What Arknights: Endfield’s Shared Facilities System Says About Players

It’s been a couple of weeks now since Arknights: Endfield launched. Since that time, I’ve been playing the game on a fairly regular basis (if you don’t count the week we were without electricity because of a giant ice storm). I’m enjoying it. In some ways, it’s like my usual fare. In other ways, it’s not.

The big difference, of course, is the factory sim portion of the game. I play factory sims and enjoy them quite a bit. But I don’t typically play them as part of my anime wife-collecting RPG games. With Endfield, the factory sim portion of the game isn’t just a major part of the game; it’s necessary. You want to progress, you’re going to build and level factories in whatever region you happen to be in. You’re not going to get very far if you don’t. Want gear? Better make it. Meds? Same thing. Need money for something. Gotta manufacture items for refugees and help them build their settlements. You won’t be able to buy presents for your operators if you don’t.

Basically, you’re going to be spending a lot of time in your factories. And you’re going to hit points in the game’s story where you just kinda have to stop and go back to the factory (or Endfield’s giant ship, where even more production is taking place) in order to be able to progress.

Here’s the thing, though. You’re not doing it 100% alone. Yeah, you’re moving through the story as if you’re the only Endministrator out there. But when you’re out there exploring Talos-II, you’ll come across certain useful facilities set up by other players – mostly things like ziplines, turret weapons, and storage facilities. You can use these shared facilities to navigate your world. That doesn’t mean you can avoid putting down your own, as the ones that appear in your version of the game may change over time. So if you want a consistent system, you’ll have to put in the work. But it can make building out your systems easier.

Of course, this being a factory sim, facilities can wear out, be attacked by enemies or creatures, and just generally need repair. And you run across this a lot as well, including the shared facilities. Realistically, these facilities are not your problem. You didn’t build them. You could use them until your own are all in place and forget about them. But you do have the option to repair them for yourself and other users. And that’s something I find interesting.

Arknights: Endfield, like most gacha-style ARPGs, is a very minimally social game. Yeah, in any of these games: Genshin Impact, Wuthering Waves, Honkai: Star Rail, etc. You may have cause to do co-op with other players. In fact, some of the games are trying to encourage it more, adding events in which players need to team up to receive all their rewards and the like. But, for the most part, you can ignore them completely if you don’t mind not getting the goodies.

Even in MMORPGs, games that are built around the idea of being social and working together, players can choose to ignore each other or content that requires them to interact with others. Although, it’s easily argued that this isn’t the point of playing an MMORPG. Players ostensibly join these games to do things with other people.

But gacha games and factory sims are very often solo affairs. It’s for this reason I believe Arknights: Endfield and other solo games that allow players to interact with each other in subtle ways say some interesting things about the gaming community as a whole. The fact is, if I run across your zipline and it’s on its last legs, I don’t have to spend my materials to repair it. I could just walk past. I could build my own and maintain them. And players certainly don’t have to leave messages for each other explaining how to locate some difficult-to-find treasure or warn each other about danger. But they do.

For another, non-Arknights example: Genshin Impact’s Lantern Rite is underway. If you’re a Genshin player, it’s a pretty big deal. There’s a big quest that impacts the game’s lore, and there are activities typically in the form of mini-games. The quest is solo, and the mini-games may be a mix. And if there is social content, the game typically only requires players to do a small amount to reap all the rewards.

But then there’s the lanterns. It is Lantern Rite after all. So players are given Xiao Lanterns and the ability to use them to send messages to other players. Granted, HoYo’s not letting any of us write anything we want. If we want to be weird and creepy, we can just do that in co-op chat.

Instead, just as with the messages sent in Endfield, the game has set phrases that players can put together to create a message. And they’re all designed to fit the holiday. But as with all social things in the game, we don’t have to put that much effort into them. Drop five lanterns, and you’ve earned your rewards. Yet they give us 20 lanterns to use to drop messages around Liyue, and we can acquire more. Every time I log in, new messages are floating around the harbor waiting to be claimed.

Basically, players are just leaving nice messages for each other because they want to. It’s simply not a requirement to be social to progress in the game.

In Arknights, it benefits players a bit more to be social. There are things like clues that players can send each other, and a stock market-type system as well, that requires players to check their friends for the best buying and selling prices. So, again, in some ways, the game does require a bit of social activity – more than your standard gacha RPG. But there are things that aren’t required, that we choose to do anyway.

It may benefit us in some way, like repairing already existing ziplines. But mostly, I think players just do it because it feels like the good thing to do. I may stumble across that hidden treasure on my own over time. But the minute someone drops one of those notes, they’ve saved me a good bit of trouble.

I’ll be honest. I don’t even really use other people’s ziplines. The ones that appear often aren’t going where I’m heading. But if I run across them and they’re in need of repair, I do it. It just seems like the right thing to do. And it takes so little effort on my part – less effort than optimizing my own factories, for certain.

Speaking of optimizing factories, the game has a system that allows players to share blueprints of their factory setups with each other. This is another one of those things that requires effort (though not a lot) outside of the general gameplay. A player has to choose to create and share the blueprint. Just a couple of weeks in, there’s a site filled with blueprints for people to look through and use. I’ll probably never talk to the people whose blueprints I might decide to make use of. But they’re uploading them, anyway.

It reminds me that despite all the negativity and vitriol we may see around the gaming community, and that often breaks containment, gamers (like everyone else) can be very nice people. (Yes, even the gamers who sometimes seem to spend more time being negative about games they don’t play than playing the games they do.) Sometimes it’s easy to forget that. So here’s your reminder.