Deconstructing the Unfocused, Brilliant Gacha Tower Defense – Arknights

Tower defense and mobile have long been a tried-and-true match. Just consider games like Plants vs. Zombies and Bloons Tower Defense, which were wildly successful on mobile. What may be a stranger match is combining tower defense with mobile gacha mechanics. Nevertheless, developer Hypergryph and publisher Yostar attempted such a match with Arknights, which launched in China in mid-2019, and globally just 10 months ago.

Judging by its reception, including one reviewer (link) stating Arknights is “the only gacha game I can confidently recommend to people”, Hypergryph and Yostar have gotten something very right here.

Arknights is a mobile tower defense game, in which players move through a series of battles, each with a different stage layout and enemy composition. The ‘towers’ in Arknights are upgradeable characters called ‘operators’, each with different stats and abilities. As players progress through Arknights, they will earn more operators through gacha and story battles. The game has an anime art style, and a dystopian, science-fantasy aesthetic that’s incredibly distinctive.

Since its global release, the game has wavered between the 50th and 100th top free strategy game on Play Store, and the 100th to 200th top card game on the App Store. It is currently the 169th highest grossing Android game overall; not too shabby, yet far from its all-time peak.

How did it get to this point? More importantly… can it do better?

Marketing

Now, you may have just picked up on something bizarre: based on my description, why would Arknights be categorized as a card game or a pure strategy game, per its app listings? This is only the first indication of a very unfocused, sloppy marketing effort. A quick app search reveals that even Bloons TD has both the strategy tag and the ‘tower defense’ tag in its app listings. Arknights, which has major gacha and RPG elements, appears to be misclassified: a major issue for any RPG gacha fans browsing the app store, looking for their next game.

Another sign of Arknights’ inconsistent marketing is in its bizarre ad strategy. Yostar ran a major YouTube ad campaign earlier in the year, but there was little thematic or structural similarity between the half-dozen or so ads released. Some were fairly tongue-in-cheek and used real-world actors and gameplay footage (link), while others were animated videos that looked straight out of an anime (link). Given the differences between the various ads, it’s hard to believe they all targeted the game’s core demographic, evidently young adult anime fans.

Two very different ad styles for Arknights

Genre

Tower defense games in the past have succeeded largely on aesthetics, stage variety, unit variety and balance, and prestige engagement through features like leaderboards. Out of all these factors, unit variety is perhaps the most vital. Players need to feel a sense of autonomy in selecting what strategies to employ, and competence in successfully executing on those strategies, which means a wide array of viable options.

Meanwhile, some of the most commercially successful mobile games are gacha hero collectors like Summoner’s War, Fate/Grand Order, and Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes. The top games in this genre have a wide variety of heroes (sound familiar?), strong social and multiplayer features, and a deep progression system with many upgrade paths. Many games also benefit from strong IPs with large casts of characters, to keep players excited about grinding and spending for new units.

Arknights may have some of these features, but like Summoner’s War, it’s a brand-new IP that needs to carve its own path. So, in terms of gameplay, against the titans of the genre, how does it compare?

Core Gameplay Loop

Core Loop

The central loop of Arknights consists of completing tower defense battles with a variety of distinct operators, using battle rewards to improve those operators, and then progressing to the next battle. Most playtime is devoted not to battles but to preparation, which involves many steps and actions, especially when a difficulty spike in battle forces a player to carefully consider their team composition. These may include completing particular missions (standard gacha RPG quests), spending upgrade materials, and managing a base of operations.

Arknights Core Loop

As the player progresses through the game, battles will be interspersed with dialogue playing out the overarching story. The story is surprisingly solid for a mobile game without any prior IP to follow, and although it does show some common anime tropes, it is compelling enough to hold a player’s interest. There is a significant amount of dialogue, but players uninterested in the story can skip it at any time.

Meanwhile, I find the game’s art incredibly impressive in its detail and aesthetic, with clear influences from anime and cyberpunk. That being said, the game’s dystopian tone can lend itself to an excess of greyscale in its palette, where the contrast isn’t enough to make out small objects on-screen. This can be a problem during a heated battle, with many units in close proximity. That being said, while the operators have a very detailed appearance in gacha banners and menus, they are rendered in a simpler chibi style during battle and base management.

Battles

Battles in Arknights, like in other tower defense games, involve placing operators on or along a path, and using them to prevent waves of enemies from reaching a designated spot. Almost every stage has a different layout, and all have different enemy units and pacing, ensuring that no exact strategy will work just as well each time. The player begins with a number of deployment points, which increase as the battle goes on, as well as a limit on how many operators the player can deploy at one time. Certain operators can only target or affect certain enemy units, and some classes are better suited for certain enemies or situations than others.

