You thought our Summer Game Fest coverage was over, didn’t you? Well, in all fairness, Nexon not only brought The First Descendant to SGF but provided a post-event code to check out the game for roughly a week, ending recently and not on the July 2nd game release date, so I’ve been checking it out post-event too, plus creative director Minseok Joo and producer Beomjun Lee were kind of enough to answer some of our interview questions too.
What I will say upfront is that like Battleborne before it, The First Descendant is a solid PvE hero shooter-looter doing things I think the Overwatch crowd wanted, though FD has a few things that may keep them out of it. That being said, if you’re looking for deep customization in a skill-based looter shooter with a fairly strong Eastern appeal, The First Descendant is looking like a good game to pick up.
Technically good
Now, to be clear, post-event, I had limited time with the game, and there was a notable lack of other players in the test, so I logged only a few more hours of gameplay, and a lot of it was spent trying to figure out things like “What’s the difference between regular characters and Ultimate ones?” or waiting in queue for a couple minutes wondering where everyone was, especially as I (randomly?) was switched from Public (meaning allowing random grouping for the 4-player co-op content) to Private (meaning solo mode) to start my mission solo. 6/26 Update: PR confirmed that multiplayer wasn’t available in my build, so I’m not at fault, weeee!
For the “Ultimate” versions of characters, Joo said that Ultimate Descendants are “enhanced” versions of the normal Descendants. “They possess more powerful physical abilities and can undergo skill modifications exclusive to Ultimate Descedants,” plus they get their own skins. As you can see above, they can be very similar to the base versions (these two builds have at least the same raw stats, and the kitted-out versions matched too), but I wasn’t able to explore the nitty-gritty customizations options as much as I would have liked to.
There’s another point I must admit to about this “SGF” write-up: Both at SGF and after it, I had access to a “Boosted” mode for test purposes, where basically all characters were maxed out, had tons of items/mods, and had most of the customizations unlocked. My post-SGF account also had a “Normal” mode where I could experience the game as a normal player, and I’d say at least 60% of my actual playtime was there as Ajax. In boosted mode, I used both Bunny and Ultimate Bunny, current “coming soon” characters Yujin and Esiemo, Valby, and Lepic.
Obviously, as I am a MassivelyOP writer, multiplayer is very important to me. As I was unable to group with anyone at the SGF hands-on demo and during my test period, I wasn’t able to get to the meat most appropriate to our readers. To compound the lack of multiplayer, I’m also usually a tank, a healer, or a controller. Those roles weren’t the best for solo play in First Descendant.
Now, at times the game reminded me of Monster Hunter with tighter controls and mostly guns, which is good, but that was mostly in terms of basic mechanics. The character abilities often seem like they’d be at home in a modern MMO, with stuns, knockbacks, slows, and yes, the holy MMO trinity, as Joo assured me the team wasn’t looking to make any character a “Superman […] who could do anything alone.” You can play solo, but my biggest complaint of my demo time was not getting to play with other players.
The game’s tutorial, both for the on-site demo and “Normal” mode I got at home, were quite on-point. Movement should be fairly familiar to FPS players, especially hero-shooter types. What was kind of interesting to me is that your melee attack has a cooldown: At first it’s a pretty strong attack, and then it reverts to a low-damage gun-butt attack while it’s on cooldown. I thought that was a neat addition that PvP shooters could consider.
As in many other demos I saw this year, there were grappling hooks involved, but they felt pretty tight once you get the timing down with double jumps that really allow you to get around levels. In terms of power, balance, and controls, it’s nothing out of the ordinary, except that on the biggest bosses, there are yellow-highlighted grappling points on them where – under the right conditions – you can latch onto the boss and ride Monster Hunter-style. It’s not quite as intense, but it was interesting enough that I always made it a point to give it a try, as both executing the move and the resulting animations were quite satisfying. Note, I did this only in the Boosted modes, and I tried a variety of bosses of varying strengths, so how effective the grapple-attacks are is hard to measure.
Combat itself is pretty familiar. You have a hero passive, the aforementioned melee strike, shoot, aim-shot, three active abilities, and an “ultimate” ability. You also set three guns outside of combat and can freely rotate between them, such as have a pistol, machine gun, and sniper rifle. While many other games had you switching between two weapon sets and abilities, FD has you cycling through three weapons – but none of them really affect your character abilities, so it was a nice change.
Of the characters I tried, the Bunnies were the most interesting. You generate electricity with a certain move and discharge with other moves. Generation comes from movement, especially running, and discharges range from simply landing after a double jump to release an AoE electric shockwave to simply blasting lighting like a laser canon. I say “Bunnies” because both the normal Bunny and “Ultimate” seemed like the same character aside from their skins. I really tried to figure out whether there was any difference between the two, but even looking at the stats, I saw no difference.
