The real funny part is, it also drove the ones who like factory gameplay away. Superficial enough to not scratch the itch for people who actually want it, while just involved enough to scare away those who donāt (obligatory āwhen you can literally spend five minutes copy pasting a blueprint ever 6 weeks with zero thought, evenā). A real prime example of how fence sitting can really hurt game design.
Something I dont hear talked about much is how bad factory progression is. In a regular factory game, you work your way up the tech tree tier by tier with each tier having a lot of relevancy even towards the end. You really only demolish and rebuild when there's a massive jump or to truly optimize.
Meanwhile in Endfield, you are much better off just waiting on the factory until you progressed the story and unlocked all recipes so you can just jump straight to the final and best tier of recipes. For anyone joining late, you just ignored like 80% of the factory. Meanwhile for anyone that is playing patch by patch, you are forced to rebuild your factory every 6 weeks which can really burn you out.
Very good point. Progression is a major selling point of factory games, and a big appeal for many people is that if you spend the time building something good instead of ad hoc bare minimum, itāll keep paying dividends long into the future. Endfield showed a tiny hint of understanding that latter part with Wuling, where patches somewhat tried to build on the previous production lines which naturally rewarded having made them well the first timeā¦ but this was pretty undermined by the very limited optimization, the blueprint system, and the drip feed of resources. As for the former, since there is no real cost to building anything and instead everything the factory produces does nothing except feed into a black hole ānumber go upā unrelated system, it kills any semblance of progression and yeah you just do story until things are unlocked then plop down the curran patch thing.
yeah the rebuilding was fun and interesting the first few times, but I could see the road ahead and it was either complete burnout or copy/paste someone else's blueprint every patch. Neither sounded appealing and I didn't have the time for a third gacha anyway.
The biggest problem is they have no idea which direction they want to go. They implemented a bunch of different gameplay elements but all of them are too shallow to be attractive. Worst of it they cannot even tap into the huge fan base of their original game.
I could even get over mediocre gameplay if the story and characters hooked me enough. Unfortunately in my first impression of the story, it felt like none of the characters could so much as wipe their ass without protag holding their hand and doing it for them lol
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u/TransparentWolf 9h ago
Blue Archive beat Endfield š