Thread: Aigis Game Design Review

Because I'm toying with the idea of designing an Aigis like game in the future, I wanted to break down what Aigis had going for it in gameplay design. Mainly because Aigis is less an H game and more a strategic tower defense game with an H feature.

I guess the first thing that really caught my attention about Aigis is that while premium units are strong, event units, depending on the unit, can be on par with some of the units from the summon gate. Most other gacha type games usually place all the power units in the gacha (I'm thinking back to when I used to play Brave Frontier, and events in that game were less about featured units for usage and more for featured units for acquisition).

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

The porn and the waifus.

There was something fun in seeing the Prince being a unit strong enough that he can be put into the front lines and fight with all the characters that we know and love, whether he's placed right next to a Julian to help cover a path, or has a strong archer/ranged unit shooting arrows to assist with getting that one boss type downed faster, Its just really neat to have the prince in the fray, especially with the whole title mechanic.

well , first and foremost it had 3 things that people like :


1. colecting stuff
2. actual gameplay ( tower defense - which were pretty popular in my days - back in the warcraft 3 age )
3. somewhat decent story that didn't revolved around H stuff (h stuff was cool in the begining , but it gets really old really fast. the fact that h content was not forced down your throat is what separated aigis from other h games)




Also the leveling/cc/aw mechanic was interesting even tho it was a grindfest , and units actually felt good to level up becuase they gained significant bonuses

Originally Posted by lolix

Also the leveling/cc/aw mechanic was interesting even tho it was a grindfest , and units actually felt good to level up becuase they gained significant bonuses

Adding onto this, it struck a good balance of making it take effort to grind units up to higher tiers of power, but once you got a few there, it it only took a bit of dedicated effort to rush a new unit up if you knew what you were doing, meaning that while you might not manage to level everyone, you could still manage to level and use any unit you got that you liked without a major setback to your team, unlike some games where leveling costs can be almost prohibitively expensive as to prevent branching out using new units.

That aside, the gameplay was actually strategy/skill based without much in the way of luck (only really factors in if you use assassinate/dodge units which are not required outside possibly skipping past some harder maps sooner than your team is otherwise ready for them). It also allowed for many possible ways to win that often allowed you to use what you wanted rather than being forced to use some specific winning combo. Sure not all units were equal, but almost all of them were viable.

As others have mentioned Aigis was great because it was an all round great game.

One of the things that I REALLY liked about it is the fact that a working joe like me could put in a few minuets each day and be successful. Most of the other games want you to sit there and watch your character do the same thing over and over....

Aigis was really nice to casual gamers that didn't have a lot of time to play.

I learned a lot about what makes a good balanced web game by playing Aigis. Making a web game is one of those things I want to try eventually too.

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 .

Originally Posted by MalusCorvus

I stand by what I meant, but I don't care about trying to explain it anymore, and you are devoting way too much time to a confusion over word usage. It's derailing the topic, and I'd rather get back to what this thread is about.



On which note, I'll have to write a list of things I would hypothetically have suggested for Aigis itself, were the option available. faketurtle, do you have any ideas for what sort of game you'd like to design, or are you currently just gathering ideas and focusing on what made Aigis good?

My main issue was that you were flippant with the words: reward, refund, and compensation. These words don't mean the same thing.

This is part of the review of the thread. People will agree or disagree. I disagree with you in the first place over that word you used. That's it. We are having a conversation not an argument over these topics.

I agree it is a nice feature for Aigis