Lately most of my gaming time has gone into two games: World of Warcraft and The First Descendant. They’re both very grindy games, but in almost totally opposite ways, so I thought it might be interesting to compare the two and explore what do they do differently, which I prefer, and where they could improve.
The big difference is time-gating. World of Warcraft absolutely loves its time gating. Almost everything is on a daily or weekly lockout, and while you technically can run most content again before it resets the next day/week, you’ll get little to no rewards for doing so.
This is unsurprising in a game that still relies on a subscription for its primary income. Blizzard is financially incentivized to make everything take as long as possible in terms of real calendar days.
By comparison, almost nothing in The First Descendant is time-gated. Crafting timers could be considered a form of time gating, but since they don’t gate you out of continuing to play or earn rewards, I’m not going to count them. Yes, I have to wait a day for my energy activator to finish cooking, but nothing’s stopping me from farming materials for my next activator in the meantime.
Let’s say I run a raid in WoW looking for a specific item. If it doesn’t drop, I have to wait until next week to try again. If a run a mission in TFD and don’t get the item I want, I can just keep running it until I get the drop, no matter how many attempts it takes.
Neither system is perfect, and each has its pros and cons. WoW‘s gating helps narrow the progress gap between the players with the most versus the least time to play, especially when combined with the various catch-up mechanics that are increasingly common in the game.
Meanwhile TFD might not gate how often you run content but tends to require a brutal amount of runs to get the best rewards. Unless you get incredibly lucky with ticket drops, it will take roughly seventy kills of Defiler — the hardest intercept boss in the game — just to get one of the skins that are the main reward for it.
That said, I have decided that I strongly prefer TFD‘s approach.
The time-gated nature of WoW‘s rewards fosters an intense sense of FOMO in me. When I’m pursuing a specific reward, I feel the need to run the content every time it is available as soon as it is available. Again, I’ll use the raid example: If I don’t run it for a week, there’s no way to get that chance at loot back. I’m just behind.
This isn’t even really irrational. With a sub fee required to play, I’m literally wasting money if I’m not doing everything I can to complete my current goals before my sub renews.
This bit may be more of a me-problem, but even when I’m not in-game I feel a small but nagging psychological pressure. The various things I need to do come the Tuesday reset hangs over my head at all times. The game starts to feel like a checklist of chores.
With no sub fee and little to no time gates, TFD feels like something I can approach in my own time and at my own pace. If I don’t do something today, I can make up the time another day.
There’s so many things to grind for and so many characters to play in TFD that I can just switch up what I’m doing whenever I start to get bored, without feeling like I’m wasting any weekly lockout. If I’m sick of killing Defiler with Ines, I can switch to grinding levels on Blair, or opening amorphous materials with Hailey.
There is also something satisfying about being able to just throw yourself into the grind. “Well, I want this item sooner rather than later, and I’ve got an afternoon free. Let’s do this.” I wonder if this is one of the things people miss about old school MMOs; sometimes, you just want to grind, without the game telling you you can’t.
There’s definitely still room for improvement in how TFD approaches grind, though. Something that absolutely baffles me is that a game so focused on running the same content dozens of times did virtually nothing to add variance to the experience. Almost every mission is facing the same mobs, with the same mechanics, in the same numbers, spawning in the same locations. It does get a bit mind-numbing after a while.
TFD would be improved immensely if Nexon randomized content even just a little bit. Different mob types, different spawn patterns, changing which content gives certain rewards week to week, something, anything. The devs have made a few attempts here and there, but nothing cohesive or fully effective.
They tried to add some randomization with the void vessel, but it has only three variants, and they only change up a few rooms, with the main set piece fights being exactly the same every time.
The “other operation support” feature for dungeons, which lets queues you for a random dungeon while getting the completion rewards for a specific dungeon of your choice, is a great idea, but since it’s multiplayer only, it’s ruined by the game’s poor balance. You’ll just end up doing nothing but pick up loot while an Ines, Freyna, or Bunny instantly deletes every enemy before you can get off a shot.
And 400% difficulty is only active for two dungeons per day, which provides some variety day to day but not if you’re planning to run multiple 400% dungeons per day. Balance is an issue again because they’re also completely trivialized by Ines, Freyna, and Bunny while other characters can’t struggle to even complete them solo.
The type of reactors dropped in each zone changes week to week, and that’s a design that I think should be applied to far more of the game’s content. So many of the game’s worst grinds would feel infinitely better if the reward sources just changed from day to day or week to week.
On the other side of things, I think WoW is too set in its ways for much to change about how it approaches grind these days. Certainly as long as it maintains the sub there’s too much incentive to stretch content out over weeks and months. But I would like to see the MMO genre as a whole be a little closer to TFD than WoW in its approach to grind. Just maybe not quite to the point where you need to kill a boss seventy times for one skin.
A compromise between the two extremes that I would like to see more games adopt is that of a generous daily or weekly bonus. The first run each day is significantly more rewarding, but you still get meaningful rewards for subsequent runs. People who can play only a little bit each day don’t fall too far behind, while those of us who want to go full gremlin mode still can.
I don’t think there’s any one perfect solution, and everyone is going to have different preferences, but The First Descendant has definitely given me an appetite for a more flexible approach to grinding than the same old weekly and daily chores.
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.
