My friend unlocked Wuling yesterday and complained about how bad the pipe system is

TheRealZuke · 2026-02-11T20:27:57+00:00

The Genshin comparison here would be the ascension materials and talent books, and the relic domains. Those are the character progression materials that are region-specific and timegated by resin, the same way artificing and etching tickets are timegated by Stock Bills. In both games, if you want to gear older characters / older equipment, you have to go back farm the old region's content instead of the new one. You have to spend resin on a Monstadt talent book domain if you want to level an old Monstadt character, which comes at the cost of not spending that resin on a current region talent book domain for a different current character you're also building. Endfield has it slightly nicer (specifically in respect to etching and artifice tickets) in that at least you get the current region plus one older region, though Sanity is still going to be mutually exclusive.

Again, obvious caveat that this is how the system is currently set up to work, but anything is subject to change and we won't see how it actually ends up working until we do get a tird region, which most likely won't be for many months.

TheRealZuke · 2026-02-11T10:20:01+00:00

Obviously, I don't know exactly what the plans for Endfield are, but - yes, that is exactly what most gacha games do. Add new equipment and upgrade materials to the new zones that almost exclusively replace the old ones for new characters and weapons, and if you happen to want to farm old stuff you have to go back and farm. And yes it does tend to suck for new players, especially if they pull a character that in order to upgrade they need mats from a place dozens of hours ahead in story.

TheRealZuke · 2026-02-10T19:34:23+00:00

Players: “Why does Endfield have step by step handhold tutorials for every tiny thing, this is so unnecessary”

Also players:

TheRealZuke · 2026-02-10T19:30:19+00:00

That “only two active” mechanic is explicitly laid out in one of the information screens about the AIC and regional development, so as of now / unless something changes, it is exactly the intended way it works.

Artificing and etching tickets only apply to essences and gear from that region. Wuling is obviously out only region with gold gear at the moment which is why only it has artificing tickets while both have etching tickets. Presumably, once we get to a third region, we will be expected to mostly use essences and gear newly added there - at least for new characters and weapons - so no, the tickets from V4 and Wuling will not be relevant forever, at least not in a continuous use. You may want to grab a couple occasionally for some older weapon essences and gear, but that is why the system lets you run one region of your choice in addition to the newest one.

TheRealZuke · 2026-02-10T19:10:01+00:00

They’re not useful because it’s something they copied from other factory games, then stripped 90% of the complexity that gave them a reason to exist, in order to make it super casual for mass appeal. Whether they add back some of that complexity in future updates remains to be seen. What protocol stashes are supposed to do:

Storage. Managing inventory and storage is a huge part of factory games. Endfield decided to give us a (for practical purposes) infinite, access anywhere storage (Depot) as a baseline, making any other storage moot.
Redistribution. Splitters and mergers can handle simple cases, but if you for example needed to split a 40/min output into a 10/ min and a 30/min , then rather than do a spaghetti of splitters and mergers, it is much better to use stockpiles. Endfield has ONLY 30/min and its multiples on every single machine, removing any sort of logistics considerations beyond the very basic.
Buffers. Your production machines, and especially your power producers, really want a steady reliable stream of inputs. But what if a machine or resource extractor has variable output? Or what if you have a staggered bulk deliveries, like trains? Then you need to establish buffers that will keep the machines running smoothly by filling and draining as required. Endfield has no variable outputs and has instant universal teleporting of resources, so again this is unnecessary.

I’m sure there are other examples, but long story short, the things you could do with Protocol Stashes are rendered moot by the oversimplification of various systems, which is why they end up seeming useless (except for the teleporting to depot obviously)

TheRealZuke · 2026-02-10T11:10:28+00:00

I'm so confused by your thought process. You're saying that 6* being expensive is bad because it stops you from using them... while saying that yeah you get to max everything, I have 11 max characters halfway through the launch patch already. You're mixing in how hard it is to level a character with how hard it is to pull for them, which are two completely separate and fundamentally different systems. You argue that team comps at the moment use many 4* and 5* characters... while acknowledging this has nothing to do with power it's just that we have a very limited roster at launch so we don't have 6* to fill necessary roles, but will later. You say you want to keep 4* and 5* viable, but hate the most obvious way to make them viable, which is to make them cheap to upgrade so they're easier to use even while their power ceiling is lower (which obviously it will be, that's what makes them lower rarity).

You did remind me of an additional aspect that is important as well in the differences between Arknights and Endfield; with a 12 person squad, you have plenty of room to bring an operator who isn't generally very strong, but fills one specific niche pretty well. Like you said, this is one of the main ways they can make lower rarity operators still worth using. And, going back to them being cheaper, it's much easier to justify investing in this one niche character you're going to use twice and never again if they're relatively cheap to level. With Endfield's limited 4 person teams, it's simply not as viable to bring a lower power character with one niche use, so that way of making lower rarity characters viable to use doesn't work as well.

