Arknights Endfield

Pyros

Pyros

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Tuco said:
Me coming home after setting up my factory to produce an excess of Valley Batteries so I could sell them...

View attachment 617216

Only to see I need SC Valley Batteries, not LC Valley Batteries...
Click to expand...
The 2nd outpost can use LC batteries so it's not wasted. You'll need to redo all your factories once you find sandleaves anyway(I think it's in power station the first time?) so it's not big deal and you can keep the outposts low on stock bills just trading random garbage like origicrust or amethyst thingies until you get there. The amount of stuff you produce and stockbills you get increases like tenfold as you progress through the story so efficiency early isn't super important.
 
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Tuco

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Unlocked Laevatain and the fire sword, but I don't think I can give up Pogranichnik's double dash. Its strategic significance probably exceeds its operational value.

 
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Zindan

Zindan

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Tuco said:
Me coming home after setting up my factory to produce an excess of Valley Batteries so I could sell them...

View attachment 617216

Only to see I need SC Valley Batteries, not LC Valley Batteries...

View attachment 617215

giphy.gif
Click to expand...
You can just keep making those, til you have several thousand. You can then use them in Wuling to free up Xiarite production for other stuff, preferably when you have reached RDM lvl12 for Valley. That opens up Metatransfer, so you can send over 1200/hr without depleting the Valley stock.
 
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Mao

Mao

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Tuco said:
I unlocked the Russian nazi.

View attachment 617166

He's swinging real Hugo Boss energy.

View attachment 617167



So what's the story here, do humans fuck animals and is Andre his dad with some human or other animorph his mom or what?

View attachment 617168

Or is he part hawk and whatever that bonus ear is is just a wing from some kind of bird?

View attachment 617169

Can I get rid of it and give him a nice high and tight haircut?
Click to expand...
Asking 'Whats the story' in Arknights is likely to get you a complete doctoral thesis cause original AK's story is full of mystery boxes, world politics, hidden behind the scenes bullshit and all kinds of crap. Its not bad, though personally I'm really kinda peeved cause they pivoted awhile back, prolly around the time they decided to make Endfield a direct sequel to Arknights instead of just a spiritual successor. They really simplified the story to smash it out to line up with Endfield.. anyway. Personal bitches aside...

The story behind Arknights is roughly that Terra, the place where all the people in Endfield come from, was terraformed by the MC's of Arknights' civilization. It didn't go quite to plan and all the 'people' we see now are basically uplifts of animals. You'll notice the only people who don't have animal traits are AK's Doctor and Priestess, and Enfield's Endministrator. AK's Doc and Priestess are members of this original civilization, and there is currently speculation on how the Endministrator ties in. Whether its one of those two, a clone, or a child.

Originium is basically the shit they used to terraform the planet. It had complications :D

The original civilization was facing extinction at the hands of an all powerful (and mostly unexplained) group called the Observers and they fled to Terra to terraform it into a redoubt to hide/resist when the Observers caught up to them. The story has sorta shifted from Originium being the terraforming material to a 'data storage' material that can store anything it touches/consumes and recreate it in addition to terraforming, with supposedly the plan to resist the Observers being they all upload themselves into the Originium matrix and then come back out when they're gone. Its where the whole 'Reconvener' thing they talk about comes from. Those are people that are reconvened out of Originium storage. Think of 'resleeving' from most of your popular transhumanist sci fi shows.

Now, don't think about it too hard cause when they did the 'squish' to push the AK story into Endfield compliance it created a fucktonne of plot holes and shit that just doesn't make a lot of sense when you start trying to rationalize it out. So... don't. While the main story got kinda butchered, AK's side stories and character stories are very good albeit needlessly wordy at times. So I have hopes that they can do good things with Endfield.

Thats a really short and dirty version, and I could rant on it for hours (I have). If you all have any interest in the original story bits and how they tie to Endfield feel free to ask away. I'll do my best to answer succinctly.

TLDR. People on Talos are terraformed uplifts of animals, aside from Endmin.
 
