Recently, The First Descendant pushed out a big hotfix full of massive balance changes. If you don’t know the game, these changes might have looked absolutely insane. Ines’ ultimate cooldown tripled? Multiple characters getting damage buffs in the range of 100-300%?!? Surely this is a massive over-correction that will break the game!
But the wild thing is, it wasn’t. It was actually a very measured response, and in this writer’s view it didn’t go far enough. So let’s dive deep and explore how The First Descendant‘s balance got to be so incredibly bad – and where it could go from here.
I want to clarify my perspective. I’m usually the last person to complain about balance problems in games. I’ve often argued that balance doesn’t matter nearly as much as most people think and that a lot of online games would benefit from fewer balance patches, as I find the nerf and buff seesaw exhausting.
Hyperbolic balance complaints are so much a background radiation of online gaming that I find it a real struggle to communicate just how busted TFD is. Everyone says their game is broken, but this one is really broken. Never in my nearly 30 years of gaming have I played anything that came even remotely close to as imbalanced as TFD prior to the recent hotfix.
So how’d we get here? I haven’t followed TFD closely from the start, so I’m relying on hearsay from the community for some of this, but my understanding is that it went something like this:Â Originally, the game was meant to require some kind of cooperation in group content, with a soft trinity system. Ajax and Kyle are tanks, Yujin is a healer, and Enzo and Luna are buffers. DPS characters had their own niches, with some focused on more on single target and others on AoE.
However, there was a problem, and her name was Bunny. Bunny is an AoE DPS character with a movement speed buff and a powerful lightning aura that can combine to annihilate hordes of enemies before anyone else can even reach them. In most content Bunny wildly outclassed the other characters.
Many testers in the beta warned that she was problematically overtuned, but others argued that nerfs shouldn’t be necessary in a PvE game and that balance should only be achieved through buffing underperforming characters. So the game went live as is, and Bunny became absolutely dominant in the meta.
The devs at Nexon’s Magnum Studio were slow in buffing other characters, but the first to majorly benefit was Freyna, another AoE DPS. I’ve seen only the post-buff version of Freyna, so I don’t know what she was like before, but today a well-built Freyna can lay down AoEs so huge and so devastating that every enemy instantly dies the moment it spawns in, even on large maps.
A big contributor to this is Freyna’s Contagion mod. It causes enemies to leave behind a poison AoE when killed by her abilities. In any sane game, this would have come with a rider like “enemies killed by Contagion can’t spread Contagion,” but in TFD, it can just spread infinitely.
And then along came Ines, who is basically Bunny and Freyna combined. She has massive damage, a huge AoE ultimate that was originally on a trivially small cooldown and gave her a movement speed buff for some reason, and a passive ability that infinitely spreads an explosive debuff, similar to Freyna’s Contagion.
Thus it came to pass that Bunny, Ines, and Freyna became pretty much the only characters that anyone plays, and with so much AoE being slung around, enemies in most content don’t live long enough to even get a shot off. Getting even one of these characters on your team means you don’t get to participate at all; if you are one of the Big Three, you’re in a race with the others to be the first to one-shot the map.
Even as the entire gameplay loop broke down under the weight of this power creep, large sections of the community continued to argue that nerfs should never happen. The developers tried a “nerf through content” approach by introducing Void Erosion Purge, a slog of a game mode featuring HP sponge enemies and a blanket global reduction to ability damage.
But all this did was create its own narrow meta. Instead of everyone playing Bunny, Freyna, and Ines, people mostly just played Hailey and Gley, the best gun-focused descendants. Just a few days ago the devs finally relaxed the skill restrictions, so hopefully VEP should have more diversity now.
And of course hard content requires new rewards, hence more power creep. VEP added weapon cores, which when fully maxed can massively increase the power of firearms. Guns were quite under-powered up until that point, so this was a good idea in many ways, but once again the studio overshot the mark (no pun intended).
