Today, on Wednesday, July 24th, the hotfix 1.0.4 was released around 11:40 AM for the shooter The First Descendant on Steam, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PS4, and PS5. The loot cave, reminiscent of Destiny, was addressed. But the team has good news.
This was the exciting point:
- The most effective way to collect gold and experience points in The First Descendant works through a skill of the character “Valby”, who kills enemies in a row with the “Vulgus Strategic Output”. However, the enemies respawn very quickly after they die: Their respawn rate is very high.
- This reminded players of the loot shooter Destiny, where such caves with endlessly spawning enemies existed in 2014, referred to as loot caves. In Destiny, the caves were fought against because Bungie did not appreciate that players could just stand in one place and shoot enemies. Players were intended to engage in the cool activities that Bungie had designed.
- Due to a translation error, players initially believed that the loot cave in The First Descendant was intended as such, and all other spots in the game would be equally strong. However, this is not the case.
Cave gets weaker but remains stronger than intended
This is now the change: With today’s patch, the spot has been nerfed by increasing the time monsters take to spawn.
However, Nexon extends its hand to players and states that the spot is still “significantly more productive” than originally intended, so that the area remains as popular as it is currently.
The spot is now “just as efficient” as other extremely rewarding hunting grounds. This is communicated by the game director.
Additionally, the hotfix reduces the cooldown timer at outposts from 5 minutes to 1 minute, allowing players to use them more frequently without having to run elsewhere or intentionally sabotage the task.
The game director says:
With this adjustment, the reward amount at the outpost of the fortress has been reduced. To ensure that the “Valby run” remains a popular hunting area, we have set the reward efficiency significantly higher than originally planned. We hope to offer numerous farming spots in The First Descendant, each with unique properties and utility for various descendants. Instead of reverting the Valby run to its original intent, we have adjusted it to provide similar efficiency as other hunting areas with high rewards.
Furthermore, we have reduced cooldown times for all outposts, allowing players to play them more frequently without intentionally failing and not having to search for outposts with shorter cooldowns by moving around on the map. We have also added gold rewards for special operations and adjusted 4 types of void fragments that drop randomly.
Here are the patch notes:
- The storage limit for modules has been increased from 1000 to 1500.
- The cooldown time for the “Strategic Outpost of Vulgus” has been reduced from 5 minutes to 1 minute.
- The spawn time between the respawn of monsters has been increased, and the amount of reward at the “Strategic Outpost of Vulgus” has been adjusted.
- Void fragments can be obtained from defeating monsters in the special operation. Most fragments can be obtained from the special operation “Neutralize Void Experiment”.
- Using the item “Mark for Arrest” received in the special operation grants ten times the usual amount of gold. When “Mark for Arrest” is used on the “Consumable” tab, it is converted into 100,000 gold, and “High-Quality Arrest Mark” is converted into 1,000,000 gold.
This is the reaction: Especially the reduction of the cooldown timer is praised on reddit as “Fucking Phenomenal”.
Another user says: “That doesn’t sound bad at all.”
While current players seem to be pleased with the change, which is not as bad as generally feared, there are quite a number of players who did not have such a good week in The First Descendant: Over 1,300 players of The First Descendant can no longer play the game – But it is only their own fault
