Five Things I Wish I’d Known When I Started ‘The First Descendants’

Okay, sure it’s a little late post-launch, but with um, other news grabbing the headlines right now, I thought I’d just write about whatever, and whatever game tips, I’ve sunk 70 hours into two. week, First Offspring.

It’s a heist with a gun in a market where a lot of people are tired of heists, but it’s free, it’s playable, and it could be a lot worse. By the end, I found it very attractive. I’ll admit, though, it’s an extremely slow start. So let’s go through the list. Here are five things I wish I had known when I started The First Descendant.

1) It gets better – The First Descendant made such a bad first impression on me that I almost didn’t leave it. The beginning of the game is rough and generic and easy to fall back on. But I would argue that things change. It starts around the time you unlock Bunny, the electric character who fights around with a shocking AOE attack, as she’s currently one of the best characters in the game and more fun than the three starters you can get. But the map and missions need more. I’d say the game gets good when you A) start fighting the first actual bosses, the Void Intercepts, and B) when you get to the last three regions of the map, as by then things will really come together.

2) Ignore microtransactions – Seriously, you can. it’s good. It’s a total atmosphere killer that you can buy powerups and characters outright, but the game is a lot more fun if you pretend none of that exists, because you can work towards what you want in every moment and get it eventually. This isn’t Genshin Impact where you run out of “power” to farm in a day with a timed reset and you can pay to get over it. You can play as much as you want and I never ran into a wall that made me feel like I needed to spend money to progress. Just more farming, just more upgrades.

3) Your power is in your mods – Yes, this is a Warframe thing (as most things in this game are), but you’ll find yourself really growing in power when you realize you need to seriously invest in upgrading your mods in order to keep your character scaled as the difficulty of the game increases, especially near the end. Some sub-tips here:

• Blue mods cost much less to upgrade than purple mods and have no compromises
• You can save all your mods back to the vendor for huge chunks of update currency
• You need pretty much upgraded HP and Defense mods for much better survivability. The shield doesn’t scale either.
• Elemental resist mods should be improved and put into motion for Void Resist elemental bosses.
• Don’t forget you can also use mods on each weapon. And when you dismount the weapon, the mods are not dismounted from the weapon.

4) The game tells you exactly where to farm things – Took me a while to figure it out, but if you go to Map Screen > Info Access and then you can go to Descendants, weapons and individual materials. Click on those specific materials for each and it will take you to the 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 weapon “infusion”, but in addition to mods, it will keep your weapons level with the enemy as you progress. It’s annoying in that you have to create a thing that takes ten minutes to fill, but it’s cheap and not a big deal. I mostly did this for my main weapon I used, then you can use random, high level ones for the other two until you want to specialize. I would make sure to keep improving somewhere between every 5-10 levels you have after the current drops.

Bonus: Best weapon overall

Right now that would be the Tamer, a main ammo machine gun that does insane damage compared to its competition. Nexon made it clear that they weren’t bothering him regardless. It drops in level 60+ areas and you can check the farming page to see exactly where it will drop on any given day as it rotates.

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