The First Berserker: Khazan - Nexon_****
Greetings, Berserkers.
This is Junho Lee, Creative Director of The First Berserker: Khazan.
The First Berserker: Khazan will finally launch officially at 3:00 PM (UTC) on March 27th.
I’ve often heard from fellow game developers that they take a “long break” after launching a game—but for us, things have only gotten more hectic since we went gold.
When the embargo lifted at midnight on the 25th, a flood of reviews started pouring in, and I’ve been reading each and every one of them with care. I was truly happy to see the positive responses—it felt like our team’s hard work was being recognized. At the same time, the critical feedback has made me reflect deeply on how we can continue improving the game.
To our surprise, many more players joined us during Early Access than we had anticipated, and we are deeply grateful to all of you.
Your enthusiasm, kind words, and positive reviews have been an incredible source of motivation. At the same time, we sincerely appreciate the honest and constructive feedback you’ve shared with us.
Not only myself, but every member of our dev team is taking your feedback to heart. We’re committed to going beyond a simple “thank you”—we’re working hard to turn your voices into real, meaningful improvements to the game.
As part of that effort, we’d like to share the details of the balance adjustment patch that was released today.
At the core of The First Berserker: Khazan lies the value of challenge and the sense of accomplishment that comes with overcoming it. To uphold that value, we’ve consistently focused on designing fair combat, creating monsters that feel genuinely worth facing, and delivering a level of satisfaction and reward that matches the effort required to defeat them.
To that end, we’ve conducted extensive internal testing, as well as multiple rounds of external testing—including the first and second FGT, TCBT, offline playtests, and an online DEMO. Throughout these stages, we received quite a number of player feedback, which we’ve carefully reviewed, discussed, and used to improve the game. Even after the start of Early Access, we continued to analyze gameplay logs, in-game data, and direct player feedback. Based on these insights and thorough discussions within the team, we’ve decided to implement several balance adjustments.
Greatsword – Increased damage of the “Brutal Attack” skill
We’ve taken into account that, especially in the early stages of play, it can be difficult to fully capitalize on the exhausted state when using the greatsword. Additionally, one of the weapon’s key strengths—its high stagger potential—wasn’t having much influence outside of the Brutal Attack skill.
To address this, we’ve increased the damage of Brutal Attack so that even if players can’t execute long combos during the exhausted state, they can still enjoy the satisfaction of landing a powerful, heavy-hitting blow.
As players become more skilled with the game, they’ll be able to string together combos within the duration of an enemy’s exhaustion—and when they do, the greatsword can deal significantly higher damage compared to other weapons. We see this as a reward for those who have mastered the weapon.
Spear - “Phantom: Heatwave” Resource Cost Adjustment
As a dev team, we strive to avoid nerfing character performance whenever possible, focusing instead on positive adjustments. However, with the official launch approaching, we came to the conclusion that a slight downgrade was unavoidable—and we sincerely apologize for this.
The spear’s signature guard skill, Phantom: Heatwave, triggers a Brink Guard against all incoming attacks during its activation period. Because it could be used by consuming just one Spirit with virtually no additional cost, we determined the skill’s overall efficiency to be somewhat excessive. Furthermore, when combined with effects such as “Spirit gained when performing a brink guard,” it became possible to use the skill repeatedly with effectively no resource expenditure, which we felt was too generous. As a result, we’ve slightly increased both the Spirit cost upon activation and the Stamina cost when a Brink Guard is triggered.
That said, this adjustment does not render spear combos or playstyles ineffective. When used efficiently, the skill still performs at a very high level. We ask for your understanding, as this change was made to prevent situations where simply spamming the skill could allow players to nullify nearly all incoming attacks indefinitely.
We have slightly reduced the difficulty of Viper and Maluca.
Viper has already earned nicknames like "newbie crusher" from many players. While there are several reasons for this balance adjustment, the primary factor was our intentional design choice to present a slightly higher challenge during the difficulty tuning process. However, we realized that this posed an excessive burden on players adapting to the game.
Additionally, the extended duration required for immersive combat, although providing a definite sense of accomplishment, led us to question whether it offered an appropriate level of challenge for players reaching Mission 3 for the first time. The answer leaned towards "no."
