I’m addicted to the ‘first child’, that’s the problem

I’m staring at a number I’m not entirely sure I can believe. 135.6 hours. I spent so much time on The First Descendant, a game that came out 20 days ago on July 2nd. That’s basically 7 hours a day just this game, at a time when I had to juggle many others plus TV shows and movies that I need to play. Instead, pretty much every hour I’m not writing or spending time with my family, I’m playing this game.

This is full blown addiction, something I don’t remember experiencing since some of Destiny’s highs or back in my 2/3 Diablo grinding days. No have all these responsibilities. Heck, I was playing for five minutes before I started this article, farming gold and checking my materials and characters that ended up “cooking” overnight. When I start playing games in the morning, that’s when you know it’s bad. This is why I forced Marvel Snap to quit.

I have already said that I cannot claim that the First Descendant is a good game. But the longer I played, the more I realized that once you got through the mud, it somehow created one of the most compelling and addictive endgame loot grinds I’ve ever seen. If I had to sum it up in one word it would be this investment.

You pretty much never run out of things to do in this game, and it hasn’t stopped being fun to pursue those things, even if you do, in repetitive, often barely interesting activities. It’s the ultimate “numbers go up” game, although ironically, sometimes it’s “numbers down” as you preempt weapons and characters to make their mods cost less so you can fit more and power them up.

What is the loop here?

Farming weapons and characters – While it may depend on what you’re going for, the game basically forces you to do stunts whole game, while relying on typical looter RNG luck. But when it hits, the dopamine is a blast.

To use Destiny’s terms here for materials and “engrams” (called Amorphous Materials), you need to farm a combination of Bases, basically public map events, Infiltrations, basically strikes, Void Reactors (durable mini-bosses), and Void Bosses (hardest bosses in the game). The engram usually opens after killing the Void Reactor or Void boss, and you’ll have anywhere from a 3% to 38% chance of getting what you want.

Prestigious – However, this is only half the battle and things get extremely expansive from here. You want to upgrade your weapons and characters with mods that boost things like fire rate and crit damage for weapons and health and skill damage for characters. Updating mods costs a lot of materials, so you’ll need to accumulate this currency (players find faster and faster farms as time goes on).

Then you can farm for an ability to permanently upgrade and prestige a weapon or character. An incredibly rare item called Energy Activator will permanently increase your mod ability by a large amount. Then you set your gun or character to max level 40, reset them, and now one of your mods will cost half what they used to. 16 to the power will now be 8 to the power and then guess what? You can put 8 more power mods in there so you will be more powerful.

You can spread your farming time between upgrading a number of characters or farming a wide range of items. Or you can hyper focus on specific characters to “max” them and try different builds. With this amount of game time I’m doing both, but right now I’m focusing on the Valby/Thunder Cage build which is actually close to max.

The loop just works. There are some friction points like how annoying Void Reactors are, but Nexon has shown that they are both extremely reactive to things players hate and extremely avoid nerfing things players love. It’s a stark contrast to so many other raiders that see players farm a lot or get stronger and get smacked with a nerf hammer. That just didn’t happen here, but it might not balance the game a bit. He kept it fun.

Note that I didn’t mention microtransactions here, which are good for nothing and allow you to pay for energy. But it literally exists No the time in the game when I felt something was completely out of reach and I needed to buy it. There are no pain points strong enough to drive you to the store. I spent $60 on a free game. But that was for some great clothes for my favorite characters and lord knows I already got my $60 here. I feel like the moment I give in and pay for the power, this game is over for me. However, I haven’t done that and I don’t plan to based on how things are going. I just don’t feel the pressure.

If you try The First Descendant and hate it, I understand. At the beginning of the campaign, it makes a very bad first impression. But if you’re bored of Destiny and miss hardcore grinds like Borderlands or Diablo, this might be for you. It certainly was for me.

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