The Games of 2024: The First Descendant (Patreon)

The First Descendant is a free-to-play action-RPG, splitting some weird difference between Warframe, Destiny 2, Outriders, Genshin Impact, and polygonal ass.

While it’s easy to be flip about a game like this and write it off as “a podcast game” or “another free-to-play nightmare,” I think I’m actually pretty frustrated by the way The First Descendant comes together. Why? Because it’s actually a pretty decent third-person shooter with fun abilities and some really meaningful differences between characters/classes. It’s mechanically interesting in ways that free-to-play games often aren’t. Unfortunately it’s buried under a terribly told story full of the sorts of nonsense nouns that make you long for the clear motivations and plain dialogue of Warframe. Once you get past the nonsense falling out of every character’s mouth, you’re hit with a system full of items and items used to craft those items and items used to craft those items until you’re left staring at a screen full of drop percentages and shaking your head in disgust. The funny thing, though, is that is actually improved over the course of the year.

For some—but not all—of the game’s more annoying to obtain items, the game has implemented a sort of consolation system. If you mark a quest reward as an item you want, every time you run that quest a meter will slowly fill. If you haven’t gotten the item as a random drop before the meter fills, then filling the meter just gives you the item anyway. Make sense? No? You’re right to feel that way. But the players who have been banging their head against this sort of thing for most of 2024 are probably seeing it as a welcome change. And hey, a quest I ran like 15 times earlier this year without getting the stupid gun part I wanted coughed up said gun part after only three more runs once that system rolled out. Progress! Right? Riiiiight?

Games are funny that way. You’re either in too deep, in which case these relatively meager quality of life improvements are THE BEST THING TO HAPPEN TO THE GAME OH HELL YEAH THE DEVS COOKED WITH THIS ONE or you’re on the outside and every change just sounds like they found a slightly friendlier way to hit you over the head and steal your wallet. One day you wake up and your main character is wearing a golden bikini that reveals somewhat more skin than the default one and $80 is missing from your bank account.

Oh yeah, The First Descendant is also one of those games. I didn’t even realize it when I first started playing it, but as soon as I found myself wondering which Warframe-esque cards I should equip to make my lady and her guns more powerful, I stumbled into the community and got a bunch of creepy fan edits where they were photoshopping fatter asses onto the characters. Whoops, I accidentally got into the porny f2p shooter! The crazier thing is that the developers of the game, in what feels like a desperate ploy to keep people playing and monetizing without having to actually make a bunch of new playable content, decided that these were the guys they were going to cater to. So the skin store has become like that one aisle in every Spirit Halloween store—Sexy School Girl Costume right next to Naughty Nun Costume right next to bikinis and… well, yeah. The game’s fashion component probably isn’t quite as deep as Phashion Star Online 2 is, but hey, it isn’t even a year in yet. The developers have also pledged to bring “jiggle physics” to the game at some point in the future.

At some point I decided it would be in my best interests as a human being to get every single achievement in this game. That took about 80 hours and the cross-progression allowed me to automatically unlock all the trophies and achievements on PS5 and Xbox. Heck, I even downloaded the PS4 version of the game just to pop all those trophies, too, eff it. Filth my profile up, baby, there’s no going back now. Jiggle physics!!!!

I don’t really believe in the concept of “guilty pleasures,” but I also can’t say that I feel great about the time I’ve spent playing The First Descendant. I also don’t feel great knowing that it’s likely that I’m going to spend even more time playing it, staring at lists of “enhancement materials” and wondering just how many hours it would take to implant a reactor with a new condition and then enhance it five times so it’s at, you know, maximum… enhancement. Ultimately, I think I just wish that this was closer to a normal video game and not a hate factory full of low-percentage drops and a game experience that seems to be skewing even further in the direction of pleasing people who are just there to zoom in and hunt for camel toe (spoiler: it’s there on some skins if you zoom in far enough) instead of distinguished gentlemen like myself, who think the cool, shiny, circular tube that leads to the guy who combines or dismantles cards is a really cool looking asset. The game also recently added dogs, so… yeah. Dogs, I guess. It’s like they saw the pets from Torchlight and said “hey, what if we also had a pet that picked up stuff for you and would automatically deal with the junk loot we keep throwing at everyone?”

Ugh. I’ve already said too much. This game got its hooks in me but I don’t think I’d recommend it to anyone, either. The action is fine, the graphics are pretty good in spots, and there are some artistic choices here and there that I think look really nice. But it’s also a grind simulator with a nonsense story that runs out of new tricks long before you’ve made it to the final area and the post-release gameplay updates haven’t really added much of note to the experience. But it’s also a game that I kept coming back to all year, and I feel that this must be documented here in this space, even if some of you will (and should!) take this as more of a warning than a celebration.