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Producer's advice for gamers who can't beat The First Berserker: Khazan — 'Blame yourself'

Published: 25 Mar. 2025, 16:18 Updated: 25 Mar. 2025, 16:32

CHO YONG-JUN
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The First Berserker: Khazan, produced by Neople and published by Nexon, is available to play for gamers who purchased its Deluxe Edition starting March 25 and officiaally launches March 28. The game is priced at 64,800 won ($44) for the Standard Edition while the Deluxe Edition costs 77,800 won.

The First Berserker: Khazan is, in many ways an oddball in the Korean gaming scene: It’s a single-player title with physical packaging and a $60 price tag on a market flooded with free-to-play games funded by microtransactions. The game, alongside its PC release, was also developed for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and Series S. It's launching without paid downloadable content (DLC) — and parent company Neople doesn't have any under development. Oh, and it's very, very hard.

Reporters, testers and early adopters have expressed frustration throughout its demo playthroughs and beta test sessions last fall, prompting developers to announce an easy mode a few months before the release of the game. It's been described as a soulslike, genre rooted in the likes of Dark Souls and Elden Ring in which players must die and die again to master mechanics. But unlike those role-playing titles, Khazan doesn't require memorizing button patterns. Yun Myeong-jin, the game's producer, hopes the right strategies will be clearer up front.

Neople CEO And The First Berserker Khazan Producer Yun Myeong-jin during a roundtable interview at the Nexon headquarters in Pangyo, Gyeonggi on March 24. [CHO YONG-JUN]

Yun said in a roundtable interview at Nexon's headquarters in Pangyo, Gyeonggi, on Monday ahead of Khazan's Friday release that he hopes players will blame themselves when they die, rather than the game. “When you die from a monster, I hope the game makes you think ‘Oh it’s my fault’,” said Yun, who is also CEO of Khazan developer Neople.

During Khazan's closed beta testing sessions that ran in September and October, many gamers complained of dying in-game hundreds of times, sometimes for many hours, just to progress only slightly further. The developers claimed multiple times that they'd intended this — that the title's learning curve reflected the difficulty of the main character's situation. “There has to be some level of difficulty for the story to make sense,” Lee Jun-ho, the game's creative director, told Restart in a September 2024 interview.

Game Over screen for The First Berserker: Khazan [CHO YONG-JUN]

Neople's specific aim, Yun clarified to reporters, was for the monsters' battle patterns to be difficult to beat, but to make sense. “From the very start of the development, Khazan aimed to give a clear emphasis on the value of attack and defense — I wanted gamers not to go ‘Oh this pattern makes no sense, I’d have to memorize them all’,” the producer said. “I hope they go: ‘I made a mistake again, I know this, but I just didn’t press in time.'”

There are caveats to the easy mode that Neople ultimately implemented in January: It's offered if you die three times before the boss fight, and you can't turn it off. Unlike most modern games that allow the player to switch between different difficulty levels throughout, Khazan players can't escape easy mode without restarting on a new save.

“Choosing easy mode just to farm items and then returning to normal difficulty, to us, didn’t feel like was offering the real gameplay of Khazan,” Lee said at the roundtable, adding that he was “always open to suggestions and improvements.”

Developers of The First Berserker: Khazan during a roundtable interview at the Nexon headquarters in Pangyo, Gyeonggi on March 24. [CHO YONG-JUN]

The developers hope to roll out a larger update later this year — following the necessary post-release fixes, balance patches and smaller updates — but it will likely make the game harder, not easier.

“We obviously want to develop DLC and release sequels: The franchise offers such deep lore and tales, and we couldn’t show them all,” Yun said. “That being said, it just didn’t make sense for us to think about DLC and sequels when we had to focus our entire developing ability on Khazan.”

Khazan is a spinoff of Nexon and Neople’s long-running Dungeon & Fighter franchise, incorporating lore and background stories from the online game that experienced huge success in Asia. But instead latching onto Dungeon & Fighter's hype, Neople wanted to separate Khazan from its original franchise, perhaps to better appeal to a Western audience.

“We didn’t even put the Dungeon & Fighter name in the game title,” Yun said. “Instead of having the goal of spreading our game to the world, we wanted gamers to play the game and be satisfied enough with the high quality of the game, so they look into the game more to naturally find the original franchise.”

The First Berserker: Khazan, produced by Neople [NEXON]

The producers said, in fact, that they didn’t care about the preorder numbers and didn't have sales targets — they were dead focused on developing a game that they were proud of.

“I’m very confident in the game — but not in the sense of whether it will sell well, I have no idea about that,” Yun told the Korea JoongAng Daily after the interview. “But I’m proud of developing the game. We accomplished our objective of having flamboyant in-game actions and to have a clear sense of attack and defense.”

And to gamers who are always “rage-quitting” games due to their difficulties, the producer suggests a slow approach.

“If you want to focus on just beating the boss, you just have to not rush,” he said. “That will make the game a bit easier.”

The First Berserker: Khazan, produced by Neople and published by Nexon, is available to play for gamers who purchased its Deluxe Edition starting Tuesday and officially launches Friday. The game is priced at 64,800 won ($44) for the Standard Edition while the Deluxe Edition costs 77,800 won.