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Mao

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CaughtCross said:
I was under the impression some of the people in Arknights are demon/angel hybrid races and not animals. How does that work in the lore?
Click to expand...
Oh God. I semi sorta forgot how messy Arknights is.

So... it just so happens Terra was inhabited before they started terraforming it with Originium by a race called the Teekaz. These are the predecessors of the Sarkaz, the 'demon' looking race with horns and a tail. They kinda couldn't keep their shit together and warred amongst themselves all the time so got their shit mostly pushed in as all the other races came to power and are kinda the 'lower class' of Arknights races, having no homeland cause it was mostly destroyed in war. (If you are looking at it as natives being pushed out by colonizing people, you're prolly not far off. AK borrows (fucking steals) almost 1 to 1 from real life as they explored various questions and stories of our own world semi sorta in game.

The Sankta, the angels you see (who love guns) are in the neo vatican known as Laterano and follow 'The Law' which is sorta a religion/code/god all rolled into one. They even have their own Pope who looks suspiciously like Gaben from Steam. No shit. When the Sankta come of age they are gifted their Patron Firearm and are bound by The Law to never use it against another Sankta or they become fallen. A fallen Sankta starts to develop traits resembling a Sarkaz, cause its later revealed that Sankta are Sarkaz an AI meddled with during the terraforming and being rejected by The Law causes them to start immediately reverting back. Anyway... the Sankta have the halos and wings. Oh, and via their connection to The Law via the halos they all have shared empathy and literally feel the emotions of other Sankta. The Law combined with this emotional bond makes for a very chaotic but 'nice' society. With explosions for fun. In one of the recent story events 'The Law' was revealed to be a super AI trying to make the perfect society (which of course people rejected) so it'll be real interesting to see how they deal with them now in Endfield since the AI that runs their society and gene codes them isn't around...

As I said, don't think too hard or it all starts to fall apart. But.. they do a good job of exploring interesting ideas and questions via the story. Or did.

There are also actual fucking demons, ala 40k demons. They are called demons, but their proper name is 'Collapsals' and so far in AK these are mentioned and talked about but not really brought into play. Just a looming future threat that appears to cast a shadow and hint at a future problem before stepping out of the story. Oddly enough, those are supposed to linger around interplanetary gates that are located at the north and south poles of Terra and are trying to enter our reality via those gates. Same gate we apparently used to come to Talos II btw.... Hmm.

Arknights really does a 1 for 1 on a lot of the in game races with RL cultures as you may have noticed by the accents in Endfield. Generally they each related 1:1 to a Earth equivalent, though not 100%. Ursus are Russian bears, but there are Ursus that grew up outside AK Russia for instance. Same goes for all.

Anyway the races break down basically like this
Ursus = Russian Bears with semi related Russian revolution
Lupo = Italian wolves. With mafioso and mob stories.
Sankta = Vatican Angels with Techno and guns
Lung (Chinese Dragons) are Chinese (Chen is a Lung)
Aslan and Draco are lions and dragons, and they rule over Victoria and Tara, which are Britain and Ireland complete with their own IRA terrorists and war for independence.
Voivre are wyverns and have desert origins but a diaspora has them everywhere (Yvonne is a Voivre)
Columbia is a good old USA melting pot, with CIA and tech and business and shit.

and it just keeps going. Goats, Horses, Birds, Cows, etc and analogs to Germany, Poland, France/Spain, Greece, etc, respectively.
Oh. And Cthulhu sea creatures. The game follows Chinese traditions and steals liberally from everyone else as much as possible with analogs of various legends and folk tales. There are immortal creatures of various types and powers resembling various legendary beings and gods of various cultures. Its a mess to be honest and I think with Endfield they might just toss a lot of it to make it more narratively tight since it all seems to focus around the Endmin and you as the player while in Arknights a lot of the (best) stories didn't involve the main character or plot at all but instead a specific area and the problems facing it and the often differing moral and philosophical ideas on how to handle it.

Anyway. Have a picture of Pope Gaben since I rambled so much.
1770006804304.png
 
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Tuco

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Mao said:
Oh God. I semi sorta forgot how messy Arknights is.

