Interview: The First Descendant Director on the Issues with the Game And How They're Fixing Them
by Richard Eisenbeis,
To start things off we talked about character build diversity in the game. While there are currently 20 characters in the game and dozens upon dozens of stat-altering modules to equip, all the characters tend to be built out similarly for the end game, with the same small subset of modules being used across the whole roster. “For The First Descendant, [build diversity] is one of our priorities that we're putting a lot of focus on,” Director Min Seok Joo began. “The players tend to focus on maximizing damage, and because of that, the builds are pretty much the same—and we do understand that this is something that we need to work on for them.”
“So, as we do understand this issue, we are actually trying to take time for the revamping of the game to provide more diverse builds,” Min Seok Joo continued. “We believe that improving the Transcendent Modules is actually the starting point for delivering a variety of diverse builds. So we are trying to improve the balance [of them]—and we do understand that [...] only one or two are really strong for each character [currently]. It is important to improve their balance so that we can provide more options to players when they play with the different characters.”
Of course, it's not just the way of building out a character with modules that is the problem. There are several characters that are largely unplayable in the current end-game zone, the Axion Plains—they just don't do enough damage quickly to enough targets. Min Seok Joo and his team are already working on fixing this. “We're providing monthly patches to balance the skills of each character—and we're actually seeing more characters being used on the Axion Plains [because of this]—so that is the direction that we're continuing to take,” Min Seok Joo explained.
This was most recently seen with the retooling of Luna and the release of her ultimate version. But she's far from the last. In fact, another will happen in the upcoming October update: Kyle. “Kyle will be strong enough to play the Axion Plains even if he is not his ultimate version yet because of balance improvements,” he told me.
Other major change in the October update will be the ability to open Amorphous Materials in Albion—and en masse to boot. While undeniably convenient, this change has the side effect of effectively turning both the majority of Colossi battles and Void Reactors into dead content. Min Seok Joo is aware of this and was keen to explain the development team's thought process and future plans. “So firstly, the opening of Amorphous Materials was actually one of the difficulties—one of the barriers—for new players to actually settling into the game. So instead of having them open [Amorphous Materials] after the Colossi battles, we will allow them to be opened in [Albion].”
“So with that change, it is true that the Colossi battles and the Void Reactor content will stay dead for the time being—[...] but we're actually taking the Colossi battles apart to improve them. It is going to be new content that will be introduced early next year.” Min Seok Joo continued, “Instead of addressing the void reactor separately, we're actually going to incorporate them into improving the content of the [pre-end game] zones. So we're trying to re-balance them, and readjust the void reactors in the context of the zones overall.”
Min Seok Joo then expanded on the philosophy behind the upcoming “Season 0” content revamp. “We realized that [the early zones] are actually not quite fun and interesting anymore for the hardcore players, yet, for new players, they're actually quite difficult—they have become a hurdle for them because they require a lot of power and skill. We were actually driving away both the hardcore and the new players with the early zones. So we're trying to improve this part—to lower the hurdle for the new players and improve the excitement for the hardcore players.”
Focusing on the new player experience, with the recent Boost Up and Boost Path events, new players were given the ability to skip the Season 0 zones and be provided with what they needed to quickly get into the endgame content. While it was well-received, the team learned something important about what new players want from the game. “Quantitatively, we learned that there are a lot of new players who don't want to skip the story—they don't want to jump [over Season 0],” Min Seok Joo told me. “So in the future, it's highly likely that, instead of having the users skip the story, we are going to speed up the progression of the story so that it will be more compressed—make it easier to catch up [to end game] rather than skip the story.”
Moving on, we talked about one of the more controversial changes made in Season 3—namely how drops now work in the Axion Plains. Instead of being able to target a specific drop, you can only target a loot box that randomly drops one of the items inside. This can be very frustrating when the single item you want just won't drop after many tries.
“We've learned from the data that there was a difference in the time it took for farming between using the [previous version of the] target setting system and the Axion Plains drop system.” Min Seok Joo explained. “For some players, it took only one day to finish farming, but for some, it took many days to finish the farming—and our goal [with the Axion Plains drop system] was to reduce the gap between the two. We are receiving the feedback from people who've experienced both [good luck and bad]. […] And so we haven't decided on the exact method we will use [going forward], but we know for sure that some players have really bad luck and we're trying to save them from that and also identify the optimal amount of farming.”
With the big issues facing the game out of the way, we moved onto one smaller but long lasting one: the Restored Relic. A popular weapon, when modded for a high rate of fire, it makes the screen shake constantly when firing, often inducing motion sickness in players. Moreover, turning off screen shake in the options menu does not effect the Restored Relic. When asking if this would ever be fixed, Min Seok Joo had this to say: “Well, for the Restored Relic, I think instead of improving the weapon itself, it's probably better for us to come up with a new weapon that has less [recoil-induced screen] shaking but less destructive power to give you more options—but I don't think we'll be fixing the Restored Relic weapon itself.”
I was also interested in potential Steam Deck support for the game in the future for those who would like to play The First Descendant on the go. But rather than Min Seok Joo, Producer Beom-Jun Lee fielded this question. “Well, first of all, our game doesn't officially support the Steam Deck—its specifications are not high enough to fully support the game,” Beom-Jun Lee began. “So of course, it would be good if everything operated without problems but our goal is not actually to allow everything to run smoothly on the Steam Deck. [...] That is the current situation. There's no official support and no plans to change that in the immediate future.”
To close the interview out, I asked how they see their relationship with their looter shooter rivals like Warframe and Destiny 2—and the answer surprised me. “Because there aren't so many options for other looter shooters to play—as gamers ourselves—we do play these other looter shooter games. As a new entrant in the genre, we are using [what we see in] these games.[...] We're trying to build our strength and learn from these games—and also improve our game based on our experiences [in those games].” Min Seok Joo said.
“The First Descendant has a lot of other strengths compared to these games. For example, we provide a variety of very cool characters and we also provide very fast and smooth action—so I think we can differentiate ourselves from these [other looter shooters].” He concluded, “But while we're competing, we're also developing the genre together.”
The First Descendant is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
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