The First Descendant had a halfway decent launch on day one with minimal server issues, compared to the broader market of these kinds of online releases. But day two? It’s been extremely rough, and the game has been down most of the day. Nexon says Microsoft servers are mostly to blame.
As of 8 PM ET, The First Descendant has been offline for the better part of the day, getting knocked off in the morning, briefly returning, then going offline again. That’s where we are at the moment, with the update the game was going into “maintenance” mode starting at 5:30 ET. Three hours later, we still don’t have an end time. Here’s what Nexon said about the server issue:
“We have found that Connection issue is mainly due to MS Network error and we are waiting for MS to recover. We will make notice once it’s recovered.”
This would be Microsoft Azure servers, where the game is hosted. Xbox Live recently experienced lengthy downtime within the past day or so, and I do wonder if it could be related. Four hours ago Nexon said the MS issue was opened but “not completely recovered” and then the game went into maintenance.
It’s unfortunate, as it has disrupted what are really solid launch numbers for the game. The First Descendant was about to pass its all-time high from launch day right when the server crashed (that may have something to do with it) and then it almost recovered right back to that point again after they briefly came back online. Now, there seems to be about 30,000 players just sitting at the title screen waiting for it to work. And that’s just on PC, as the game is also being widely played on consoles. It’s cracked PS5’s top 10 list, for starters.
It is of course not unusual that an online game has a problematic launch and it will get worked out. I’m less worried about downtime and more worried about latency and stability, as it was much, much jankier to play in the past two days than other online shooters because of those issues.
I do find it somewhat amusing that Nexon gave out “apology” gifts to players for a mildly rough launch day. They are boosts that automatically get activated when claim, but three days of boosted XP and materials is now down to two because of these outages. If they gave those sort of gifts for this, I wonder what players may get for an entire day of downtime.
Hopefully it will be back online before too long, and definitely for tomorrow, the Fourth of the July in the US where people may have more time to play being off from work or school. I will update this post with anything new that comes in.’
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
