I was impressed by how honest Nexon Games was about The First Descendant‘s path after launch at the Game Developers Conference this year. Producer Beom-jun Lee’s public talk was titled ‘The First Descendant: Persevering Through a 57 Metacritic as a Live Service Game’, and when I sat down with Lee on the last day of the conference, he was similarly open, admitting that though on an upward trajectory, the game is still “struggling.”
“I think we’re in progress, going toward having a strong narrative and [working] to satisfy users. When we first launched the game, we set the bar differently compared to that of users,” said Lee through a translator. “I think we were trying to set the right tone.”
Recovering From A Rocky Launch
As indicated by the rough Metacritic score and a precipitous drop in concurrent users since its peak in its first week, that has been difficult. Players complained about the grind, about one character being massively overused, about another character being annoying to play, about pernicious microtransactions, and about alleged plagiarism. That led to the game dropping 70 percent of its player base within a few weeks of launch last year. The game debuted with a peak concurrent player count of 265,000 — an impressive number for any game. But the day I sat down with Lee, The First Descendant was hovering around 18,000 on Steam.
There is an established path forward. For much of the history of live-service games, it has been possible for a game to garner a negative reception at launch, then slowly work to build a community and earn goodwill. Final Fantasy XIV did it, No Man’s Sky did it, and Bethesda pulled it off as recently as Fallout 76. But short-term results seem to have taken precedence over long-term relationships, leading to publishers shutting games like XDefiant and Concord down quickly after launch.
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Given the saturated live-service market and the expectations that games immediately hit or quit, it seemed unlikely that The First Descendant could ever get back to those debut numbers, so I wondered what success would look like for the game going forward.
“Even though concurrent users are very important metrics, the most important metric in our opinion is the retention rates,” says Lee. Per his GDC talk, Season 2 brought a 92.4 percent increase in daily active users and a 20 percent increase in returning players. “That’s the part that we are focusing on and trying to improve. Compared to Season 1, the Season 2 Episode 1 retention rate was higher and for Season 2 Episode 2 it became even higher. So I think that’s our main focus at the moment and once we reach a satisfying point with the retention rate, I think we’ll be able to secure more users once they come back to the game.”
Speed Or Quality
Getting players to stick with the game means finding out what players want and giving it to them. In his GDC talk, Lee spoke about the team having three focus areas as they sought to improve the game: “swift adaptation based on player feedback, delivering consistent high quality content that keeps players engaged, and enhancing stability and performance for a stable and seamless gameplay experience.” I wondered how those first two goals — speed and quality — coexisted when they seemed to be at odds.
Though fan feedback is important, the team often receive requests to be able to change Descendants’ skin color, but say they’re solidly against ever implementing that change.
“Those two points are in conflict and sometimes in the early stages of running this game we also struggled, and we focused more on being agile,” Lee said. “We wanted to resolve problems as fast as possible, but then we saw problems getting bigger and bigger like snowballs and we realized that it’s not an ideal way of resolving the issues.” This led to the team switching to longer development cycles for updates. Season 3, which is set to hit this summer, has taken more than half a year.
But it’s bringing exciting changes along with it. There will be a new open field area called Axion, mounts to make crossing the space easier, and colossi for large-scale battles in the field. But, they’re saving further details for the future.
The First Descendant may never reach the heights it hit right out of the gate. But after a rocky start, it seems like it’s in a good position to please its dedicated audience. That won’t change its 57 Metascore, but if Nexon can keep the fans happy, they don’t seem to mind.
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