Despite the possibility for many players to simply give up, you provided us with valuable feedback through various channels. Some mentioned that Viper felt like a "final boss-level challenge," yet clearing it brought a thrilling satisfaction reminiscent of past experiences, sparking curiosity about "what comes next if the third boss is this challenging." The required skill level to face Viper was significantly higher than the proficiency players had developed up to that point and the prolonged engagement and the punitive nature of mistakes could have led many to abandon the challenge, yet you chose to share your precious insights with us. Once again, we sincerely thank you for your invaluable feedback.
Regarding Maluca, we have structured Khazan's storyline into two parts, with Maluca serving as the boss of the first part. While we understand that many of you found this encounter both challenging and enjoyable, we also recognized that it presented a relatively high level of difficulty. Although we cannot disclose exact data, we observed that players new to Khazan found Maluca to be more than twice as challenging as Rangkus, the previous boss and deputy leader of the bandits.
Taking these factors into account, we have slightly reduced the difficulty in the main game. Players can be now rewarded more quickly through stamina-based combat, and we've made adjustments to ensure that minor mistakes no longer necessarily lead to failure.
While we've implemented these slight reductions in difficulty, we've ensured that the core values of challenge and accomplishment remain intact. Therefore, these bosses will still present a significant challenge compared to other monsters.
We don’t believe that every piece of content needs to be harder than what came before—and the same applies to bosses. While it’s important to maintain an overall level of challenge that feels worthwhile, we also believe in proper pacing, and in recognizing that different weapons and playstyles may have advantages or disadvantages depending on the encounter. Striking the right balance between these elements is key. For a few bosses, we felt that their impact and overall design didn’t quite live up to their intended presence within the game.
As a result, we’ve made buff adjustments to bosses that we felt delivered too little sense of accomplishment, even when players overcame them successfully. We wanted these encounters to be something players truly want to take on—and feel genuinely rewarded for completing. We apologize for not being able to name the specific bosses here, as doing so may reveal spoilers ahead of the official launch.
Although we offer various difficulty adjustment options, we received a great deal of feedback from players who still found themselves unable to overcome certain challenges—even after switching to Easy Mode as a last resort.
To address this, we’ve made some changes to the benefits provided in Easy Mode. These adjustments are designed to provide a clearer sense of support for players who choose this option, without significantly affecting the experience of those playing on Normal difficulty. We hope these enhancements allow more players to enjoy the game without compromising the core challenge and satisfaction that Khazan is built around.
1) Reduced health and stamina damage taken – especially helpful for players who prefer a guard-based playstyle.
2) Increased damage dealt to enemies
Even small decisions like these can have a significant impact on the overall player experience. That’s why we’ve put a great deal of thought into every adjustment and made these changes with care and intention. We’re sincerely grateful to everyone who took the time to share their thoughtful and valuable feedback with us.
We hope you’ll enjoy the full release of Khazan, where you can experience the thrill of challenge and accomplishment—and follow the journey of the great general Khazan as he transforms into a berserker, growing stronger through fierce combat and hard-fought battles.
Among the many suggestions we received, some improvements require more time to implement—and we’re actively working on those as we speak. A few of these updates are on track to be released as early as next week.
We're also preparing a free content update scheduled to arrive by May.
This content is currently in development, and we’ll share more details with you once it’s closer to completion.
Thank you so much for your interest in and support for The First Berserker: Khazan. We've poured our hearts into creating an action game that lives up to your expectations and excitement. We truly hope you enjoy playing it. Although we’ve reached the major milestone of official launch, our development journey is still very much underway.
Khazan may be a package game, but we don’t see launch as the finish line. We’re committed to continuing development and delivering even better experiences through ongoing updates and improvements.
Your feedback plays a crucial role in shaping the future of the game. If you have any thoughts or suggestions while playing, please don’t hesitate to share them with us on our official Discord channel. We read every message with care, and your voices will continue to guide us as we work toward making Khazan a game you can truly enjoy and be proud of.
We hope The First Berserker: Khazan delivers thrilling moments of challenge and accomplishment—and leaves a lasting impression.
Thank you.
As I was writing this developer letter, we received the amazing news that The First Berserker: Khazan has been rated “Overwhelmingly Positive” on Steam.
This means the world to us—because it shows that the challenge, the sense of accomplishment, and the action experience we aimed to deliver truly resonated with many of you who played during Early Access. Every heartfelt review, piece of feedback, and word of encouragement has deeply moved our entire team.
Thank you. Truly—thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
With gratitude, Junho Lee, Creative Director
This is Junho Lee, Creative Director of The First Berserker: Khazan.
