There was a lot of hype around The First Descendant‘s season three update, Breakthrough. With a long wait between updates, including delays, and the end of service for older consoles theoretically allowing them to design more ambitious content, there was a sense that this was going to be almost like a soft reboot of the game, a second launch to usher in a new era.

It’s probably fair to say we overhyped ourselves, but even if we hadn’t, this update would still be disappointing. Having returned to the game a few weeks after Breakthrough’s launch, I’ve found nothing but frustration.

Firstly, a lot of what made season three sound so ambitious was not included in the initial update, and much of it still hasn’t arrived but will instead be portioned out over the coming months. I was particularly disappointed that melee weapons are not coming until October.

In the meanwhile, the meat of the update is the new Axion Plains zone, and gods, what a miserable experience it is.

First of all, Axion is probably the single ugliest zone I’ve ever seen in a video game, and it’s not even ugly in an interesting way. I love bleak, macabre, and horrific zones. Axion is just a big empty mud puddle sprinkled with a few grey bunkers. With the end of support for old consoles, we expected a zone more beautiful and detailed than what had come before, but it’s miles below the base game zones in visual quality. It looks like something you’d see in a tech demo, not a live game.

Worse still is the gameplay. Following the blowback over the very mild nerfs they gave Ines a few months ago, the developers have returned to their policy of never nerfing the top end characters and instead “balancing” by making ever harder content. Axion is the fruit of that philosophy, and oh what bitter fruit it is.

As Ines and Serena, I can finish the missions on Axion, but it’s an awful slog owing to what unbelievable HP sponges the Axion enemies are. We’re talking multiple minutes of just holding down the left mouse button while I slowly, agonizingly work my way through the billions of HP bosses have.

Mind you, I have seen some people delete these bosses in seconds, though I have no idea how as I’ve already maxed out pretty much everything I can for those two. The only thing I haven’t completed is arche tuning, which provides only a few percentage points of bonus damage, and I can’t imagine you’re meant to have full tuning to do Axion given Axion missions reward arche XP.

On my other characters, Axion missions aren’t doable at all. I’m not going to claim that I’ve perfectly minmaxed them in every way, but we’re still talking max level descendants (ultimates in many cases) with maxed mods, maxed ultimate weapons with level X cores, and partial arche tuning. If I go almost anywhere else in the game, these characters will completely roll the opposition without breaking a sweat, but in Axion, they feel powerless.

Grouping seems to be the best solution, albeit still not an ideal one given how solo friendly the game has been up until now, but there’s no formal matchmaking for Axion missions. I tried using the group finder tool, but I gave up after a few minutes of fruitless searching. I’m not sure whether it’s bugged or if I’m missing something, but all I got was error messages about the session being full, even on parties that clearly showed empty slots. You can run into people running the missions in the open world and work together with them, but that’s hardly reliable.

I need to be blunt: Magnum Studio‘s approach to balance in The First Descendant is not working. It is an abject, utter failure, and it is crushing the fun out of the game.

The power disparities in this game are simply too big. Not just between the best and worst descendants, but even just between someone who’s fully optimized and someone who’s building for “good enough.” You can’t build a healthy game where the power levels of different endgame players can be orders of magnitude apart. It doesn’t work.

The current difficulty of Axion is good for someone who’s 100% minmaxed one of the two or three top tier characters, but it’s agonizing for the rest of us. And again, the rest of the game is a complete faceroll! It’s too easy! The gulf in difficulty between Axion and everywhere else is oceanic in scale.

In hindsight, it was an error to make every new piece of content in this game so devoted to vertical progression. The power creep that has happened since launch is literally game-breaking. It would have been a lot better to focus more on horizontal progression — new build options and the like.

The new trigger modules are a good step in that direction, but of course unlocking them is a tremendous grind. I have zero characters eligible for them, and I’ve played nearly three hundred hours of this game. I guess I should have focused on building one character instead of spreading myself thin over half a dozen, but isn’t the variety of characters meant to be part of the appeal of this game?

The devs keep saying they’re going to balance all descendants up to the level of the top performers, but the fact is they’re just not delivering on that promise. First they were going to buff everyone to Bunny’s level, then they were going to buff everyone to Freyna’s level, then they were going to buff everyone to Ines and Serena’s level. Meanwhile characters that have been at the bottom of the meta since launch continue to languish in obscurity, but hey, they just buffed Bunny and Freyna again!

