Arknights Endfield vs. Mainline Arknights: What’s Different?
Arknights: Endfield shares the same universe as mainline Arknights but plays and feels like a completely different game. It shifts from 2D tower-defense grids to a 3D party-based action RPG with deep base-building and exploration on a new frontier world.
Story, Setting, and Connection
Endfield and Arknights exist in the same broader universe but on different worlds and timelines. Endfield is set on Talos-II, a frontier planet being explored and developed by Endfield Industries, whereas Arknights takes place on Terra and follows Rhodes Island’s struggle with Originium and Infected politics.
Lore explanations introduce Reconveners, reconstructed individuals based on data from original Arknights operators, explaining why some characters look familiar but act differently in Endfield. This makes Endfield more a parallel, related project than a direct sequel.
Core Gameplay and Combat
Mainline Arknights is a tower-defense tactical RPG: you deploy operators on grid tiles, manage deployment points, and block enemies in lanes with timing-based skills. Endfield, by contrast, is a real-time 3D party RPG where you move a four-operator squad in third person, time dodges, build stagger, and trigger elemental/physical reactions.
Combat in Endfield emphasizes:
- Live positioning, Perfect Dodge windows, and stagger/vulnerable systems.
- Synergy between physical debuffs and Arts reactions rather than lane blocking.
Mainline Arknights emphasizes: - Puzzle-like map solving, deployment order, and tile-based range/blocks.
Structure, Exploration, and World Design
Arknights presents stages as discrete tower-defense maps with limited navigation; overworld “exploration” is mostly menus and event stages. Endfield uses hub-based 3D regions on Talos-II, with open combat arenas, side events, chests, environmental hazards, and regional systems like Wuling’s ecology and technology.
Developers explicitly avoid calling Endfield a fully open-world game, instead framing it as large, interconnected zones with mission flow and exploration gameplay, closer to structured region hubs than a seamless continent.
Base Systems and Long-Term Progression
Mainline Arknights has the Rhodes Island base, a side system for passive income (factories, dorms, trading posts, power plant) managed via rooms and operator assignments. Endfield escalates this into the AIC (Automated Industry Complex): a conveyor-based factory where you place facilities, route resources, automate production lines, use blueprints, and even deploy region-linked structures that affect on-field exploration.
Many previews describe Endfield’s AIC as a Factorio-style factory sim embedded inside the gacha RPG, far more complex and central to gameplay than Arknights’ base.
Monetization and Gacha Focus
Both games are gacha-driven, but their emphases differ. Arknights focuses on operator banners with no weapon gacha, and progression is heavily about unit acquisition and raising skills/talents. Endfield, according to Beta Test II info, splits monetization between character banners and a separate weapon/gear system, with low pity caps, rate-up guarantees, and a strong tie-in between gear, essence, and combat builds.
This pushes Endfield closer to modern action-gacha hybrids (character + gear ecosystems), while Arknights remains a more traditional tactic-focused, unit-only gacha experience.
Endfield vs. Mainline Arknights
These differences make Endfield less a replacement and more a sister title: Arknights stays a high-skill puzzle-tower-defense, while Endfield targets players who want an action-leaning, exploration-heavy gacha with deep factory and progression systems.
