping the surface of it all despite the time I’ve put into various game modes, but it’s difficult to tell since this is a gacha game at its core and those are ALL about giving you stuff to repeat daily or weekly. Some of the stuff might just wind up being the short of shallow “this game expect you to repeat this weekly” type stuff that never really changes, but some of it at least feels like the kind of stuff that might not have an end-point (since endless play is also the point of gacha games). It’s difficult to tell since I don’t really play these types of games, generally speaking, so I don’t really have a feel for them, but I’m not sure I’m really motivated to chase any of that stuff down. The plot hasn’t really hooked me, so it’s pretty much all about that factory/resource management treadmill, but I’m also dreadfully aware of how much I’m missing out on by not playing regularly enough to get all the daily/weekly rewards. I can see that getting me to at least log in and play a bit every day, but it is rapidly approaching a feeling of obligation and once it becomes a chore I “need” to do rather than something I enjoy doing, all the joy will be sucked out of it. Which is why I’m doing my best to ignore that sort of stuff, with mixed results.

Still! I’m enjoying myself so far, now that I’ve worked out the worst of the kinks, so I think I’ll keep trying for a while longer. I might need to inject some other kind of game into my life, though, because I could really use some more story-based entertainment in my life. Or maybe I’ll get back to reading and try to tackle that massive To Be Read pile of mine. I can’t let all of my game time be some sort of treadmill running, no matter how enjoyable the treadmill might be (I’m thinking of Final Fantasy 14 in this case, not Arknights: Endfield). Maybe I’ll dig back into my piles of other games. I don’t know. It’s difficult to make those kinds of plans these days and it’s so much easier to just stick with what I know or am already doing.