The First Descendant has made quite a splash since it launched earlier this month. Nexon‘s looter shooter, dubbed “Warframe with waifus” by the greater internet, has done big numbers on Steam and seems to have been generally well-received, but there are definite flaws.
Those flaws may have proven fatal for my interest in the game, and if you’re familiar with Nexon’s reputation, it won’t surprise you that grind and monetization are at the heart of the issues.
I had pretty low expectations going in to The First Descendant, but my early impressions were largely positive. I expected a low quality mindless loot grinder, but I found a moderate to high-quality mindless loot grinder.
To be sure, there’s nothing particularly original or clever here, but the gameplay loop remains satisfying. Missions are mostly fast and simple, keeping you on a constant train of quick dopamine hits, and the guns feel great to use, largely owing to some very punchy sound design.
I didn’t get far enough to really dive into the full potential of builds, but between the variety of guns and gear modules, I suspect you could do a lot to tweak and specialize each character. The potential for theorycrafting appears high.
I did notice some issues that might get tiresome in the long term. Enemy AI is extremely dumb; NPCs’ only tactic seems to be slowly march forward, making themselves into easy targets. Bosses all seem to have the same immunity phase mechanic in that they become invulnerable until you destroy several small floating balls above them. But at least in the short term, the game was more fun than not.
The sexualization of the female characters gets a lot of attention, both from fans and critics. It wasn’t as bad as I was expecting, but it’s not not bad. I’m definitely damning with faint praise here, but at least all the female characters appear to be of the age of majority and have at least one skin where they’re fully clothed, which feels like the best you can expect from Korean games in the current paradigm.
I’ve heard a lot of hate for the story, but I think it works for what it is. It’s basically just window-dressing, but it’s not really trying to be more than that. I actually appreciate the extreme in media res approach where almost nothing is explained. It feels immersive that the characters don’t pause in the middle of a war to explain the full history of their world, and you can pick up the basics as you go.
The characters are surprisingly well-realized by the admittedly low standards of this style of game, and I appreciate that many of the playable Descendants are introduced as NPCs first, allowing you to get a sense of their personalities before you play as them. There’s also unique personal quests for at least some Descendants to flesh out their stories, which is an embellishment I really appreciate.
The voice-acting is hit and miss, but some of the actors seem to have had a lot of fun with their roles, and the translation is better than I’ve seen in most import titles (again, low bar), excluding some odd stylistic quirks like the much-lampooned “Commander Greg.” I assume that’s a case of something seeming like a plausible fantasy name in Korean but not in English, as it’s played quite straight.
So it’s hardly a masterpiece, but I think the basic building blocks of the game make for a good time. Like Lost Ark before it, it’s definitely junk food gaming, but there’s a place for that.
My problems with the game mainly stem from the mechanics around unlocking characters.
My ability to enjoy RPG and RPG-adjacent games is heavily dependent on finding a class/character that I like, and I often have to reroll a few times to find one that I’m happy with. I have always resented when games lock me into a character and require me to grind or pay to try anything new. It immediately killed any chance of my ever enjoying Marvel Heroes, and it’s rankled every time I’ve encountered it since. The First Descendant is no exception.
TFD currently features fourteen playable characters, not counting their ultimate variants, but to start you can choose only one of three, and those three all so aggressively vanilla that I half believe they were designed to be boring so you’d be pushed toward the cash shop sooner.
Lacking a more appealing choice, I picked Ajax, a tank character who mostly just summons shields. To be fair, he’s very powerful. I pretty much steam-rolled all content by simply bunkering down behind my shields and picking enemies off at leisure. But it didn’t make for a very exciting playstyle.
You do unlock a second character, a glass cannon speedster named Bunny, early in the story with little effort, and I had hope she would impress where Ajax didn’t, but I found I didn’t much enjoy playing her, either. I can definitely see how she could be fun for some people, but I found her frenetic playstyle exhausting.
That leaves me with two unappealing options: grind for an indeterminate length of hours as characters I don’t enjoy to unlock one I do, or fork over cash to unlock someone new now.
What’s really killer about this is there’s no guarantees that I would enjoy whatever character I do unlock, regardless of method. There’s enough variety among the playable characters that I’m reasonably confident I’d like at least a couple (though the fact that I’m 0 for 2 so far is concerning), and some seem appealing on paper, but I just won’t know for sure until I try them.
If I had the potential to try before I buy, I’d strongly consider just forking over the cash, but I’m not willing to take the gamble sight unseen. Similarly, I might be more inclined to grind, but RNG being what it is, there’s no way of knowing how many hours it would take, and that’s too daunting a prospect when I’m already struggling to enjoy the game on my current characters.
In theory I can see the appeal of character-collecting games like this, and I have often said I’m more interested in grinding for new skills or playstyles than for strict numerical gear upgrades, but there needs to be a way for me to get into a character or build I enjoy right off the bat. Not having that just kills games for me.
I also don’t appreciate that the Descendants are arranged into totally arbitrary tiers, with some being significantly harder or more expensive to unlock. Even the cheapest are over $10 in my currency, which seems steep. Let’s not even get into the bonkers prices for ultimate variants, which can run around $100, and just take comfort in the fact most people seem to agree their bonuses are too small to grant a major advantage.
There are other gripes to raise with the business model, too. There are very few options for no visual customization of Descendants without paying. You can’t even hide your helmet without a skin. I’m all for monetizing cosmetics, but that’s a bit much.
Dyes are a particular source of criticism for many people. They’re not exactly single-use, but they do become locked to a piece of gear once used. You can apply or remove a dye from a skin as many times as you want, but if you want to apply that dye to a different skin, you need to buy it again. You also can’t dye default skins; you need to buy or unlock one to start using dyes.
There are some free skins available through the battlepass, but the selection is limited, and the grind to get them seems significant. I think I saw a tooltip about unlocking cosmetics by collecting lore entries, but I couldn’t find anything about what those cosmetics are or exactly how I get them. Given the game’s stinginess, I expect it would just be something trivial like a spray, if anything.
There’s a part of me that wants to play more of TFD, but I don’t think I can overcome my distaste for the characters I currently have available to me, nor do I think it’s terribly likely that the mechanics around unlocking new characters are going to change much given how integral they are to TFD‘s business model. Most gamers seem to be fine with this sort of thing in other games that have done it, like Warframe and Marvel Heroes, so maybe it’s just a me problem.
The world of online gaming is changing. As the gray area between single-player and MMO becomes ever wider, Massively OP’s Tyler Edwards delves into this new and expanding frontier biweekly in Not So Massively, our column on battle royales, OARPGs, looter-shooters, and other multiplayer online titles that aren’t quite MMORPGs.
