I’m addicted to ‘The First Descendant’, it’s a problem

I’m staring at a number I can’t quite believe. 135.6 hours. That’s how much time I’ve put into The First Descendant, a game that came out 20 days ago on July 2nd. That’s essentially 7 hours a day just now this game, in an age where I’m supposed to juggle a bunch of other stuff plus TV shows and movies to review. Instead, I basically spend every hour I’m not writing or spending time with my family playing this game.

This is a full-blown addiction, something I don’t remember experiencing since some of Destiny’s high points or way back in my Diablo 2/3 grinding days when I not have all these responsibilities. Hell, I was playing for five minutes before I started this article, farming gold and checking my materials and characters that were done “cooking” overnight. When I start playing games in the morning, you know it’s bad. That’s why I’m force quitting Marvel Snap.

I’ve said before that I can’t claim that The First Descendant is a Good game. But the more I play, the more I realize that once you get past the mud, this has somehow created one of the most immersive, most addictive endgame loot grinds I’ve ever seen. If I had to sum it up in one word, it would be investment.

You can basically never run out of things to do in this game, and so far it’s still fun to do them, even in repetitive, often barely interesting activities. It’s the ultimate “numbers go up” game, although ironically sometimes “numbers go down” as you prestige weapons and characters to make their mods cost less, allowing you to equip more of them and become more powerful.

What’s the loop here?

Peasant weapons and characters – While it may depend on what you want to achieve, the game essentially makes you want to share parts of the whole game, while also relying on typical looter RNG luck. But when it hits, dopamine is an explosion.

To use Destiny terms, for materials and “engrams” (called Amorphous Materials) you’ll need to farm a combination of Outposts, which are essentially public events on the map, Infiltrations, which are essentially strikes, Void Reactors (tough minibosses), and Void bosses (the hardest bosses in the game). An engram usually opens after a Void Reactor or Void boss kill, and you have anywhere from a 3% to 38% chance of getting what you want.

Prestigious – This is only half the battle though, and from here things get extremely verbose. You’ll want to beef up your weapons and characters with mods that boost things like fire rate and critical damage on weapons, and health and skill damage on characters. Mods cost a lot of materials to upgrade, so you’ll need to farm that currency (players will find increasingly faster farms as time goes on).

Then you farm for the ability to permanently upgrade and prestige a weapon or character. An incredibly rare item called an Energy Activator will permanently increase your mod capacity by a large amount. Then you farm your weapon or character to the max level of 40, reset them, and now one of your mods costs half of what it used to. A 16 power mod now costs 8 power, and guess what? You can put another 8 power mod in it, making you stronger.

You can spread out your farming time to upgrade a range of characters or farm a broad spectrum of gear. Or you can hyper-focus on specific characters to “max” them out and try different builds. With so much playtime I do both, but right now I’m focused on a Valby/Thunder Cage build that’s basically maxed out.

The loop just works. There are some friction points, like how annoying Void Reactors are, but Nexon has shown itself to be both hyper-reactive to the things players hate and hyper-avoidant about nerfing the things players love. It’s a stark contrast to so many other looters where players over-farm or get too powerful and get hit with a nerf hammer. That just didn’t happen here, but it can unbalance the game a little. It kept it fun.

You’ll notice I didn’t mention microtransactions here, and yes they are worthless and they do charge you for power. But there is literally No There were times in the game where I felt like something was completely out of reach and I had to buy it. There are no pain points strong enough to drive you to the store. I spent $60 on the free game. But that was for some cool outfits for my favorite characters, and God knows I already got my $60 worth here. It feels like the moment I succumb and pay for power, this game will be over for me. I haven’t done that, and I don’t plan to, based on how things have gone. I just don’t feel that pressure.

If you try The First Descendant and hate it, I get it. The beginning, the campaign give a bad first impression. But if you are tired of Destiny and miss hardcore grinds like Borderlands or Diablo, this might be for you. For me it is.

follow me on Twitter, YouTube, And Instagram.

Pick up my science fiction novels Herokiller series And The Earthborn Trilogy.