What you need to know
- The First Descendant is enjoying immense success and has been going from win to win lately.
- Nexon has teased the next update arriving next week, and there’s another batch of great changes drawn straight from community feedback.
- Nexon is making it easier to grind Hard Mode Infiltration Operations and other missions, tweaking the Frost Walker Colossi to be easier with a public lobby, massively improving how easy it is to manage all the new rewards you’ve acquired from farming, and more.
- However, one area where Nexon still isn’t committing to change is how difficult it is to experiment with new Descendant and weapon builds after you already commit to a build.
Nexon has been on a roll with its hit free-to-play co-op looter shooter, The First Descendant, responding to community feedback with update after update. It hasn’t been a week since the game was last updated, but Nexon is still teasing what’s coming next for The First Descendant. Hotfix 1.07 is on the way, but the studio is taking a few extra days to finalize the release. In the meantime, we’re getting a sneak peek at what this update includes.
Again, Nexon is proving that it’s actually listening to its players and attempting to make The First Descendant a beloved game that can stand the test of time, and the 1.07 update reflects that. There isn’t any new content here, but Nexon will be rolling out a variety of quality-of-life improvements and gameplay changes to make playing The First Descendant (especially in the endgame or in public lobbies) less of a headache. With one exception, everything included in this update seems to be a great development.
If you only care about the when, The First Descendant 1.07 should begin rolling out to all players across Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC, and PlayStation 5 on Tuesday, Aug. 13, 2024, pending any last-minute issues that Nexon may discover. For those interested in the minutiae of what this update includes, keep reading.
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Nexon is actually listening to players. That’s weird.
Alright, let’s not beat around the Colossi. The First Descendant 1.07 seems mostly focused on quality-of-life improvements surrounding endgame grinding and farming, which is… Most of the game, if we’re being honest. For one, The First Descendant is making it easy to quickly restart Intercept Battles, and Infiltration and Special Operations, with a longer period of time to hit either the new “Restart with Squad” or “Restart alone” buttons.
On top of that, Infiltration Operations in Hard Mode are already enjoying a number of improvements to the optional modifiers that players can select to increase their chances of earning rewards, including permanently removing the completely awful “Grappling Hook disabled” and “Jump disabled” options. Nexon has also confirmed that The First Descendant’s Season 1 update will improve the flow of Infiltration Operations by decreasing the amount of progression roadblocks like occupation objectives and focusing more on elimination objectives.
The notoriously difficult Frost Walker Intercept Battle will finally be tweaked to make it more conceivable to actually beat with a public lobby of randomly matched players, with Nexon adjusting the Colossi’s unique mechanic. On top of that, players will no longer take damage from the hazardous areas of the Void after completing an Intercept Battle, making it easier to use the Reconstruction Device and collect your rewards.
Special Operations will also automatically move AFK players to the “Abort” section in interim reviews (finally, some progress here), Void Fusion Reactors will have reduced HP for enemies and will drop ammo more frequently, and Weapon Proficiency will still be gained correctly even when using unique Descendant weapons. All good stuff, but there’s one more exciting update.
It has been a constant complaint since The First Descendant, launched, and Nexon has heard. The inventory is adding a ton of much-needed, glanceable icons that will allow players to quickly gauge the options and attributes of equipment, especially Reactors. The tooltip display will also be displayed faster following the 1.07 update. All of this is to make it easier for players to parse through their equipment and manage farmed rewards without having to individually analyze each item. Yes!
Well, there’s one thing Nexon can do better
I’ve written extensively about some of the ways I believe Nexon can improve The First Descendant and elevate it from “great” to “spectacular,” and the studio actually has implemented some of my feedback already! There’s a lot more left to be done, but Nexon has nonetheless proven over the still-short life of The First Descendant that it’s interested in working with the community rather than against it when considering how to update its game.
The First Descendant 1.07 is further evidence of that, and it’s honestly strange to see from a live service game. We as players shouldn’t be surprised that a studio is actually engaging with the community and acting positively on criticism in an effort to make its game beloved, but that’s unfortunately not the norm with a lot of live service titles. The First Descendant is shaping up to be one of the best Xbox games you can play, but there’s one thing Nexon mentions in The First Descendant 1.07 tease on its website that isn’t a positive.
In order to fully build a Descendant or weapon in The First Descendant, you have to use Crystallization Catalysts to assign Socket Types (with each Type halving the costs of equipping specific modules). Each Descendant has twelve Sockets and each weapon has ten Sockets, and fully upgrading each individual Socket requires leveling that Descendent or weapon to Lv. 40 and then resetting that level using a very valuable and hard to acquire Catalyst. It’s incredibly time consuming to fully build a character, but it can be incredibly rewarding to do so. Unfortunately, once you’ve built a Descendant or weapon… You’ll have very limited options if you ever want to change them.
That’s because you’d have to use another Crystallization Catalyst every time you wanted to assign a new type to a Socket, making it nearly impossible to actually experiment with new builds and setups. In the 1.07 update tease, Nexon has reiterated what the current system is, but it doesn’t fix the problem: there’s no build diversity in The First Descendant. However, I and other members of the community have already proposed a solution.
Nexon, make it so that once a player fully upgrades a Descendant or weapon and assigns a Type to every Socket, that Descendant or weapon is max prestiged and all Sockets become freely reassignable. If I put in hours of work to fully level and reset a Descendant up to 12 times, I should then have the freedom to experiment with all the modules and potential builds I want. As it stands, having three loadouts is completely pointless when you’re limited to modules of the same Socket Type once you use a Catalyst on it. I hope we see this change in a future update.
