#playing endfield

[kyogre-blue]

I started Endfield yesterday, and I've been slowly chipping away at its nightmare starting section.... I'm still not done.

That should give you a general idea of how it's going.

The one nice thing I will say is that Endfield does have a skip button, and today I've started using it because this stuff is just so pointless and also long. I do wish they'd done something about the scenes where you have to hand something over. It's not handled all that well atm.

Aside from that, the game does look good in a general sense, but 1) it gave me extremely dire warnings to just use a different device when I tried to install it on my laptop (not sure if it would have run, since I ended up getting a new computer), so that all comes at a price that is imo excessive, and also 2) the prettiness is largely kinda generic and pointless?

Like, you go to the starting area and you are stuck there for hours. And the starting area is just a generic wilderness. It looks nice, yeah, but who cares. I've seen this before. There is almost nothing setting it apart. It's to the point that the reasonably interesting character designs look very out of place because we're always just running around in the woods. But the woods are peppered with tech stuff, so like... it doesn't even have a nice sense of being out in the wild. Genshin at least felt like a fun fantasy, and the open world gave the impression of being expansive and fun to explore. While Wuwa had that post apocalyptic feel (in Jinzhou, anyway) that had a different flavor.

Plus, Wuwa's movement was so, so free compared to this. Endfield stamina and dodging feel so much worse, it's honestly surprising.

The story is uh. Well, I've heard it gets better when you get to the obligatory China section, but so far it's sliding between bad (the confusing, overdone intro) and boring (most of Valley IV). The worldbuilding isn't being delivered particularly well, and the MC glazing is Rover levels. The only positive(?) is that they haven't done the harem stuff. Otherwise, they've hit practically every negative possible.

And don't even get me started on the factory tutorials. For the factory system itself, I honestly can't even tell whether it's good or bad or what because the way it's being presented is just so poorly done.

I'm really trying to struggle through to the academy section to see if it does get better. But man. MAN. It's been hours. I am suffering. And I haven't even mentioned the combat yet (it's bad).

[kyogre-blue]

OK, I feel like I've almost stabilized out Endfield. I have all the mining spots hooked up and I've written out how much monopoly money I need for the remaining upgrades, so it just becomes a waiting game until I get that money. Aside from that, I'm only planning to do Wuling, which... hopefully is under ten hours, jesus this game...

In order to get to the last mining location, I did Wulfgard's quest.

Now, Wulfgard has one of Endfield's top designs (for me). He's got a color scheme that's simple (black, gray, red) but is combined in a pretty nice way, he has cool guns and animations, he has a lot of nice little details, like seeing his fangs when he talks. He probably also has the nicest looking set of fake ears in the cast. Top three design. The only negative I'll give is that the tubes hanging from his mask (on his back) look kinda dumb. Interestingly, among the characters who had art and such released during the design period, he seems to have gone through the most changes, being almost unrecognizable compared to his original concept. The time in the oven obviously helped.

In regard to his quest, I guess I'll start by saying that it does feel very high production value. There's a lot of effort put into the music choices, the camera angles, the animations, it's got that going for it. And the overall story is fine. It's not bad.

However, I do think it's kinda mid in the overall writing. Wulfgard in the main story is very much Doing His Job, and the only personal aspect about him is actually about his sister (the fake loli who blushes at the Endmin) calling him unreliable. He is little more than a stranger, especially since he's fairly stoic. He barely breaks that stoicism in this quest either. When he info dumps about his two childhood friends and how one is dead (off screen, never seen) and the other has become a traitor and killed the first (uses generic mob model), it's kinda hard to know what you're even supposed to be feeling. Very "that's rough, buddy."

And of course, it's another story selling future promise, since it ultimately ends with "btw, there's a mastermind behind the scenes that we won't even show you, but we promise it'll be important later." That's nice, but...

Anyway, solidly whatever quest. Could be better, could be worse, mildly offensive in them locking a mining node behind at least starting it.

[hotvampireadjacent]

shit did not want to download when i tried so screenshot it is. 6H1VX4453KZD2BXJ is my invite code

[kyogre-blue]

Quick update:

First, about Endfield. After the Wuling date yesterday, I had a good think about this game while lying in bed, and I have decided to set it aside. I haven't uninstalled it yet, but I didn't log in for dailies today and I more or less don't plan to continue.

It's certainly a very high production and polished game, which is especially obvious when I play IN. The difference is stark. And I do think there's a lot to enjoy about it, especially on the gameplay side, and the story is skippable. The skip button is right there.