Yes, they have handed out a lot of buffs, and the gap between the best and worst characters has narrowed, but it’s still there. Part of the problem is they mostly just do numbers buffs without addressing deeper design issues that keep characters from being meta.

Blair needs faster animations, not just bigger numbers. Viessa needs more range, not more damage. Unique weapons need to benefit from weapon cores if they’re to ever be a meaningful option. And a good chunk of the cast is still suffering from being designed for a slower, more tactical version of the game that no longer exists. No one wants to play Hailey when she needs to debuff her own movement to do max damage in a world where Serena can do better damage and literally fly, with no downsides.

-Hailey reacts to the news Freyna is getting buffed before her.

They also increasingly seem to have decided to use ultimate variants as a way to “fix” off meta characters, but that’s a bad policy for multiple reasons. You shouldn’t have to wait months, potentially years, for your favourite character to be made viable, and ultimate characters should be about adding fun new ways to play characters, not just fixing their broken mechanics. To say nothing of characters that already have their ultimates and are still struggling to find a solid place in the meta, like Ajax.

There are other issues with Axion, too. The big rewards like descendant and vehicle blueprints are now earned through lootboxes, and you can only set the pity system to the boxes themselves, meaning you can’t target individual items you need. In other words, it’s a big nerf to bad luck protection, and a fairly transparent attempt at extending the grind of new content. They also increased the battle pass challenges for this season to make them much more grindy, though a recent patch did tone that down a little.

Oh, yeah, we also have vehicles now. Those are fine, I suppose, but I can’t escape the feeling the devs made Axion a big empty wasteland purely to justify the inclusion of a new way to stare at the female descendants’ butts.

So far, the storyline around Axion seems like a significant improvement over what’s came before (the bar was under the floorboards, but still), but my progress through it was delayed by a bug that prevented quest NPCs from spawning. This bug was fixed fairly quickly, but it furthered my poor impression of the new area.

There’s one other notable new piece of content that just got added, and that’s the lounge. You could consider it a very basic form of player housing, but it’s really more like a virtual trophy case where you can display your descendants and a few other collectibles. Considering the team is selling a decoration that lets you watch your descendants showering (through frosted glass to preserve the game’s age rating, however tenuously), it’s pretty clear what the true purpose of the lounge is.

Under most circumstances, I’d consider a feature like the lounge pointless but harmless, but the bluntly voyeuristic intent of it is gross, and in the context of everything else wrong with the game, spending development resources on something like this has real “fiddling while Rome burns” energy.

Sure, the balance is broken beyond belief, and the new content is a miserable slog of HP sponges and RNG, and the rollout for new content is painfully slow, and we haven’t gotten a zone with anything so colourful as grass since launch, but we can watch Bunny take a shower, and that’s the important thing!

Sure, the balance is broken beyond belief, and the new content is a miserable slog of HP sponges and RNG, and the rollout for new content is painfully slow, and we haven’t gotten a zone with anything so colourful as grass since launch, but we can watch Bunny take a shower, and that’s the important thing!It’s frustrating because there is still a lot of good stuff in this game. The characters largely have fun and interesting toolkits. The guns feel good to use. Raining fire from the heavens with Greg’s Reversed Fate feels great. Backflipping around the battlefield with Hyrdo Pressure Bomb Valby is delightful. But the atrocious balance, the bland content, the endless grind… it just wears you down.

Playing The First Descendant feels like buying all the ingredients for a five star gourmet meal and then having a toddler do the cooking. It increasingly seems like the developers are only putting effort towards finding new and creative ways to sexualize the characters. I get the bikini skins make money, but surely you can make bikini skins and content that doesn’t feel like getting a root canal?

Clearly there’s a subset of players for whom the T&A is reason enough to keep playing, but those of us who actually want a fun looter shooter seem destined to leave for greener pastures. I really liked Nell as an NPC, and her kit looks fun, so I’ve been looking forward to unlocking her as a playable descendant, but I just don’t know how much more slogging through Axion I can take.

The world of online gaming is changing. As the gray area between single-player and MMO becomes ever wider, Massively OP’s Tyler Edwards delves into this new and expanding frontier biweekly in Not So Massively, our column on battle royales, OARPGs, looter-shooters, and other multiplayer online titles that aren’t quite MMORPGs.