So... it just so happens Terra was inhabited before they started terraforming it with Originium by a race called the Teekaz. These are the predecessors of the Sarkaz, the 'demon' looking race with horns and a tail. They kinda couldn't keep their shit together and warred amongst themselves all the time so got their shit mostly pushed in as all the other races came to power and are kinda the 'lower class' of Arknights races, having no homeland cause it was mostly destroyed in war. (If you are looking at it as natives being pushed out by colonizing people, you're prolly not far off. AK borrows (fucking steals) almost 1 to 1 from real life as they explored various questions and stories of our own world semi sorta in game.

The Sankta, the angels you see (who love guns) are in the neo vatican known as Laterano and follow 'The Law' which is sorta a religion/code/god all rolled into one. They even have their own Pope who looks suspiciously like Gaben from Steam. No shit. When the Sankta come of age they are gifted their Patron Firearm and are bound by The Law to never use it against another Sankta or they become fallen. A fallen Sankta starts to develop traits resembling a Sarkaz, cause its later revealed that Sankta are Sarkaz an AI meddled with during the terraforming and being rejected by The Law causes them to start immediately reverting back. Anyway... the Sankta have the halos and wings. Oh, and via their connection to The Law via the halos they all have shared empathy and literally feel the emotions of other Sankta. The Law combined with this emotional bond makes for a very chaotic but 'nice' society. With explosions for fun. In one of the recent story events 'The Law' was revealed to be a super AI trying to make the perfect society (which of course people rejected) so it'll be real interesting to see how they deal with them now in Endfield since the AI that runs their society and gene codes them isn't around...

As I said, don't think too hard or it all starts to fall apart. But.. they do a good job of exploring interesting ideas and questions via the story. Or did.

There are also actual fucking demons, ala 40k demons. They are called demons, but their proper name is 'Collapsals' and so far in AK these are mentioned and talked about but not really brought into play. Just a looming future threat that appears to cast a shadow and hint at a future problem before stepping out of the story. Oddly enough, those are supposed to linger around interplanetary gates that are located at the north and south poles of Terra and are trying to enter our reality via those gates. Same gate we apparently used to come to Talos II btw.... Hmm.

Arknights really does a 1 for 1 on a lot of the in game races with RL cultures as you may have noticed by the accents in Endfield. Generally they each related 1:1 to a Earth equivalent, though not 100%. Ursus are Russian bears, but there are Ursus that grew up outside AK Russia for instance. Same goes for all.

Anyway the races break down basically like this
Ursus = Russian Bears with semi related Russian revolution
Lupo = Italian wolves. With mafioso and mob stories.
Sankta = Vatican Angels with Techno and guns
Lung (Chinese Dragons) are Chinese (Chen is a Lung)
Aslan and Draco are lions and dragons, and they rule over Victoria and Tara, which are Britain and Ireland complete with their own IRA terrorists and war for independence.
Voivre are wyverns and have desert origins but a diaspora has them everywhere (Yvonne is a Voivre)
Columbia is a good old USA melting pot, with CIA and tech and business and shit.

and it just keeps going. Goats, Horses, Birds, Cows, etc and analogs to Germany, Poland, France/Spain, Greece, etc, respectively.
Oh. And Cthulhu sea creatures. The game follows Chinese traditions and steals liberally from everyone else as much as possible with analogs of various legends and folk tales. There are immortal creatures of various types and powers resembling various legendary beings and gods of various cultures. Its a mess to be honest and I think with Endfield they might just toss a lot of it to make it more narratively tight since it all seems to focus around the Endmin and you as the player while in Arknights a lot of the (best) stories didn't involve the main character or plot at all but instead a specific area and the problems facing it and the often differing moral and philosophical ideas on how to handle it.

Anyway. Have a picture of Pope Gaben since I rambled so much.
View attachment 617337
Click to expand...
Thanks for the lore dumps, very interesting!
 
Tuco

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Wow, running the 3 shared depot missions is really profitable for the midgame. Can get almost a million Stock Bills by running three quick delivery missions. I'm sure that'll pale in comparison to what can be generated from outposts once they start rolling...
 
