NEXON's The First Descendant launched last week on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series S|X. The free-to-play looter shooter game immediately entered Steam's Top 10 live chart (despite mixed reviews from users on Steam), and it looks like it has continued to perform well. Today, the official Twitter/X account of The First Descendant celebrated reaching 10 million players across all platforms in the first week.
We don't have split numbers, of course. However, SteamDB registered a concurrent player peak of 264K five days ago. Estimates of 'owners' on Valve's Steam range from 1.37 million players (according to VG Insights) to 3.19 million (as reported by Gamalytic).
NEXON's game also caused some controversy when it was found (via Forbes) to have employed several skill icons that resembled those used by Bungie in Destiny 2. The development team has now shared a statement to IGN addressing those allegations:
The First Descendant, as a looter shooter game, was developed with a deep affection and respect for other games in the genre. Destiny 2, being a globally renowned looter shooter game, is also personally admired and respected by the team, and it has served as an inspiration during the development process. We have taken the concerns raised seriously and decided to make adjustments to ensure that the imagery that may appear similar clearly reflects the unique identity of our game. We will continue to improve the game for fans of the looter shooter genre.
Regardless of the inspiration for the icons, there's no doubt that The First Descendant drew a lot from what is still the king of looter shooter games despite Bungie's many ups and downs.
By the way, the developers deployed a hotfix (version 1.0.2) yesterday, adding the 'Start Public Operation' function (matchmaking) to Infiltration Operations (Hard). There's also a brief Director's comment on the changes:
The Dev Team acknowledges the community's concern about the monotonous patterns of Named Monsters and strives to enhance them. In particular, we've noted that the pattern involving breaking spheres in a specific order isn't appropriate for public matching and have decided to remove it immediately.
As new patterns are developed, we will soon update the patterns of existing Named Monsters one by one. As Named Monsters frequently appear in Hard difficulty and Special Operations, we will continue working towards diversifying their patterns.
On the optimization front, the developers at NEXON improved the stability of the shader preparation process by reducing the CPU load during shader generation. They also reduced GPU memory usage when set to High or higher quality.
Today, NEXON also announced the permanent ban of 3481 users from The First Descendant, with a publicly available list on the official website. These users either created, distributed, or used unauthorized software (e.g., cheats and hacks).
