Yesterday, Korean gaming giant Nexon launched their new free-to-play action title The First Descendant, promising to blend looter shooter goodness with the hot new tech of Unreal Engine 5.
It came to many platforms, including last generation Xbox and PS4 consoles, which is surprising considering the modern graphics tech under the hood. The game does indeed blend inspiration from many different popular titles into one mostly enjoyable soup — but it’s also hitting all the same growing pains and week one snags that plague so many online games around their launches.
I played a bunch of it yesterday, both by myself and in a party with a friend, and had a mostly great time — on PC. My friend and I both have AMD-based rigs that are a couple of years old now and handle other UE5 titles okay, and this one performed reasonably well. We did see a few lag spikes during missions, where all the enemies would freeze and we’d start teleporting around, but it would catch back up after a few seconds. We were able to play for a couple of hours and it was a fun time overall. The missions are designed to be quick hits of intense gameplay, and in an amazing bit of “quality of life” design, the opening screen for each quest shows you about how long the developers think it will…