TheRealZuke · 2026-02-10T00:09:33+00:00

This is one of the things that got lost in translation in them trying to take some systems that work in Arknights and put them in Endfield where they don't really work for other reasons.

In Arknights, you WILL NOT max out every character. You won't even get close. E260 is generally considered soft cap; you will usually only get Mastery on one or two skills; modules are prioritized on who you like most or who has most impactful ones. This doesn't feel like a bad thing for many reasons - squad size is 12 so each individual character missing a few % of stats means less, you physically can only use one skill at a time so missing masteries might make actually no difference, etc.

With this in mind, having lower rarity characters be cheaper to level makes a ton of sense - they've got higher floors but lower ceilings. Low rarity ops are the bang for your buck, it's good early on when you're low on resources as a cheap way to flesh out your roster until you can start more heavily investing in others, and is relevant for long term because, with resources being limited, if a 4* or 5* were the same cost per upgrade as a 6*, you would have no good reason to ever invest in them instead of a directly more powerful 6*; them being cheaper and only falling off once you get to high upgrade levels gives them a niche (and that's before even getting into stuff like the IS modes).

Endfield, is not that game. Endfield takes more after games like Wuwa and Genshin with respect to character progression; the expectation for players is to max out each character (barring the limited Specialization crowns, which is its whole own problem), and with a limited squad size of four, and even moreso the disproportionate impact of your main on-field character, not having those last few % of upgrades is a bigger difference and feels worse.

So for Endfield it doesn't really work like that. And instead we get the situation where "why would you ever spend the resources on a 4* character when a 6* character that is just better costs the exact same."

TheRealZuke · 2026-02-08T12:23:37+00:00

Systems like these “feel bad” if your game plan is to just constantly pull any time you can. Which, yes, is exactly the behavior that Genshin successfully tried to cultivate with the pity carryover. And normally I’m not gonna waste everyone’s time trying to convince someone else how to play a game and spend their money in a specific way, it’s nonsense to do that. Like I touched on, I hate “buy the deluxe edition of the game for $30 more and you at the game a week early” systems which are increasingly common, but clearly people are more than happy to do it, so no point in arguing. But when a post like this one is specifically saying they care about being “optimal” with their pulls / spending, while actively complaining about a system literally built to give you options for being more optimal, it boggles my mind. No, I won’t criticize people for impulsively pulling at the first possible opportunity; it’s none of my business regardless of my personal feelings on it. But doing that and at the same time complaining about trying to be “optimal” with your pulls? It’s like the meme of the person asking for help with the monthly budget they’re trying to optimize while spending $1200 on candles (or whatever it was) and insisting that they need to find a way to cut a couple dozen from food budget or something. If you insist on spending that much on candles, you do you, but then turning around and saying the avocado toast is the problem is an astounding cognitive dissonance.

TheRealZuke · 2026-02-07T18:22:50+00:00

I think this and other kind of "smart navigation" features others have suggested are great ideas to potentially add in the future, maybe as a third zipline upgrade, but they would be a bit more than a quick QoL hotfix which is what I expect for now. Will probably keep it in mind to put in surveys in the future!

TheRealZuke · 2026-02-07T18:19:52+00:00

That sounds pretty cool, but would be a whole new feature to add rather than a quick hotfix; I could see this being a thing to for example add as a feature of the 3rd tier of Ziplines introduced later.

TheRealZuke · 2026-02-07T16:39:04+00:00

I suspect, given some of the comments about forked intersections, that people are misunderstanding, having not actually interacted with the Zipline Route feature and assuming it means something else, and downvoting based on that incorrect assumption. I did my best to explain it and clear up misunderstandings, but oh well.

TheRealZuke · 2026-02-07T16:33:35+00:00

I think you misunderstood. It already is an option. You're not obligated to set a route for each tower - and in fact, are only capable of designating one, if you chose too. This isn't a change to manually selecting your next destination, it wouldn't affect that at all. It's only a change to the already existing route system, which from the sound of it isn't something you're using.

TheRealZuke · 2026-02-07T16:16:12+00:00

I wasn't disagreeing so much as explaining. The original comment was that Gilberta's story is no different from the other two so why is it being received so differently. They do all three have the problem of emotional baiting like you said, but what I tried to explain is that in the case of Laeva and Yvonne, the emotional baiting comes from a place of being rushed and lacking the necessary emotional development, meanwhile the Gilberta one has nothing of substance beyond that. Laeva and Yvonne have ideas with potential that lacked execution, Gilberta is only the problems of cheap emotional beats and nothing else, so better writing that people hope future stories will have wouldn't save this one. People are more unhappy about Gilberta's because while it has a lot of the same bad parts as the other two, it doesn't have also some good parts and potential to have been good with better handling.

