Nexon’s free-to-play looter-shooter The First Descendant – “Nexon’s Warframe”, as the wags are calling it on Steam – launched this week and has encountered a few snags and snaffaroos, including beta rewards not showing up, Easy Anti-Cheat not running correctly, frame-rate drops for people who downloaded in advance of release, and players finding their merry way to servers where no other players exist. Nexon are even now patching the game, and have plied players with in-game bonuses and cosmetics as an apology for the inconvenience.
The bonuses basically consist of being able to level up faster and paint your guns red. Here’s the rundown.
– Gold Gain Boost +30% (Duration 3 days)
– Kyper Shard Gain Boost +30% (Duration 3 days)
– Descendant EXP Gain Boost +30% (Duration 3 days)
– Weapon Mastery EXP Gain Boost +30% (Duration 3 days)
– 2 x Matte Red Paints
These boost items will activate immediately upon your claiming them from the mailbox, so you might want to save them for a happier time when you understand what the hell a Kyper Shard is. For context, The First Descendant pits you and up to three friends equipped with sci-firearms and accessories such as grappling hooks against the snobby alien Vulgus and a bunch of cursed war golems called Colossi. The latter are after the Ironheart, a mystic energy source said to lie somewhere on your home planet, Ingris. It sounds like Kyper Shards will help with all that. I think the red paint is more of a fashion thing.
All the talk of percentages might suggest a game of making numbers go up in proportion to the implosion of your grey matter, but speaking to Nic last week, the developers insisted that The First Descendant’s endgame won’t be about “meaningless DPS” or “piling on specs”.
While I don’t have a review to share just yet, our hardware editor James Archer laid hands and eyes on a near-final preview build a week or so back, and concluded that The First Descendant’s performance could still use a bit of love. He was mixed, much like the current Steam user reviews, as to whether the game itself is worth the time. “I don’t dislike The First Descendant,” James wrote. “It has a good grasp of the numbers-go-up-yay appeal behind looter shooters. Sometimes you get to grapple onto a vast robot crab. The first evil alien overlord you fight is named Greg. Not bad, not bad.”
James has also written about The First Descendant’s Steam Deck optimal Steam Deck settings, commenting that “a mixture of Low and Medium seems like the best compromise”.
