What Happened to Arknights: Endfield?

Endfield joined Twitter in March 2022. Over 2 years ago. They opened with a single Tweet on March 15th, teasing a new game in the intellectual property.
This saw quite a bit of interaction – 7,200 likes, 2,800 retweets, 105 comments. They followed up 2 days later on March 17th with a full 2 minute cinematic trailer, and a 1 minute gameplay trailer, showcasing a part of one of the worlds, animations, character models and designs.
This got players thirsty for more. But.. Gryphline, known as Hypergryph at the time, went quiet. April passed. May passed. June passed. An entire year passed, a year and a half passed, and players were growing concerned.
Until Tweets surfaced on October 26th and 27th, showing off an entirely reworked trailer, graphical style, combat style, exploration style, world style.
What they showed us in October 2022 was only a skeleton of what we could expect. They’d taken a year and a half to re-design the game into something almost unrecognizeable, and it was well worth the wait.
The gameplay showed us how much larger the world was – how much more freeing and explorable the world was. It was different to Genshin, different to Wuthering Waves. They’d created a world with what seemed to be more to do – while focusing less on scaling mountains, looting treasure chests and chasing butterflies.
Players were thirsty back in 2022, but now they were absolutely parched.

Since their re-debut, the Endfield Twitter page continued to drip-feed new characters to us daily, then began slowly highlighting parts of the world, monster types, introducing us to everything the game had to offer, maintaining hype until on December 7th, they announced their Technical Test.
They continued with the drip-marketing, until the Technical Test began, on January 11th, 2024. The test lasted until January 21st, 2024, when they announced the test servers had gone offline.
They held a small merch giveaway in March, in an attempt to not let hype for the game disperse once again, announcing the winners in April, but other than that, since the Technical test concluded, have remained completely silent.

This has left many players – as you may have guessed – concerned once again.
The last time they went silent, they remained silent for almost 2 years. This isn’t something we want to see become a recurring theme with Endfield’s development. Disappearing from the public eye for extended periods of time is an easy way to fizzle out.
But at the same time, if they’re deep in the development process and they have nothing to show at present, then there’s really nothing that can be done.

Fret not, as GamesRadar reached out to Gryphline just a few weeks ago for an interview, and the devs agreed, answering some questions GamesRadar had.
The interview revealed several things to us.

On the one hand, they’re definitely going all-in on the base-building aspect of the game, stating “players are always looking for new and different types of gaming experiences and a lot of them will get tired of repetitive content.
There will come a time when players run out of content or get tired of the gameplay. These are challenges all game developers have to face, but we think taking on such game design challenges is exciting and fun.
And if we succeed in making something awesome, we hope players will get a special joy from Arknights: Endfield they won’t get from in other games. This is something we’re still figuring out.”
Evidently, they’re still hard at work attempting to finalize their ideas for the game and many of the core mechanics present within it.

“we are having to develop it using different technologies, pipelines, and designs. Though this has proved to be quite a challenge for us, we’re pretty excited that we can finally interpret our original universe in an all-new perspective.”
This is where things get a little trickier, as this is an engine the team aren’t necessarily familiar with and has no doubt slowed down the development a little bit. They even openly admitted to it being “quite a challenge,”

Further down they repeated that it was “important to keep in mind that Arknights Endfield is still currently under development, and what we see in the current build doesn’t represent the final gaming experience,” which could mean they’re still planning on making quite a few alterations to the game ahead of its release. Potentially pushing the game back further than we had originally expected.

The following information however makes it seem like maybe it’s not as far off as their previous statement leads us to believe, going on to state “We are still working on this and making changes as we go. This aspect of Arknights: Endfield has not been fully showcased since we’re still in the testing phase.”
Not the creation stage. They’ve created what they believe they need, they’re currently in the testing state. What comes after they’re done testing? We test. And what comes after we test? It releases.
After release it does seem as though they have plans for new maps, new stories, new characters, new products, new formulas, and new facilities, but they don’t want to give exact details, nor a timeline for said details – especially content cadence. Which makes sense.

I appreciate that Gryphline have taken the time to drop the interview with GamesRadar as it shows they haven’t gone completely radio silent. They’re just very busy at work, testing the currently existing systems – as they noted.
Because the game seems to be pretty far through the development process. Which is great news.

Is Arknights dead? Definitely not. Is it delayed? Absolutely not. I’d expect a future Beta test or two before full release, but they seem highly confident in their product, and show no signs of slowing down. I’ll take that as a win.
As for when we can probably expect the next major update, or test phase? Probably 2025. I know that’s not something you want to hear but I wouldn’t expect them to be ready for a release before then. Which is fine, because Zenless and Promilia both launch – likely within the next 6 months to a year, so we need time to play them, and Wuthering Waves.
Best to space all of these out.