The battle system in Arknights is one of its strongest features. Given how many factors the player must take into consideration, there is a significant degree of strategy and focus involved, such that a battle can literally be won or lost by the split-second placement of one unit. A few such factors:

• Operator positioning

• Operator range

• Operator skills

• Deployment costs

• Redeployment costs (in case an operator is defeated and must be replaced)

• Special enemy units

• Stage layout

Battles can be auto-played, but only if a player proves their skill by achieving three stars on the stage (allowing no enemies to reach the end), which may involve multiple repeat plays.

A midgame battle with traps, grassy camouflage tiles, and multiple enemy sources (red)

Due to the challenge involved in mastering a battle, the most common stage layouts and enemy compositions effectively drive the in-game ‘meta’ guiding which operators players will prioritize. The genius of this is, since even lower-ranked operators may be outperform high-ranking operators on certain missions, Hypergryph can easily nudge the meta whichever way they want by releasing new content.

Operators

Operators play a number of roles beyond just their combat abilities and stats, but these are the primary traits driving whether players will make an effort to acquire them and use them. Again, it is important that any gacha RPG have distinct units with a number of upgrade options. In this regard, Arknights excels by allowing players to upgrade or change the following:

• Levels, which increase stats and are essential for unlocking other upgrades, but quickly ramp up in cost

• Skill levels, which makes their skills vastly more effective and may even change how those skills handle

• Elite levels, which are set at 0 for new operators and are expensive to promote, but increase an operator’s level cap and grant new skills, to a max of Elite 2

• Potential, which changes a number of stats, and requires duplicates obtained through gacha to unlock

• Appearance Options, which increase once a unit reaches Elite 2 status, or can be purchased using premium currency

The inclusion of multiple upgrade paths, using a wide array of resources, encourages the player to constantly upgrade some of their operators, even if they can’t afford to upgrade their most powerful ones. It also provides another tool for Hypergryph to significantly increase Arknights’ longevity, by simply increasing the caps for level, skill level, Elite level, and potential. However, even with the current upgrade trees, players report having a hard time upgrading the rarer units.

Operator page for a highly-upgraded Projekt Red, a melee vanguard operator

New Player Experience

Arknights’ new player experience is a mixed bag, if we consider the goals of a new player experience to be (1) introducing the game mechanics, and (2) getting the player excited about progression while priming them to spend. The game is quite flawed in the former, but undeniably succeeds in the latter.

The first chapter of the game largely consists of guided battles with a limited roster, interspersed with fixed-roster tutorials that introduce new mechanics over time. Though this approach is effective, the tutorials play out very, very slowly; I would be curious to see Arknights’ churn rate in the first chapter alone. After about 30 minutes to 1 hour, when the player unlocks the full main menu, the tutorials drop in quality significantly. The guided tutorials give way to confusing info dumps which, after several chapters of text-based story, most players will likely tune out.

After a few introductory battles, Arknights gives players access to a beginner banner that guarantees two 6-star operators, the rarest tier in the game. Giving players powerful units right off the bat gives them a cushion to cover for tactical mistakes, and genre-savvy players may pour all their resources into upgrading those units first. But, in doing so, they give themselves challenging, long-term goals that will keep them hungry and engaged for a while. Similarly, players develop a rhythm for completing many battles in quick succession, only to hit a pinch point as battle stamina costs vastly outpace stamina recovery, pushing them to pay for more.

Other Mechanics & Loops

Base Management

As players gather certain materials from battle, they can begin funneling those materials into upgrades for their base. The base, in turn, provides resources for upgrading operators. Players can even choose the layout of their base and which structures to build, depending on what resources they want most. Here, operators see their biggest use outside of battle, as they can be stationed within the base to provide various bonuses.

The base increases engagement by not only giving players a degree of control over some valuable resource taps, but also contributing to feelings of player immersion into the role of a military commander. It’s hard to deny the similarities to the base-building from XCOM, but it succeeds at the same goal, despite being far less complex. The added immersion is important in giving players more of a stake in the storyline.

An endgame or late-midgame base, with nearly all of its building slots filled

Support Unit

Starting in the introductory chapter, players can call on a ‘Support Unit’ before battle, essentially an operator loaned from another player. In battle, Support Units are added to a player’s team, costing their normal deployment cost and counting toward the limit, essentially functioning like any other unit. Using Support Units drives the friend feature, and also gives players a preview of units they may not have access to or haven’t leveled, giving them new recruitment goals.

Support Units increase engagement by granting resources and encouraging gacha, but diminishes in value over time. Letting new players preview powerful units is a great way to get them excited about new operators and keep them rolling the dice on banners that feature those units. However, Support Units become far less useful as a player approaches endgame, and could very well have acquired their desired units or at least have a good sense of which ones they want, at which point it functions as little more than an extra slot.

