The First Descendant
The First Descendant will launch Season 1: Invasion a week from today, but new information has fans a bit frustrated with how it’s rolling out.
Turns out there will be a three-part structure to the season, with significant timegates in place for some of the most anticipated additions. Nexon has released the schedule which delays, for instance, the release of Ultimate Freyna for months.
First Update: August 29
- New Descendant Hailey and Hailey Skins
- Invasion Dungeon
- Inversion Reinforcement
- Invasion Season Battle Pass and Ultimate Weapon Excava
Second Update: September 26
- New Intercept Battle Death Stalker
- New Ultimate Weapon Frost Watcher
- New Ultimate Skins and Ultimate Descendant Exclusive Spawn Effects
Third Update: October 30
- Ultimate Freyna and Freyna Exclusive Story
- Ultimate Freyna Modification Modules
- Hailey Modification Modules
- New Ultimate Modules
- Highest Difficulty Infiltration Operations
- ETA-0 Vendor
You can see why this is…not great. While other live service games break up weeks or months with story updates, this is instead breaking up character, weapon and playable content pretty significantly. Players are not thrilled that they have been gearing up to farm Ultimate Freyna and instead they can only farm Hailey herself for two months until Freyna is actually out.
The First Descendant
On top of that, Hailey’s ice rifle isn’t available for a full month, and more modules for her are not available for two months. Why? You also need to wait one month for the new boss and two months for highest difficulty operations.
It’s a lot of waiting for no real reason other than “engagement” which is the tried and true lifeblood of live service, but you can also see how it might make a season launch with a whimper with just a scarce bit of new additions arriving at first. Players thought Ultimate Freyna would be here in a week, and instead it’s a week and…two months. Though I guess we need to understand this is probably just going to be how things are unless Nexon says otherwise. They are pretty reactive to feedback but we’ll see how this goes for them and I’m sure they want the engagement data to figure out if this actually works or not.
The last few games I’ve seen do a seasonal “Act” structure like this, Destiny and Suicide Squad, it has not gone well. Maybe The First Descendant will be different but it’s certainly easy to be skeptical of this level of timegating as the season starts. In a week we will see how it feels, I guess.
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