Arknights Endfield Is So Close To Being Amazing, But...

AR Knights nfield just launched his technical test and your boy got accepted to play it now unlike 99% of technical tests and betas this test looks like it's actually meant to improve the final product I say that because most companies do a beta a month before the game drops and then they try to tell us that [ __ ] is meant to improve the game like we somehow ain't no it's coming out faster than the cult of suar and can do this whenever she appears for. 3 seconds on a live stream most betas are simply demos that advertise the game but since we don't even know the release date of Enfield and these sent out countless in-game surveys and even have a feedback channel in the Discord then yeah I'd say they actually give a damn about feedback which is why in this video I want to say all of my major feedback for the game and also give a lay down on what the game's like cuz there's some stuff that caught me by surprise the combat being the biggest one I expected it to be closer to an action game and I mean okay yeah it is an action RPG but at the same time Devil May Cry 5 is labeled as a father-son bonding game despite Virgil trying to go for the latest stage abortion known to man that is to say if you expect something close to punishing Gray Raven or honai impact third you're going to be disappointed as the game doesn't feel like that the best way to explain the combat is it's basically a light MMO it's like you took Final Fantasy 14 and made it somehow less furry that's what you can expect from the combat and honestly I [ __ ] love it I'm going to keep it 100 at first I thought the combat was ass when I only had two people in the party and battles consisted of me holding left click in between mashing skills off cool down yeah I wasn't the most neurologically stimulated by that experience but with time I leveled up my skills and got four people in the party and then I came to a realization one that made me love the game the realization was that this is the closest I've ever played to jiujitsu kaisen as a video game now you may ask yourself holy [ __ ] were you doing some cool ass strings and launching off domains left and right and to that I say [ __ ] no it was close to jiutu kaisen cuz I was jumping [ __ ] I would dead see one solitary enemy 1,000 M away and pull up four ultimates on their ass immediately most games try to have a sense of Honor behind what you do you're the chosen one who only has battles in which you are outnumbered but in this you are four people people ready to jump sentient rocks because they stopped you from Excavating natural resources and jokes aside yes it's actually pretty damn fun at first you simply use skills off cooldown which then gives you a skill point and eventually you can throw out your ultimate but between that you're just Mario Party mashing left click though with four people it feels like you're actually doing something interesting for the battles actually setting up combinations for what to do and there is depth behind just having four people jump the local innocent Wildlife there's different effects like knockback lift to knockdown which have benefits depending on how you use them with a lift if you use it on a knockdown enemy they take additional break and break is the bar below their HP it's basically a stagger but the thing is when they're lifted and you knock them down they also take additional break and because of that your boy cooked up an optimal rotation now my team was Ember cuz she's a redhead of w cuz she's broken Angelina cuz this gift makes me cackle whenever I use her ultimate and the administrator yes that's her actual name the rotation to start channeling Angelina's ability then knock the enemy down with Ember from there Angelina lifts them up they take extra to break now that they're in the air and begging for mercy have the administrator slam all of them into the concrete floor and after that the whooping is still not done cuz then AA comes on in and targets any enemies close to a wall with her knock back as when you knock an enemy into the wall they take extra damage and break so in layman's terms the rotation is literally make them eat dirt throw them into the heavens slam them down to the Earth's core with 5,000 lb of force then take the fine Pace that was once a human being and throw it into the wall you know I was trying to make some jokes that we were actually evil in the game because we jump people in a 4 to1 battle but I'm beginning to think that's not a joke when I say what we do to the enemies out loud we kind of seem like a bunch of [ __ ] and that's not even counting the many nuclear reactions we set off in battle see thing is in case you thought to yourself that we weren't brutal enough yet you let me talk about the elemental Fusion system so some moves have a chance to generate an elemental orb from the tech test there were three different elements pulse ltis and thermal different combinations triggered different effects like like comust petrify radiate yeah we're committing Royal crimes on the battlefield now I know the element names I already stated kind of sound as though they violate the Geneva Convention but if I were to bed I'd say more elements will be added with time either when the game fully releases or later on in its lifespan I mean [ __ ] look at AR Knights they've added in a ton of classes and status effects after the game's launch I expect them to do the exact same for Enfield so what you're seeing here will probably be expanded on later but I can say that what we have right now is