Zindan

Zindan

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The issue with the Story/Lore, is that it is a COMPLETE mess. The Story of Endfield, as I understand it from the cutscenes, is that the people we see on Talos-II are not native to that planet. Everyone arrived at Talos-II via a Gate from somewhere else (assuming Terra) and that Gate exploded on the Terra side. They arrived on space ships and started to colonize this new planet using Originium, but there was resistance from some form of life and other dimensional beings (Aggeloi, Neferith, FF14 clone guy). This colonization process has been going on for hundreds of years, with at least 1 huge war.

After watching a couple videos of people trying to tie Arknights together with Endfield, all I can say is that those people are huffing deeply on copium, as there is zero reason to think Endfield is a sequel, its much more like a side story. The main Arknight story is still going on in that game with the Doctor (MC), Priestess (MV) and Terra.
 
Zindan

Zindan

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Anyone notice how the sky box changes while you're in Valley 4 or Wuling? While in Valley 4 you see the north hemisphere of the planet Talos, while you're in Wuling you see the southern hemisphere of Talos along with its rings.
 
Zindan

Zindan

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Tuco said:
really nice production chain calculator: Endfield Calc - Production Chain Calculator
Click to expand...
Hm, that is really nice. Now if only they would add in a layout builder so you could design the production chain.

Edit: I have been trying to design a compact production line using 2 Crucibles, and 1 Shredder to make Jincao Drink. The input/outputs on the Crucibles really limit placement, but I did learn that you can feed 2 lines of Jincao powder into the first Crucible, and send 1 line of powder OUT of that Crucible into the second. That has helped a lot.
 
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Pyros

Pyros

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Tuco said:
Wow, running the 3 shared depot missions is really profitable for the midgame. Can get almost a million Stock Bills by running three quick delivery missions. I'm sure that'll pale in comparison to what can be generated from outposts once they start rolling...
Click to expand...
Yeah you end up getting like 5-6m a day I think, but even then the 1m you can get from other's depots is nice cause the expensive stuff is well, expensive. Although this is something that I'll stop doing once I get tired of it since it's not that valuable either, just need to buy out the expensive permanent stuff in the shop and then once it's just the weekly reset I won't need more than what I get for trading/stocks/my own depot.
 
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Tuco

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Pyros said:
Yeah you end up getting like 5-6m a day I think, but even then the 1m you can get from other's depots is nice cause the expensive stuff is well, expensive. Although this is something that I'll stop doing once I get tired of it since it's not that valuable either, just need to buy out the expensive permanent stuff in the shop and then once it's just the weekly reset I won't need more than what I get for trading/stocks/my own depot.
Click to expand...
Yeah. It'd be nice if there was a plan to integrate the factory mechanics into the long-term reward loop. Maybe put out a new recipe for each Weapon Banner and Headhunting Banner that provides a modest pull currency that would motivate players to rework their factories, but put some reasonable cap on production to put a ceiling on how efficient your factory needs to be.
 
Mao

Mao

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I've given it some thought as I've reviewed Arknights' lore in my head and gone back to reread some of it and to be honest, you're better off enjoying Endfield if you are only passingly familiar with it in broad strokes and don't dive into it too much.

Arknights lore itself is pretty contradictory and seems to have shifted over the years as they realigned the game's theme and mood and then eventually a harder pivot when they started bringing it to feed into Endfield. It relies extremely heavily on mystery boxes and unreliable narrators with the MC being another amnesiac with a big history of being a badass that people talk about and are angry with him (you) over but then they kinda toss it to pivot towards a more heroic tale and drop the ambiguous morality for a more, straight up hopeful tale of you being the hero.

It starts with you waking up as an amnesiac who was the former head strategist/tactician of a group called Babel that was one of the factions in the most recent Sarkaz civil war, and you were supposed to be a murderous motherfucker. Not personally powerful, but the 'Ghost of Babel' whose strategies stacked bodies like cordwood. At one point, you end up coordinating the assassination of Thereas the leader of Babel and as a last 'fuck you' she mind wipes you as she is dying. Your mind wiped form is stuffed into cryosleep. The Perlica analogue of AK (Kal'tsit) is big mad with you but has sworn not to kill you in your sleep and they need you to help lead Rhodes Island, the remains of Babel that has since become a paramilitary pharmaceutical company that is trying to cure Oripathy, an all consuming cancer caused by Originium. You learn eventually that you actually are one of the predecessors, the ancients that created Originium to terraform Terra and Theresa learned about you from Kal'tsit, your junior you created to watch over the terraforming, when they are working together to try and unite the Sarkaz and make the world a better place. Theresa asks Kal'tsit to wake you up to help out.