Recently we got more power creep in the form of new guns and Serena, a firearm-focused descendant who of course power crept Hailey and Gley. Armed with the new guns and some weapon cores, she can potentially one-shot any intercept boss in the game. A true one-shot build takes a lot of optimization, but even a sub-optimal Serena like mine can kill endgame bosses with ease.
Now, we’ve finally reached the point where the devs had to admit that some nerfs are necessary, leading to the recent hotfix that tuned down Ines while buffing the many underperforming descendants.
I do think this was a step in the right direction, but it was a small one. Previously under-utilized characters are being seen more, and that’s good, but Ines still absolutely shreds, Freyna wasn’t touched, and Bunny actually got buffed, which is just insane to me (to be fair the buffs did focus on her lesser-used abilities rather than her lightning aura, but still).
More changes will be needed to get the full cast on an even power level, but to really get this game to a good state, I think the overall power level for everything needs to be dialed down, and I don’t know even if that’s even a viable possibility at this point.
While many supported them, Ines’ nerfs triggered a harsh backlash from certain elements of the playerbase, leading to review bombing on Steam and lots of complaints on social media that are still ongoing – all despite the fact she is still the strongest character for most of the game’s content by a comfortable margin. I worry this backlash will discourage the developers from making necessary nerfs in the future.
Again, I want to clarify my point of view here. I don’t want this game to be hard. I play TFD precisely because it is an easy, simple game where I can blow off steam with some mass virtual murder.
But there’s a difference between easy and broken. It doesn’t need to be a challenging game, but it does need to be a game, and right now I’m not sure it’s even meeting that standard. As I’ve said before, the purpose of difficulty in online games isn’t really to make things stressful but to allow you to fully engage with the gameplay. Hitting one button and watching everything die is not really gameplay.
The characters in TFD by and large have fun, well-designed kits, but because of power creep, most of them use only one or two buttons, and non-DPS characters can’t fulfill their intended roles. I’m not saying I want the game to start requiring a hard trinity for group content, but characters should be able to play out their intended fantasies.
The recent damage buffs to underperformers help increase character diversity somewhat, but they don’t solve the deeper problem of a meta that’s all about killing everything the moment it spawns and has no room for anything else. It’s great that Ajax’s leap actually does decent damage now, but imagine being a new player, choosing Ajax for the fantasy of being an indestructible tank, and then finding out his optimal playstyle is to ignore defensive abilities and just bunny-hop around the map.
There are a lot of arguments used against nerfs in this game, most of which are pretty spurious. This being a PvE game doesn’t automagically mean balance doesn’t matter. If one character does ten trillion damage per hit and another does 0.037 damage per hit, that’s still a problem, even if there’s no PvP.
But there is one argument that I do kind of agree with, and that’s that this is a very grindy game that pretty much requires speed-running. Take Void Abyss bosses: Unless you get super lucky with drops, it takes over 70Â kills of a Void Abyss boss to get its associated outfit on one character.
As this is one of the few ways to get free skins and about the only way to get skins for female characters that aren’t ludicrously sexualized, I absolutely do not want the Void Abyss grind to get any slower. You better believe I’m leaning on Serena to trivialize this thing.
This is the real rub of TFD‘s crazy power creep: To really get things back to a healthy state, Nexon would need to revamp nearly every aspect of the game – not just characters and guns but also rewards. I’m not sure the developers have the bandwidth or resources for that level of overhaul – or whether the community has the stomach for it.
But I’m also not sure the game has any real longevity on its current trajectory. I’m playing less and less, and a lot of that is because of the insane power creep. Playing off meta characters or playing solo helps, but it’s a bandaid on the problem.
I don’t want this game to be hard. I just want it to be functional. I want every character and every ability to actually have a role. A version of TFD where you get to fully utilize every character’s kit, with slightly slower combat but greater rewards to compensate, has the potential to be an insanely fun game.
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