really damn fun to play it's like I said prior don't expect a huge action game like ing gven expect an action game that focuses Less on how fast it is like having to do quick Dodges or parries and expect a more strategy based game you'll be thinking about where the best position for your skills are what abilities to use and in what order to maximize damage how to properly get off your Pursuit attacks which are these conditional attacks that do really good damage some are a simple attack after the main skill but there are some like angelinas where you get 8 Seconds of unpowered attacks after your ultimate which means to make perfect use of it you don't want any other skill to go off cool down in those 8 seconds as when you switch characters you lose that attack State and in addition to thinking that your strategy may change if an element orb respond in Via a skill and getting an ultimate may change your rotation entirely for example I like to have a one hit last for my rotation but if her ultimate is up I want her to go first as she throws her spear into the ground and any skill that hits it causes an elemental reaction so all of this is to say that the game does something I love in which any rotation based games do it has mechanics behind its combat which actually makes you think now I know that sounds like the stupidest [ __ ] you've ever heard but let me explain in many games where you have your ation for your characters it can get very static that is to say that [ __ ] never [ __ ] changes I've played genin for about a year at this point and the rotation I've used for my teams has been the exact same for any combat encounter Yan EQ Kaza EQ Leila QE Hut e and left click I don't have to actually think for that rotation granted I had to think when setting up the team as genin's team building is very in-depth but I don't feel that translates too well into gameplay as I've constantly been doing the same thing for about a year but in my experience of nfield the combat encounters haven't felt really similar I mean [ __ ] the skills are all of cool down at different times so if anything my rotation I talked about earlier is more of an opening because if I try to use the skills off cool down then it'd be a completely different rotation and then [ __ ] like ultimates being generated orbs being dropped have also made me constantly think what's best to do right now instead of being able to follow rotation I've done a thousand times before and that's not even taken into account how you might want to hold on to a skill to interrupt an enemy's attack as if you hit them with a skill while these red circles are out then you stop their attack and deal extra break to them the only problem with that is when you're holding on to a skill and just regular attacking the enemy it really feels like you're actively healing them basic attacks do almost no damage to where I feel like I'm sitting the enemy down on a warm towel and turning into a full-blown masseuse as I lightly brush my weapon upon them what I'm trying to say is that basic attacks need to deal more damage as right now it seems like those are unimportant and you just wait for your skills to be up now all in all enfields combat is if you took an action game and slowed down the pace to focus on making it more strategic that is what you can expect from the game not everyone will like it hell the only guarantee is that you'll hate the beginning of the game as playing it with a the party of two was the most boring [ __ ] ever but I can say that so far I really like the gameplay part of that is because I can have four anime girls jump people like they're from the streets at of Detroit but the other reason is because the combat constantly has me thinking of what is best to do I don't have many moments where I can actively be receiving a labotomy and still hold up an optimal rotation however none of this is to say that I fully love the comet in the game and it has no flaws cuz by God there is some the greatest is a lack of a Dodge that's right you cannot Dodge we may have traversed to a different planet but the concept of of rolling is still only tied to Goa now the weird thing about a lack of a Dodge in game is that it feels like it was made with one in mind you can see outlines of where enemies are going to attack and bosses usually follow a set pattern for their attack so people who are used to them can adapt and start dodging yet that [ __ ] is more absent than my heterosexuality after seeing anel's new outfit and the worst part about the Dodge is how the regular swings feel they feel clunky as hell like you need to give a second for your character to actually move after you finish attacking and for normal attacks there's a slight delay between clicking and the move coming out in fact there are many small delays due to animation locks it's hard to really show them but when you're playing it feels very apparent though I'm like 99% sure most of the animation locks are going to be fixed before the game actually releases but I did want to talk about them although the greatest thing that I would like to see is the ability to Dodge I mean in one of the surveys they literally asked do you want to dodge so I'm pretty confident in saying the no players want it I mean [ __ ] we already got Dodge light version It's called jump that interrupts the lag normal attack animation so it's your best bet of getting out of an AOE that or you're going to face tank the hit face tank it because blocking is uh nonexistent as well I don't really know why it isn't a thing in the game lack of being able to dodge