A little over a year has passed since the launch, if the developers First descendant could go back in time and do something differently, it would be to create ways to control what they call “power inflation.” As it turns out, the game's eponymous characters developed faster than expected, and players were able to exhaust the content too quickly.
On June 30, 2024, Nexon launched The First Descendant, a free-to-play online shooter in the spirit of Warframe. During the initial release period, there were 200,000 concurrent players. However, the company that developed and published the game was unable to retain this initial user base.
Speaking to a game developer at the Tokyo Game Show, First descendant Director Min Seok-ju and producer Beom-Joon Lee shared their thoughts on the challenges of balancing the game in real time and dealing with feedback from completely opposite sides of the player base.
Continuing with the example of the powerful Descendant, in cases like this Lee says there is usually feedback from two main user groups. Some argue that the team needs to reduce its powers, others argue the opposite and ask to maintain its current status. The trick is to figure out how to deal with these two competing groups.
“In fact, we cannot weaken the Descendant, [as] it will be very damaging to the game because users who don't like it will leave and we won't be able to do that,” he said. “Therefore, in order to satisfy the needs of both groups, we must improve the strength of the other Descendants. It takes more time and energy than planned to improve the strength of all the other Descendants.
Lee added that players generally want to progress faster, and the team is constantly listening to their “needs and wants” to try to incorporate their feedback. But once they receive the feedback, they have to digest it before incorporating it, which takes extra time. At the same time, the team also needs to consider the larger scheme of things.
Jue called it a “wave” that could push the team in an unplanned direction. “All this feedback, it all comes together and then kind of forces us to move in a certain direction that we didn't plan on at the beginning,” he said. “So this changes our plan, and to make those changes we have to adjust our schedule and change our priorities. So I think that's the hardest part of live games.”
Balancing player feedback is a delicate operation.
Despite all this, Joo said the team doesn't have a hard and fast rule about making decisions about changes based on feedback. Sometimes it may be one person's idea or concern, but it can be quite significant. In other cases, a large number of players may be clamoring for the same thing – even if the team didn't originally plan to make the change, these cases may cause them to reconsider it.
In addition to reviewing and processing data, the team also relies on its intuition to decide what needs to be given more attention. The balance between these two elements is the key to maintaining the original direction of the game and not straying from the developers' intentions.
“I think the thing about live service games is that you have to serve two different groups in parallel,” Joo said. “In other words, we need to give existing users new things to play with so that they become the core. And then we also need to attract new players who can catch up very quickly so that they can join the existing players. We can't say that between these two players, one is more important than the other. It has to go hand in hand.”
He added that running a free-to-play game with a live service is “very complex,” with the biggest thing being that the team's intentions and actual results sometimes don't match up, and the feedback that pushes things in a completely different direction doesn't match up. “It was actually quite stressful on our part, and I think that's the hardest part of a free-to-play game.”
“Yes, and although we provide an online service, we are simultaneously preparing for future updates,” Lee said. “But when we have this live service, we get live feedback, and so we try to deal with things that we didn't really expect. But at the same time, we also need to prepare for the future. So it's very difficult for us to allocate resources.”
