Developer Neople and publisher Nexon are celebrating the first anniversary of The First Berserker: Khazan, and in a letter published online, creative director Junho Lee has confirmed more content coming to the Soulslike RPG. According to Gematsu, Lee has also revealed some interesting statistics about the game, including how many players have finished the story.
“I poured my heart into making Khazan, telling myself that this would be the game I stake my entire career on, leaving absolutely nothing in the tank,” wrote Lee. “By the time we launched in 2025, I truly believed I had given every last ounce of energy I had. But then, so many of you showed up. You played the game, you shared your honest thoughts, and you cheered us on.”
“Because of all that, not just me but the entire dev team found ourselves filled with even more energy than we spent building the game in the first place.”
Lee has revealed that 35 percent of players finished the game on Normal difficulty. 40 percent went on to “discover the truth,” while 25 percent went “deeper into darkness.” When it comes to boss fights, Viper was seemingly the toughest one on Expert difficulty, resulting in 17,734,694 deaths. Second place was Volbano accounting for over 16 million deaths, and third place was Maluca, with over 12 million deaths.
On Hardcore difficulty, Maluca was the toughest one, with 206,169 deaths. Ozma took second place with 154,202 deaths, and Elamein was third, with 151,835 deaths. Taking all boss fights across all difficulties into account, there have been 273,804,045 player deaths in total.
Other causes of deaths are also quite interesting, with falling having resulted in over 20 million player deaths. Status effects had a hand in over 5.5 million deaths, and traps accounted for 2.2 million deaths. The deadliest non-boss enemies were Prince Spider, Lunatic Destroyer, and Wild Bear.
Players seemed to have preferred the spear as their main weapon of choice by a small margin, accounting for 38 percent of all players. Second place was dual wielding, which was used by 37 percent of players, with third place taken up by Greatsword, used by 25 percent of players. Getting more specific, the Bloodthirsty Fiend’s Dual Wield was the most-used weapon, followed by the Sentinel’s Greatsword and the Survivor’s Spear. Interestingly 43 bosses were defeated by players using no weapons at all, with only their fists.
When it comes to defenses, players preferred the Bloodthirsty Fiend the most, followed by Crimson Fiend and Golden. For Phantoms, Kenta the Unyielding was the most popular, being called in 23,355,981 times, followed by Wulfric the Resilient, who was called in almost 7 million times. When leveling up, players overwhelmingly preferred to pump up their Endurance stat, which was raised 37,442,742 times.
Hardcore players have also come up with their own unique challenges, with the fastest clear time for the entire game being two hours and ten minutes. This meant that, in such a short time, the player was able to beat 16 bosses throughout the world of The First Berserker: Khazan. The fastest bosses to clear were Reese, who took 17 seconds, Aratra, who took 13 seconds, and Shactuka, who took 16 seconds.
As for the future, the studio is currently working on a commemorative armor and weapon set for The First Berserker: Khazan. Dubbed the Immortal Fury Set, it will be available to all players who have purchased the game.
The First Berserker: Khazan is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Check out our review for more details.