The First Descendant delays its next season by six months as it lays the foundations for much-needed redemption arc

I remember trying out The First Descendant at Summer Game Fest. As someone who enjoys Warframe, I felt right at home in Ingris, as did over 260,000 players when the shooter first dropped. But Nexon hasn't managed to retain a lot of those players post-launch, and while recent reviews are in the green, its lifetime Steam score sits at 64%, or 'Mixed.' Complaints cite issues with aggressive monetization, the constant addition of new content that feels hard for the sake of being hard, and a repetitive grind that often ends in disappointment as drop rates for important materials are low. In 2026, however, Nexon is taking aim at a lot of these issues, hoping to lure fans back to its sci-fi world.

In its December 2 devstream, Nexon confirms that the first half of the year won't include a Season 4 update as expected, with the next chapter of the multiplayer game's ongoing saga dropping in summer 2026 instead. Creative director Min-Seok Joo says (via community manager Jason Lee's translation) that "the first half of 2026 will focus on reorganizing The First Descendant's core loop and strengthening its content.

"Rather than adding more content on the current foundation, we've decided it would be better to invest more in the game's completion through reorganization before moving on to the next stage. Therefore, we've decided to continue with Season 3 during the first half of 2026. We believe time is needed to regroup and gain new momentum by reflecting on the past."

"The primary goal is to reorganize the cycle of gameplay," Min-seok continues. Episode 2 at the start of the year will add the new Breach Tracking farming activity, allowing players to farm gold and super-conductive cooling units. With rotating mission types, the hope is Breach Tracking helps cut down on some of the game's current repetition.

In Episode 3, we'll see the addition of the new Onslaught mode, where players face off against four waves of enemies, which get progressively more difficult. Enemies have elite effects, and you'll squad up in a group of four to try and take them down. This may ring alarm bells for some (The First Descendant's higher tier bosses are consistently referred to as "bullet sponges" in negative reviews), but the team plans to release Onslaught in beta first to gather feedback ahead of its full launch in May.

Nexon has also heard players' complaints about the game's farming loop, and will now give you the chance to choose what you farm using the Operation Command system. "We're preparing a major overhaul of the entire farming experience across all difficulty levels beyond hard difficulty," producer Beom-Jun Lee says. "Our focus on hard difficulty and above stems from the judgement that, while new player onboarding is important, prioritizing the refinement of the experience for our current players comes first."

Perhaps the biggest new addition in Episode 3, however, is Dia, the much-requested Descendant. Making her debut in February 2026, she'll have her own unique storyline. Then, further down the line, there's a new Mega Boss Dungeon centered around Karel's story, more large-scale combat missions, and a complete overhaul of the weapon system, which is in desperate need of a rethink.

"The current weapon system, which involves research, readjusting, and augmentation cores feels monotonous to core players and is also difficult for new players," Min-seok admits. "We're preparing a new weapon system, and plan to release Transcendent-tier weapons that can be enjoyed primarily through farming, and offer a different experience from existing progression weapons."

Before all of this, however, there's the First Descendant's big December update, arriving on Thursday December 4. This adds the Ultimate variant of medic Yujin, the new Forbidden Sanctuary dungeon, poison-based Abyss Colossus boss, Grim Reaper, and, finally, rebalancing for various Descendants. You can check out all of the info here.

As someone who did play quite a bit of The First Descendant at launch, it did struggle with some pretty significant jank, and its systems had almost gacha game levels of complexity. I've played a lot of Warframe, and even I found TFD a little hard to get to grips with.

We've seen several developers ditch a consistent rollout of new content to really drill into fixing their games (Riot is doing just that with League of Legends), and generally I think Nexon's making the right choice here. Throwing content at the wall and hoping it sticks works sometimes, but if it doesn't, you only exacerbate your existing problems. Hopefully The First Descendant picks the right battles coming into 2026.