Key Highlights:
- Arknights Endfield is a free to play gacha game with summonable characters and weapons.
- The game has multiple safety systems in place, to ensure you eventually obtain the character.
- The process does seem needlessly overcomplicated at times.
Arknights Endfield is finally out, after multiple delays and years of intense anticipation. Endfield is a free to play gacha title, and is available for the PC, mobile (Android/iOS) and the PlayStation 5.
The launch hasn’t been without its fair share of controversy either, especially with regards to its progression system and gacha. The gacha in particular has been very controversial, further exacerbated by many mentioning that it was ‘too grindy’ or even ‘pay to win’.
Arknights Endfield Gacha Systems Explained
Like most gacha games, Arknights Endfield also features a failsafe system, more popularly known as the pity system. In short, the game guarantees you the uprate character or weapon after a certain set number of pulls.
This provides a kind of safety net to ensure that even in the worst case scenario, you do not overspend your pulls.
However, unlike its peers, Endfield’s gacha system appears to be a bit complicated:
- The gacha uses a currency known as Oroberyl. A single pull costs 500 Oroberyl, while a 10 pull costs 5000. There is no difference in pulling one by one or by triggering a 10 pull, save for saving you some precious time.
- There are 3 kinds of operators; 4 star, 5 star and 6 star.
- 4 star operators have a 91.2% drop chance.
- 5 star operators have an 8* drop chance.
- 6 star operators have a 0.8% drop chance.
- Every 10 pulls guarantees a 5 star, though you can always trigger one early which resets the 5 star pity counter.
- There is a soft pity at around 65 pulls, past which your chances of obtaining a 6 star increases with each pull.
- A hard pity is imposed at 80 pulls.
- However, neither of these pities will guarantee you the featured operator. The featured operator and/or weapon is at a fixed 50% chance to drop, with the other 50% being distributed between a pool of standard characters.
- Assuming you failed to hit the 50%, you will have to keep pulling till you trigger the next 6 star pity (at 120 pulls) which guarantees you the featured character. Every 6 star pull triggered before this does not guarantee the featured unit.
This particular 120 pull ‘guarantee’ does not carry over to future banners, which seems a bit unfortunate.
Is It Arknights Endfield Really Pay to Win?
Endfield isn’t necessarily pay to win, since it has a lot of additional safeties in place. Unlike most other gachas, whenever a new limited character makes its appearance in the game, the previous two featured characters remain within the gacha pool.
This means you can technically ‘lose’ your 50/50 to obtain a copy of the previous character (7.14% chance on each). However, the standard pool characters remain at a much higher 35.72% pity drop rate, making collecting characters beyond their initial release period a lot more difficult.
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For whales, there are a few more safeguards. The game has a hard pity at 240 pulls, and repeats every time you trigger the featured character on the draw. This lets whales max their character out a bit more easily.
There’s also a free 10 pull reward handed out once you hit 60 pulls total on the featured banner. It can only be used once per featured banner, and expires afterward. As such, make it a habit to use up those vouchers.
Taking all this into account, and the fact that the majority of Endfield’s content can be cleared using 4 star characters (though it will require a bit more investment), it’s hard to really call Endfield a pay to win game. The banner logic does need some work though.
