The First Descendant

Submission 280

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About

The First Descendant is a free-to-play multiplayer looter shooter developed by Korean developers Nexon. Upon its release in early July 2024, the game proved quickly popular, scoring over 170,000 concurrent players on the first day, though it scored mixed reviews on Steam. The game swiftly drew a large fanbase and online, and the fighter character Bunny received a significant amount of attention for her revealing outfits.

History

The First Descendant was developed and published by Nexon.^[1] It is a co-op looter shooter in which multiple players work together to tackle missions and bosses. The game also has RPG elements and uses a free-to-play model in which players can spend real money to bypass grind-based chores or get character upgrades.^[3]

It was first teased in a trailer posted on July 14th, 2022, gaining over 71,000 views in two years (shown below, left). Over the following two years, it developed significant interest and anticipation online, as evidenced by a June 7th, 2024, launch date trailer that received over 6.9 million views in three weeks (shown below, right).

The game^[1] was posted on Steam on June 30th, 2024, with an official release date of July 2nd, 2024. The game had over 170,000 concurrent players on launch day, catapulting it to the top of Steam's charts.^[2]

Reception

The game received mixed reception upon release. This was seen on Steam^[1] where reviews of the game read "Mixed" as of July 2nd, 2024. Much of the negative reviews came from players reporting making in-game purchases but not receiving the items they'd purchased. Nexon announced it was aware of the issue and working to fix it.^[5] It also received a mixed review on IGN,^[3] which said that while the combat was generally fun and up-to-par with other games in the space like Destiny and Warframe, the dialogue was terrible, the campaign was relatively dull and the free-to-play aspects were "eyebrow-raising."

Online Presence

Online, the game developed a strong interest throughout its development. The game's subreddit, /r/TheFirstDescendant,^[4] accumulated over 25,000 subscribers as of July 2nd, 2024.

Furthermore, the character Bunny drew significant attention online due to her curvaceous, feminine design (example post shown below).

On July 2nd, Redditor Genji88 posted pictures of Bunny in a revealing cosmetic skin, gaining over 250 points in /r/TheFirstDescendant^[6] in less than a day.

On Twitter / X, some users celebrated Bunny as a moral victory against supposedly unsexy female characters, similar to the discourse surrounding Stellar Blade. For example, on June 28th, 2024, X user @endyimonyt^[7] favorably compared Bunny to a character from Concord, gaining over 640 retweets and 2,800 likes in four days (shown below).