The First Berserker: Khazan (souls like - PC/Xbox/PS5)

Greetings again, Berserkers.

This is Junho Lee, Creative Director of The First Berserker: Khazan.

On March 27, 2025, The First Berserker: Khazan officially launched.
While I wrote a developer note filled with overwhelming emotion after our Early Access release, the official launch brought entirely different feelings.

On launch day, I stopped by a local game store on my way to the office, pretending to be a customer just to see our title displayed on the shelves.
The worry, “What if no one buys our game...” briefly crossed my mind, but seeing more than five people purchase Khazan despite the early hour will remain an unforgettable memory for me.

I’m truly grateful for your support and love. I sincerely hope that playing Khazan brings joy to many of you, and I promise we'll work hard to make it an even better game through continuous updates.

Following Early Access and since the official release, many of you have left valuable reviews and opinions. We're doing our utmost to carefully listen to each voice from those who have shown interest and love for Khazan, played passionately, and taken precious time to provide feedback.

We humbly accept that we may not be able to meet all expectations, but at the very least, we believe that we owe you a clear explanation of why we made certain choices and what we aim to achieve. Thus, I’d like to take a moment to share more detailed explanations about our previous patch.


Boss Balance Adjustments

The first topic we’d like to address is the boss balance adjustments.

After the first balance patch went live, we had a flood of feedback in various forms. Some even suggested that defeating Viper and Maluca before the nerf was an exclusive perk only available to Deluxe Edition owners—but I assure you, that was never our intention.

While these changes might appear to make things easier from a simple "nerf" perspective, many players who started after the official release are still facing significant challenges – perhaps even more so than those who cleared the bosses before the adjustments. Let me explain a little further on this topic.

Viper

As for the actual adjustments made to Viper, we specifically reduced attack damage, stamina, and HP by approximately 12%. We did not make any changes to its still or AI behavior.

Viper is one of the bosses we feel most confident about in terms of completeness. It is a prototype monster created during the early stages of Khazan project, and we went through countless iterations to refine it until we were satisfied with the final result.

Normally we investigate how players experience the game from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives, and in this case, we evaluated the difficulty by comparing those who played with Deluxe Edition exclusive set to those who didn’t.

As you would know, the Deluxe exclusive set offers a strong performance, and having it equipped gives a significant advantage in combat. Our concern was that once the official release opened, many players would be starting the game without this set. If we had left the difficulty as it was, these players would have faced a much steeper challenge.

While this wasn’t our sole intention, we did intend early access players to have a smoother experience with the set. However, after inspecting gameplay data, we noticed that Standard Edition players starting fresh at full launch were consistently facing a much tougher challenge – which we didn’t believe was fair. This was the core reason why we chose to slightly adjust attack damage, stamina, and HP. Even after the adjustment, our data still shows that many players are continuing to face challenges in Normal difficulty.

Maluca

Maluca’s case is a little different. Most players weren’t using the Deluxe exclusive set when facing Maluca, so we reduced attack damage and stamina by around 8%. We believe that one of the main reasons players enjoy Khazan boss fights is the action-based progression – figuring out patterns and reacting more skillfully with each battle.

Of course, stats matter. However, the reason behind the adjustment is the same as what I’ve mentioned in our previous Dev Note.

If you are still thinking, “Maluca is way easier after nerf.”, you might not be wrong.

Here’s a quick example.
After the online demo opened, many players mentioned that the demo felt easier than the TCBT – even though the balance was almost identical.
Players who participated in the TCBT already had experience, and Khazan’s boss designs reward this kind of repeated learning so that you can defeat the boss easier next time.
Even if we raise the stats again, players who already defeated the boss may not notice this. Please note that for new players, however, this challenge could be overwhelming.

We’re not trying to defend every decision we make. Instead, we would like to thank everyone.
We received so much genuine feedback on nerfs – concerned, constructive and clearly coming from a place of love for the game. Those voices helped guide our decisions, so thank you.

Some of our players have asked: “Can we roll back to pre-nerf?”

As we emphasized above, the changes were purely statistical. If you’d like to replicate the challenge before the nerf, try unequipping a few pieces of the set or lowering your level. In the case of Viper, just taking off the Deluxe exclusive set will make the battle much tougher.