Lore & Trust

Arknights goes above and beyond in providing extremely detailed lore and backstories for each character and their respective faction. The game helps players dip their toes into the lore via the base-building mechanic, whereby assigning operators to work in the base increases Trust, in turn unlocking more lore snippets as well as new abilities. Some characters even play roles in the story, and develop as the story progresses.

The lore increases engagement by increasing the sense of immersion in the detailed game world, as well as contributing to a sense of connectedness to the story and operators. Given Arknights’ focus on story and aesthetic, any feature that encourages players to feel more viscerally connected is a win. This feature isn’t perfect – the lore is buried in the Operator menu and it’s another one of those features that doesn’t get its own tutorial, so many players won’t prioritize it – but it’s clearly effective. Taking one look at social media, the most fervent discussion is not about team meta or content releases; it’s about operator memes, cosplay, and fanart.

Three of the most highly upvoted posts on the Arknights subreddit

There is another benefit to the lore system: encouraging spending. Many backstories reference other operators and their factions, and it takes a fair bit of time to max out an operator’s Trust. So, if a player’s favorite operator has deep lore connections to another, why not spend a few dollars to get them both on the same team?

Progression

Game progression is fairly straightforward, with battles becoming more challenging in their layouts, enemy variety, and enemy team size over time, while operators become stronger. Daily and weekly missions, as well as the base, are the biggest resource taps, and although they initially appear quite generous, players quickly realize how many resources each upgrade costs. Players will likely spend a lot at the start as they come to grips with the game and identify which operators they prefer, but as they move into the midgame, they should develop their core strategies and identify which operators they want most. From then on, players will likely be much more strategic about their grinding and where they focus their gacha efforts.

There are a few interesting changes at the endgame, however. At that point, sanity recovery becomes extremely scarce compared to the cost of battles (~3 hours of sanity recovery for one battle), such that a player will run through their daily allotment very quickly, unless they pay premium currency. The difficulty of the battles, particularly challenge battles and extended ‘Annihilation’ battles, will also force players to devote far more time grinding to upgrade their team. Thus, the game slows down significantly at this stage, with session time dedicated to preparation far more than the battles themselves.

I would speculate the rationale by Hypergryph behind these endgame quirks to be increasing the longevity of their game without adding substantial new content. Unfortunately, this strategy risks alienating both the hardcore players who grow weary of the limited sanity allotment, and the casual players who find themselves hitting a brick wall of difficulty.

An endgame battle; the player has already defeated 350 powerful enemies, and 50 remain

Social Features

In-Game

In-game social features are rather minimal, and primarily factor into the core gameplay loop via Support Units. Additionally, friends can visit a player’s base, though this does little more than give players more resources. Bases are so limited in their aesthetics and layout options – outside of the Dormitory – that there is no need for a more involved social mechanic involving the bases. That is not to say that a deeper visiting feature would not be a welcome addition, if players had more options for customization.

Out-of-Game

Out-of-game social features do not exist per se. However, there is a lot of social activity on platforms like Reddit which are, to an extent, driven by Arknights’ delayed China-global release schedule. Although the delay between Chinese and global content releases is shrinking, Hypergryph has made it clear that the global release will follow the same update path. As a result, the gameplay meta has essentially been discovered already, and players know what to expect from upcoming operators, which eliminates much of the discovery and discussion that endgame RPG communities tend to enjoy.

That being said, other RPGs have seemingly turned this into a boon. Final Fantasy: Record Keeper also has a delay between Japanese and global releases, but FFRK players welcome these ‘leaks’ and use them to plan their gacha spending and upgrade materials around which new characters appear most useful. There may be downsides in terms of spending consistency and a pressure toward power creep, but these are already persistent issues for gacha games.

Monetization

There is one premium currency, Originite Prime, which underlies Arknights’ monetization model. Originite Prime can be acquired by completing a mission at three stars for the first time, rarely through daily logins, or by purchasing it with real money in the store. While a player will gain a substantial amount of Originite Prime as they play, mission completion will gradually become harder and require more sanity, slowing the tap significantly.

Gacha

Outside of a handful of operators earned through story battles, there are two ways to acquire new operators. One method is called Recruitment, in which a player selects a handful of operator descriptors, sets a recruitment time (up to 9 hours), and then waits for their reward, usually a lower-star operator matching one or two of the chosen descriptors. Recruitment is inexpensive from a resource perspective, but takes time, offers poor odds, and cannot provide the highest-tier 6-star units.

The more traditional method is called Headhunting, which follows a traditional gacha format, and is far more expensive. Players roll the dice for one or more pulls, usually on a banner with increased rates for certain operators. Besides the helpful beginner banner discussed previously, Arknights offers a ‘pity mechanic’, whereby the odds of drawing a 6-star unit (normally 2%) increase if the player has not drawn a 6-star after 50 pulls.

