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vonaegiremblem · 2 years

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Now that Dragalia Lost's story is over and it cruises towards EOS, I would like to reflect a little on why it really did not succeed that much. I want to log why I, as someone who played the game every day from launch until the final chapter released, think it failed. You know, beyond just "it didn't make enough money." We all know it didn't make enough money. I want to dive a little bit into why it didn't make enough money, because it really wasn't just one thing. Dragalia Lost was a game slain not by a single fatal blow, but by a thousand smaller injuries. Also, fair warning: I'm going to be talking about FEH a lot since it has passed the one billion dollar revenue mark at this point, and because I think the reasons why FEH is so successful can explain some of the reasons why Dragalia Lost wasn't.

1. The first challenge Dragalia faced was that it was a new IP. It was always going to be an uphill climb trying to get people interested because it had no other media to fall back on. The biggest things that could bring people in were the story and characters. Cygames is, admittedly, really good at character design, but the story that these characters were in was really average at the beginning. Also, if you liked characters outside of the main cast, then you had to hope that they would be featured in an event, or just live with their five adventurer stories. They did expand on this somewhat with Dragalia Life, castle stories, and non-limited alts, but for the most part you didn't get much for non-main characters (especially if your favorites were in the initial batch of 3 star units).

FEH, on the other hand, already had an install base from the start. Fire Emblem is the most popular SRPG series, and making an accessible version of it that features characters from every game in the series was a pretty easy selling point. Also, every Fire Emblem character is unironically somebody's favorite. It doesn't matter how useless, obscure, or unrecruitable they are, someone is willing to summon for them.

2. Speaking of summoning, let's talk about Dragalia Lost's summoning mechanics. Dragalia Lost was both too generous and not generous enough. Cygames admitted in a rather well-known interview that they could have made Draglia more profitable (read: exploitative) but Nintendo stopped them. Dragalia was generally pretty generous with wyrmite and summoning tickets, sometimes even making summoning tickets rare drops from certain raid bosses, but in the beginning summoning was awful. There was a time when wyrmprints were in the summoning pool, and you could be pity broken by a 5 star wyrmprint. They removed that feature pretty quickly. They did at least add sparking to the game during the 2nd anniversary update, but they also made the game as a whole way less generous with summoning materials, which pissed a lot of people off. To further add to this issue, sparking cost 300 summons, which was a lot. Sure, you could now guarantee a unit you really wanted, but consider: the cost of purchasing enough dimantium to do a single 10-fold summon is $25 dollars, last I checked. There is a reason I, and a lot of other people, never spent money on this game. It was fundamentally not worth it given how expensive it was for a single 10-fold summon. Admittedly, they did halve the amount of summons you had to do using payed-for currency to spark, but that's still a lot of money to spend. Sure, there were the platinum showcases, which guaranteed a 5 star, but you weren't guaranteed a 5 star you didn't have (at least not until some of the absolute last platinum showcases). For reference, it costs like $12 in FEH to get enough orbs for a full 5 summons, and in FEH sparking costs 40 summons. Without optimizing purchases, it costs ~$100 to spark in FEH. It costs $325 to spark in Dragalia. Also, for perspective, FEH gives about 300 orbs a month. That is enough to spark twice a month.

3. I'll talk abut FEH's systems first for this part. FEH's summoning system works so well because it feeds into three other systems: traits, merges, and skill inheritance. There is never a useless unit to summon. If you already have a unit, getting another one of them means a chance to get better IVs or a chance to merge the two together to make a stronger unit. If they have good skills, you can consider using the duplicate to pass those good skills onto another unit. Even lower rarity units can pass on lower level versions of skills so you don't have to waste as many inheritance slots when passing on good skills from another unit. Also, the max amount of merges a character can have is 10, meaning that you have to summon 11 of them to get a character to their max potential. That is, of course, assuming you only want one +10 version of that character. I'm pretty certain the theoretical max is 7 +10 versions of the same unit, meaning you would need 77 of them. Needless to say, you can really whale in FEH if you feel so inclined.

Compare this to Dragalia Lost where once you summoned an adventurer, there was no reason to try and summon them again. You couldn't have more than one of the same adventurer, and there was no merge system for them. The only thing you got was Eldwater, which while useful for upgrading other units, there were ways to get outside of summoning. The only characters you could merge were the dragons, and the game, surprisingly, provided plenty of ways to get merges for them without summoning. The dragons also only took 5 to get to MUB, and you usually only wanted at most two of the same dragon on a team, so you'd really only need to summon 10 of the same dragon ever, assuming you weren't using any of the ways to get free merges.

