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

Well, this is a little late post-launch, but hey, other news is dominating the headlines right now so I thought I’d write about whatever, and that whatever is, is some advice for a game I’ve poured 70 hours into over two weeks. The first descendant.

It’s a looter shooter in a market where a lot of people are tired of looter shooters, but it’s free, grindy, and could be a lot worse. I found it very engaging when I played it to the end, though I’ll admit it had a very slow start. So, let’s go through the list. Here are 5 things I wish I’d known when I started The First Descendant.

1) It gets better – The First Descendant gave me such a bad first impression that I almost quit. The beginning of the game is rough, mundane, and easy to bounce back from. But I would argue that things change. It starts around the time you unlock Bunny, an electric character that flies around with shocking AOE attacks, she is one of the best characters in the game right now and is more fun than the three starters you can get. But it takes time with the maps and missions. I think where the game gets interesting is when A) you start fighting the first real boss, the Void Intercepts, and B) you get to the last three regions of the map. By that time, it all really comes together.

2) Ignore microtransactions – Seriously, you can. No problem. It would ruin the atmosphere to be able to buy powers and characters right away, but the game is much more fun if you just assume they don’t exist. can Always work towards what you want and eventually get it. This isn’t Genshin Impact where a timed reset means you run out of “power” to farm in a day and can pay to get through it. You can play as much as you want and I’ve never hit a wall that made me feel like I needed to spend money to progress. Just farm more, upgrade more.

3) The power is in your mods – Yes, this is specific to Warframe (like most things in this game), but you’ll find yourself really scaling up in power, especially towards the end, when you realize you need to seriously invest in mod upgrades to keep your character scaling as the game gets more difficult. Here are some tips:

• Blue mods are much cheaper to upgrade than purple mods, and have no trade-offs.
• All duplicate mods can be salvaged at the vendor, granting you a large portion of your upgrade currency.
• To significantly increase your survivability, you will need to heavily upgrade your HP and defense modules – the shield will not scale as well.
• For elemental void resist bosses you will need to upgrade and cycle elemental resist mods.
• Don’t forget that you can also use mods on each gun, and when you dismantle a gun, the mods are not dismantled from the gun.

4) The game tells you exactly where to grow your crops – This took me a while to figure out, but if you go to the map screen > access info you can navigate to each individual descendant, weapon and material. Clicking on each specific material will take you to the exact mission on the map where you can/should farm it. Some farms have higher production rates for the same item than others, so be careful.

5) Upgrade your weapons – This is basically an “infusion” of your weapon, but in addition to mods, it keeps your weapon up to enemy level as you progress. It’s annoying because you have to craft something that takes 10 minutes to infuse, but it’s cheap and not a big deal. I mostly did this for my main weapon, but for the other two you can just use random high level ones until you want to specialize. I recommend keeping upgrading every 5-10 levels up from your current drop.

Bonus: Best Overall Weapon

At the moment, it’s the Tamer, a primary projectile machine gun that does ridiculous damage compared to the competition. Nexon has clarified that it will not be nerfed despite this. The Tamer drops in level 60+ zones, and you can see exactly where it will drop on any given day on the farming page. This will be on a rotation.

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