What you need to know
- The First Descendant is a brand-new, free-to-play, MMORPG co-op looter shooter from Nexon.
- On Friday, Nexon announced that The First Descendant has reached over 10 million unique players in just 7 days, an impressive milestone.
- The game has experienced some issues since its launch, including server outages, but it has continued to thrive regardless and seems to have a promising future.
It's official, Destiny 2 and Warframe are dead. Bungie and Digital Extremes need to pack it in... I'm joking, obviously. Both of those games are and will continue to do great, but there's a new player in town that seems to be carving a sizeable space in the co-op looter shooter genre for itself. The First Descendant has emerged off the back of a massive hype train (mostly driven by some not-so-subtle character designs), and it just reached its first major milestone.
On Friday, Nexon revealed that The First Descendant has officially reached over 10 million unique Descendants, and it amassed that many players in just seven days. It's an impressive start for a brand-new live service game, especially when The First Descendant was offline for almost the entirety of its second day in existence. Those issues and microtransaction concerns have earned The First Descendant some mixed reviews, but that isn't stopping Nexon... Or the players, it seems.
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Just on Steam, The First Descendant is staying strong at over 150,000 concurrent players, and that doesn't include Xbox Series X|S or PlayStation 5. There's no sign of this game slowing down, although that'd be shocking to see so soon after launch. Either way, Nexon also appears committed to improving The First Descendant and keeping the momentum going, as The First Descendant's first proper hotfix update also came with a number of comments from the game's team.
Nexon is working on diversifying boss battles (especially those annoying Immunity Spheres), making collecting valuable resources and farming easier and more fun, and protecting powerful meta builds (instead of nerfing the best guns and abilities into the ground). Players can earn more freebies from the Battle Pass now, too, and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers can redeem a free cosmetic DLC bundle from the Perks program. More improvements and features are enroute, too, like a way to revisit past dialogue and tutorials.
It's a promising beginning to the game, but Nexon needs to show it's listening to the community and that it's respecting players' time and money. Keeping the servers stable and continually refining the game on top of adding new content is important, of course, but many complaints levied against the game are in regards to the incredibly aggressive and expensive microtransactions in the in-game store, as well as how difficult it is to obtain cosmetic items for your character.
The First Descendant is already quite a lot of fun, honestly, and there's a lot of potential here. For Nexon to stay on our list of the best Xbox games, though, it's going to have to work hard. The First Descendant is now available for free across Xbox, Windows PC, and PlayStation, so get hunting, Descendants.
