• by Colin Kirkland , August 21, 2023

"The First Descendant," a free-to-play third-person shooter game developed by Nexon, will be the first-ever official release to support Samsung's HDR10+ gaming standard, a higher-quality experience the company initially announced in 2021.

According to Samsung, HDR10+ gaming should deliver “deeper contrast, rich colors, and balanced brightness” to gamers, who will be able to see “accurate depictions of details in dark shadows and in brightly highlighted areas” as well as “near-instant responses, low latency, variable refresh rate support, and more.”

HDR10+ is a free alternative to Dolby Vision.

Samsung, which co-established HDR10+ Technologies LLC in 2018, says the compatible ecosystem has grown to 155 partners and over 7,000 certified devices, including Samsung’s Odyssey gaming monitors, select Amazon, Panasonic, TCL, and Vizio TVs.

However, the offering is still limited, and currently there is no support for HDR10+ gaming on any popular gaming console.

Xbox exclusively uses Dolby Vision, while Sony doesn’t support HDR10+ on any of its TVs and has invested in its own Perfect For PlayStation HDR system.

Although Samsung claims that the game is the world's first offering utilizing the HDR10+ standard, the company has mentioned other compatible titles in the past that were supposed to premiere last year at CES 2022 but never made it to market.