The First Berserker: Khazan will finally launch officially at 3:00 PM (UTC) on March 27th.
I’ve often heard from fellow game developers that they take a “long break” after launching a game—but for us, things have only gotten more hectic since we went gold.
When the embargo lifted at midnight on the 25th, a flood of reviews started pouring in, and I’ve been reading each and every one of them with care. I was truly happy to see the positive responses—it felt like our team’s hard work was being recognized. At the same time, the critical feedback has made me reflect deeply on how we can continue improving the game.
To our surprise, many more players joined us during Early Access than we had anticipated, and we are deeply grateful to all of you.
Your enthusiasm, kind words, and positive reviews have been an incredible source of motivation. At the same time, we sincerely appreciate the honest and constructive feedback you’ve shared with us.
Not only myself, but every member of our dev team is taking your feedback to heart. We’re committed to going beyond a simple “thank you”—we’re working hard to turn your voices into real, meaningful improvements to the game.
As part of that effort, we’d like to share the details of the balance adjustment patch that was released today.
Regarding Balance Adjustments
At the core of The First Berserker: Khazan lies the value of challenge and the sense of accomplishment that comes with overcoming it. To uphold that value, we’ve consistently focused on designing fair combat, creating monsters that feel genuinely worth facing, and delivering a level of satisfaction and reward that matches the effort required to defeat them.
To that end, we’ve conducted extensive internal testing, as well as multiple rounds of external testing—including the first and second FGT, TCBT, offline playtests, and an online DEMO. Throughout these stages, we received quite a number of player feedback, which we’ve carefully reviewed, discussed, and used to improve the game. Even after the start of Early Access, we continued to analyze gameplay logs, in-game data, and direct player feedback. Based on these insights and thorough discussions within the team, we’ve decided to implement several balance adjustments.
1. Skill Balance Adjustments
Greatsword – Increased damage of the “Brutal Attack” skill
We’ve taken into account that, especially in the early stages of play, it can be difficult to fully capitalize on the exhausted state when using the greatsword. Additionally, one of the weapon’s key strengths—its high stagger potential—wasn’t having much influence outside of the Brutal Attack skill.
To address this, we’ve increased the damage of Brutal Attack so that even if players can’t execute long combos during the exhausted state, they can still enjoy the satisfaction of landing a powerful, heavy-hitting blow.
As players become more skilled with the game, they’ll be able to string together combos within the duration of an enemy’s exhaustion—and when they do, the greatsword can deal significantly higher damage compared to other weapons. We see this as a reward for those who have mastered the weapon.
Spear - “Phantom: Heatwave” Resource Cost Adjustment
As a dev team, we strive to avoid nerfing character performance whenever possible, focusing instead on positive adjustments. However, with the official launch approaching, we came to the conclusion that a slight downgrade was unavoidable—and we sincerely apologize for this.
The spear’s signature guard skill, Phantom: Heatwave, triggers a Brink Guard against all incoming attacks during its activation period. Because it could be used by consuming just one Spirit with virtually no additional cost, we determined the skill’s overall efficiency to be somewhat excessive. Furthermore, when combined with effects such as “Spirit gained when performing a brink guard,” it became possible to use the skill repeatedly with effectively no resource expenditure, which we felt was too generous. As a result, we’ve slightly increased both the Spirit cost upon activation and the Stamina cost when a Brink Guard is triggered.
That said, this adjustment does not render spear combos or playstyles ineffective. When used efficiently, the skill still performs at a very high level. We ask for your understanding, as this change was made to prevent situations where simply spamming the skill could allow players to nullify nearly all incoming attacks indefinitely.
2. Boss Balance Adjustments – Nerfs
We have slightly reduced the difficulty of Viper and Maluca.
Viper has already earned nicknames like "newbie crusher" from many players. While there are several reasons for this balance adjustment, the primary factor was our intentional design choice to present a slightly higher challenge during the difficulty tuning process. However, we realized that this posed an excessive burden on players adapting to the game.
Additionally, the extended duration required for immersive combat, although providing a definite sense of accomplishment, led us to question whether it offered an appropriate level of challenge for players reaching Mission 3 for the first time. The answer leaned towards "no."
