‘The First Descendant made me realise I’ve had enough of live service shooters’

The First Descendant is a fine game. It has fun shooting, it looks great and it moves along at a satisfying pace. It’s not too difficult, it’s not clumsy, it’s an enjoyable experience. You can watch 30 minutes of us playing it below and see a game that you can’t poke too many holes into from a bread-and-butter technical perspective. It’s also entirely broken my desire for live service shooters.

I’ve had enough of crafting materials. I don’t care if my gun is blue or purple because, frankly, I have three other games whose rarity systems I’m more concerned with. Is there a constantly replenishing group of players that can latch to games like this? It’s like when you walk down the high street and see 5 new hairdressers pop up every month, for whose head?

Obviously, there will be a huge number of players not as burnt out as I am on this genre, who will, in The First Descendant, find a finely crafted looter-shooter with which to sink their time.

But personally, when I finished a mission in The First Descendant and saw that I received 12 different items, multiple currencies, mods, buffs, new guns, and decorative tea cosies, I just knew I was never going to look at any of them. I’ll play for another hour, and everything I’ve picked up thus far may as well have never darkened my door.

It’s like the Huel of video games, all of the joy of earning weapons, exploring new worlds, and meeting new characters churned into a fine dust that is best experienced with a podcast on in the background to keep you awake. It’s the video game equivalent of spinning around a sword in a Skyrim loading screen to give you something to do. Don’t get too scared, you’ll be showered in hollow loot soon. The game even gives you an estimation of how long it’ll take to finish like it’s an excruciatingly delayed Uber.

I look at The First Descendant, and I see a game that I will never finish. I have no scope as to how much game is here, how much of my life I’ll have to invest, and if I’ll miss a key piece of content, thus rendering my time spent pointless. Oh, what I’d give for a 15-hour shooter that I can play through, finish, and then play its multiplayer portion if I want to.

I hate this sense that I can never be done with games. Obviously, in my situation as someone who has to finish 40+ every year makes me an outside case of someone who simply can’t spend too much time on multiple live titles, but even if I could I have so little appetite to invest all of that time.

“I look at The First Descendant, and I see a game that I will never finish… Oh, what I’d give for a 15-hour shooter that I can play through, finish, and then play its multiplayer portion if I want to.”

Frankly, I think it’s misguided that games are still being presented on the basis that you’ll play them as a part-time job. Games like this exist at a strange crossroads where you need to play absolutely tons of them to get the most out of the experience, but they’re free to play, and there are 40 games just like them, so they’re totally ephemeral.

Occasionally, people used to say, “It gets good after five hours,” about a game, and if that was a game you’ve already bought, there was some incentive (or sunk cost) in at least seeing that through. Now you can download and delete games quicker than ever, meaning if they don’t sufficiently jangle their keys at you in the first five minutes, they’re a busted flush.

When I thought about playing more of The First Descendant, I realized that I’d be playing that instead of Warframe, which does everything The First Descendant does, plus has a decade of content. There’s also Destiny 2, which, despite routine stumbles of Bungie‘s own making, is a modern classic, and my other live service haunts.

How are you, as a new live service shooter, supposed to drag away players who already have their favourite live game, their second favourite live game, and probably a third?

I do sympathize with developers somewhat. The length of time it takes for games to be made now means that attempting to chase trends is virtually impossible. If you start developing a game today, you’re probably not launching it until near 2030, and who’s to say what the landscape is going to look like then?

I’m sure developers realize this too. We often publish stories about live service titles not having enough players to fill a game of 5-a-side, and rarely is this entirely down to the game itself. Unless you’re a genuine phenomenon, you’ve probably got about one of two weeks of eyeballs before everyone moves over to the next thing.

“How are you, as a new live service shooter, supposed to drag away players that already have their favourite live game, their second favourite live game, and probably a third?”

Single-player titles have been facing similar hardships for a while, with some big hitters releasing to disappointing sales figures. This is often attributed to live-service titles sucking up the audience, but for some reason publishers haven’t realized that the way to stop players from playing other live-service games instead is not to pump money into another bog standard live-service game.

Attention span is at a premium, and as the core gaming audience ages with little to replace it, the question for players isn’t, “is this worth my money?” it’s, “Is this worth my time?” and you know what’s certainly not worth their time? Another shooter with color-coded loot, expensive outfits, and forgettable characters.

While I seemed to be the only person on Earth who actually liked Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, the live-service parts feel like when everyone in media in the 2010s “pivoted to video.” No one knows why we did it, but some people were successful, and it became assumed wisdom.

That same assumed wisdom is why we have so many games that feel like soylent. Bits and pieces of games you’ve liked before, crushed through the mill to try and hopefully distract you for a few moments before the end of days. Then when it’s all over and the bombs drop, it’s Christmas 2007 again, and you’re loading into your first game of Slayer on Valhalla.