However, I just don't see a point in committing to it, for me. A live service game is a massive time investment and the opportunity cost is very high.

Exploration: The world is pretty, but the first two regions didn't make me feel much of anything. At the same time, the thought of doing the factory related stuff, setting up the mining nodes, grinding money to upgrade all the facilities and such, it just makes me feel tired. I don't want to do it.

Factory: I don't care either way. My endgoal was really just to max out map and copy over some online blueprints.

Combat: Again, I didn't feel much about it. The SP bottleneck is unpleasant, the lack of sustain feels bad, the strictness of the rotations combined with the cursed dodge stuff just makes it unfun. I feel like the character kits a few months from now will probably look quite different to essentially work around certain aspects of the system, but who even knows. We don't have leaks to give us something to look forward to, after all.

Characters: None of the three first banners do anything for me, of the next six previewed characters, only one is male and at least four of the others (the ones we've seen in-story) leave me indifferent. So I can't say I'm even interested in progressing my account and collecting characters like in HSR.

And finally, the story. Oh man, the story.

So it's discussed on reddit that you can basically chart out which parts of the story are the oldest (from CBT 1), which ones were added over time, and which are the newest, and the newest ones are the best. So you could definitely say the writing is improving. Additionally, since the game is so interested in setting up this complex world with many concepts and factions, the writing will naturally have more room to breathe as time goes on because it will no longer need to do so much heavy lifting to lay the groundwork.

And I was originally thinking I'd be willing to wait a little while and see where it goes. But.

But that date, man. It really nailed in that the core foundations of the story just do not work for me. No matter what, we're always going to have this MC glazing. MC is the most special, the most unique, the most sacrificing, that's not going to change. But at the same time, Wuling as a whole and especially the date add some jokester TB-like characterization, and having that not only in the dialogue options but in the animations too? I'm not here for that. At least Rover still had a certain heroic demeanor.

We're also always going to have this ancient plots within plots, old history on top of old history between characters, everyone is always going to be like "MC, you don't remember, but we totally had this thing going on and all this stuff happened" and I am just not here for that. Not on a largely silent amnesiac protag and their rotating cast of glazers.

But also, I just cannot forget the hoyo experience. I don't have patience for "it'll be good never" promises.

(And, to be really honest, I do feel a bit stung that they put so much effort into these extravagant graphics, all these attempts at cinematic scenes and visual delivery of the story, and yet the story is just... the usual tropes that haven't even been repackaged. It's just the same bottom of the barrel silent self insert who is the most specialest ever and loved by these female characters you can pull for now-soon-someday. All that pomp, and it's just this?)

So anyway, pretty game, but not worth the time.

Second (because I did mention Endfield is first), Infinity Nikki.

It continues to be jank! At one point, a quest trigger did not work correctly and I actually got soft-locked. Some of the transitions between segments are rough as heck. The difference between how different types of models look is honestly kind of jarring. The tutorial timing and progression is a disaster. The story is ridiculous on a level I have not experienced in a long time.

But it is high key so charming. It's all so charming, I really can't explain it.

I like the mushrooms. I want to help the Mothershroom. I am legitimately curious about what is going on with the Saintess stuff. I respect Nikki more than any gacha protag except maybe Ritsuka, and that's a maybe.

I guess because she doesn't need to play off any sellable characters and she's not a silent protag, but Nikki is like... she's actually smart. Her EQ in particular is off the charts compared to what you normally see from characters. She's such a smooth operator, and yeah, it's in part because she's dealing with the mushrooms that have the usual mascot level of intelligence, but she controls the conversations with them so smoothly... Girl has it locked in. She actually feels like she's in charge of her own protag journey. I am genuinely impressed.

But also, she just kind of goes "oh, we need a big creature to scare off this behemoth, I'll just make an outfit that turns me giant." And she just does that. This story is so ridiculous.

Who needs a two hour fetch quest and lore dump to explain a new gimmick? Nikki gets it done in five minutes of walking, talking, and tutorial screens combined. Bam.

But also, this world might not have the same production values, but it feels magical and fun in a strange way. I particularly liked the Mothershroom's dream. It felt very, hm, constructed to work well with the story? I want to run around even more. I want to jump and float more. It's just nice.

I don't know whether I'll play this daily and keep up with the content, but I do want to keep playing it. It's just fun in a weird way.

[kyogre-blue]

Advanced Wuling a little more, enough to unlock the new factory.

And it's going downhill quickly. Pretty much everything after arriving in the city is bad.

