'Did Not Work': The First Descendant Considered a Failure by Its Developer

Have yall seen some of the skins in that game? 😳 they’re literally trying to bait gooners to spend money

Interesting. And here was I thinking that sex sells. Guess it's more complicated than that, huh?

Shame, I actually quite enjoyed my time with it. Just goes to show what a fallacy GaaS are though. As I’ve said many times, yes there are exceptions to the rule (but even they appear to be struggling lately - Fortnite)… but generally dev-teams are ****ing into the wind chasing this particular dragon.

@danzoEX oh so you mean appealing to “what gamers want” didn’t work for them? Damn lol. It obviously lasted longer than certain other live service games like that one that starts with a C but color me surprised since this game was always mentioned as an example of “appealing to the main audience”😂. At least something like stellar blade actually seemed to still care about the game itself

The reality is that most people don’t want to spend years playing the same game over and over. The games that do manage that sort of success are either excellent games in their field or they are lucky. You can’t plan for it!

Maybe they want take a long hard look at themselves. Amongst grindy games this one was still an absolute joke, determined to funnel you in to those ridiculously priced micro transactions...in fact I don't think micro transactions is appropriate for the amounts they were asking for things. I actually enjoyed the game for a little bit but that left a bad taste in the mouth and I never returned.

Well I enjoyed the game for what it's worth it always felt like it never it was never going to last, I had 400 hours in the game btw... oh and Bunny will always be best girl

@Boxmonkey Exactly my thoughts. I feel like a LOT of people play something like this, enjoy it for a while, get bored with doing the same thing over and over, and move on. There are some games I absolutely love, but I know if I played them constantly for years I'd lose interest.

I'm not saying those people who enjoy riding the same bike for years obviously aren't out there, but as has been said before, most of them have already been captured by older and more established live service ventures.

Live service games all have a time limit of some sort, though. Even the almighty Fortnite has been falling off a bit recently. Years pass, people and tastes change, and what was the hotness one year becomes passé the next. I feel like the single-player game model better fits the longer-term realities of a constantly shifting marketplace, instead of having a product that is inherently more and more limited over time by its own core design elements. No amount of celebrity or brand crossovers can account for that.

I guess sex only sells when you're actually a good game 😂😂😂

People only have so much time to play video games. It sucks but breaking the mold and staying relevant against unstoppable live service games like Fortnight or Roblox is really hard. Most fail it seems.

Or if they are lucky they get a small but dedicated following, but that won't put food on the table.

I thought it was pretty decent, but after about 30 hours I had my fill of it and moved onto something else.

@DennisReynolds There's an entire industry on Steam that begs to differ 😂

I genuinely had a good time with TFD, but once I was done I was 100% done. If it had an interesting and well made ongoing narrative I probably would've stuck with it, but it wasn't strong enough to retain this butt lovin' rootin' tootin' cowpoke...

I think most people here know that I'm not anti-GaaS, but I think one of the biggest problems in that sector is every GaaS wants to be a "forever" game. It obviously goes against every instinct in a share-holder's body, but games really should be designed to be finite. It makes space for more titles and even more releases from your own teams.

Destiny 2 should have ended with the Light and Dark saga, taking the same approach as Destiny 1: keep the servers up, but no new content. Even with Marathon, Destiny 3 should have been announced by now. The Last of Us Online should have been released with a 1-year content plan and that's it.

Call of Duty is a GaaS and they release new titles every year. I'm not saying that other devs (or even CoD) should have that kind of output, but it shows that games don't need to last forever - even GaaS.

@naruball Unless it's attached to a super popular IP, a game needs to be good first in order to be a bit.

Anyone who thinks Concord, Dustborn, Highguard, etc. would have been successful if they had super hot gooner characters (like The First Descendant does) is kidding themselves

@Oram77 I miss bunny gang 🙏
I still fondly remember the early days of Ult Bunny. I clocked about 400 hours into this game myself, mechanically it was actually pretty fun to play, fun pve boss fights.
Eventually I really just finished the game. Nothing left to do.

I think these games suffer from never taking risks. Look at Warframe: game gets wild new expansions all the time, adding variety to the proceedings. But then you have game like this that expect you to literally do the same exact thing ad nauseum, never adding anything truly new, just more of the same. So they alienate any player for whom that core loop doesn't remain exciting, killing their own playerbase over time as more people grow bored.

Plus, they almost NEVER reevaluate their onboarding processes. New players get absolutely swamped with overwhelming amounts of cruft that rarely gets explained well because modern devs expect players to join a Discord channel or search Reddit communities instead of bothering to design good, informative games.

It never surprises me when such titles crumble under their own misguided decisions.

I played this game pretty heavily when it launched and enjoyed my time with it; even got the platinum trophy. I defended it on the 3/10 review comment section because I felt that was too low (another topic). But what ultimately got me to stop playing is exactly what their president is stating - "retention challenges". Once you complete the story modes (normal and hard), you're left with boring daily grind stuff and the hope that a low drop item you need for an upgrade does indeed drop. Doing the same mission 10+ times for 1 item gets to you after a while and you ask yourself "why?". At least they are acknowledging the issue and maybe will create some new retaining endgame content.