Japanese Arknights: Endfield Player Encounters Hilarious Bug Turning Characters into Demons
It's been about a week since the release of the highly anticipated free-to-play action-RPG Arknights: Endfield from Chinese developer Hypergryph, and, as is often the case with live-service games at launch, some players have already encountered issues hindering their comfortable expansion of their industrial empire. While there have been more serious bugs, like those with PayPal, a rather amusing problem has caught attention on the Japanese side of X.
It turns out, players encountered an error causing all characters to be displayed with blue skin. After spending several hours in the game, exploring Talos II and setting up a factory, X user Hatomugi finally noticed that perhaps the characters weren't originally supposed to have blue skin. Although, since Endfield's story heavily resembles a space opera, the player didn't see anything strange about a blue-skinned Endministrator and Perlica in the tutorial section.
Ever since I started playing this game, for some reason, all the characters have had blue skin, and I thought, 'Oh, this is like those demons from Shinra Bansho Chocolate.' But come to think of it, none of the game's promotional images had blue-skinned characters, so something very strange is definitely going on here. (Though, honestly, I kind of like it.)
While immersed in the game, Hatomugi didn't notice anything odd, and only when they reached the scene where Perlica hands the Endministrator an apple (a very blue one) did they begin to suspect something was amiss. However, at first, the player took it in stride, reasoning that if all the characters are blue, then why shouldn't the apples in the Endfield universe be blue too?
Apparently, the "blue bug" didn't just affect character skin color. Judging by the color mismatches between the original and blue characters (both in 2D illustrations and 3D models), including clothing, weapons, and accessories, it seems there was a general "hue shift" somewhere. Moreover, upon closer inspection of the provided screenshots, normally yellow UI elements in the operator menu also turned blue. Another gameplay screenshot from Hatomugi shows the same thing in the friends menu: the Endfield administrator icon took on a blue tint.
This doesn't seem to be the first instance of such a bug in Endfield since its release seven days ago. Inspired by the viral post, another Japanese X user reported the same "blue skin color" error, suggesting it might be related to an Intel graphics driver update they performed before installing the game. Apparently, the error was fixed after they rolled back the driver to a previous version.