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The First Descendant is a widely popular game made by the Korean studio Nexon. It is one of the best looter shooter games of today, and rightfully so. The dev team is in constant contact with the fanbase and is actively working on improving the game for everyone’s enjoyment. Unfortunately, the situation with Nexon in Korea itself is not that great, it is quite the opposite. That resulted in quite a controversial move by Korean fans during the TGS 2024.
The First Descendant Fans Are a Minority in the Korean Gamer Community
You’d expect that a popular game like TFD would have a ton of fans in its home country, but the reality is completely different. It turns out that The First Descendant is a “hater game” in Korea, with only a small number of loyal fans. The rest of the community uses everything they can to besmirch the game as much as possible. But why is TFD hated in its home country while it is being praised everywhere else? The game is the same everywhere, even gravitating more towards the Asian style of games (with incredibly attractive characters everywhere) than the Western style. What seems to be the problem?
Bad Reputation and Unintended Hate-Speech
The first issue is that Nexon has a reputation in Korea for being “money-grabbers”, only making live service games to milk as much money from their players as possible and even manipulating some drop rates. They have been around for decades now, so you can see why the initial reaction of a lot of players was negative, even before TFD got released. And add the fact that, while we still love TFD, it does look quite a lot like Warframe or Destiny. That is quite enough ammo for haters to label it as plagiarism.
But, the other, more burning issue is that a certain spray, Valby’s spray, has a hand gesture that can be interpreted as hate speech. To clarify, certain hand gestures have a bad reputation in Korea. Without getting into too much detail, the gesture of bringing your thumb and index finger close together (like when you want to symbolize something as small, there is even an emoji of it) is used by some groups in Korea to show hate towards a specific group of people. It is quite a serious issue that basically every other game company made sure to remove and avoid anything that can be loosely associated with said gesture, just to be on the safe side. Nexon did not, claiming that the spray has nothing to do with the infamous hand gesture, but that is more than enough for “anti-fans”.
Korean Players Ignored
To prevent any further damage, the dedicated TFD fans asked Nexon to change the spray, since the game’s popularity plummeted even more. So much so that the players are now getting labeled as “haters” by the rest of the community, for continuing to play the “hater” game. The fans have tried to raise this issue with the devs on every channel possible but got absolutely no response and no action was taken. They even say that the bunch of issues that are getting fixed now were all brought up during the beta by the Korean players, and were ignored.
Last-Ditch Effort
With the community being in shreds, the rest of the dedicated players banded together in a last-ditch effort to turn the devs’ attention to the issue. During the Tokyo Game Show 2024, which just ended, Nexon had a live-streamed interview where they talked about the game and answered the fans’ questions.
During the whole interview, besides the anti-fan messages of “this is a hater game” and “do not play this game”, you could see a lot of messages showing the emojis of the controversial hand gesture. This was a last-ditch effort of the community to turn everyone’s attention to the burning issue, albeit in poor taste.
The Community Apologizes
Unexpectedly, the fans are not proud of what they have done. This whole situation was brought to us by a Korean fan, named TorchNine or Reddit, where they said: “First things first, we royally sc***ed up and let everyone down with our antics during the TFD slot on Saturday and the IGN Japan livestream on Sunday at TGS 24. We’re genuinely sorry about that. Massive apologies especially to our Japanese TFD bros and everyone else caught in the crossfire.“
“Lastly, we acknowledge that our methods were rough and inappropriate. We sincerely apologize to everyone who felt uncomfortable because of this. We’ll strive to communicate our opinions in a more mature and constructive way in the future.“ It is not easy to admit when you have stepped over the line, even if you believe the cause is just, so hats off to TorchNine and the whole Korean TFD community for being accountable for their actions.
This is quite a messy situation for the Korean fans. We hope that this issue will be looked into by the devs as soon as possible, especially if it reaches the rest of the player base around the world, and we all manage to unite to help out our Korean friends.