Gacha banner focusing on a variety of characters with lore connections

Arknights’ gacha system works excellently. The deeper and wider a gacha, the more retention and long-term spend a game has, and Arknights succeeds at both. Due to the variety of battle layouts and enemy compositions, there is a wide range of potential strategies, and lower-star operators can have great uses or even be the best choice for particular scenarios. As a result, the gacha is wide, with even lower-star rewards being worth a closer look. The gacha also rather deep due to the value (and rarity) of dupes, especially for 6-star operators, as a player needs to pull any operator six times to max out their potential.

For those not statistically-inclined, your odds of pulling 6-star operators six times in 100 pulls is 1.5%. Given that there are 32 6-star operators, and assuming a player isn’t pulling on a banner that favors specific operators, their chance of getting their favorite operator fully promoted is a scant 0.004%, even after 1000 pulls. The odds are low enough that if certain operators truly set a meta, or if the game was PvP, the game would be downright untenable for non-whales.

Outfits

Each operator has a number of outfits that affect their detailed menu appearance as well as their chibi in-battle avatar. These outfits are purely for aesthetic purposes and have no gameplay effect, though each operator has one outfit only unlocked by reaching Elite 2. Outfits are visually very distinct, with Hypergryph even classifying them by in-game ‘brands’. Any outfits not unlocked via promotion are instead limited-time store purchases using Originite Prime.

Given the game’s detailed and unique art style, as well as its focus on making players feel attached to operators, selling premium outfits is a great fit. Making the outfits limited-time purchases also induces a sense of FOMO that can be helpful in driving purchases, and engage interested players by getting them more invested in the event and outfit release schedule. For players with a variety of desired outfits for many operators, they will likely find themselves hitting a pinch point as the Originite Prime tap slows: a great incentive to pay up.

Three available outfits for the operator Grani

Bundles

Players can purchase bundles and resources directly from the store using real money. These include upgrade materials, recruitment items, gacha currency, and of course Originite Prime. There is a staggering amount of resources needed to improve operators, so buying resources or bundles is an easy way for players finding themselves stuck on a level to afford some much-needed upgrades. Bundles will also appeal to players that are no longer receiving Originite Prime at a fast rate, and may have no other choice if they want a particular outfit or gacha banner pull before it’s too late.

All available materials and currencies in Arknights

Recommendations

#1 – Consistent, Focused Marketing Strategy

Arknights’ spray-and-pray approach to advertising clearly hasn’t worked, given its declining app rankings. I would safely bet that the more reserved, character-focused, anime-style ads performed much better than its live-action ads. Regardless, Yostar should take a close look at its metrics and double-down on what has worked. Additionally, given the compelling aesthetic and (on a surface level) simple gameplay, the game could potentially fare well with the types of playable ads that have proven so effective lately.

#2 – Strategic Additions to the Operator Pool

From the lore to the gacha to the outfits, so much of what makes the game engaging and monetizable depends on its roster of operators. So many characters are connected to one another in the lore, often through detailed factions, but there are no strict synergies between them. Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes does this very well by synergizing Jedi characters, Empire characters, Jawa characters, and so forth, encouraging players to build faction-based teams and spend on faction-based bundles. Adding new operators with specific skill or talent synergies within their factions would almost certainly drive more ‘cross-selling’ of outfits and gacha.

#3 – Overhaul the New Player Experience

As it stands, new players may enjoy the early combat missions and interspersed tutorials. However, it takes far too long for the base-building and other out-of-battle mechanics to play a role, at which point new players will likely be overwhelmed by the info dump. Hypergryph could improve the new player experience by speeding up the first chapter of combat tutorials, and interspersing some more guided tutorials of the non-core mechanics in-between.

#4 – Significantly Improve the Social Experience

Though they might want to, players currently have no way (or reason) to show off their operator outfits and bases. Adding new base customization options and sharing features would help capitalize on players’ attachments to their operators. Another great improvement would be some new form, perhaps a co-op PvE mode like a base defense based on the players’ base layouts (killing two birds with one stone). Such an addition would also improve the endgame for more casual and hardcore players alike, especially if it used a different sanity/energy pool than the main battles, by giving players something to do when their daily battle allotment runs out.

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Arknights, with its exceptionally fun core loop, and its distinctive lore and aesthetic, clearly has had the potential to be a smash hit. Though its style may not appeal as universally as a series like Bloons TD, it certainly has room to improve its commercial and popular ranking. By laser-focusing on what Arknights fans love about the game, and introducing new content and features that capitalize on those aspects, Hypergryph might retain more players and build an even more engaged and dedicated community. By projecting a stronger, more cohesive message on why gamers should even give Arknights a try, publisher Yostar has a chance to bring a new wave of players into the game, players who may just discover their new favorite (anime) (gacha) tower defense.