The First Descendant hasn’t even been on the market for two years, and the game’s developer and publisher, Nexon, seems ready to write it off. In a recent financial update, Nexon’s CEO, Junghun Lee, suggested that while The First Descendant did well at launch in July 2024, it quickly fell out of favor with gamers worldwide.
He suggested that ‘structural changes’ would be needed to fix The First Descendant, as what’s wrong with the game goes beyond a simple ‘patch’.
The First Descendant Seems Ready to Collapse
The First Descendant is a third-person looter shooter that relied on pleasing the ‘gooner gamer’ crowd since the moment it hit the market. It’s a divisive title that’s firmly in the middle of the road when it comes to reviews, both from critics and from the average gaming audience.
On Steam, it boasts a mixed rating from 110,000 reviews, and on Metacritic, it has a score of around 57, with a user score of 6.2. It’s not winning any awards with numbers like that, but once upon a time, it was pretty popular.
Taking Steam as the example again, The First Descendant managed to secure an all-time high peak player count of 264,000 users, which isn’t something to scoff at. However, at the time of publishing, the game was floating at around 5,000 peak users per day at best.
On Twitch, it managed to pick up 160,000 concurrent viewers at launch, but at the time of writing, just 200 people were watching the game.
In the recent financial document, Nexon’s CEO and President declared that the game has no staying power. He directly said it’s something that ‘didn’t work’:
Let me start with an assessment of what didn’t work.
Dungeon&Fighter Mobile launched with terrific momentum in 2024, then lost its way. The retention mechanics weren’t strong enough to hold players longterm.
Same issue with The First Descendant: Strong launch, no staying power. These are design issues that are not fixed with a patch – they require structural changes to game mechanics.
For a while, The First Descendant found fame on account of Nexon adding some audacious and hyper-revealing outfits, which proved to be scandalous at best. It was all very short-lived, and even the skimpiest outfit was incapable of retaining too many players.
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Grant has been gaming for 30+ years and in the industry for 10+. You'll probably find him playing a post-apocalyptic game or an extraction shooter somewhere.
More from Grant Taylor-Hill
Still seems better than Saros.
The problems were seven fold, but shit hit the fan when they smashed the power creep button. First they released Ines and Serena with ridiculously over-performing kits, and they cried like bitches when they nerfed the characters and tried to bring them back in line only to be review bombed on steam in retaliation (like anybody can take steam reviews seriously anymore after they’ve been proven to be so easily expoitable).
So they reversed course and let the power creep stay, then kept making successive characters that were just as, if not more powerful, leaving the original characters with horrible under performing kits, then opted to spend months, drip feeding meager updates to the original characters.
Along the way, other variations of power creep were added that only made the original characters worse to play; emphasizing over-performing characters monumental dps via skills. At the same time they severely diminished weapon based damage output; giving bosses buffs against weapon damage (so under-performing characters, who had to rely on weapons, fell into an even worse state).
That hasn’t stopped. Compounded with the incredibly slow content drip feed and a story that’s very badly written and showcases how they never had a plan to begin with.
Whole thing needs to just be converted to a single player game, offline, with optional multiplayer via P2P matching/direct invites from friend lists (like what Wayfinder’s devs managed to do after clawing the game back from Digital Extremes/aka Tencent), and then fix the fucking character balancing and weapon balancing by establishing a base ruleset for damage output/performance across the board, and not just make shit up as they go along without regard to the established metrics. Damned amateurs.
Likely won’t last another year. Director was complaining about the workforce being siphoned away to work on other projects, so it doesn’t seem Nexon is going to keep the lights on and will just let it crash and burn. I give it 2 more months. Tops.
“Staying power” at #195 on the steam charts is still really good. Plus people are still spending 100$ a month on skins. What else do you want?
The problem is nexon relies too much on selling skins instead of making engaging content. Its a terrible business model and im surprised the game has lasted this long
Fr, at the end of the day Gameplay is King, and will always be
I assume this is written by an AI, you repeat the same point 3 times without offering an explanation or perspective on what is broken, only that skimpy outfits arent enough.
I’m not sure what value is being offered by such an empty uninspired take on a news bite.
I’ve been playing TFD since beta. The game was good at first, especially with friends, but was ruined by the constant gooner outfit fishing and the terrible grind. They kept “fixing” stuff with updates that made all the time people put in feel wasted. Making things that took hundreds of hours to grind for take seconds or minutes. Then the constant character rebalancing and changes. Spending hours, days, weeks grinding for the best stuff just for it to be obsolete or changed next big update. Also, the real-time waiting for crafting vs just pay real world money to instant craft stuff was a TERRIBLE idea that was created just for Nexon to make money. The devs kept killing their own momentum. They created a game that REWARDS you for not playing for weeks or months.
I still hop in every few months to start a crystallization catalyst, maybe do some dailies, and a few other missions but after 1206 hours (just checked cause I’m currently on my PS5), I’ve realized that it’ll never have the weight of games like GTA V, Remnant 2, or even other looter shooters. It’s obvious that it was a cash grab, that probably made millions, and that they didn’t have a two year roadmap planned from the start. They didn’t know what the game would become. You can tell by every single character needing a rework within a year of release. It’s a hodgepodge of Destiny 2, Warframe, and idk maybe Borderlands? They keeping having to think up new content to challenge players, it takes months for the content to come out, and when it does its super grindy because it’s really not that much content (still looking for enough of that black stuff for one of the characters and I’m not even gonna THINK about grinding for the last character that got added).
Like this article says, it would need a whole overhaul, not just another “big update”, to make the game function properly. Outside of that, it’s a decent game for gooners with tons of money that they can use to dress up their killer dolls.
Quite plainly …
There’s nothing to do.
At least in Black Desert we could raise animals, farm, deal, cook…all kinds a shit.
But looking at hot ass all day…
(That have no bounce physics)
Gets boring.
Maybe enhance enemy a.i. with REAL A.I. lol!!!
I still play often. Using different descendants and rebuilding them. It was more fun when more friends were playing, to play together. Adding descendants and buffs to them and guns can seem a little overwhelming. Some type of pvp mission might revitalize the game, but to keep adding descendants and guns too frequently is a bit much. The graphics and gameplay is great imo.
Once they banned ppl w/inappropriate nicknames altho some of them I knew were a decent pro & rich spenders there was their big downfall turns backfire for game that violates human rights & freedom of identity. Suck it snitch :,)
All they have to do is literally make the exp grind not take hours and I’ll play again, nothing feels worse than maxing a character then spending hours remaking a character only to do it once more so you can fit more modules. Warframe the exp grind takes 10 minutes or less to max a level so that’s why remaxing isn’t an issue. A lot of folks just get burnt out playing TFD cause of the horrible grind.
The game can be something, if gameplay and innovation was king.