You get woken up and agree to help out as you assess things, but supposedly come to the conclusion that the Observers are going to come and erase everything and you need to put the original plan back on track or everyone dies, but unfortunately Theresa has the device that controls Originium so she has to die. As she lays dying, she wipes your mind cause she believes that if you could see everything again, unburdened by the knowledge and weight of the past you could make a different choice and find a way. (Cue China joke. 5000 years of culture, 50 years of history)

So.. this in itself isn't a bad concept but it quickly starts to develop holes when you learn more and think about it. Kal'tsit was literally created by you and Priestess (your partner who created the Originium Project to terraform the world into a defense against the Observers) and Kal is supposed to oversee the project while you all are in stasis. So, why has she never woken you up in the past when it all went completely off the rails? Why is it not until this one girl asks that she wakes you? In one of the stories you come across a cryosleep facility where much of your fellow predecessor race is in cryo, but the power has been failing and all the people there are beyond recovery? Kal'tist comments she knew about the place but 'Wasn't ready to reveal it to you yet'. Umm. Why? Why not wake us when the cryo started to fail? Then the game tries to change the story to Originium wasn't actually meant to terraform the world and turn it into a defense. It was supposed to store all the knowledge of your race for later species to come, so they can benefit from it like guidestones. This was always the plan and your species agreed to die out but Priestess hijacked it and turned it into the shit we see now. Cool, but then why are all our people in Cryo waiting to get woken up? Then you killing Theresa turns out wasn't actually your fault. Priestess had brain washed you to support her plan so when you went to make the choice you were forced to by your brainwashing and your not really a murderous motherfucker Ghost of Babel and thats why Theresa wiped your memory. To set you free of Priestess. So now Priestess is the big bad evil villain and you are fighting her to save the world. However, last checked the Observers who destroy everything are very real and no one but Priestess has any sort of plan on how to deal with them. So... yeah.

Arknights main story is a mess and you can see how it warped and changed over time. I'm obviously more critical of it than a lot of people and if you go looking into it people have different takes that cause much fighting and arguing in Wikis and on Reddit. There is the whole "Team Theresa" vs "Team Priestess" (Priestess did nothing wrong) that goes on. How critical of it you are depends on how tolerant of the unreliable narrator and mystery box ass pulls they've done in the past to make the shifts.

Now, while I'm obviously super critical of the story changes they've done and how contradictory it has been, from a business angle it makes a lot of sense. Not a lot of people want to be the bad guy. The part where they do the flashback of you killing Theresa in game had people in fits and having the out of 'it wasn't really your fault' with the evil Priestess reveal is a much easier sell than trying to do a nuanced both sides have merit argument. Turning it from a morally grey game that has people at odds where no one is wrong per se and were just doing what seemed right to them at the time is a really tough story to keep writing in a consumer game world you have to sell. It also requires a lot of writing talent, attention to detail and skill to do well which lets be honest, isn't the hallmark of game writers. The other issues is Arknights as a game is getting old and dated and its not growing. So trying to push and grow the playerbase by moving onto a new more modern game with more longevity makes sense from a business standpoint and has been pointed at for why the writers streamlined things quickly in the AK story to move towards a single point and the choice to make Endfield a direct sequel.

A lot of OG Arknights players hoped Endfield would give some clues about the future story of Arknights and continue the tone, but it seems the company has kinda chosen (prolly wisely) to punt on that and go with another amnesiac MC and a mystery past and history that isn't all clear to the player and may be revealed later if they feel the need. It gives them a lot more freedom and helps break with a rather messy contradictory lore past.

