When I first tried The First Descendant, I hit a brick wall over the fact that I didn’t enjoy playing the two freebie characters I was given early on, and unlocking further characters required too much of an investment of time and/or money. I did, however, keep the thought in the back of mind that I might give it another shot in the unlikely event character unlock mechanics changed.
A permanent change to the system still seems unlikely to appear, but the holiday event currently running through January 15th grants anyone who logs in the option to unlock almost any Descendant for free, excluding only ultimate variants and the two most recent additions to the roster (Hailey and Keelan). I decided to give the game another shot.
I spent my free unlock on Valby, a highly mobile water mage. Her main hook is blanketing the battlefield in pools of water that both recharge her mana and deal high damage to enemies.
And lo and behold, I liked her much better than Bunny or Ajax, the first characters I played, and I was able to get much farther into the game than I had before. As I expected, once I had one character I liked, unlocking others felt more like a fun carrot to chase than an onerous chore.
It only took a bit of grinding a small amount of lost sanity to unlock my next character, Freyna. I later learned there’s now a bad luck protection system buried in the “access info” tab of all places, and while it’s very limited in its applications (it can’t be used for a lot of items, quite arbitrarily), it would have made the grind for Freyna a lot more pleasant if I’d known about it.
I found Freyna to be… pretty much like Valby. They’re not one to one clones, of course, but they both have the same general playstyle: blanket the field with AoE DoTs and watch the bodies hit the floor. It’s not a bad way to play, but it was disappointing to find that both characters felt so similar.
Next up came Sharen, an assassin character with a versatile mix of damage, stealth, and crowd control abilities. Of course, I tried to turn her into a clone of Nova Terra from StarCraft, though I don’t think the blonde hair is working out for her and I’ll probably change it.
I like Sharen a lot, and she’s become my main for the time being, but it was around here that I started to realize the balance in this game is incredibly poor, as Sharen feels much less powerful than Valby or Freyna.
I’m not saying Sharen is weak. Not even close. If this were any other game, I’d say she’s very strong. It’s just that the top-tier Descendants are so absolutely bonkers overpowered that it skews the scale massively.
This is even more evident when you start grouping with other people. A fully optimized Freyna can just pop an AoE every 10 seconds or so and instantly destroy any enemy across an entire battlefield the moment they spawn. A high-end Bunny can delete anything that comes within fifty feet of her, and she moves so fast she can always get to enemies before anyone else. Abandon all hope of actually getting to fight anything if you group with one of these characters, though on the plus side nearly all content can be played solo if you wish to avoid this.
This imbalance is reflected in character popularity. Any dungeon group is pretty much guaranteed to have at least one Bunny, and often two or three, and most have at least one Freyna. Sharens, Viessas, Valbys, Haileys, and the occasional Gley make up most of the remainder.
That makes for more than half the roster not seeing regular play, and there’s a considerable number of Descendants I have literally never seen anyone play after over 50 hours in-game. Support and tank characters in particular just don’t have a reason to exist considering the meta game for most content is to just obliterate everything the moment it spawns in.
This is a purely co-operative game with very little genuinely challenging content, and most if not all characters remain viable for solo play, so I don’t think balance needs to be a particularly high priority, but this is insanity.
I think part of the problem is that the developers apparently have a philosophy of balancing only through buffs, never nerfs, and past experience has taught me that’s one of those ideas that sounds good until you actually see it put into practice. Sometimes things just need to be tuned down. If you got everyone up to Freyna’s level, it might improve the disparity in character popularity, but I’m not sure a game where everyone is effectively playing with god mode cheats is going to have a lot of longevity.
To be fair, I haven’t progressed far enough to get to what you’d consider “endgame” content yet, and that might prove a bit less trivialized, but based on community chatter, I doubt it. There seems to be a broad consensus that almost all content in this game outside one or two intercept bosses can be steamrolled at this point.
Something else that I’ve found off-putting is how much the game has leaned in to excess sexualization of its female characters. That was always an element, but they’ve really tripled down on it since launch. I feel like if I play much more of this I’m going to owe the women in my life an apology.
What’s worst is the community’s steadfast refusal to be normal about it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being horny for video game characters, but when you start talking like Magnum Studio is making some heroic effort to save civilization from The Wokes by churning out an endless supply of skins where every female character’s entire ass is hanging out, you should consider touching some grass.
At least all the characters are adults (knock on wood).
And yet still, somehow, I’m enjoying myself. The First Descendant is an utterly mindless, wildly imbalanced, over-monetized, over-sexualized, absolute raging dumpster fire of a game, but I can’t say it’s not entertaining.
I do think a lot of my enjoyment hinges on the ludicrous generosity of the holiday events. The free character unlock barely scratches the surface of it. Between various log-in and challenge events, I’m being absolutely inundated with staggering quantities of loot, boosters, and currencies. It’s allowed me to build out a variety of characters and guns in what is probably a fraction of the time it would have normally taken, and the constant dopamine rush of new stuff is intoxicating.
I’m not sure I would have gotten this far in the game without the holiday events taking the grind out of the equation, and I suspect my interest in the game will drop off considerably once the events finally end and the firehose of free stuff gets shut off. But then I’ve been expecting to lose interest in the game any day now for weeks, and it hasn’t happened yet, so who knows?
For now, the constant onslaught of loot, explosions, big noises, loot, boobs, shiny things, and more loot has numbed my brain into a pleasant fugue state. Pretty girl shoot big alien. Glowy things come out. Gooood…
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.
