The First Descendant censorship is ridiculous, as “shoot” and “AFK” are somehow banned words

You’d think that in a looter shooter, you’d easily be able to type “shoot” into chat without it being censored. After all, the word’s already in the genre itself. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case in Nexon’s The First Descendant since it’s a banned word in the game. Yes, that means instead of being able to tell your teammates to “shoot the enemy,” you’ll have to jump through a few loopholes to get your point across, whether it’s adding spaces in between letters or mistyping it on purpose and hoping others understand.

Of course, that’s not the only ridiculously banned word you can’t utter in-game. For some reason, “AFK” is also prohibited, which means you can’t actually let your team know when one of your squadmates is an AFK farmer. Some, like Reddit user 2Board_, speculate that this is due to it having “FK” written consecutively, which is hilarious considering it’s already a censored version of most people’s favorite swear word.

You also aren’t allowed to show other players that you’re laughing your arse off because, again, “LMAO” is another banned term. Other words that the game absurdly censors include “subtitle,” “OMG,” and “snipe,” all for reasons unknown. Now, even though The First Descendant monitors your word usage worse than a kindergarten classroom, this isn’t the first instance of heavy chat censorship in games. Players from other MMOs, like World of Warcraft, have also encountered these same issues.

For those curious, this ever-present issue is called the Scunthorpe problem, defined as “the unintentional blocking of online content by a spam filter or search engine” for containing letters that appear to have an obscene meaning. Unfortunately, with The First Descendant peppered with plenty of other issues, addressing this might not be high on the dev team’s to-do list. So, for now, you’ll have to make do with typing each banned word as if it’s your first time learning how to use a keyboard.

Before you jump back in to battle with these censorship issues in The First Descendant, we recommend checking out our guides on the best Thunder Cage build in The First Descendant and how to get Metal Accelerants in The First Descendants. This way, you can have an easier time navigating through the game.