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.
Continue readingFactory
The One Resource Management Game I Can’t Seem To Enjoy
I tried another gacha game. I’ve got friends who are really into some of them (the ones that are pretty high-qaulity, generally speaking), so when one showed up that included one of my favorite things ever (factory building and resource management), I figured it was finally time. Plus, I needed something else to play on my Tuesday nights that didn’t require much of an emotional or mental committment. Arknights: Endfield seemed like the perfect thing, especially after watching Let’s Game It Out’s video about it. After all, LGIO is what got me into Satisfactory, perhaps my favorite entry in the resource management and factory building genre and second only to minecraft in terms of survival/crafting games, and he made it look so fun! So of course I tried it out. Unfortunately, it hasn’t really lived up to my expectations and has even fallen further and further from them as I’ve played. Even without getting the the gacha side of things, honestly. There’s enough free stuff there that I don’t feel tempted to pay money for anything and the whole “gambling on loot boxes or random draws for heroes” thing never really appealed to me. I get absolutely nothing out of the process other than more piles of junk I need to sort through or turn into one of a couple dozen currencies. The game’s menus feel labyranthine, I frequently can’t find what I’m looking for unless I click through every single menu option and even then I’m not guarranteed to find it. For exmaple, I kept accidentally opening a menu that showed my resources in to production numbers back before I could actually automate anything and now that I’ve got a bunch of stuff automated, I can’t find that menu for the life of me. It’s so much clutter! There’s so many menus, sub-menus, limited-use currencies, weirdly expiring items, and on and on and on. It never ends.
Continue readingBig Red Button
Sally like pressing the button. It didn’t do much, just send a few electrical impulses along to a machine that raised an arm and then lowered it. The arm held a little iron heated by an internal mechanism so that every time the arm was lowered, it pressed the white-hot foundry stamp into a metal ingot. The gears that raised the arm also moved a conveyor belt, so a fresh ingot was waiting as the arm came down.
She only got to press the button when the computer system was down, because the computer handled it without involving the button at all. Sally thought this was unfair, so she used her position as the floater to occasionally cause the computer system to reboot. Then she got to press the button for fifteen minutes so the company wouldn’t lose out on production while the computer restarted all essential tasks first.
No one knew it was her, messing with the computer. They’d set up security cameras because the managers and IT staff were suspicious, but she had plenty of time to study the cameras when she wasn’t pressing the button. When she was pressing the button, though, there was room for nothing but the satisfaction of hearing it thunk and click into place with every press of its bright red surface.
That was why, today, when the computer system failed to restart and the managers had assured everyone that they’d get it working again before the asteroid base ran out of air, Sally went to press the button. As the air thinned and everyone began to panic, she pressed the button. As the managers and administrators took the only shuttle, she pressed the button. The last thing she did before she faded away was to press the button. It was worth it.