The First Descendant player count flies past 150,000 on Steam in first hour of launch

The First Descendant is the latest title from Nexon, and it’s a looter-shooter somewhere in-between Destiny and Warframe. Having launched early on this morning, its Steam player count has already smashed past 150,000, with that number growing each and every minute.

It’s nothing out of the ordinary or unexpected really, especially considering just last week a game called The Descendant grew to a similar player-count thanks to a simple confusion of names.

Nexon’s previous history includes a pretty interesting range of games – The Finals and MapleStory are a few notable entries, and it’s got a track record of pushing out pretty successful free-to-play games. Community sentiments are pretty wary, however, as the F2P elements are said to quickly descend into a pretty shoddy monetisation system.

On Steam, Nexon’s latest is currently fifth in the Most Played charts, with Elden Ring enjoying roughly 70,000 more players at the moment. When The First Descendant properly wakes up with its full force of US players, I’d imagine it’s going to test this boundary pretty fast.

The game features PvE, though it seems unlikely that a PvP mode will ever be developed. As a blend of Hero Shooter and Looter, you pick from a selection of classes that you can the modify with specific builds and weapons. Enemies are typical creatures ranging from anthropomorphic to outright monsters – and the gameplay loop is going to consist of the typical seasonal battle-pass structure.

It’s going to be interesting to see how The First Descendant holds up in terms of longevity. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what the game is, much like Supervive, which borrows heavily from so many genres that its identity is pretty fluid. To top it off, the design of the game is pretty boilerplate, and looks like every other Unreal Engine 5 shooter out there.

The First Descendant is free-to-play, and available on all major platforms already.