It’s very hard to comment on Yujin, as he was the first character I tried and he’s a healer. As I was in a giant boss battle, I was simply happy I was able to clear it with him, so yes, healers can DPS, though it didn’t feel like his strong suit. Esiemo’s animations are a bit gross (he smells his own armpits, and he looked quite pleased with the scent…), and in terms of gameplay… I guess he’s DPS? I didn’t note anything super exciting, but I also admittedly didn’t do any deep reading into his moves, so all I can say is that any meat he has is below the surface. If you’re into characters that are quick to pick up, he’s either a solid enough pick or more complex.
Valby was pretty neat, as she’s got both a water-teleport type move and a kind of “ghost” mode that leaves a trail of damaging water. Her bounce bullet felt pretty neat, as did her ultimate, which acts like an AoE pull and I could see it doing very well in groups, though you need a certain debuff on them to pull.
Lepic felt a bit like Valby in that they both have access to an AoE pull, but while Valby feels more tricky, Lepic felt straightforward, not needing the debuff for his AoE pull plus having explosive specials to combo with his own pull. It’ll be interesting to see what the nitty-gritty balance differences are between the characters as people really get into the game’s guts.
For the main gameplay, I went Ajax, in case I could group. It’s a shame I couldn’t, as he felt really fun as a tank. His wall-building skill was useful both to give me temporary cover and to protect objectives during missions. His leap with AoE stun was highly useful, especially when comboed with his AoE knockback. I’ve always enjoyed a good knockback, especially when I can knock stuff off of a cliff and into the void, and Ajax didn’t disappoint on that front.
He is a tank, though, so certain missions I did felt a bit rough, and I ended up gaining levels from repeatedly failing, which lead to gaining enough stats and skills to clear it. Hopefully this won’t be a release issue because he could a really fun tank in a group.
The overall level of customization feels crazy for a hero shooter too. No, you can’t change a character’s ethnicity or gender, but you can change makeup (men and women, though some of it’s just scars), headskin (which is like helmets and hats), chest (like pins), back (like jet packs), and body (costumes). You can change your grappling hook’s look, spawn animation, and some other things. Oh, and there are dyes. Lots of dyes, for very specific parts of your gear. What’s neat is that all the (non-dye) options seem to have a kind of lore story behind them, like why Lepic can suddenly be blond or how you got a certain costume.
Don’t worry, min/maxers: There are plenty of weapon, slot, and character enhancements too. Like, an intimidating number. Admittedly, I don’t fully understand it as I mostly only could access it via my Boosted account option, but it’s there in spades.
And you’ll probably want to min-max, as not only are there normal and hard modes but hard mode lets you tune things up for higher chances of getting good rewards on the rewards mission screen. These range from 10% less health to things like no jumping or using your grappling hook. You can pay some kind of currency to change the available list, as you get several options at seemingly random. I saw total odds from taking all challenges range from 150% to 210%, the latter of which, among other things, disabled both jump and grappling hook, so be careful!
While the mechanics of the game are theoretically enticing from what I could tell with my limited hands-on, there were a few catches.
Stock personality
Unlike the casts of a lot of Western hero shooters these days, the cast of The First Descendant is decidedly European and Asian, and aside from old man Ajax, all seem to be in their 20s or 30s, with no heavyset characters in sight.
That being said, as Joo and I discussed, they’re all kind of like X-Men, as their Arche (think mutations) awakened from traumatic experiences and caused some kind of havoc they have to learn from, basically by teaming up with others like themselves. Your heroes have lost limbs, fought to overcome paralysis (less the RPG stat and more the medical you-may-never-walk-again kind), lost parents and comrades… it’s tragic war stuff, but I didn’t see it come out in my limited playtime.
In fact, some of the skins really undercut that. While X-men isn’t perfect, I also would argue that a lot of the mutants’ traumatic pasts get revealed quickly, such as Rogue not being able to touch other people without hurting them. Similar nuance didn’t pop up at all in my first few missions for any of the main characters and maybe only hinted at about an NPC.
Let’s look at Bunny, who Lee referred to as the game’s “mascot.” Bunny stole a grenade as a kid and dropped it, setting it off. How she wasn’t annihilated is beyond me, and getting off with only paralysis seems light. But when she is an adult, none of that is displayed; she’s not only recovered from her paralysis but quite athletic, she’s still helping you Indiana-Jones some tech, she runs ahead of you, and she gets into a bit of trouble much like you’d expect from a kid who hasn’t learned her lesson. Mechanically, Bunny is a great character, but lore-wise, from what I saw, she could be any stereotypical female character getting into trouble and needing to be rescued.
To compound the lack of backstory support via in-game action for the first few levels, only the female characters are heavily sexualized in their skins, despite the roster having a brooding bad boy, skunky dirtbag, sexy chef, and even a guy who looks like he could join a KPop band.
