The First Descendant is rapidly rising on the Steam charts and may even soon pose a threat to Elden Ring

Do you remember The First Descendant? It’s Nexon’s free-to-play loot shooter that made headlines about two years ago. It was first announced with an impressive cinematic trailer, followed by various beta tests a few months later.

Connor and I played the game a year and a half ago and thought it was fine, but lacked a little extra appeal. After announcing its release date at Summer Game Fest a few weeks ago, The First Descendant has now been officially released. a lot of A lot of people are playing this game right now.

The First Descendant is a free-to-play third-person shooter with RPG mechanics and loot, so it was destined to succeed. However, this success wasn’t inevitable, especially considering the saturated loot shooter market.

The game was welcomed by thousands of players on its first day, and as of this writing, the loot shooter is the sixth most popular game on Steam, with Elden Ring next in its sights.

The number of concurrent players is growing rapidly, reaching its most recent peak of over 180,000 just a few minutes ago. This is a significant number regardless of whether it is free, but the response has not been entirely positive.

Judging from the player reviews, The First Descendant currently has mixed reviews on Steam, based on about 2,400 reviews. 49% of the player reviews are positive, which is a bit unusual for a game that has received mixed reviews.

It’s hard to tell how many of the negative reviews were critical of the gameplay or monetization, rather than pointing out server outages and other launch day issues. A large portion of the negative reviews also stemmed from the game being available for download before the servers were live, leading players to believe they couldn’t log in when in fact the servers weren’t yet live. This felt more like a miscommunication, but it’s largely reflected in the game’s rating on Steam.

The game has also seen over 105,000 viewers at the time of writing, thanks to Twitch Drops, putting it firmly in the top five on the streaming platform. In fact, the game is so popular that Nexon had to apologize for delayed rewards. Some negative reviews have also reported being unable to get their battle pass despite paying – so server issues are definitely an issue at the moment.