Five Things I Wish I Knew When I Started ‘The First Descendant’

Okay, sure, this is a little late after launch, but with uh, other news making headlines right now, I figured I’d just write about whatever, and this is just some advice on the game I’ve sunk 70 hours into in two weeks, The First Descendant.

It’s a looter shooter in a market where a lot of people are burned out on looter shooters, but it’s free, it’s playable, and it could be a lot worse. In the end, I found it very engaging. I have to admit, though, that it’s an incredibly slow start. So let’s go through the list. Here are five things I wish I’d ​​known when I started The First Descendant.

1) It’s getting better – The First Descendant made such a bad first impression on me that I almost quit. The beginning of the game is crude and generic and it’s easy to bounce back from. But I’d say things change. It starts the moment you unlock Bunny, the electric character who moves at full speed with a shocking area attack, because she’s currently one of the best characters in the game and more fun than the three starters you can get. But it takes up more time on the map and missions. I’d say the game gets good when A) you start fighting the first real bosses, the Void Intercepts, and B) when you get to the last three regions of the map, because that’s when things really start to come together.

2) Ignore microtransactions – Seriously, you can. It’s fine. It’s a total waste of atmosphere that you can buy power and characters directly, but the game is a lot more fun if you pretend none of that exists because you can work towards what you want at some point and get it eventually. This isn’t Genshin Impact where you run out of “power” to farm in a day during a scheduled reset and can pay to override it. You can play as much as you want and I never hit a wall that made me feel like I had to spend money to progress. Just more farming, just more upgrading.

3) Your power lies in your modules – Yes, this is a Warframe thing (like most things in this game), but you will find yourself really increasing your power when you understand that you need to seriously invest in upgrading your mods in order to keep your character scaling with the increasing difficulty of the game, especially towards the end. A few sub-tips here:

• Blue mods cost much less to upgrade than purple mods and have no tradeoffs
• You can grab all your duplicate mods from the vendor for huge chunks of the upgrade currency
• You need heavily upgraded HP and Defense modules for better survivability. Shield is not as scalable.
• Elemental resistance mods must be upgraded and recycled for Elemental Void resistance bosses.
• Remember that you can also use mods in each weapon. And when you disassemble weapons, the mods are not disassembled from the weapon.

4) The game tells you exactly where to grow things – This took me a while to figure out, but if you go to the Map > Access Info screen, you can access individual descendants, weapons, and materials. Click on those specific materials for each thing and it will take you to an exact mission on the map where you can/should farm. Some farms produce a better percentage for the same item than others, so keep an eye on that.

5) Upgrade your weapons as you go – This is basically a weapon “infusion”, but in addition to mods, it will keep your weapons leveled against the enemy as you level up. It’s annoying in that you have to craft something that takes ten minutes to infuse, but it’s cheap and not a huge deal. I mostly did this for my main weapon that I used, and then you can just use random high-level weapons for the other two until you want to specialize. I would make sure to keep upgrading every 5-10 levels you get after the current drops.

Bonus: Best weapon overall

Right now it’s the Tamer, a primary ammo machine gun that does insane damage compared to its competitors. Nexon has clearly stated that they’re not nerfing it despite this. It drops in level 60+ zones and you can check the farming page to see exactly where it’ll drop each day, as that changes.

Follow me on Twitter, Youtube, And Instagram.

Get my science fiction novels Herokiller Series And The Earthlings Trilogy.