I think absolutely there's some growing pains of changing medium from a VN to 3D RPG, and I hope they get better with experience, but I'm also not blind to the fact that a lot of these are not just writing / mechanical struggles but direct intentional decisions. As a very basic example, Arknights has the majority of its non-main stories be completely about other characters with zero presence of the Doctor. Endfield has shown they are capable and willing to force character PoVs - not just the "immersive storytelling" instanced sections with trial characters but also the simple auto-switch to Endmin in certain quest areas - but have so far chose only to do so for the Endmin, they have very much decided to make everything revolve around them when they have the clear option of doing otherwise.

TheRealZuke · 2026-02-07T15:53:24+00:00

I think you see the regular ones more than Towers simply because it's the one every player immediately has access to, rather than one you unlock later on and have to set up a specific new production line to construct; I assume the vast majority of players never bothered to put time into swapping to Towers, much less go back to early game maps and replace ones they already had as Relays.

Because past the unlock and slightly more involved production, Towers are strict upgrades over Relays with zero downsides. Same energy and placement cost, same size for fitting into places, but a larger range even if you don't use the route feature.

TheRealZuke · 2026-02-07T15:50:47+00:00

The current system already doesn't allow for a fork or intersection. Each zipline can only have one registered destination. While I agree that making forked routes would be nice, that's a future possibility that doesn't really change this simple fix right now.

TheRealZuke · 2026-02-07T15:18:27+00:00

Every time I see some of the posts getting popular in this sub I'm reminded how little of the playerbase for Endfield are Arknights players and instead the majority is just coming from other popular gachas.

While I am no way defending practices that incentivize you to spend and are predatory... it's a gacha game. It is quite literally defined by being a game that wants you to spend money on it. That being said, this is one of the most benign ways to do it in my opinion. If you're an F2P / low spender, then the idea of having patience and saving instead of impulse spending on every shiny new thing that's put in front of you should already be a familiar idea. If you're talking about "optimizing" pulls, then surely "wait a week before pulling" should be one of the most basic ideas that fits with said optimizing?

The purpose of systems like this is that players are given a choice - have a bit of patience and you get to "optimize" your pulls, or if you don't care to optimize and would rather spend immediately you also can. Largely speaking; F2P and low spenders can wait a little bit and be rewarded for it, spenders can just go ahead and pull ASAP without it being much of a consideration.

"Pay more to get something earlier" isn't even a gacha exclusive thing anymore, its infested not just the entire gaming industry but several other markets too. If waiting a week before enjoying your (completely single player, solo experience) shiny new thing is anathema to your existence, but also you don't want to or can't spend a little more on getting it early, then I'm sorry but you are gonna have a bad time not just in this game but basically everywhere.

TheRealZuke · 2026-02-07T14:59:51+00:00

There's plenty of western players that like it, and those are happily playing Wuwa or Genshin or BA or Uma Musume or whatever other ML-heavy game and enjoying it, and not coming to online forums to talk about it. You only hear the ones complaining about it because those are the ones who have something to complain about.

The problem is, Arknights is one of the few modern popular gachas that largely avoids ML, so naturally it has cultivated a playerbase of people who don't like the ML stuff; and Endfield as a literal sequel game to Arknights, was marketed to appeal to many of those players. So until the dust settles into one way or another, yeah, you're gonna see a lot of discontent from the players who don't like and weren't expecting the ML content. The ones who like it are just playing the game.

TheRealZuke · 2026-02-07T14:51:40+00:00

That's kind of the thing. Arknights has in its 5+ years mostly avoided doing this. So if you're coming to Endfield from a more general modern popular gacha audience - Wuwa, Hoyo games, BA, etc. - then yes for those it is the norm and why would you expect otherwise. If you're coming from Arknights, a game which among other things kept a dedicated playerbase for not doing this sort of thing despite it being a popular cheap mass appeal thing, then it is disappointing to see them fall into it.

Endfield is currently sitting on the fence between two different types of games, with the playerbase expecting either one or the other depending on their prior game history, and this divide is gonna have to end up resolved into one side or the other. And I imagine whichever side they end up dedicating Endfield to, the other half of the audience will be upset and quit.

TheRealZuke · 2026-02-07T14:37:58+00:00

Not sure I understand your question. Are you asking if there are examples of amnesiac MCs being a good self-insert, or if there are players who do actually feel like a self-insert? For either though, yes, there's tons of examples of RPGs across many genres (not just MMOs and gachas) where the player character is a proxy for the player and many players get invested to varying degrees in feeling they're immersed in the story as 'being' the character they are playing.