TLDR, all you really need to know is Rhodes Island is the protaganist organization from the first game whose goal was to cure Oripathy, a horrible cancer caused by Origininium and was led by 'The Doctor'. Originium originally was a double edged sword that powered all tech and magic(arts) in their world but also caused extremely contagious cancer. Rhodes Island appears to have not cured it but developed treatments that stop its effects and originium itself is no longer as dangerous as before. Originium is both a data store and a building block of terraforming/creation. So it can serve to store people in 'the cloud' of itself and 'reconvene' them back into existence, as well as power and create any manner of thing. It was the raw blueprint material of terraforming. The people of Terra brought originium with them through the gate to Talos II to settle there and something went wrong and the gate closed and now people on Talos are stuck there fighting to survive. That is pretty much all you need to know atm from AK's original backstory. The only real additional important thing is the Endmin is unique in Endfield because they have the singular ability of total mastery of Originium, but that is kinda laid out in Endfield itself.

Of course, I'll be happy to share more if you all want cause its full of interesting stories but as you can tell it is both huge and contradictory and trying to understand it too much without just accepting a lot of 'it is what it is' can be extremely frustrating.
 
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T

turbo

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Not for this cat, Epic 7 still is the best gacha on the market for my tastes. Came back last august after 18 month break and after 3 months of grinding and getting back into the swing a things was able to be hyper competitive in both guild war pvp and real time arena which is a testimony to the game design. They finally addressed some of the QoL things people have been begging for as well, so much easier to get gear and took out gold costs for changing gear. If you are looking for a gacha and this doesn't cut it for you give E7 a try!

Ironically I started E7 while waiting for Ashes of Creation as I thought that was going to be my game of focus for next 5+ years so didnt want to get burnt in alpha for next year. With Ashes going tits up looks like i'm ride or die in E7 for a decade while a new good MMO gets made....fuck me
 
Zindan

Zindan

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Mao said:
I've given it some thought as I've reviewed Arknights' lore in my head and gone back to reread some of it and to be honest, you're better off enjoying Endfield if you are only passingly familiar with it in broad strokes and don't dive into it too much.

Arknights lore itself is pretty contradictory and seems to have shifted over the years as they realigned the game's theme and mood and then eventually a harder pivot when they started bringing it to feed into Endfield. It relies extremely heavily on mystery boxes and unreliable narrators with the MC being another amnesiac with a big history of being a badass that people talk about and are angry with him (you) over but then they kinda toss it to pivot towards a more heroic tale and drop the ambiguous morality for a more, straight up hopeful tale of you being the hero.

It starts with you waking up as an amnesiac who was the former head strategist/tactician of a group called Babel that was one of the factions in the most recent Sarkaz civil war, and you were supposed to be a murderous motherfucker. Not personally powerful, but the 'Ghost of Babel' whose strategies stacked bodies like cordwood. At one point, you end up coordinating the assassination of Thereas the leader of Babel and as a last 'fuck you' she mind wipes you as she is dying. Your mind wiped form is stuffed into cryosleep. The Perlica analogue of AK (Kal'tsit) is big mad with you but has sworn not to kill you in your sleep and they need you to help lead Rhodes Island, the remains of Babel that has since become a paramilitary pharmaceutical company that is trying to cure Oripathy, an all consuming cancer caused by Originium. You learn eventually that you actually are one of the predecessors, the ancients that created Originium to terraform Terra and Theresa learned about you from Kal'tsit, your junior you created to watch over the terraforming, when they are working together to try and unite the Sarkaz and make the world a better place. Theresa asks Kal'tsit to wake you up to help out.

