The First Descendant Has Lots of Easily Squandered Potential [Review]

In a world crammed with wannabe looter shooter games that are hoping to carve out a place in a pretty brutal and unforgiving market, it’s always interesting to see something show up with the potential for sticking around. 

It is currently a time of flux in the looter-shooter genre. Bungie is finishing out their Light and Dark Saga in Destiny 2, Warframe developer Digital Extremes is taking their flagship title from strength to strength while working on Soulframe, and Ubisoft has decided to give up completely and bin The Division Heartland. Add in that Borderlands has ventured into spinoff and movie territory, and Payday 3 was an abysmal failure for Starbreeze, and the market for these types of experiences has room for something new and surprising to appear.

For The First Descendant, developed and published by Nexon, the opportunity is there to produce a game that lasts, not just in their home market of South Korea but in the potentially lucrative Western market. Whether they can do that or not will depend on a couple of interesting factors.

Understanding the Product

To review a game like The First Descendant, it’s important to understand the intention of the product. As far as narrative goes, The First Descendant falls firmly into the realm of heroic science fiction. There is not much subtlety here, with clear distinctions between the good guys and the bad guys. Those baddies are the Vulgus, ravaging aliens who have decided to invade our planet. We are the good guys, a bunch of plucky humans who can harness a power called Arche. This results in us, as the players, having access to numerous characters that we can potentially play as. 

At the start of the game, we pick a hero, then unlock the game’s “mascot” character in Bunny, and then it’s up to us to grind out the rest. We go from mission to mission, slaying enemies, using our abilities, and slowly growing stronger, all the while learning that the evil Vulgus are, in fact, just as evil as we first suspected and that we also need to kick their asses even harder than we thought. 

We spend numerous missions traveling across the game’s different regions, aiming for a showdown with Karel, leader of the Vulgus and the certified Big Bad in this story. To progress, you need to unlock the areas and then fight the various bosses known as Colossus. These are huge lumps of metal and meat, and we dive into publicly matchmade Void Intercepts to fight them in arenas. Take it down, and you move on with the story. These fights are a lot of fun and can be very difficult at first. All of them have some reasonably simple mechanics that might trip up a public lobby, but they also act as a hard DPS check. You can’t progress the story until you complete them because intercepting the boss before they hit the planet is the important thing; it is your sole focus until it is completed. You can still farm open areas and previously finished missions to get better gear to help you, however.

The reason for all this is that it gives us a reason, a place, and a means to grind because the grind is the real story of The First Descendant. It is both protagonist and antagonist, and if you don’t like grind, there isn’t much for you here because everything else about this game is subservient to it. You grind blueprints for weapons and Descendants, and you grind the resources to make them; then you grind to level them up and earn the other resources you need to make them more powerful. If that sounds like hell, then this is definitely not the game for you.

2% Drop Chance? Count Me In!

The First Descendant borrows heavily from other games in ways that feel odd because those other games are quite popular and quite recent. Nobody questions the idea of color-coded loot in a game, despite the fact that some games had to use it first. Our brains have been trained to assign more value to something green than something white and something gold than something purple. Any game using a color system will, 99% of the time, follow this simple convention. 

So, what convention is The First Descendant borrowing from other games, other than color-coded loot, of course? It doesn’t feel like a stretch to say that they have borrowed most of the loot system from Warframe. Not just color coding but also how the basic elements of the farm grind work. Most Ultimate weapons and Descendants have a main blueprint and sub-component blueprints that you need to get.

First, you farm a source mission for an item called Amorphous Material. That is then unlocked in another mission. In this case, the Colossus fights, and it drops a randomly selected item from a small pool, each with a specific drop probability. If you want certain items, you need to farm the relevant mission to get the right Material, then farm the fights to open it, and keep doing so until you get the drop you want. 

Outside of the Colossus fight, this is the Warframe system. I would argue that it is also a good system, or at least it is the way that Digital Extremes has implemented it. In Warframe, all the dropped items end up in a shared pool at the end. If I get Maguffin A, and you really want that, then you can choose it as your reward. I still get it for myself; you just have the option to select it over whatever Maguffin you have, and I can select yours if I want it.

This means that Warframe players tend to team up to farm very specific items. If we all go on a mission with the same Relic (Warframe’s version of the Amorphous Material) and open it, it increases our odds of being able to pick that exact piece we want. It’s a built-in bit of fairness that makes farming the items in the game surprisingly quick and also adds to the sense of community. There is no way to do this in The First Descendant. You farm your item, and I farm mine, and we get what we get.

