Arknights: Endfield’s launch leaves a lot to be desired. Yesterday, on the game’s first day, developer Hypergryph was forced to remove PayPal payments after an issue caused some players to be charged for other players’ purchases.
While not as worrying as the PayPal issue, complaints have continued into Arknights: Endfield’s second day, with players extremely unhappy with the game’s gacha elements and its tutorial.
Arknights: Endfield Players Seem To Be Struggling To Enjoy The Game
First and foremost, Arknights: Endfield is a free-to-play gacha title. That means it was always likely to be littered with predatory microtransactions designed to extract as much money as possible from its players, each of which are all hoping to pull the best characters. Just two days in, though, these gacha mechanics are already grating on its audience.
Arknights: Endfield Review – Style Over Substance In Gacha Purgatory
Despite its gorgeous world and characters, Arknights: Endfield is stuck deep in gacha purgatory. A game that does not respect your time, or reward it.
Since launch, the Arknights: Endfield subreddit has been littered with threads of players complaining about the limited number of free rolls they are getting and the difficulty of earning more. Between them, these threads have garnered thousands of upvotes.
“Now that I have spent some time with the game, the economy feels extremely unbalanced,” said Cobipo in one thread that received more than 3,000 upvotes. They continued, “A single multi-summon requires 5,000 currency, yet chests only reward around 15, which is comparable to games like Wuthering Waves or Genshin Impact. The difference is that here, the cost per pull is approximately 2.5 times higher. This means that reaching a single guaranteed pull requires close to 60,000 crystals. At this point, the progression feels excessive and raises serious concerns about the overall fairness of the summoning system.” This was an opinion shared by many.
Now that I have spent some time with the game, the economy feels extremely unbalanced.
“I agree the pull economy feels very bad right now. I mean, it has me questioning if I’m even able to pull for the first limited character without spending,” said Aestheticccss, while Amalgam2001 added, “Right now, the pull currency is way too poor to support this system.”
Of course, awful microtransactions and free-to-play games go hand-in-hand, and we’ve seen it many times over, with the likes of The First Descendant facing similar complaints at launch, but as some games, like Wuthering Waves, get more generous, the stingier games become more noticeable.
It’s not only the pull economy that has irked players in Arknights: Endfield’s early days, with players getting frustrated by the game’s “impossibly bad” tutorials.
“I can’t be the only one who thinks the tutorials are so painfully bad, overbearing, and time-consuming,” said Jaxx4 in a thread that had almost 1,000 upvotes on Reddit. “Most of them pop up after I’ve already done the thing that they’re trying to teach me, and when it is something new, it’s so beyond holding my hand that I just tune out entirely.”
A second player concurred, adding, “I don’t want to be reminded I got to place an arrow on an arrow for gods’ sakes, I wanna play, not play tutorial from Minecraft.”
It’s only around two days in, but it looks like Endfield has a lot to do if it wants to keep players happy.
- ESRB
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nr
- Developer(s)
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Hypergryph
- Publisher(s)
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Hypergryph
- Engine
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Unity
- Multiplayer
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Online Multiplayer
- Number of Players
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Single-player