You get woken up and agree to help out as you assess things, but supposedly come to the conclusion that the Observers are going to come and erase everything and you need to put the original plan back on track or everyone dies, but unfortunately Theresa has the device that controls Originium so she has to die. As she lays dying, she wipes your mind cause she believes that if you could see everything again, unburdened by the knowledge and weight of the past you could make a different choice and find a way. (Cue China joke. 5000 years of culture, 50 years of history)

So.. this in itself isn't a bad concept but it quickly starts to develop holes when you learn more and think about it. Kal'tsit was literally created by you and Priestess (your partner who created the Originium Project to terraform the world into a defense against the Observers) and Kal is supposed to oversee the project while you all are in stasis. So, why has she never woken you up in the past when it all went completely off the rails? Why is it not until this one girl asks that she wakes you? In one of the stories you come across a cryosleep facility where much of your fellow predecessor race is in cryo, but the power has been failing and all the people there are beyond recovery? Kal'tist comments she knew about the place but 'Wasn't ready to reveal it to you yet'. Umm. Why? Why not wake us when the cryo started to fail? Then the game tries to change the story to Originium wasn't actually meant to terraform the world and turn it into a defense. It was supposed to store all the knowledge of your race for later species to come, so they can benefit from it like guidestones. This was always the plan and your species agreed to die out but Priestess hijacked it and turned it into the shit we see now. Cool, but then why are all our people in Cryo waiting to get woken up? Then you killing Theresa turns out wasn't actually your fault. Priestess had brain washed you to support her plan so when you went to make the choice you were forced to by your brainwashing and your not really a murderous motherfucker Ghost of Babel and thats why Theresa wiped your memory. To set you free of Priestess. So now Priestess is the big bad evil villain and you are fighting her to save the world. However, last checked the Observers who destroy everything are very real and no one but Priestess has any sort of plan on how to deal with them. So... yeah.

Arknights main story is a mess and you can see how it warped and changed over time. I'm obviously more critical of it than a lot of people and if you go looking into it people have different takes that cause much fighting and arguing in Wikis and on Reddit. There is the whole "Team Theresa" vs "Team Priestess" (Priestess did nothing wrong) that goes on. How critical of it you are depends on how tolerant of the unreliable narrator and mystery box ass pulls they've done in the past to make the shifts.

Now, while I'm obviously super critical of the story changes they've done and how contradictory it has been, from a business angle it makes a lot of sense. Not a lot of people want to be the bad guy. The part where they do the flashback of you killing Theresa in game had people in fits and having the out of 'it wasn't really your fault' with the evil Priestess reveal is a much easier sell than trying to do a nuanced both sides have merit argument. Turning it from a morally grey game that has people at odds where no one is wrong per se and were just doing what seemed right to them at the time is a really tough story to keep writing in a consumer game world you have to sell. It also requires a lot of writing talent, attention to detail and skill to do well which lets be honest, isn't the hallmark of game writers. The other issues is Arknights as a game is getting old and dated and its not growing. So trying to push and grow the playerbase by moving onto a new more modern game with more longevity makes sense from a business standpoint and has been pointed at for why the writers streamlined things quickly in the AK story to move towards a single point and the choice to make Endfield a direct sequel.

A lot of OG Arknights players hoped Endfield would give some clues about the future story of Arknights and continue the tone, but it seems the company has kinda chosen (prolly wisely) to punt on that and go with another amnesiac MC and a mystery past and history that isn't all clear to the player and may be revealed later if they feel the need. It gives them a lot more freedom and helps break with a rather messy contradictory lore past.

TLDR, all you really need to know is Rhodes Island is the protaganist organization from the first game whose goal was to cure Oripathy, a horrible cancer caused by Origininium and was led by 'The Doctor'. Originium originally was a double edged sword that powered all tech and magic(arts) in their world but also caused extremely contagious cancer. Rhodes Island appears to have not cured it but developed treatments that stop its effects and originium itself is no longer as dangerous as before. Originium is both a data store and a building block of terraforming/creation. So it can serve to store people in 'the cloud' of itself and 'reconvene' them back into existence, as well as power and create any manner of thing. It was the raw blueprint material of terraforming. The people of Terra brought originium with them through the gate to Talos II to settle there and something went wrong and the gate closed and now people on Talos are stuck there fighting to survive. That is pretty much all you need to know atm from AK's original backstory. The only real additional important thing is the Endmin is unique in Endfield because they have the singular ability of total mastery of Originium, but that is kinda laid out in Endfield itself.

