The technical test for Arknights: Endfield, an upcoming spinoff of massively popular tower defense gacha game Arknights, caught me off guard. It's an open-world RPG with tactical action combat that felt snappy on PC (it's also coming to PS5 and mobile), but this is not the part that tripped me up. It's also an unexpectedly engrossing base builder in the same vein as industrial hits like Factorio and Satisfactory, and even given the broad strokes strategy footprint of Arknights itself, this came as a complete surprise. Arknights: Endfield will be free-to-play when it eventually launches, and it genuinely feels like two games in one so far.
Publisher Gryphline has been pretty quiet about Endfield since that technical test, though it did separately find the time to release the equally surprising sci-fantasy RPG Ex Astris, a rare and darn fun $10 premium mobile game. As we await the next test period and still-unannounced release date, I reached out to the studio to ask about what makes Endfield tick, how it's building on the foundations of Arknights proper, and whether we should call this thing an RPG, a base builder, or something else entirely. (For the record, I also asked about monetization and how it compares to Arknights, but Gryphline didn't provide an answer as the game is still in flux.)
