Everyone, even your neighbour’s dog, knows about the Ines nerfs and how much of an issue they proved to be. We all hoped Nexon would say something, and they finally did. In the most recent dev livestream, The First Descendant devs finally commented on the issue of the recent balance patch, as well as the power creep that comes with every new Descendant.
Hardly anyone expected that the character rebalance would cause that much of a ruckus. Sure, some would get agitated, but not that much. Unfortunately, the Ines nerf rubbed many players the wrong way, so that a lot of them threatened to leave the game, with hundreds of players review-bombing TFD on Steam. Now, the developers have finally given their thoughts on the whole situation.
Nexon Won’t Budge – The First Descendant Devs Give Their Reasoning Behind the Ines Nerf
If anyone expected Nexon to roll back the changes, they will be severely disappointed. The devs do apologize to the players for the nerfs multiple times, but have put their foot down.
“About the reaction after the adjustments, we do feel the weight of the reactions. Many bonded with Ines during the gameplay, and making them disappointed after the adjustment, we’d like to apologize first.
Adjustment wasn’t to degrade a certain Descendant, it was our choice to secure the sustainability of the overall balance structure. Ines was excessively influential in many different battles and circumstances. She not only increased the performance gap between the Descendants, but she was also an obstacle in designing the difficulty of different content. As a result, other Descendants became less important and dull in the game. The dev team also struggled to plan and add harder content to the game. Nonetheless, we’d like to apologize again for making the players feel disappointed about changing the characters they like.
We would like to improve our process to provide content that is more stable and balanced from the release stage. And if adjustments are inevitable in the future, we would like to clearly announce the reason and the direction of that change and will take a discreet approach, accompanied with explanations specific enough to make our players understand the change.”
As for the upcoming Serena nerf, they said that, after seeing the reaction to the Ines patch, they want to communicate with the players about the direction and the specific changes they want to see, and will try to come up with an effective way of doing that.
What About the Power Creep?
Unsurprisingly, they are pretty much aware that the new Descendants outshine the old ones by a lot. We all know it is to entice players to invest in them, but the players voiced their dissatisfaction time and time again, and the devs finally addressed the infamous power creep.
“We expected that the new Descendants to be noticed by the players, but we do think that it is undesirable if the content crumbles because of the new Descendants…We are internally checking what is really causing this, and by improving the development process, we’ll try our best to provide more stable and balanced content in the game.”
Didn’t really say much besides “we know and we will look into it”, but beggars can’t be choosers. At least the devs finally commented on the whole balance issue situation in The First Descendant. Sure, it is far from what some players wanted to hear, but at least now we know. You can see it all for yourself in the official live stream video.
