Key findings
- The first season of The First Descendant introduces new descendant Hailey, invasion dungeons, and improved experience efficiency.
- The developers plan to encourage regular use of Descendant and apply growth retroactively to the final versions.
- The changes aim to reinvigorate the player base and combat issues with XP farming routes and overused offspring.
The first season of The First Descendant is here, bringing a ton of changes to the game and a brand new Descendant, Hailey. In addition to Hailey, the game is getting Invasion Dungeons, Inversion Reinforcement, two new Ultimate Weapons, Ultimate Freyna, and a new seasonal progression system.
Ahead of the launch of the first season, the game’s producer Lee Beom-jun and director Joo Min-seok discussed the future of their title with Korean website Inven, sharing how they plan to make the descendants used more diverse.
“The overall efficiency of the experience should be improved”
When asked if they felt that players spent so long leveling up certain descendants that others were pushed aside, the Nexon developers said, “We didn’t have any in-game events during the preseason. Starting in Season 1, we plan to encourage growth externally through in-game events, and the overall efficiency of the experience is to be updated. I think the growth speed will be more flexible than during the preseason.”
We plan to drive growth externally through in-game events.
This is welcome news for the community, who recently thought an XP farming route was getting a major buff, only to find out it was a translation error and found that the Descendant Bunny is heavily overused.
The team also shared their plans to get more players to use the standard Descendants, as the Ultimate versions are currently heavily preferred. When asked about this issue, the duo said, “This is an issue that we feel is quite important as it currently requires an update. This is a part where you are guided to experience and use the regular Descendant first and then move on to the Ultimate, but since it is inferior to the Ultimate at the end point, most people don’t touch it at first and wait for the Ultimate. The exact method has not been decided yet, but I think it will come in the form of retroactively applying the growth of the regular Descendant to the Ultimate Descendant.”
Given that the game has lost 70% of its player base since its release,I hope that these changes and the launch of the first season of “The First Descendant” will provide the necessary impetus.