4. Now's as good a time as any to talk about multiplayer. Dragalia Lost from the beginning tried to frame itself as a somewhat multiplayer experience. Basically everything outside of the main story mode could be played with other people. This encouraged community growth and involvement, and could be used as a way to convince friends to join the game. It also helped make high level content viable early on, since you only needed one good unit as opposed to the four you needed in solo. It also helped that the AI in early Dragalia was really bad. The only problem was that Dragalia's multiplayer community was toxic throughout the entirety of the game's life. The devs literally removed the Cleo Nope! sticker because people were being so awful about other players bringing off-meta units. Sure, it got better as time went on, but I know it was still happening through the addition of Trials of the Mighty because it happened to me. I didn't have Gala Jean for the Thor fight, so the owner of the room kept using the arrow sticker to point at me and eventually just closed the room.

Look, I kind of get it. Dragalia really marketed its high level content. The boss fights were intricate and had complex mechanics. They also lasted upwards of 10 real life minutes, and it sucked if you had to keep retrying because someone kept dying or you just couldn't do enough damage. The amount of effort you had to put into learning boss fights, building characters and backup characters, and actually doing the fights was a big ask, and finding three other people who were good enough to do it could take an excruciatingly long time. Dealing with toxic people and also dealing with people who were not good enough to do high level content is a big reason why I, and probably a lot of other people, switched to just doing solo content. I'm pretty certain there are still some High Dragon trials that I haven't done in multiplayer. And I will probably never do them.

5. This next point is kind of difficult to explain succinctly. Basically, due to differences in gamemodes, AI, and player interaction, FEH encourages players to build and summon for units more frequently than Draglia Lost did. Several major gamemodes in FEH involve AI controlling teams you create. Arena and Aether Raids are the big ones, but things like Rival Domains also use units you and other people build to make teams. Since the AI in FEH is so dumb and exploitable, one of the best ways to make your team win is by building an incredibly busted set of units. FEH also has a real-time PVP mode that can be played without any unit restrictions, meaning that you will almost certainly need a team of busted units to compete against others. You are also encouraged to create at least one very strong unit just so people you've friended can use them in the brigades. Creating busted units in either case requires summoning for merges and summoning for fodder.

In Dragalia Lost, there was one PVP mode, and unit stats and builds didn't matter. People could use a character you set as a helper, but outside of Shadow adventurers being able to equip Ramiel to give you dragon prep, they basically did nothing and were outshone by weapon abilities or shared skills. That basically left high level content as the place where unit build in multiplayer really mattered, and as time went on for the High Dragon and Agito battles, it started to matter less. Sure, when each type of high level content came out, you were expected to use the meta units, but as more units became more viable for it, it really stopped mattering who you were using and how they were built, so long as they fulfilled their role well enough. It also helped that actually controlling the character could make up for sub-optimal unit build. At least, all this was true until they added Curse of Nihility, which I'll get into later.

6. All you Josh Strife Hayes lovers out there might recognize this next point. Dragalia Lost did not bring in enough content for new players. It mainly focused on making content to keep old players, which is a losing tactic. The three consistent things that were added to Dragalia were new story chapters, new high level content, and new events. New story chapters and high level content were not going to appeal to new players. The high level content wasn't appealing because it was too challenging and required too many resources to try it. The new story wasn't appealing because you had to read all of the other chapters first for it to make sense and be impactful (also the chapters get too hard for a new player to handle). So, you're left with events. In theory, they should have appealed to players of all levels, but they just didn't. The problem was the difficulty scaling. First off, and this is a side note, Dragalia never had good metrics for how difficult content was. Once the "suggest might" value went above, like, 10,000, the game lied. Depending on the difficulty of the quest, you needed 5,000 to 10,000 more might than what was listed. Not being able to tell how the actually difficulty of a quest was extremely frustrating to new players, but I digress. You had five main kinds of events--Raid, Facility, Onslaught, Defensive, and Invasion. All of them had problems.

One of the biggest overlapping problems was that to receive the best rewards in these events, you basically had to be able to do the hardest content consistently, excluding Omega Raids (which still gave you good, but not necessary, stuff). Onslaught and Defensive events were arguably the least offensive. They both required you to battle to earn enough points in the bonus bar to see the whole story. The problem was that the bonus bar was set up so that you basically always unlocked the story so long as you went through and did every level once. If you were unable to complete every level, then you were going to have to grind to see the whole story, which means you were more likely to miss out on the story if you were lower level. This sucked because the writing in Dragalia was generally pretty good. Facility events were just far too grindy for new players (especially the kind that had the "Extra" battles). Getting the facility bonuses was important, but starting from scratch and going to level 35 was slow and required a lot of a battling. Also, the challenge battles to fill up the rewards bar faster were very difficult for just-starting-out players. Invasion events were also grindy and expected you to have specific overdamage and high-hit teams ready to get good scores. Raid events were perhaps the biggest offender. The thing that generally made raid raid events so appealing were the cool boss fights. The problem was that new players just didn't get to experience it. If you were a new player and you got paired with anyone who had played the game for, like, at least 6 months, you were not going to get to experience the Standard, EX, and Nightmare raids because the boss would basically be instakilled. This left you with the Omega Raids, which were way, way too hard for new players to attempt. In the end, new players were going to feel like they were missing out on something in each of the event types.

