Comparing Duet Night Abyss and The First Descendent

Previously I looked at how The First Descendent (TFD) did poorly with its Monty Haul style mechanics.

Now a new mobile game, Duet Night Abyss (DNA), appears to be copying that formula of overpowered characters.

Yet the same complaints haven't surfaced. Why?

In this article we'll look at the key differences in approaches and why it works better in Duet Night Abyss.

Similarities

Powerful Builds

• The two games are actually very similar in how they approach character development: At the core, you apply modifiers to both your character and your weapons, and the proper choice of these modifiers can make your character extremely powerful.
• In Duet Night Abyss, this is taken a step further where in most game modes you can have two AI partners. In lower-level content, these partners can be so powerful that they kill just about everything before you really have time to do anything, leading to AFK (away-from-keyboard) "gameplay" grinding where you simply start the mission, go do something else, then come back to collect reward and just restart the mission.

Need to Grind

• Like TFD, DNA also requires a lot of repetitive missions to get materials, maybe even more so than TFD. And both games allow basically "unlimited" grind -- you can generally rerun missions as much as you like.
• Naturally, players start to look for ways to farm more efficiently, faster, and/or conveniently. AFK farming (thanks to powerful AI Partners) is possibly even an anticipated consequence and allowed, but the devs clearly try to build in ways to thwart outright automation.
• For example the maps have slight randomization, require you to move to the starting area, and sometimes require an easy puzzle.
• Complaints about the grind are generally about these issues instead of characters not being powerful enough to instant-clear a mission that takes 5+ minutes.

Differences

No Rushing / No Need for Power - the key difference

• In TFD, you are tacitly encouraged to rush your development.
• The first battle pass required endgame activities in just that first season, so grinding out development for a powerful character was basically required.
• In TFD's second season, the seasonal activity was so demanding that players really needed endgame builds right away, further encouraging rushing.
• In DNA there's no such pressure.
• The DNA battle pass and dailies are not demanding at all. In an hour or so you could have maximum possible weekly battle pass points and then just relax the rest of the week doing light gameplay to fulfill the daily "Memo" requirements (basically a daily activity check-in) where you could be done in less than 15 minutes.
• There's no need to do any endgame activity for any part of the battle pas.
• The most demanding game mode is Theatre, and even then, even if you don't do well or don't participate at all, the rewards will show up again eventually in an easier game mode as the game rotates out older content from harder modes to be replaced with the newest content.
• Some players do get very far into Theatre, but after a certain point, it becomes pointless because you have an excess of rewards. There are certainly a lot of things to spend it on, but basically nothing really critical (except maybe Yum-Yum Milk, an extremely rare resource, but it recurs every season and even doing just a bit of Theatre without a grossly powerful character/team will allow most players to buy it every season).
• In DNA, obscenely powerful characters are possible but completely unnecessary. In TFD, such powerful characters are necessary and the devs keep putting out challenging content to make it challenging. Except they can't properly balance it and all they end up doing is deprecating most characters into uselessness.

Easy Grind

• In TFD, the grind is tedious. Most of it is meant for co-op, and even when someone has such a powerful character that they can sweep most of the maps easily, it still takes a lot of time.
• In DNA there is a lot of grind but it is easy.
• Most missions take less than 5-10 minutes, and even less once you have powerful AI Partners and even if you are AFK.
• The game has "Commission Manuals" that let you multiply certain mission rewards, further reducing grind (although even with this, the amount of grind is still immense).
• The game is designed around solo play. There is co-op but it can be more trouble than it is worth dealing with other players, especially if they are intent on abusing it by being AFK and just collecting rewards from more complicated modes where you can't just let the AI Partners handle it.
• In DNA the grinds can't really be helped much more by having excessively powerful characters because they are already easy. Once again, power is available but doesn't feel mandatory. In fact it feels appropriately excessive. Players can take pride in having powerful characters and try to challenge themselves in late-stage Theatre missions.
• In TFD, the powerful characters feel necessary just to make the gameplay and grind tolerable.
• Each mission takes a long time and at the end you can be thwarted by random drops not giving you what you need, resulting in another tedious repetition. So naturally there are players who will say whatever it takes to defend having it.
• Further, not every playable character can clear these grind missions easily, so only those who can essentially become viable and the rest are "useless".
• Future characters must now also fall into the category of being "useful" -- that is, with some kind of ability to clear some grindy mission very quickly.
• In DNA the grinds generally let you accumulate something steadily, so there are no "wasted" runs where you simply got nothing useful. And where it doesn't (e.g., Secret Letters where only some drops are valuable), they are easy and quick to re-run.

So is DNA "Monty Haul"

Mostly yes. Too-powerful characters who are basically not challenged.

And the devs don't bother to really challenge players in DNA -- this is the key difference.

Instead, the game primarily revolves around collecting things -- characters and weapons -- and this is backed by an immense grind that slows you down so you "always have something to do".

So DNA is about easy power fantasy and collecting things, rather than truly challenging and exciting combat. By shifting the focus, DNA allows itself to make fun characters that don't need to be balanced and all characters are equally viable in the core game modes and basic grinding missions. Unlke TFD, you basically CAN play any character you want, except in the hardest content meant for the most optimized character builds.