It's still somewhat better than Valley IV, but that's just because Valley IV was so bad. On its own merits, it's quite tedious but also very overdone to the point of cringe. I was raising my eyebrows when they needed an entire production to head to Zhuang Fangyi's office, and then her office is some kind of cubist nightmare, but it just keeps getting worse and worse.

The date is where I started skipping. This is just worthless...

On top of that, there's endless Endmin glazing and yap about the past Endmin (who was so amazing and perfect). It's really making me hate the entire amnesiac protag trope. I never cared much before, but oh boy. It is a shit trope, and it's here to stay.

On a similar note, there is so much glazing of the Protocol Automation stuff. And it's just... it's LITERALLY just a production line. It does nothing except mass produce stuff. And yet everyone has to endlessly clap and go on about how amazing it is. We'd be lost without this ability to mass produce which apparently this highly advanced civilization doesn't have otherwise.

In general, they really want to go in on science being cool, but they don't even technobabble about what is going on properly. Like, what is so special about PAC/AIC? What does it do aside from being a production line? What is Xiaranite? Why is producing it so difficult, except when the PAC can magically do it? They give so little context that I'm just kind of squinting, unimpressed.

And of course, let's not forget Zhuang Fangyi. Oh yes, Zhuang Fangyi...

She sucks.

She's shit.

At first, I just was thinking that she's really bland and they're overselling what an amaaaaazing leader she is (her subordinates treat her like a friend, even though they explicitly say they don't understand what she's thinking, ie she's keeping them at arms' length) and how she's working herself so hard sob sob. Typical gacha character sins, very hoyo, but whatever.

But no. She sucks so bad.

THE DATE----

Combining the overall glazing toward Endmin with the hints of master love, it just makes the whole story feel extremely cheap.

And as a reminder, we're doing this stupid date crap after a whole lot of hand-wringing about what a dire situation we're in. It starts to feel like the entire drama and pomp of the Wuling situation was just set up to show what a wonderful waifu Zhuang Fangyi is, and that's not a good place to be.

I gave up after getting the sky forge blueprint. Honestly, not sure I care to keep going... I guess I could take the tutorials and hope of better story, but the waifu is too much for me.

[kyogre-blue]

Made it to Wuling City. I'm not sure how long the Wuling storyline is so far (I know the region itself is not complete yet), so I don't know how much is left to go, but I'll take a break here to do other games lol.

I can see why everyone was swearing up and down Wuling is so different. I wanted to nitpick, but it's genuinely hard to find something to genuinely complain about. Probable the most I can say is that the (female) character designs somewhat undercut certain scenes. A lot of Tangtang's initial scenes spend a lot of time focusing on her barely clothed ass, including her butt cheeks, and her bare back, etc. And then the otherwise very cool scene with Zhuang Fangyi's Thunder Arts is kinda deflated by her imo kinda weird powered up form. It just looks rather plain, and then there's her bare toes hanging out.

Of course, I feel like her uwu Endmin hints are going to be the bigger problem in the long term. I heard a whiff of discussion about whether she's into Endmin or just wants their "approval" but either one sounds like it's going to test my patience.

(Oh, and Ardashir is selling more mysterious far future plot threads, but what else is new.)

But like... that's really about it. That's all I can whine about.

The pacing is good, there's gameplay integrated in, the scenery is much more interesting, there's character stuff at least going on with not only Tangtang (no wonder everyone is excited for her next patch) but also Perlica and Chen (and Endmin) finally having some actual dynamic. You can even really get a feel for what Endfield's sense of humor is. Congrats to them for making good use of their cinematics both for dynamic character introductions and to make Wuling seem very cool and powerful. Liyue could never, Xianzhou could never

Overall, good beginning. Now, please don't piss me off too bad, Zhuang Fangyi.

[kyogre-blue]

OK, I've finished up the Valley IV main story, so I'll try to give some more coherent thoughts about Endfield (though pending the supposedly much better Wuling main story).

I want to make it clear, which probably doesn't come through my many complaints, that Endfield is not an unplayable game. It's not even "bad" in the general sense. It obviously has a very high budget and time put into it. It's stable, everything works as it should, it has high production values on the visuals, the cinematics, the voice acting. The combat works. The factory works. The exploration works. The story makes baseline sense and is fine(tm) on the most basic level. If you don't nitpick, it's fine and probably very cool to look at.

