Today marks the launch of Arknights: Endfield, the major competitor to Genshin Impact, but instead of endless grinding, there are assembly lines.
What kind of game is this? Arknights: Endfield is an open-world action ARPG where you simultaneously control 4 characters. They have different abilities and roles, including tanks, healers, and damage dealers.
Despite the Holy Trinity, Arknights: Endfield is by no means an MMORPG, as the game focuses on single-player content. Just like in Genshin Impact, there is a story that continues to unfold.
Another aspect that works similarly to its major competitor is monetization. Arknights: Endfield relies on gacha mechanics and allows you to summon new characters for real money. However, there is one fundamental difference between the games.
Here you can watch the trailer for Arknights: Endfield:
Factory Building like in Satisfactory
What distinguishes Arknights: Endfield? The factory building is a brand new system in the genre, allowing you to create production chains with conveyor belts, power grids, and factories, similar to Satisfactory or Factorio.
Instead of laboriously grinding all materials in the world, mines and refineries, placed by the player beforehand, extract resources even while offline.
Moreover, the equipment for your characters comes from your own factory, making the optimization of it one of the most important tasks in the game.
If you have no desire for factory gameplay, you’ll miss out on a large part of the gameplay, but you can simply rely on the standard blueprints from the developers, which, while not optimal, are sufficient to progress in the game.
What does this have to do with Arknights? Arknights: Endfield is the first spin-off of the popular Arknights tower defense game, which is one of the largest gaming brands in Asia. The mobile game has been downloaded by over 35 million players combined.
With Endfield, they aim to build on that success. They have taken well-known characters and transported them 10 years into the future in the story, where they explore the planet Talos-II alongside the protagonist.
There, various alien ruins and dangerous enemies await the beloved characters, which they must defeat to make progress with the planet’s resources.
With over 35 million pre-registrations alone for Arknights: Endfield and just as many players of the well-known main game, Arknights: Endfield could achieve great success, but whether it will truly be enough to compete with Genshin Impact will be revealed over time. More about Arknights: Endfield and what makes the game special can be found here: New anime game mixes Genshin and Satisfactory, and over 35 million players want to play the game
