One of the more enjoyable aspects of Nexon’s looter shooter 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The First Descendant is its MMO-lite co-op play. All dungeons and activities are usually📖 shared between four players, and this makes menial tasks - hacking a device, escorting a drone - much easier. Certain boss fights, like the Hanged Man, require a level of coordination th🌱at can be hard to grasp with random players, but getting that win after multiple attempts is always so rewarding.
So I was shocked when I reached the so-called hard mode content for The First D𒁏escendant, otherwise known as the endgame. These have you replaying areas of the map you’ve already visited to begin grinding for crafting materials and get your hands on new Descendants and weapons. There are usually modifiers in place - enemies spawn with invincible shields, health drain, and so on. But as of right now, hard mode content has no public matchmaking. You need to enter with a party, or go it alone. This is awful.
Are We Really Surprised By The First Descendant's Monetisation?
Everybody knows that Nexo🍬n games will take all your money, and then some.
As it stands, there’s no way of forming any clan or team within the game itself. You could join the Discord or form a group via an externa𝐆l site like Reddit, but with no dedicated party finder or clan system the game suddenly feels very small and closed off, despite the fact there are over a hundred thousand players on PC alone as I write this. Finding people to play with isn’t easy, and you need to be active in game chat and during boss fights in order to get by in harder content - something not everyone is keen on. Doubly so because of the lack of easy typing for console players.
I can see lots of people getting to the endgame, looking forward to grinding hard mode content to unlock new Descendants, only to be met with an impenetrable difficulty gap. I tried to solo one of the dungeons in Kingston, the starting area the game recommends you begin your grind in, and spent 45 minutes completing a dungeon only to die to the boss at the end multiple times. Fortunately, I found one partner to attempt๊ the dungeons with via game chat in a particularly difficult boss fight. This made it so much easier, and I was able to actually start the grind and enjoy it. Unless you get lucky like me, it’s next to impossible.
The problem is meeting up with that player again. We need to both be online at the same time, going after the same materials - they might want to grind Blair, which requires certain dungeons, whereas I want to go after Sharen. What makes this even worse is the fact that dungeon loot isn’t shared. My partner might get the required material after one run, while I might have to do it three or four times - with them still grinding pointlessly along with me. This is a terrible system, and what really worries me is that I feel lik🍃e this has been done on purpose.
Nexon has an awful reputation for these sorts of things, and it's warranted. The company was even fined in South Korea for modifying the loot drop rates in MapleStory. I feel like this system has been designed to make it intentionally difficult to grind for the materials you need - which will, for those dedicated players, likely force people toward the cash shop where you can outright buy materials and Descendants for real-life money.
The First Descendant, and rivals like Warframe and Destiny 2, are all about the grind. Quite a lot of it is totally mindless. Warframe and Destiny 2 have, over the years, gone through their own struggles with how to handle this. Some parts of Destiny 2 also don’t have public matchm🌞aking, but the key difference is the feeling of fairness and the satisfaction of the rewards you get at the end. In The First Descendant, you could grind for an hour for one crafting piece of a Descendant. To actually get🥃 your hands on one, you need four.
I’m yet to see if hard mode dungeꦏons become easier to grind on my own as I level up my character with better mods and weapons. But I shouldn’t have to do it on my own. This is a simple fix from Nexon that it needs to be done before more players reach the endgame. If they don’t, I fully believe that The First Descendant’s player numbers will totally collapse within a month. 🌳But…was that the plan all along?
A quick cash grab before ditching the game in a few months? This is Nexon we’re talking about, and honestly, it’s hard not to pull on my conspiracy cap. Nexon has shut down multiple games, including Warhaven, Darkness Rises, Dynasty Warriors: Unleashed, MapleStory 2, SinoAlice…why won’t The First🦋 Descendant go the same way? It’s a shame, but when I see decisions like no hard mode matchmaking, it’s hard to see this going any other way.
