New action RPG Arknights: Endfield turned heads not just because it's a major release from Hypergryph, home of tower defense powerhouse Arknights, but also because none of these other post-Genshin Impact gacha action RPGs have tried turning themselves into Factorio yet. This mix of genres immediately stood out, and I'll be damned, it actually works. Lead developer Ryan of Hypergryph tells me the factory and automation side of the game was something the developers just wanted to try, but it does have the added bonus of feeling different in a space crowded with similar RPGs.
At GDC, I spoke to Ryan about the risks of launching any live service game in 2026 – an intimidating task even to the Marvel Rivals devs – and how the gacha landscape, in particular, has evolved and started to settle. In the years since Genshin Impact's massive launch, more and more open-world-y gacha action RPGs have cropped up, and that doesn't seem to be stopping. Just look at the likes of Neverness to Everness and Silver Palace.
"There are so many similar titles nowadays," Ryan agrees, "and we still think that players are expecting something new. For some open-world RPG gacha games, for some titles, they are so similar that players go into the game for one hour and they know what will happen in the next 20 hours. It's like, build teams, fight the dungeons, and get rewards.
"Our hope is to make something different for the characters," he continues. "We actually decreased the cost of building teams so players can try out more combinations, and we are giving out more free pulls in the [current] version and the next version for players to get more characters to try out different combinations."
This is still comfortably in the realm of collecting, building, and piloting teams of characters, which is standard for gacha games. Endfield finds a bit of an edge in its commitment to factory building mechanics, challenging players to construct and optimize resource pipelines and lightly terraform the world around them. You don't have to invest a ton of hours into it to get a workable resource farm going, but for the sim-minded, there's a good bit to tinker with.
"[In] a lot of open-world games, the world is more aesthetic," Ryan says. "Players cannot influence the world. So the factory building part introduced some of the experience from the sandbox games, which makes players feel different. And we find that, on average, players spend more hours [in our game] than other similar games because of the sandbox. The building part is something new to them."
Overall, Ryan says Endfield players are putting in "a lot more time in the game than we expected," with the folks who stick with the game spending "tens of hours in the system" for factory building.
"Our strategy is that we are not going to make it harder and harder," he explains. "We don't want players to go deeper into the calculations and math, we just want to bring some more new, more different but not harder, game mechanics into the building system in future versions." Threading the needle on potential depth and necessary knowledge, essentially, I gather.
Just as Arknights has introduced new game modes over the years, including its own spin on auto chess, Ryan says the Endfield team is preparing "different gameplay to introduce in the future versions". I was initially interested in Endfield precisely because it is doing something I haven't seen in any other post-Genshin games – because Genshin-like feels a little too limiting, but a lot of These Types of RPGs do share some DNA – so I'd love to see it get even wilder with gameplay styles and genres.