or block makes fights feel less about what your skill is and more about having the stats to deal with the Enemy it's kind of like a turn-based game and most of them your only option is to just take the enemy's head and have the stats to survive and then beat the enemy's ass lack of being able to dodge or block makes fights feel less about what your skill is and more about having the stats to deal with an enemy if you don't you simply die that's kind of what nfield feels like in games like El ring you could do a level one challenge if you're good enough you'll have the ability to dodge all damage but in nfield something like that is not happening now I'm not saying the game needs to play like eldering I'm just asking for more tools to be given to the players so they can make up for a difference in stats by being skilled now stuff like fixing animation lock or adding in dodg SL blocking is something that seems relatively easy to add on it's not as if it's fundamental to how combat is so I'm not terribly worried if it will exist when the game releases one thing I'm worried about though is more behind the systems of the game like how orbs are really random to generate Angelina skill has a 20% chance to generate an orb the thermal set gives a 50% efficiency bonus so Angelina has a 30% chance instead if you got the four piece set on but that is still really low and if I don't get that proc or have of one is Ultimate up then I don't really get to play with the orb system which feels weird as in the future I'd imagine it'll be meta I mean [ __ ] it gives resistance shred who does that remind you of there is zahi whose ultimate generates one orb which when you compare the amount of reactions you're able to do she feels like a worse of one but I'm worried that since orbs are RNG dependent to generate in the future we will get a character who can generate an orb with a skill guaranteed and that will power creep so many units who still have a small chance to generate an orb cuz when you have a system tied to RNG so you can interact with it any character who ignores that RNG will immediately be the best especially when the system grants so many benefits like resistance and physical shred yeah let me put in AR's terms Leonard has a skill that inflicts resistance shred on him now imagine that has a 20% chance to happen yet afala has that [ __ ] guaranteed to happen on her skill who do you think is outright better and even beyond that relying on RNG to play with what seemingly an integral system mechanic is whack as hell you want players to be interacting with that [ __ ] at all times not a fifth of the times which is why I'd like to see the overall effect of orbs be brought down but make them guaranteed to spawn so instead of making it a 50% shred instead make it a 10% shred that you can stacked with consecutive applications of Electrify I'm not saying that's concretely what I'd like or that it's the best choice with what to do for the system I'm basically just spitballing but I can say for certain that making orbs RNG based means players will either not care to bother with the depth of the elemental system system as many don't wish to rely on RNG or in the future a character will be able to easily guarantee spawning orbs which will be overpowered as hell a muste in any team comp which is hell for a four-player Max party and the players who don't have that character will think the game is incredibly restrictive and simple in what they can do as they are not able to play with a combat mechanic consistently or reliably so that's why I think orbs should be guaranteed on any skill but also tuned down as if that was the case with them retaining their current strength then the game would be easy as hell but making it not RNG based would incentivize players to interact with his depth in my opinion that's all my thoughts on that topic so let's move to the greatest flaw on the tech test the lack of femo I mean the story now this is going to be brief as hell because the technical test ended what seemed like Midway through the story so I can't judge it as a whole because I meant to experience it as a whole but I can say that so far the early chapters remind me a lot of Ark knights's early chapters now if you've ever played Ark Knights you know that [ __ ] is not a compliment though it's true it seems one to one these starting chapters of Ark Knights drown you in Exposition so much to where you don't really understand what is being said granted it's all set up so chapter 6 and Beyond can be some of the greatest sh you've ever read but that doesn't make the early chapters any better and nfield it feels like the characters are waterboarding the administrator with information due to their Amnesia but because they say so much it made me not able to really take in that much information like at the beginning your boy was fine but with every new Cuts scene saying even more information about the world I started to drift away from the story like they talk about a ton of the factions and Talos 2o but since they don't do a good job of showing them off it really comes in one ear and out the other that's to say I believe the story is ass as again I feel like I've only seen half of it but that half spent a lot of time throwing knowledge at me but didn't spend time letting it stick though there is an inel menu that gives you summaries of the world so if you've ever felt lost you can open up that and give it a look and I love [ __ ] like that existing in story heavy games especially live service ones where you may not remember what happened last chapter as