The First Descendant Player Count Explodes Despite Middling Reviews

Gaming

July 4, 2024

Daniel Morris

The First Descendant is a brand-new third-person looter shooter from Nexon Games, and as a free-to-play title, it might just be your latest obsession. During its initial launch period, The First Descendant player count has exploded, although reviews from players have been mixed, to say the least.

The First Descendant Player Count Explodes

Credit: Nexon

The First Descendant player count has been enormous in its opening few days, with over 235,000 players at its all-time peak on Steam (and still rising at the time of writing). So why the massive popularity?

One huge reason is the free-to-play aspect. We’ve seen gamers give recent free live-service titles a chance in a big way – recent FPS XDefiant secured 11 million players in just over a month. Because they’re free to try, they’re inherently more disposable to gamers, meaning they’re more likely to jump in during the release period to see what it’s all about. From there, it’s a snowball effect. More players equals more exposure, which in turn results in even more players – it’s the natural cycle.

The other reason is that it just looks plain fun to play with friends. It’s designed to be played with multiple players, and it’s easy to convince a couple of friends to download a free looter-shooter for a few hours of fun. Thanks to this co-op focus alone, the First Descendant player count will likely continue to grow for a little while yet.

The First Descendant Maintenance and Microtransactions

Credit: Nexon

Now for the not-so-glamorous part. The First Descendant has plenty of players, yes, but how are they enjoying the game? Well, reception has been a little frosty so far, for a few reasons. The first is down to server maintenance that has plagued the early days of the game. It hasn’t been easy to login to actually play, which is definitely frustrating for gamers with limited spare time, especially for those who also suffered through the major Xbox Live outage at the same time. In fact, the servers were down altogether for most of The First Descendant’s day two, and while they’re back now, hopefully they can hold up against the huge player counts.

Gamers can forgive server outages. However, a bigger problem with The First Descendant is its aggressive microtransactions. The game is designed as a grind, and while you can technically earn everything in-game, it will take you a long time. It allows you to purchase new characters, weapon skins, and a battle pass (par for the course for other Nexon games such as THE FINALS). This skips that grind entirely, and the game seems designed for you to make those purchases – not very “free-to-play” of the developer.

Worse still, the cost of new Descendants comes in at just under the price of the Caliber bundles, meaning you need to buy more than you actually need to purchase a character. If the gameplay remains fresh, we imagine The First Descendant will be just fine. However, this no doubt puts a blemish on an otherwise stellar launch period.