The other aspect of Warframe that is missing is trading. Players can use premium currency to buy and sell items among themselves. This does create an economy within the game where, with the right farming, a player never has to put any money at all into Warframe. With patience, you can have just about everything you want, except some of the cosmetic items. 

So, why embrace grind, and why borrow the basic elements of a system if we’re not also going to borrow the parts of that system that truly make it fair? That’s easy. Monetization.

Money Makes the World Go Around

The most unfortunate aspect of the entire model of The First Descendant is the monetization options. You can buy the Descendants, the slots to keep them in, starter packs, boosters, and skins. You can pay your way past build timers for weapons and characters. You can buy the particular, already-built resources that you need to allow more modules to be fitted to weapons and Descendants, and that will make those modules more efficient. There isn’t much you cannot buy, which I honestly don’t think I have a tremendous issue with.

What feels overbearing is that the game pushes us towards those options a bit too much due to the aforementioned grind and then hits you a little too hard in the pocket when it gets you there. As already stated, the systems that would skew things more in the favor of the player are just not there. You cannot buy and sell items and you cannot select from the squad loot pool when farming. Some of the drop chances are extremely low. Almost ridiculously so, when you combine them all together into a singular equation. If Ultimate Ajax has parts with a 3% drop chance and you are looking at nearly 180 runs to potentially see a single piece that you need, you then need to multiply that out for all the required pieces. 

While some might get lucky, others will be looking at close to 1000 runs to get the Ultimate version of Ajax, or they can spend about $50 to skip all that. I feel like there is more of a middle ground between what Nexon is doing and what might be good for the game and the players. For smaller items, like ways to power up your weapons or Descendant, it feels like the real-money prices lean just a bit too much on the expensive side.

While Nexon is free to monetize its game however it pleases and players are free to engage with that system however they like, this does bring me to my main worry. 

I do actually like The First Descendant, and I would like it to be sustainable. 

It’s Not All Bad

While I’m aware this review has focused heavily on negatives so far, it’s because I want folks to understand the nature of my concerns and the source of them. I do like The First Descendant but I am under no illusions as to what it is. I have thousands of hours in titles like Destiny 2 and Warframe, Diablo, and Path of Exile because of how my brain reacts to the grind. The comfortable nature of a repeatable process with a predictable outcome is appealing, as I think it is for a lot of people. You will do a thing, and you will likely NOT get the most important item in return. From time to time, you will. As long as you enjoy doing the thing, that is what is important. 

I do very much enjoy the combat in The First Descendant. Kit variation across the characters makes them unique and fun, and everyone has a role and tends to fit it well. While the campaign is somewhat overwrought, and some of the voice acting during it is pretty rough, the characters are fun and engaging outside of its confines. I’m also a child of the 80s and 90s video game industry, so I like a degree of campiness in some of the games I play, and The First Descendant delivers. 

I personally enjoy working the maths at the heart of the system and finding the most efficient farms for different things that I want, and I don’t mind putting time into something comfortable and entertaining, especially with friends. Hell, The First Descendant has even driven me to dive into new Discords and, the horror, talk to new people. 

The reason I can take the time to beat up the game about a very important issue is actually two-fold. First, the game is free. You can download it and play it at no cost if you want to see what it is like. I believe the first job of any review is to help the consumer make an informed purchase, but without a fee to get into the game, I feel like the focus on the monetization practices is extra warranted. 

Secondly, Nexon has shown itself to be oddly open to player feedback on this one. A big issue was the drop rates and volumes of certain resources, and they were improved pretty quickly. The playerbase is finding broken builds and solid farms that other titles might decide were outside the parameters or metrics that they deemed acceptable and would turn them off. Nexon seems to be reveling a little in just how fast people can take down their toughest bosses with ludicrous builds or finish a 20-minute mission in 90 seconds. 

I do not think The First Descendant is generating the interest it currently is by luck. There is a fun game here and an interesting system for the grind-obsessed; it just needs to be polished up and made a little fairer. Instead of chipping away at every possible angle of monetization, it might be better to ease up a little, especially around areas that invoke player expression, and let goodwill carry the day instead of a feeling of need. Nexon would be wise to lean into the idea that this title might just be able to have a long life if it can keep the playerbase interested instead of being just another game where the servers are being shut off in a year because they drove fans away through bad monetization practices.

The First Descendant is available to play now on PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox X|S, and Steam