'Came for the combat, stayed to be a factory worker': Anime gacha game players are discovering they were born to be factory builders in Arknights: Endfield

At first glance, you might think Arknights: Endfield is another anime gacha game in the style of Genshin Impact. And you'd be mostly correct. It certainly starts out that way. But then you're asked to build a base to mine and process materials, and suddenly you're knee-deep in a factory building game that has nothing to do with collecting anime characters.

This is the trick that Arknights: Endfield is playing on all the people giving it a try now that it's released, and many players are discovering that there's been a factory builder inside them all along.

"Came for the combat. Stayed to be a factory worker," Reddit user The_4th_Wonderland wrote, speaking for me and a lot of other players who had no idea they'd be spending hours building conveyor belts rather than fighting rock monsters for XP. Users on the Endfield Reddit have started to chant a mantra borrowed from the Factorio community: "The factory must grow."

I had the exact same experience when I played one of the early beta versions of the game. A few hours into the introduction missions, I was tasked with running power lines to set up a base. As someone who has never touched a base management game, I just wanted to speed through it as fast as possible to get back to the third-person, character-swapping combat that every gacha game is trying to perfect these days.

By the time I felt like I had done enough of the early base building to be able to move on, I realized I had just spent a solid four hours constructing the most efficient machine possible. Uh oh. Maybe it's a good thing I've never downloaded Factorio.

Endfield's surprisingly satisfying factory building is the one thing that makes it stand out from the flood of anime gacha games that keep coming out. It will still assault you with 20 different currencies, XP bars, and daily log-in reward notifications, but the base management seems to be the main hook that is catching a lot of players who thought they knew what they were in for.

Who said this game have 50% action and 50% factory? from r/Endfield

YouTuber Braxophone calls the factory building "the great Endfield filter" in their beginner's guide video. While parts of it are optional, you really do have to engage with it to craft a lot of useful items for combat and leveling up your team. There's even a blueprints system that lets you borrow factory designs from other players if building one from scratch isn't your thing. To maximize anything in Endfield, you can't ignore it—which is kind of great, if you ask me. I'd much rather have something that veers away from the daily quest structure of every Hoyoverse game and actually brings something new to the table.

The fact that Endfield is making a bunch of people realize there's an entire genre of games that will suck up all their free time is just a funny byproduct of a well-designed system doing its job. There are plenty of other gacha games to play out there. Endfield is for the people who know that XP and loot is a fool's game; the real power comes from building an industrial empire one conveyor belt at a time.