This isn’t just about who is being sexualized, though. It’s also about skin choices. All the women seem to have both a maid outfit and some kind of school uniform, including Valby, who is supposed to be limited to her special suit just to live. Perhaps largely because of the kink costumes, the male toons often have two fewer costumes than female characters. I don’t want to spend too much more time on the game’s apparent efforts to appeal almost exclusively to a specific demographic, but some readers may want to be aware of this potential shortcoming.
The story in-game isn’t much better. The audio/visual sync is a bit weird, like old-school Godzilla dub levels. Some of the areas where your chosen Descendant plugs a reply into what seems like stock-story dialogue can be off. The out-of-action world is complex, and I appreciate Joo mentioning how even though the story is dramatized, the trauma the characters have undergone can remain that way, become a turning point, or transform into a new way of life.
Seeing that in-game would be awesome, and the way things are presented could be fine depending on the way your culture tackles stories, but as a Western player, I feel as if players are thrown into the middle of something unrelated to what we can read on the site and are expected to understand whatever we end up playing. Even having read the online story bits and watched lore videos prior to playing, I felt lost. I don’t know if there was any outside consultation used to tackle stories about experiencing amputation or living with multiple personality disorder or other issues the characters experience, but lacking that could be a reason why the characters in-game seemed like cliches instead of nuanced characters.
While all this could be a result of my limited play experiences, there are hints that it’s something else. Little things, like what seems like some big bad alien dude being unironically named “Greg,” or big curve balls, like your mission objective to get “the one” was just “part of the one” and everyone in-game knew that and is cool with what happens to it while you’re sitting there wondering if you missed something. Maybe there was a translation problem with that last bit, but if it was an intentional storytelling strategy, it felt cheap, like most old-school Scooby Doo episodes making little to no sense with their “clues.”
All that being said, though, there’s a of neat world-building if you read what’s on the company site or in-game descriptions. It’s the one thing that really stood out to me prior to SGF. While the game’s action has you racing against a big bad to assemble something while listening to a mysterious voice, in the background lore, you basically have three races fighting for survival, with one (currently vaguely subdued) trying to annihilate everyone, another doing the same but also having defectors helping out humanity, and humans trying to kick everyone out off their turf. There’s some nuanced stuff going on, and I hope it comes out in later levels of play, but the opening beats suffer from either translation issues or storytelling missteps.
Luckily, future stories are supposed to roll out seasonally and unrelated to Battle Pass purchases (which, I’m told, offer cosmetics for those who try challenging content), so hopefully more of what I’ve read gets baked into cutscenes if they aren’t already in there in later parts of the game. And speaking of seasons, Joo noted that unrelated to the Battle Pass, there will be new systems and other content on top of story updates, which is pretty good for a free-to-play game. In fact, early feedback on the gameworld feeling dead has already been addressed during beta, so we can also say the devs are listening right now.
Of those future systems, at least during the development phase, Lee noted that despite being developed for consoles, the game is meant to be played online, and couch co-op isn’t currently on the menu. In fact, driving home the online co-op, Lee told me, “If there is one aspect that has remained unchanged from the early development stages to now, it would be our direction as a cooperative PvE shooter.” He also notes that the “Overwatch series did not have a significant impact on [The First Descendant]” because the devs aimed to make a co-op game long before Blizzard messed up the original OW2 pitch.
Lee’s understanding that prior to the OW2 debacle that “there are not many PvE-centric shooter games released,” and it “is something [he] also [finds] disappointing as a gamer” speaks volumes though, so when he says, “We developed this game for many gamers, including myself, who are eagerly waiting for a PvE shooter,” I believe him.
OWÂ was never perfect, but at its release, I didn’t feel it offered gamers anything new, particularly in terms of mechanics. I applauded the inclusiveness of the cast and understood that the game’s guts, largely borrowed from other titles, appealed to mainstreamer gamers who hadn’t seen the same features in other games years before. The First Descendant, on the other hand, isn’t impressing me with its characters’ in-game presentations, but did wow me with the way it borrowed from other games and built something that may not exactly be new but still feels not only fresh but challenging, something I don’t often get to applaud in online gaming PvE.
Overall, The First Descendant has some great bones for hero-shooter-looter fans, with no PvP to fear. The mechanics are fun, some of the characters feel mechanically solid, and it’s very single-player accessible, though as everything is instanced. It’s not “alone together” gameplay, just either alone or together.
If you’re looking for Western tastes and storytelling, though, you may not get it here. While there is evidence of good world-building right down to customization flavor text, its marriage to in-game dialogue and cutscenes is very much a hit-and-miss endeavor. There’s going to be a crowd that loves this game, some who can play it casually to kill time, but also some who will see it as a stereotypical “Asian game” and avoid it, which isn’t completely fair but could have been avoided. There are worse gaming sins out there, so unless story is really high up on your list of reasons to play a game, The First Descendant is at least worth trying.