Despite the possibility for many players to simply give up, you provided us with valuable feedback through various channels. Some mentioned that Viper felt like a "final boss-level challenge," yet clearing it brought a thrilling satisfaction reminiscent of past experiences, sparking curiosity about "what comes next if the third boss is this challenging." The required skill level to face Viper was significantly higher than the proficiency players had developed up to that point and the prolonged engagement and the punitive nature of mistakes could have led many to abandon the challenge, yet you chose to share your precious insights with us. Once again, we sincerely thank you for your invaluable feedback.
Regarding Maluca, we have structured Khazan's storyline into two parts, with Maluca serving as the boss of the first part. While we understand that many of you found this encounter both challenging and enjoyable, we also recognized that it presented a relatively high level of difficulty. Although we cannot disclose exact data, we observed that players new to Khazan found Maluca to be more than twice as challenging as Rangkus, the previous boss and deputy leader of the bandits.
Taking these factors into account, we have slightly reduced the difficulty in the main game. Players can be now rewarded more quickly through stamina-based combat, and we've made adjustments to ensure that minor mistakes no longer necessarily lead to failure.
While we've implemented these slight reductions in difficulty, we've ensured that the core values of challenge and accomplishment remain intact. Therefore, these bosses will still present a significant challenge compared to other monsters.
3. Boss Balance Adjustments - Buffs
We don’t believe that every piece of content needs to be harder than what came before—and the same applies to bosses. While it’s important to maintain an overall level of challenge that feels worthwhile, we also believe in proper pacing, and in recognizing that different weapons and playstyles may have advantages or disadvantages depending on the encounter. Striking the right balance between these elements is key. For a few bosses, we felt that their impact and overall design didn’t quite live up to their intended presence within the game.
As a result, we’ve made buff adjustments to bosses that we felt delivered too little sense of accomplishment, even when players overcame them successfully. We wanted these encounters to be something players truly want to take on—and feel genuinely rewarded for completing. We apologize for not being able to name the specific bosses here, as doing so may reveal spoilers ahead of the official launch.
4. Improved Benefits for Easy Mode
Although we offer various difficulty adjustment options, we received a great deal of feedback from players who still found themselves unable to overcome certain challenges—even after switching to Easy Mode as a last resort.
To address this, we’ve made some changes to the benefits provided in Easy Mode. These adjustments are designed to provide a clearer sense of support for players who choose this option, without significantly affecting the experience of those playing on Normal difficulty. We hope these enhancements allow more players to enjoy the game without compromising the core challenge and satisfaction that Khazan is built around.
1) Reduced health and stamina damage taken – especially helpful for players who prefer a guard-based playstyle.
2) Increased damage dealt to enemies
Even small decisions like these can have a significant impact on the overall player experience. That’s why we’ve put a great deal of thought into every adjustment and made these changes with care and intention. We’re sincerely grateful to everyone who took the time to share their thoughtful and valuable feedback with us.
We hope you’ll enjoy the full release of Khazan, where you can experience the thrill of challenge and accomplishment—and follow the journey of the great general Khazan as he transforms into a berserker, growing stronger through fierce combat and hard-fought battles.
Update Plans
Among the many suggestions we received, some improvements require more time to implement—and we’re actively working on those as we speak. A few of these updates are on track to be released as early as next week.
We're also preparing a free content update scheduled to arrive by May.
This content is currently in development, and we’ll share more details with you once it’s closer to completion.
In Closing
Thank you so much for your interest in and support for The First Berserker: Khazan. We've poured our hearts into creating an action game that lives up to your expectations and excitement. We truly hope you enjoy playing it. Although we’ve reached the major milestone of official launch, our development journey is still very much underway.
Khazan may be a package game, but we don’t see launch as the finish line. We’re committed to continuing development and delivering even better experiences through ongoing updates and improvements.
Your feedback plays a crucial role in shaping the future of the game. If you have any thoughts or suggestions while playing, please don’t hesitate to share them with us on our official Discord channel. We read every message with care, and your voices will continue to guide us as we work toward making Khazan a game you can truly enjoy and be proud of.
We hope The First Berserker: Khazan delivers thrilling moments of challenge and accomplishment—and leaves a lasting impression.
Thank you.
In Closing+
As I was writing this developer letter, we received the amazing news that The First Berserker: Khazan has been rated “Overwhelmingly Positive” on Steam.
This means the world to us—because it shows that the challenge, the sense of accomplishment, and the action experience we aimed to deliver truly resonated with many of you who played during Early Access. Every heartfelt review, piece of feedback, and word of encouragement has deeply moved our entire team.
Thank you. Truly—thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
With gratitude, Junho Lee, Creative Director
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