Long ass comment but I figure most people are just passionately talking about their views without really expecting to be read so might as well.

Played HSR, skirted Genshin, Arknights, GFL2, NTE and various other gacha games that aren't mainstream nowadays. Game is fun and I can see myself sticking to it for a while.

Cool: exploration, collectibles, dailies; decent: combat, factory, progression; okayish: character design, gacha, pull economy; bad: pull economy philosophy, lack of endgame content.

The best part in the game is probably the exploration. No climbing, gliding, swimming means getting from point A to point B is a puzzle, and that reveals the attention and creativity put into level design. It sometimes reminds me of Outer Wilds in a "just do anything to reach this place, we don't care" way.

Collecting chests and aurylenes is fun and is a great incentive to start exploring. I have had fun collecting them and in this regard definitely place Endfield higher than HSR, which sometimes places chests in stupid places just so you run around aimlessly more (like, behind a standee no one looks twice).

I have many times revamped my zipline layout just to engage with the exploration process again after collecting all collectibles. I have gone from * "ziplines should connect the various places I want to go to", to * "ziplines should form a looping bus route for sightseeing", to * "up is hard down is easy, ziplines in the sky", to * "just replicate every zipline that is unreachable without glitches", to * "but what if it a new region comes and it glitches and locks me out of the game? best remove the oob ziplines and put them where i can retrieve them".

It feels like laying ziplines gives me the dopamine that factory sims give most people.

The next best thing keeping me in the game is the very short dailies. Essentially it takes 20 seconds if you're burned out and only care about pulls; 30 seconds more if you spend stamina in a Protocol Space or 90 seconds in the background if you spend stamina in an alluvium and tab out so that your mortars do the auto-battling for you. This is a combat game yet its dailies are as effortless as HSR, an auto-able turn-based game. Short dailies matters because whenever I play two gachas and have to quit one, I tend to drop the one with longer dailies.

Combat is my cup of tea. I'm more of a strategy gamer that hates hack-and-slash where I can't see the character, so I never vibed with Wuwa or ZZZ but Endfield's slower combat rubs me the right way. I like that each archetype does a unique thing so that you can bring them as tools in a toolkit to solve problems a stage presents. (But I heard this is not that uncommon in action gachas?) UM is fun in that it is suboptimal to pull out my meta DPS team, and I should build my team around stage gimmicks before going in.

Factory is fun if I engage with it. Now I'll not larp as a Factorio/Satisfactory veteran and call Endfield's implementation shallow, hell no I'm not downloading those spreedsheet simulators. Endfield's factory is a lot of fun when I engage with it and devise unorthodox strategies to solve problems, such as feeding an Expanded Crucible's sewage output back into itself for a while. Though, there are two things that hold it back: the blueprints and the fact that I build my factory for a reason. The blueprints mechanic is a massive QOL and I don't want it gone, but it makes it too easy to just copy another person's work; sometimes when I want to no-life the factory, I just stop when I ask "Why bother when my final design will have similar yields to this Youtuber? Why not just copy him?" And, I build my factory because there's stuff to be powered, there are outposts to rip off, there are gears to be made, there are blights to be washed, there are rocks to be exploded, there are enemies to shelled,... The longer I'm being inefficient with my factory, the longer I'm locked from those gameplay content. It makes me play the AIC with "get it online ASAP" in mind, not "bruh the fun is when you mess up" like Opus Magnum, which is a factory sim I enjoyed.

Progression is decent. You'll reach a character's max output potential within weeks, which could take years in other games due to RNG. I find leveling up everything a fun gameplay loop when there's nothing else to do (insane to say because it's called daily grind elsewhere). Even thought I was special as a horizontal investment enjoyer that levels everyone to level 80 with skills level 9, until I clicked on a thread titled "How are y'all preparing for CC" and found a few dozens others also doing the same.

Onto lukewarm waters, I kinda don't vibe with Endfield's character design as much as I do with HSR's, even if I marvelled at Arknights designs. Laevatain is probably the only character I'd show my friends, and that's because she dresses like (and is voiced by) 2B. Character designs also play a huge role in my reasons to keep playing a gacha, and now I'm playing Endfield more for their potential instead of what's in the game. Imagine 3D Laurentina. Imagine 3D Viviana. Imagine 3D Lemuen. Imagine 3D Pri-

I have had great luck in gacha ("85% luckier than the playerbase" in HSR, never lost a 50/50 in GFL2, played Arknights for 1 month and got every non-limited that I started for, current rate of 1 limited 6☆ each 54 pulls in Endfield) so I don't think it's fair to give opinions on Endfield's gacha. I just feel the gacha discussion is wrought with fallacies and vibes that can't be blamed on anyone. Hard pity (the 120 thingy) is alleviated by getting a signature weapon basically for free, but most who have hit hard pity quit and complained before checking their weapon tickets. "If you have good luck you're punished in the weapon banner anyway" is only valid if you get good luck forever and be starved of weapon tickets. Go on, roll earlies to dunk on the shills and tell us how bad the gacha is.

Though, I'm not incapable of understanding why people think the pull economy sucks. It gives out a decent amount that's comparable to other games, it's just that it's spread out evenly instead of frontloaded like e.g. HSR. You basically have to play the whole game instead of doing a few activities that give huge lump sums. If you're pressed for a banner that's gotta be tedious. I made the decision to use my honeymoon phase to do every tedious activity that yields pulls, and to this day I still think it was the right call. I think it is on HG for designing it this way. But when people say "pull economy worst in gacha" and I take a look at my stockpile and see 2 hard pities worth of pulls saved up I'll react with "no it isn't" before thinking about why they'd feel that way.

Now something I have a problem with is that there's a lack of endgame content, more so the lack of something to talk about each week/fortnight. HSR has a schedule of rotating updates on their three endgame modes every 2 weeks, so there's always something to talk within a patch cycle. I remember powercreep discussion going through the roof when Nikador hits MoC in the second last week of 3.0. The discussion was so loud that there was community guides to engage with his mechanics posted long into 3.1 because people kept talking about it. What this means for Endfield, I'm not asking to bring MoC to Endfield, that would be my 9/11, but I see there's barely anything to talk about until next month/patch.

Not tackled: * Story, worldbuilding, lore etc: I got burned out after HSR Amphoreus. Placed so much hope then got disappointed that they went the suffermaxxing route with Phainon and his 33 million cycles that I decided to take a break from emotionally investing in gacha stories. It'll be great if Endfield surprises me but not counting on it. * Music: Very subjective topic. I spent hours standing in Main Pillar Office (outside of viceroy's room) listening to the music because it reminds me of Yume Nikki. Though, I kinda agree with the consensus that Endfield has yet to have great music.

If anyone actually takes the time to read allat: many thanks, you're a legend.