Thread: Aigis Game Design Review

Originally Posted by Ericridge

I give it an 0/10 because it shut down. The game design wasn't good enough to stay up.

That hits me as a pretty silly way to look at it given that the Japanese version has ran successfully for years. I think the biggest problem is that the English version ran off a lot of players early by having a painfully slow update schedule. That's a fatal flaw when you consider that the sufficiently determined whales can just jolly well go ahead and play the Japanese version instead.

After playing DMM Aigis for a bit, a few drastic differences exist, mostly in favor of DMM Aigis.

First, upon leveling, charisma and stamina, instead of capping at the max, goes past the max. Makes leveling more of a reward, and gets rid of annoying levels of trying to optimize exp when leveling.

Second, when a mission quest is failed, half of the cost for both stamina and charisma is returned. It really replaces a lot of the punishment found in many other games (including Nutaku Aigis) with an energy mechanic, and it actually encourages a bit more risky gameplay.

One of the general understandings of players of your game is that the player will always find the safest game loop to play with time, no matter how boring. For example, for a game like the newest Doom, without the reward of health pickups and bonuses for playing aggressively, the players would keep distance from the enemies, returning to the boring gameplay loop of some FPS PVE, where the player just stands back and slowly kills enemies (hi Halo).

DMM Aigis partially solves Nutaku Aigis's loop. While N Aigis's safest loop was a lot of YouTube a run and then attempt to emulate, unless the map really demands such a run style, DMM Aigis allows for some level of risky or blind running for certain maps, as the player knows that even upon failure they can still play on or return to the attempt faster. And it still manages to retain punishment for failure; depending on current stamina/charisma, the player likely will be unable to attempt the mission until much later.

Third, the FTP vs whale situation was described earlier. I won't go too into detail about it because, well, it was already addressed. Since Aigis is PVE with no PVP elements, direct or indirect, it really needed a well fleshed out singleplayer experience. And Nutaku's Aigis, even the most recent updates, cannot compare to DMM Aigis.

I guess it's unfair to compare an older, well supported version of a game to its newer and less supported version. But hey, there is one mechanic that N Aigis has over DMM Aigis. No mosaics .