Most gacha games, and honestly most games and many stories in other media, have bad or at least very awkward beginning sections. Let's not forget Persona 4's somewhat infamously long intro segments before you finally hit TV world. FGO is straight up bad for three chapters. Etc, etc. So having a comparatively weak opening and some friction while you're in the learning curve doesn't really mean all that much in the long term either.

The problem, at least for me, is that the Endfield is so aggressively railroaded and gated. The first half to two thirds of Valley IV is dominated by tutorials that are tied into the progression and story. Practically every mechanic is gated behind some kind of quest, and many seem to be gated behind leveling one of your multiple progression tracks, which often take real world time to do.

Even now, I can't finish laying power lines to all the mining nodes, for example, because there's still parts of the map grayed out, and I'm not even sure whether I need to do some quest to get there, or level up the outposts, or what, but I definitely can't finish... which gets tiring. I want to be able to get the game stabilized into a daily cycle, which is hard to do when you have so many things to upgrade, but you can only upgrade them after upgrading other things, and everything takes some materials that you need to pick up every day. I still can't even tell what the dailies in this game are going to look like.

And yeah, I can spend hours trying to sort it out right now, because I'm on vacation, but I won't have time or energy for that once I'm back at work. Even right now, it's making me miss stuff in my other games, which I'm much more invested in.

Maybe Endfield wants to be a high contact game that you need to spend so much time on regularly. Maybe they wanted to frontload content at launch. But right now, I'm just feeling kind of annoyed and tired of dealing with it.

On more minor overall gameplay points:

Laying powerlines sucks.

Making ziplines is tied to powerlines, so it also sucks. Ziplines can also be blocked by stuff like trees and cliffs, so they are not always a solution. And if you want to put them up high somewhere, most of the time you need to circle around to get up there, which complicates the powerlines issue a lot.

This is a problem because you have to manually hoof it to a lot of things repeatedly. The recycle stations, the rare growths, the delivery thing, etc. I assume you eventually don't need to because you max out everything that uses those materials, but for now it's quite miserable and it's been more than a week.

Combat is generally tedious. You don't have any proper sustain, so your health is always going to get worn away unless you use consumables (which no video game player will want to be doing). There's no grouping and your teammates are always drawing aggro, so dealing with mobs is particularly miserable. As a whole, combat seems to be built around applying a debuff then consuming it to do big damage, but this means rotations are strict. Combos have long cooldowns that are invisible to you. SP is an eternal bottleneck. It seems to have the worst of both action gameplay and more strategic gameplay.

I have no interest in the upcoming banners this patch, and unless one of the six characters after is Physical, they're also all skips. No way to guarantee a standard SSR, and I've already used up all the easily accessible standard pulls. Also, there doesn't seem to be any way to bulk convert oroberyl into pulls? There must be some way, but I can't find it. In general, I have only about 70 pulls after all this, which is wild since that is still way off from a guarantee at 120, and as a reminder you absolutely do not want to pull until you have the 120.

You can't interact with anything while in combat which is just an insane choice.

I hate that the operators you assign to tasks on your spaceship have stamina about it. Awful choice.

For the story, it mostly suffers from three things so far. 1) Shit pacing early on due to the tutorials and excessive fetch quests to pad things out. It's great you can at least skip all that, but once you start skipping, you never know when to stop and it's hard to start caring about what's going on. 2) All the characters suffer from what I like to call "just doing their jobs" syndrome. Basically, everyone with anything above a bit part is just here because it's their job to be here, and no one seems to be particularly emotionally invested about any of it. This was one of Luofu's many sins. No one here has a character arc, or anything like that. 3) The MC glazing is giving real Wuwa vibes. It doesn't matter if it's "justified" by the story and their feats or some future twists. It's just annoying to sit through. Bonus points for Rossi blushing enough to start giving the Wuwa harem vibes about it too.

Otherwise, it's somewhat hamfisted and cheesy, but makes sense for the most part.

(It's also trying desperately to tell you that there is Big Things coming for years to come, but that stuff doesn't make me happy after the Hoyo experience(tm). It's a potentially very cool setting, but I wish it would focus on being cool right now instead of promising to be even cooler in the future.)

Oh yeah, and special mention to the fact that I still don't understand why they talk about the factory like it's the most special magic power ever. Bro, you're a scifi civilization, why is this what you glaze so much...

[kyogre-blue]

Hm, I was going to say something nice about Endfield after getting a bit further and starting to finally stabilize things about after the tutorial hell...

But then I finally scrapped together 80 standard pulls to get the next 6 star... and it's an Ardelia copy.

Nevermind, this game is dogshit.