FEH generally has more new player appeal. Difficulty scaling tends to be handled better, and its easier to make a team that can do hard content. Arena, Aether Raids, and Summoner Duels try to put you against similarly ranked opponents, so that you don't just get absolutely destroyed by their teams. Basically every event has a variety of difficulty options that should allow everyone to get all the rewards, presuming they put the time in (with the exception of Rival Domains, where you do have to do the highest difficulty stuff consistently to make it to tier 25). A player can also probably take on the easiest difficulty of the most recent story maps within their first day of playing if they train up their free units. FEH, overall, just handles new player experience better.

7. One of the biggest things that I think really hurt Dragalia was that neither of the two most recent non-boss battle gamemodes that were added encouraged summoning. Alberian Royale was true competitive multiplayer, but characters you had summoned (except in very rare cases) didn't effect it at all. The Kaleidoscape (which I only just realized is not called the "Kaleidoscope") was really fucking cool and a great game mode, but it was an entirely singleplayer mode and you didn't need specific characters to get specific effects on the wyrmprints you received for completing it. Both of these modes probably took a lot of time, effort, and money to make, but neither of them seemed like revenue generators.

FEH's newest gamemode is a real-time competitive PVP mode where you make and use teams from characters you have summoned. I do not need to explain how this makes people want to spend money.

8. Alright folks, here's the big one. The one I actually almost made a very long post about when it first came out, but didn't: Curse of Nihility. I said that Dragalia was felled by a thousand minor injuries, but this one was perhaps the most damaging. Here's the thing: Dragalia was no stranger to arbitrarily hard content that almost entirely limited team composition. The High Dragon trials were like this initially. You had to use up one of your two wyrmprint slots on the dragon's wyrmprint, you had to have enough HP to survive the initial attack, and you had to deal enough damage to beat them in the time limit. This all came to a boil with the release of the master level difficulty for High Jupiter, where you basically could only run one of two units in public rooms: Gala Cleo or Veronica, and the former was very much preferred. Master High Jupiter was the first time the awful toxicity of the community was really apparent. If you were not running either of those two, you would be Nope! stickered out of existence. (Fun fact: Gala Cleo was so dominant that basically all dark content for a significant amount of time was balanced around her. Someone made a chart of the Fafnir Roy battles, and you can see that the light Fafnir Roy just had way more HP for a very long time because of Gala Cleo. She was even put into "Tier 0" on gamepress due to how meta-defining she was. The only other adventurer to ever be put on that will be talked about shortly.)

Alright, fast forward a little bit and the Agito are coming out and people loved them. The battles were interesting, tough but fair, and well-tuned for the most part. Also, you were relatively free to use units you wanted, so long as every requirement for the battle was fulfilled. Sure, you might have had to change to a secondary unit if someone had already taken you role you want to fill, but you could generally play who you wanted to play. They did make Volk a little too hard at the start, and then made Ciella and the Twins too easy, and then went back to making Kai Yan and Tartarus way harder. Overall, though, they were great battles and with them came the mana spirals, which allowed for older units to be enhanced further so that they could more easily be used in newer content. This was the first step to Karina becoming an absolute monster of a unit. The other two parts she needed were the Shared Skill update (not entirely necessary, but nice to get) and the 2.0 update. The 2.0 update completely rebalanced the game (and absolutely gutted Chrom) and brought major changes to wyrmprints. Wyrmprints after 2.0 all had basically one skill, but you could equip five of them at a time. A team of mana spiraled Karinas with a full deck of doublebuff wyrmprints and Patia's and T!Hope's shared skills could easily immediately get over 50 buffs at the start of a battle. Karina's S1 had its power boosted based on the number of buffs she had. A team of Karinas could eviscerate every single Agito. Needless to say, this was a problem for balance, and the devs were going to need to make changes for Sinister Domain.

Now, I'm not saying Karina was the only reason they added Curse of Nihility, but I think she and buff-stacking as a whole played major parts in it. I also think one of the intentions the Dragalia team had for CoN was to not implement pure powercreep. They wanted to make it so you couldn't just destroy the newest high level content with old units while still not making them wholly outclassed by new units. It's a reasonably noble goal, but it was implemented so, so poorly.