Of course, I'll be happy to share more if you all want cause its full of interesting stories but as you can tell it is both huge and contradictory and trying to understand it too much without just accepting a lot of 'it is what it is' can be extremely frustrating.
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This just means that they will need to adapt the Arknights Story to fit into the Endfield narrative, as the Endfield stuff is set @150yrs into the future. To me, this says that the Endmin is not the Doctor from Rhodes Island. I feel the writers have gotten off to a bad start with Endfield since they will have to explain a ton of stuff from Arknights that led to people going to Talos-II, in addition to all the stuff that has happened since.
 
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Zindan said:
This just means that they will need to adapt the Arknights Story to fit into the Endfield narrative, as the Endfield stuff is set @150yrs into the future. To me, this says that the Endmin is not the Doctor from Rhodes Island. I feel the writers have gotten off to a bad start with Endfield since they will have to explain a ton of stuff from Arknights that led to people going to Talos-II, in addition to all the stuff that has happened since.
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I feel they tried to have their cake and eat it too. Originally it was supposed to be set with Arknights OG as 'distant history' but I think at a point they got scared about moving their playerbase to the new one and decided to go with splitting the baby. Lots of key jangles and memberberries for the AK people, and a 'fresh'-ish story that allows them to not be super tied to the old lore. Surtr and Ardelia are both 1:1 lifts off old AK characters, and Chen is basically the same model as another popular character named Chen. (its China, family surname so no big deal.) Chen at least is a child of the OG Chen, but holy fuck does that raise some questions. A lot of the character models resemble Arknights ones, but that is nothing new for these companies. Mihoyo has been respinning the same designs and even the same names at times for multiple games now.

As far as the Arknights' story, they already have started to bend it to fit into the Endfield narrative and that started prolly over a year ago with Priestess suddenly being the big bad and them tying all the stories together with that. Before, each area/nations story was sorta self contained. It touched the main plot line but more tangentaly. The stuff going on there was main focus with maybe an undertone of the bigger problems at hand. One of the latest stories though was resolving the Irish/British insurgency/civil war of Tara and Victoria. This story has been a long time coming with a whole host of characters native to those countries that are part of your crew, complete with the rebellion leader of Tara and the return of the once and future king Arthur analog in Victoria. But those characters mostly got tossed to rehash Theresa's (the girl you killed that wiped your memory) clone and her and Kal'tsit picking a fight with Priestess and the big reveal. A number of people loved it. What a twist! Others looked at all the story threads they laid over the years getting tossed and were like, "We got robbed." This also happened recently with Laterano's and the Sankta Angels storyline.

Anyway. I am bitching a lot, but I really did and do enjoy a good bit of AK's story telling. Their side and character stories, the vignettes that focus on stuff that isn't the main have often been really good with characters people grow deeply attached to (Part of why people are mad they got sidelined recently). The main story was really good as well for most parts of the early game before it sorta got truncated. As such, I'm both nervous and hopeful for Endfield. It almost looks like they are going to rehash the same story, but this time with an actual plan as they openly admitted they really only had an idea and general direction for AK, but found they were in over their heads without a real plan and were kinda building the road as they went. They had a lot of world building done but may have R.R. Martin'd themselves as they got deeper into the 'holy fuck how do we tie this up'.

Lastly, the Endmin being The Doctor is toyed with. The entire introduction sequence to the game is all callbacks events from AK. These are supposedly going on in the Endmin's mind, and how the Endmin has emotional reactions to seeing them implies there is some sort of shared memory there. So... yeah. Maybe the Doctor. Maybe not. Maybe a clone. The term 'Child of Originium' is used, so I wouldn't be surprised to find out that you are sorta a 'kid' of Doc/Priestess made from Originium. But truthfully, who the fuck knows. I'm just speculating and to be honest, the amnesia and mystery box stuff with people not telling you anything (Perlica knows more, but ain't saying shit it seems) leaves them free to just feel it out and go any direction. So who knows.

That said, for all my looking side eye at everything I've been pretty happy with the games mechanics and have hopes for the story. I actually like the game. I'm just being bitter with the realization that the OG Arknights story of complex issues with no clear 'right' solution may finally be dead. We'll see though, cause Endfield's story still has a lot of places it could go and they might surprise me.
 
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