there was a couple months in between them so that system is a w but it still doesn't help how the story we got now hasn't done the best job of sticking as the current story just feels like go to x then y then Z as you're told about the world now I imagine having more story will make the exposition stick and give us payoff for what was being said but if the story Remains the Same un release then I can imagine the beginning chapters being a SLO to go through for most people however the voice acting helps a ton in making the story easier to digest not every line is voice acted but the majority of the main story is and it's also in two languages English and Chinese in the future they'll probably add Japanese voices and the voice acting we got Now is really nice there wasn't any performances that felt off to me they got a really solid cast but I also can't say that any performances blew me out of the water as I haven't seen any deeply emotional moments where the voice actors can really shine so all in all they're great and I want to see more of the work for Enfield or I suppose here more but that's generally my thoughts on the plot and in the future I hope we can get more knowledge on the connection to Ark Knights all we know right now is that people use a teleporter in the northern Tundra to reach this new planet TS 2 then they spent years establishing civilization on this new planet oripathy still exists but is easily treatable and somehow clones our thing which is why we have Angelina that's basically the summary of the connection and I'm wondering what they'll do do with both worlds being connected how they'll play with that concept I don't really got many answers now but I am interested to see where the story will head it's an entirely New World a fresh start with a world that is just beginning to develop the potential for what to do was Limitless and I really want to see where the story is head I mean when I saw the preview of the game more than a year ago I didn't even know what to expect but I didn't [ __ ] expect this [ __ ] would be a thing let's talk about the base mechanic now I'm not 1,000% sure of this but I'm pretty confident in saying hyper Griff must have seen all the jokes about the Bas and Arc Knight still being in beta for more than 3 years and that caused them to have malice behind making this system whenever I need to recreate an ant colony for the sake of my trading station I can hear the faint voice of hyper Griff in the back it's almost like via laying down more conveyor belts than there are stars in the sky I can hear the developer speaking to me yeah you punk ass [ __ ] all the [ __ ] whining about oh the Bas is still in beta after 3 years n [ __ ] you the one still in beta after 20 years years of your damn life with every new grinding unit placed the [ __ ] you complaining about the Bas is still in beta [ __ ] we know your brainless beta self wasn't enough to be doing that [ __ ] on your own every planting unit dropped you were going to cry to kill for him to make a guy to save your ass after saying for 3 years you wanted this [ __ ] to be more complicated every bus load giver and load taker I feel it you should be thinking your damn lucky stars that [ __ ] is still in beta you wouldn't be able to handle the next level their hopes in this system their dreams their aspirations what they want this game to be home and my God is it beautiful I'm rather surprised to say this but I really love the base building I haven't played any games like Factoria prior so this basically took my first time playing this style of game and I find it fun as how to automate production lines quite honestly I was viewing the main story as a way to unlock new areas so I could then place down my miny rigs on them I might not be American but I was fully embodying the American dream with my capitalism now if you'd love to do this I don't know I found this [ __ ] amazing and this system sold some of my friends on the game like dead ass they looked at the com combat and went that's all then looked at this and demanded a release date in case you're worried of it being too complicated it honestly isn't I found that tutorial eased me into it and I was never terribly confused about anything though even then if you're still worried I'm a million per sure someone is going to upload a guide to the most optimal base build so you can just follow that worse comes to worse I mean [ __ ] it's the ark Knights Community [ __ ] make guides over nothing the easiest [ __ ] like Paradox simulations who needs a guide for those ignore the fact that I've watched a 90% of them even aside from guys the surr brought up the option of being able to apply user uploaded blueprints I don't know if they'll do that but [ __ ] I would love to see it another thing I would love to see is making structures easier to place it feels a little clunky on PC and the idea of how it'll be on mobile is uh [ __ ] terrifying so hopefully the base building can be improved in that aspect one thing that won't have any problems on other platforms though is the UI it's perfect [ __ ] looks nice and is really easy to navigate they fully cooked with a UI but going back to the base system I wouldn't say it's overly complic I'd say it's enjoyable to go through and I want to see more of it but there does exist people who will look at this Abomination me and three lines of cocaine has made and say yep [ __ ] that I ain't doing that so the ability to copy a user upload a blueprint would be really nice now when it comes to actually explaining what the [ __ ] is happening in my base homie