The first issue with CoN was that the replacement for standard buffs, amps, were just not fun to use. The mechanics for how they stacked together were much more complicated than standard buffs, and they couldn't go nearly as high. Also, there were only three types of amps, as opposed to the myriad of buffs available. The second was that not all unique buffs were immune, and the ones they decided weren't seemed kind of arbitrary. They were so arbitrary, in fact, that sometimes they decided to just make ones that weren't originally immune, immune in an update. Yeah, originally Ilia's Alchemical Cartridges weren't immune, despite being a major part of her gameplay, and they decided to just make them immune in the beginning of 2022 (I assume this was to make Dragonyule Ilia, who used the same mechanics, better). Making some character's unique buffs capable of being ruined by CoN made them basically unusable in high level content. Even if they were still reasonably okay, they were boring because they lacked their central gimmick.

In a game that relied so heavily on people becoming attached to specific characters, CoN made it so that there was a very real chance you wouldn't be able to use your favorites. Everyone who knows me knows that I used Mym as my main flame unit the entire game. As soon as she came out, I used her because I liked her design and her character. I also really enjoyed her gameplay loop of trying to gain dragon gauge as quickly as possibly to turn into one of the most powerful dragon transformations in the game and buff herself. I used her extensively before they made her good in the 2.0 balance update. I used her even more after that because she became the unit with the highest damage potential in the entire game (and I think she still technically is). The problem is, I couldn't really use her in either Sinister Domain or Primal Dragon fights because CoN, for some reason, got rid of her personal buff, which means her S2 couldn't be powered up to its full potential. Furthermore, I couldn't do the fun loop of stacking Dragon's Claws and Dragon's Skill to get permanent buffs. I genuinely avoided all the high level content with CoN because I couldn't use my favorite character, and I knew that my other faves from the other elements might not work either. I had some hope when they announced Mym would be getting a spiral, but they did not make her personal buff immune when it was added. At that point I basically swore off high level content. And mine is not a unique story. Anyone who liked support units, anyone who liked buff-stacking units, anyone who liked characters with unique buffs affected by CoN all probably felt the same way. If you look up CoN in a search engine, a ton of the top results are forums and threads of people talking about how they don't like it, or how their favorite character got destroyed by it, or how they were worried that a character's buffs would be affected by it.

I genuinely believe CoN was the final push for Dragalia to fail. In an already struggling game that was for the most part kept alive by people's interest in its difficult and engaging content, and their love for specific characters, CoN appealed to neither of those things. Bosses in Trials of the Mighty, Sinister Domain, and Primal Dragon fights became health sponges, now that most characters couldn't build themselves up with buffs. People couldn't use their favorite characters because the meta was so insanely rigid. People couldn't even hope that their faves would become usable because unlike the Agito and High Dragon battles, where new weapon and wyrmprints could make up for a subpar unit, the devs could not implement an "ignores CoN" weapon effect or wyrmprint because it would trivialize all content the new high level content. It was a recipe for inactivity--for stagnation--where people just waited for event reruns and half of a story chapter instead of focusing on the new content being put out. And in the end, Dragalia died for it.

The death of Dragalia Lost really is tragic because the devs clearly intended for the game to go further. The last New Year's event laid the groundwork for new characters to show up in the next New Year's event. The last summer event established an entirely new city that was supposed to ally with the Halidom. The rebellion in Svenitla never got its resolution. The Dragalia Mini comics showed the final Valentines dragon, and implied that he was coming next year. The team had so many more ideas for Dragalia but ultimately the plug got pulled because it just wasn't making money, and I kind of doubt we're going to see any more Dragalia content for a very long time, if ever. Still, the devs did at least get to finish their story, and I think it would be a shame to disregard it just because so many other things had to be left behind in the process. It's important to enjoy what we did end up getting to experience from a fun little game that never really took off, and if you never actually tried it, then maybe give it a go. Try it out, and see why people are genuinely sad about its finally before the entire thing inevitably gets taken offline. I mean, after all, it's free to start. Goodnight Dragalia Lost, I'll miss you.

#dragalia lost #goodnight dragalia; I'll miss you #I also don't have proof of this point; but I want to bring it up: I think Dragalia was also more expensive to make than FEH #given that the voice work and amount of art for every character is comparable #and you have to have a 3D model and skill animations and programming for how attacks work in a 3D space #along with additional support for any character-specific mechanics #then there's the fact that the character stories are more involved with the different expressions and animations #also some of them are fully voiced in japanese #and the creation of unique bosses that have to be modeled and given extensive attack sequences #and; of course; the music #not to mention the constantly active servers for multiplayer #like I said; I don't have any proof of this; but it would not surprise me in the slightest if Dragalia was as expensive #if not more so than FEH to make and keep running #long post #like really really long post #like I wrote a whole ass essay on dragalia lost here

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