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There’s a lot to love and hate about The First Descendant, Nexon’s latest free-to-play shooter. The good news is that they got the basics right, making a game that is genuinely enjoyable and rewarding to play. The bad news is that a host of performance bugs, and extortionate microtransactions threaten to undo this hard work.
The microtransactions are particularly frustrating. Their presence in free-to-play games is inevitable, and most don’t mind forking out a bit of cash for bonuses, especially when it is supporting a well-made game they enjoy playing. For many though, The First Descendant has gone above and beyond what is reasonable, especially when it comes to customising characters.
It’s common for custom skins, outfits and wearable objects to feature as additional content you can purchase. In a lot of these free-to-play games, this customization is a big appeal for players who enjoy expressing themselves in their character, or racing to unlock the latest popular skin. The First Descendant even lets you customise your new objects with different colours. So far so good, but, unlike almost all other similar games, you aren’t paying to actually unlock the colour, you are paying for a single use.
This has resulted in players forking out cash to dye a helmet or weapon, only to find out they now have to pay again if they want to change the character’s hair to that same colour. Reddit user kolvaer put it simply “Monetizing colors is expected for me, but monetizing the usage of them is insane.”
There is a way to unlock certain colours for free, through Twitch Drops. Once you unlock these colours though, you’ll find you can’t actually apply them to default skins, only premium ones that must be paid for. This means you are still forced to spend money. Oversights such as this only add to the chorus of voices accusing the game of being a cash grab.
All of this hasn’t been helped by reports that the entire microtransaction payment system is broken as well as crashing errors and stuttering in the gameplay.