I'mma keep it 100 with you I don't remember what was happening when I made this that three lines of cocaine joke wasn't entirely fiction cuz I don't remember [ __ ] of making this the base system isn't complicated but boy did I make my base over L complicated the one thing I didn't mess around with too much is the building outside of your Hub base yeah put simply you connect relay Towers further outwards then connect those to pylons which power whatever structure you've built out there in my case it was really only mining rigs yeah what can I say I'm going for the high score in ecological Footprints but I did mess around a little bit and made zip lines to quickly get to far away areas and it was really nice seeing how areas could be optimized for traversal with the ugly Abominations I created though I didn't mess around with it too much as I was not that attached to traveling the environment in case you're wondering what the exploration in this game is like I'd say it reminds me of honkai Saw rail but with bigger zones it's not really an open world game you go to an area explore through it Slaughter the wildlife then go to the next zone now in terms of design the areas are nice they don't feel as vast as an open world but they don't feel linear either they hit that sweet spot for me of it's not too much at once and it's not [ __ ] Final Fantasy 10's Railway map design which makes every area nice to explore around in except for one big thing let me pull you through a story one time on stream your boy decided to go past the fence I notice that the jump pad wasn't working but to its left there was a bunch of buildings I could parkour on naturally your boy took the 43 penguin looking ass administrator and had her scale the buildings like Batman and when I had finally cleared it made my way over the trials tribulations and tubulations I had one last jump to make to reach my goal of passing the fence one last Hur ra before Victor I hit a [ __ ] invisible wall I thought I was a genius a modern day Einstein cuz that [ __ ] was born back in the 1800s yet my expiration ate [ __ ] because of an invisible wall and let me tell you there is a lot more than just that invisible wall take this place for example the blight was blocking off my path and to get rid of it I needed to destroy that ball over there so I took the American approach and decided to bomb it I threw my homemade pipe bomb and in midair God slapped it down yeah there's an invisible wall right there out in the open the zones we go to are fun but it's stuff like that which makes me not want to really explore them all that much it also does it help that there's not many puzzles to be found in the overw world a lot of exploration results in you just going around to find the ethereum chests or new mining spots but to get to those locations all you really do is just run around not necessarily with freedom either as the invisible walls make it feel like we're meant to follow the path the developers intended instead of making our own whack ass path now there is some stuff in the locations like puzzle spots that I really like and I wish there was more as I personally find those enjoyable to go through there are Zelda s dungeons you can go into and I like sing the puzzles in those but I wish I could see more puzzles present in the Overworld and aside from the puzzles I don't feel as though the areas look that unique they all kind of just desaturated to me and I don't feel that much of a visual difference between the areas with the FL release we'll probably notice more of a visual difference in the areas as in the first trailer the were dead ice in the Sahara but the technical test didn't bring us there so on release the areas will probably look more unique aside from that they're enjoyable to go through in scale and level design but I would like to see more puzzles or things to do in those areas aside from just marking off a checklist of Collectibles and placing down or EGS and stuff like invisible walls needs to be toned down so the player doesn't feel as restricted in their expiration though what we got now is a great Baseline to add more onto it as again the zones are really fun to go through but more can be done to really elevate it one thing that is rather perfect though was leveling I don't know if it was made to be quicker as a tech test is only 10 days long but I never found the game to be that grindy leveling up characters was really easy you just go to the rift that gives the EXP basically Rifts are just domains and after one or two runs you'd have enough to reach the next promotion the only the problem was getting plants basically just materials for operators to eat there weren't that many sources of plants but with more areas that problem will be fixed and even without that there's a planting section in one of the zones where you can just go in and plant your own heroin and I mean resources have them grow and get a steady supply of them there are also weapons You Can level up and those aren't really grinding to max out either though you will probably need toag Goa for the five star weapons I say probably because in the tech test we didn't have gacha to do we just bought the units with in-game rollal currency so I can't tell you what the rates are as I wasn't able to roll much to my dismay and there is a potential system but I can't tell if it's like Arc knights in which it doesn't help that much and can honestly just be ignored or if it'll be a huge power boost to a character though I can't say that I was able to get fourstar weapons by just playing the game and they