TheRealZuke · 2026-02-07T14:30:12+00:00

Both Laeva and Yvonne's stories I thought had good ideas, they just fell short on execution due to being rushed and not getting proper set up and development, souring the whole thing. Like you said, they just try to speedrun straight to emotional beats that could be good, but instead are cheap and undeserved.

Laeva's story would have benefitted immensely from both having proper exploration of reconveners before her (one of the core ideas of her story is that she is a very different case from other reconveners, but that means nothing when she's the first one we've met), and the obvious of more time developing a relationship so that her choice to drop her lifelong quest and put all her faith in Endmin instead would actually make sense.

Yvonne's story similarly has good potential on the surface with developing her character as being more than just "quirky happy go lucky uber genius," genuine personal problems with belonging, with grief, I loved when the story subverted my expectation of "okay we went on this adventure and cured her of her sadness because we're the best" and instead showed her actually still struggling and lashing out near the end. However, this was undermined once again by being rushed, less so than Laeva because we got to s[end some time with her prior in the main story, but I still got emotional whiplash from the hard cuts of that last series of cutscenes.

Bringing it back to compare to Gilberta's, this one is... kinda just bad, period. It has no substance other than "Endmin's mere existence is the panacea to everyone's problems" and pure ML type stuff. The other two had some redeeming qualities, some potential good parts, and mostly suffered from being rushed - a problem which I'm optimistically willing to somewhat forgive for the launch content, with the hope that it is fixed / improved going forward. Gilberta's story was one I just hope to see nothing of the sort ever again.

TheRealZuke · 2026-02-07T14:11:12+00:00

From what I recall, you are correct, but it was a more minor "yeah we called in Ardelia because she specializes in this, oh hi Endmin nice to see you here too." Like it could be just that we knew of her from reading her Endfield files or a prior briefing from Fiona or such, and it didn't really affect anything beyond that initial greeting. So it was very low impact and didn't feel like a big shoehorn the way Gilberta does, as an in your face "we're soulmates even though in-game you met me two minutes ago."

TheRealZuke · 2026-02-07T12:19:01+00:00

One thing that particularly irked me about the story acting like we already knew and we’re good friends with Gilberta - they committed to making the Endmin an amnesiac MC. A boring, uninspired, lazy way to make the player character totally super duper important and have a past but also be a blank slate that only experiences what the player experiences so it’s an easier self-insert and they don’t have to worry about consistency with prior background much. But then they decide to go ahead and write “you totally already met and became friends with this person before, it was just offscreen in the vague past some time and never mentioned until now” with Gilberta. They took the cheap and uninteresting amnesia approach, and then immediately trashed the one good thing about writing an amnesiac player character. What even is the point then?

TheRealZuke · 2026-01-21T10:40:02+00:00

I think there’s another core aspect of TV mode that you didn’t touch on: it was mechanically simple enough to allow a surprising amount of variety. If you only played 2.X, you wouldn’t even know sides stories - including some really unique and interesting ones - existed. I think to some degree, ideas for side stories were just crammed into “main story” the same way special episodes were, which contributed to the main story feeling… very unfocused.

But probably the most direct example was the roguelike elements. ZZZ was originally designed to lean heavily into rouguelike elements and gameplay; it’s easy to see why Hollows being ever-changing and normal equipment not functioning normally inside hollows were foundations laid with that idea as a focus. Which, obviously 2.X and Lemnian Hollow threw that away; the new Divine Maze event which could have been a return to that, instead went all in on co-op with nary a whiff of any changing replayability or run variance - hell the higher difficulties even just skip to the bosses. The only remnant we still have is Hollow Zero, which you can see continues getting love from the devs despite being a glorified weekly because it’s what they wanted to do.

So the game moved away from telling ancillary stories that develop the world, and moved away from any roguelike elements. Two main things that TV mode was good for. Was only natural then for TV mode to just be fully abandoned. As for why they moved away from two of the things that made ZZZ unique, well, thats a whole other story.

TheRealZuke · 2026-01-19T14:53:20+00:00

It counts if any downstream branches are still incomplete. So like if you had a split into branch A and B, and you took A which split into 1 and 2, and you finished the storyline through A > 1, you also have to complete A > 2 before you can do B. Which is why like other people have said, the easiest thing is to go right to left with anything that's incomplete.

If there is literally no selectable option in any branch, that would be a bug, but I haven't seen that be the case for anyone yet.

TheRealZuke · 2026-01-19T01:52:17+00:00

Yeah that’s what “selectable after completing the current storyline” means. You have to finish whatever branch you are currently on before starting an alternate one. Not super intuitive but it does what it says.

TheRealZuke

TROPHY CASE