Our one last note: We have no plans to nerf any other bosses in the future.

Next Update Plans

1. Increased Drop Rates for Set Equipment Materials

Our original intention was for players to complete a set from defeating the boss five times and making purchases from Danjin. However, due to the design, which makes it hard to meet the Danjin conditions in the early stages of gameplay, obtaining materials was more tiring than we expected. Thus, we’re significantly increasing material drop rates from bosses.

2. Stat Scaling of Online Demo Weapons

Due to additional balance patches after the demo, there are some differences between the online demo and the full release build.
Especially, some weapons obtainable in the demo have high base stats – yet they are not the best weapon you can obtain in your first full playthrough.
Their stats fall significantly behind sets that can be obtained mid-to-late gameplay, which have extra options.
We debated whether to change the stats of the weapons from the demo. In the end, we decided to leave them as a thank you gift to players who enjoyed the demo.

3. Build Number Removed from Gameplay Screen

While the build number in the lower left of the screen was helpful for us to review your reports, there was some feedback that it broke immersion and occasionally caused issues on OLED monitors.

The build number will be removed from the gameplay screen in our next update and will only be displayed on the title screen and other select areas.

4. Difficulty Adjustment for Later Part of Game Content

We recently realized that we should have reevaluated the difficulty for later part of the game before early access started.
The dev team ran numerous internal tests, to a point where we became extremely familiar with the game.
This led us to underestimate how steep the challenge curve might feel to players new to our game.

We emphasized and deeply considered your feedback on the level design from the later part of the game. We will be adjusting areas that felt unfairly difficult, frustrating, or overly fatiguing.
Please check the patch notes for full details once it’s up, and we welcome your feedback after replaying the updated content.

5. Improvement to the Change Attributes System

We’ve included bug fixes on the Change Attributes system and applied some UX improvements to streamline the experience.


Also Sharing Some Sneak Peek on Future Update Plans:

We’re currently preparing patches based on your feedback.

Our top priority is to address the issues that are negatively impacting your gameplay experience. While some of these fixes may take time to implement, we’re doing our best to deliver them as quickly as possible.
Making appearance change available from the very first playthrough
Preparing new Gear Preset and Skill Preset systems
Allowing players to freely switch difficulty back from Easy to Normal mid-game
Investigating platform-specific issues with achievements


We’ve also received reports that the Netherworld Energy (healing potion) may sometimes disappear from quick slots.
While we’re working on a permanent fix, we’ve applied a temporary solution that will restore the item when you restart a mission or re-enter the game.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, and we’ll do everything we can to fully resolve the issue as soon as possible.


As we wrap up this Dev Note, I’d like to once again express my heartfelt gratitude.

We couldn’t include each and every detail in this Dev Note, but around 400 improvements and bug fixes are included in our next update. We’ve just completed the QA process and preparing platform review.
For details on the update, please check our patch notes which will be uploaded along with the update build.

While we know there’s still room for improvement, we promise to continue updating The First Berserker: Khazan and moving it closer to the complete experience we envision.
Thanks to all of you who’ve joined us on this journey, we continue to develop the game each day with joy and purpose.

If you have any thoughts or feedback while playing, please don’t hesitate to share them in our official Discord channel.
We also welcome your input on the updates. While the volume of feedback has been greater than we anticipated — and there have been moments when we couldn’t respond as quickly as we’d like — please know that we’re reading everything carefully and taking your voices seriously.
Everyone on the dev team remains committed to making Khazan a better game, step by step.

To those who’ve shared words of encouragement, and to those who’ve offered honest criticism — we are deeply grateful. We’ll carry that feedback with us as we continue to build the content ahead, and we sincerely hope you enjoy what’s to come.

Thank you again, from the bottom of our hearts, to everyone who has shown interest and support for The First Berserker: Khazan.

From Junho Lee, Creative Director


PS. There were so many fixes and improvements in this update that we may have missed mentioning a few important ones.
The issue where the Danjin’s shop could not be accessed after collecting all of Danjin’s jars will be fixed in this update.
The issue where players were unable to obtain the recipe after clearing Ozma will be resolved soon. (We ask for your understanding, as it has been slightly delayed due to additional work required to provide the recipe to players who have already cleared the boss.)