weren't much weaker either like these two lances don't have that much of a difference between their effects and when it comes to gear the effect bonuses we've seen so far have been basic but the way to get the gear is pretty interesting all you really got to do is just make it that's it and it has a chance to be made into a higher Rarity there is some very variation in the stats of the gear you made but it's not grindy at all to fully level and gear up a character the only thing that's really grindy is weapon Essences so these Essences drop from enemies at a low chance you can then use three of a lower Rarity to build a higher Rarity Essence and that higher Rarity has random stats and by using three of the same Rarity you can make that same Rarity Essence again just with different stats and getting Essences is a pretty low chance and there are multiple different ones they can have skills which boost certain effects operators can do this system seems to be where most of the grind will be focused the end game so I really want to see a rift made just for the purpose of farming Essences or for their chance to be increased because the only way to get them right now is to just go around killing stuff other Rifts like the ones that give exp can also drop Essences from kills in those but I'd be down to see a rift have a higher chance to drop them whilst cosing sanding instead of running around committing genocide for the sake of a 1.2% attack boost overall though it is really easy to level up characters whilst it seems like most of the grind will be put into the essence system and I think that's a good balance so new players can level up their favorites while still having a goal to go for and honestly there are are fair bit of favorites to level up cuz dead ass these designs are really damn nice ember in particular but that's cuz your boy has a gigantic bias of red though in addition to having good designs the character models look really good and the environment looks great graphically while still having the game Run really well cuz straight up for whatever reason when I booted up the game it started with 4K quality now here's the thing your boy has a 1080p monitor straight up I don't know if it was even running in 4k or it saw how dog [ __ ] my M was and decided to just down scale it but I can't say that even with that being the case the game never notably dropped frames except for like one time which is also why I hope the game can go above the 60 frame Capital releases and also has a higher graphical quality option as I said it looks great but since it also runs great I want to pump up these settings and see how high this [ __ ] can go though it's really impressive to see how well this game runs in just its technical test I didn't really know what to expect from it if it ran with a lot of hiccups then I'd understand but overall from the technical test it feels like the game has a sense of what it wants to be and is already really close to achieving that while it's running really well I know in this review I talked about a fair bit of flaws but overall I kind of already love the game I mean there was a lot I'd like to see improved like making orbs not RNG based making combat more interactive improving the story and making ex a character an nfield but what I've played so far has been really fun and I just want more of it I can see the potential this game has and it displays what it can be at full force of times like look at the final boss in the tech test this is how I view the potential of the combat system imagine getting to fight a boss of this quality or even better at the end of every event this [ __ ] is cool as hell imagine fighting your favorite villain from Ark knights in this style of game that [ __ ] would be raw as [ __ ] having Patriot those Spears that you at the speed of sound measuring up against a gigantic steam Knight fighting a god of the Seaborn or a gigantic pink sheep that is why I believe this game will be amazing we've seen how well Ark knit has gotten as game how far it's come not to say it launch was Rocky but instead to say it started good and continued to get better gamep playay character story it's only improved and as as a result of that it's become a game many love myself included and I have so much faith that Enfield will take the same route it does have problems the story isn't that interesting right now connection back to Ark Knight excluded the gameplay needs some function like Dodges and blocks whil the orph system shouldn't be highly tied to RNG and instead a consistent thing you can play with exploration is too restrictive with the invisible walls and the areas don't feel too different from one another whilst the base building honestly doesn't have that many flies I kind of just love it but that is why they did a technical test to see the feedback from the community and improve the game before it releases based on hyper Griff's work with Ark Knights I'm confident and thinking that the game will fix these flaws before it's released what we have now is a great foundation for an amazing game to take rout I came into the tech test hype for the game but I had no clue what to expect and in my time of playing it I really enjoyed it I don't know when they release the game but I can say that when it does release I'll be there to play it because my main thought after playing the game for a week is I can't wait for the four la you know you know

Channel: Tsunul

Views: 21,873

Keywords: Tsunul

Id: 1QoJXvTiM2Q

Length: 26min 0sec (1560 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 20 2024