Dev Note vol.5

Greetings, Descendants. This is the Director of The First Descendant, Minseok Joo.

It's already time for our fifth Dev Note, and this will probably be the last Dev Note before the Crossplay Open Beta Test. The Dev Team is toiling away on the final stages of the test. I've also been in the daily loop of testing, finding things to fix, discussing them with the team, and testing new builds as they come out. As a looter shooter gamer myself, I'm working with the Dev Team on meticulously polishing every detail to create a game that I would love to play.

Today I'd like to talk about Missions, which we've spent the most time testing.
Missions were another type of content that received a lot of feedback after the last Steam Beta Test. The feedback included: the fields felt empty; Missions felt monotonous and repetitive; as well as feeling difficult to play together because players on different Missions were often matched in the same field.

We'd love to be perfect in every way, but unfortunately the Dev Team's time and resources are limited, so we had to decide where to focus. The First Descendant is a character-driven game, so we wanted to design the Missions so that they lent themselves to skill-based combat. Since it's also a grindy game, we established a direction for design to ensure that the Missions have a structure that motivates farming and offers high replayability. So rather than trying to fill the fields to make them come alive, we focused on increasing the quality of Missions to enable character-driven combat with high replayability for farming.