Nexon launched The First Descendant yesterday and so far, the game has had a rough time. The looter shooter has been plagued with bad reviews over poor game performance across all platforms, bugs and negative reviews regarding predatory in-game purchases.
It goes without saying that The First Descendant is a free-to-play game and given that Nexon is involved in the project, it has been monetised to death. The shooter includes in-game currencies, a battle pass, purchasable cosmetic items, locked heroes, XP boosts and even materials purchasable with real money.
You can buy everything in The First Descendant and its pay-to-win mechanics don’t try and hide away. However, while these issues are present in most of the user reviews, the game’s performance and bugs are the bigger problems.
Across all platforms, The First Descendant is struggling to keep up its performance. On PC, users are complaining that the game’s frame rate is all over the place. It struggles to stay stable which caused major hitches while playing.
There are also issues with bugs. Enemies don’t take damage, objects don’t spawn and some objectives don’t update when you complete them. Players are also complaining about game crashes on all platforms.
The First Descendant has been built on Unreal Engine 5 which explains the game’s poor performance. On PS5, it is likely the worst of the bunch. The game would constantly stutter and hitch. Even when I wasn’t doing anything and there was no active combat, something would cause the frame rate to drastically dip below 10FPS.
This would happen when there were no other players around and no combat encounters. It is almost like the game suddenly gets hit with a memory leak and starts going crazy. I also need to note that a bug I encountered in the September 2023 beta where settings won’t save on PS5 after you exit the game, still hasn’t been fixed in the launch version.
On Steam, The First Descendant is currently sitting on “mixed” reviews at 46%. The majority of the negative reviews are related to the game’s performance, and in-game purchases but also to a launch bug which saw players buy in-game credit and not receive it.
The official The First Descendant X account has noted some of these issues but at the moment, Nexon has detailed the most common issues on the blog here.
