Fleeting First Impressions Of The First Descendant

This morning I successfully logged into The First Descendant via GeForceNow, using a clever trick I discovered: it's called patience. It turns out there isn't any actual problem with the game per se - I'd been giving up too quickly. It takes frickin' forever to load.

Or it does the first time, anyway. I took a second run at it this afternoon and it wasn't nearly so bad. Still took ages but I only had time to tab out and read a couple of items on my news feeds before the game was ready. The first time, I could have taken Beryl for a walk round the block and made myself a coffee when I got back and I still wouldn't have been in.

Was it worth it? Hmmm....

I mean, I've clocked up a little over two hours. I did go back for a second session. I am probably going to play again. So... Maybe?

Let's go through what happened. I'm not even going to call this a First Impressions post. It's more like Fleeting Impressions. Which is a good idea for a new category, now I come to think of it.

The whole thing starts, as these things usually do, with a cut-scene or a video, whichever you prefer to call it. It was slick enough but it felt like whoever wrote the script was really phoning it in. I'm used to these things not making much sense but this was just gibberish.

Also very thin on detail. I'm used to being overwhelmed by tidal waves of lore coming at me from the start, often in the form of some deeply portentous narration that tells me far more about the setting than I have any need to know at that point. I'm not used to getting to the end and finding myself thinking "I could have done with a bit more context there."

Since it's come up, let's talk about the plot. It's nonsense, even by the astonishingly low standard of F2P video games. Earth got overrun by - I don't know... Aliens? Demons? Something nasty, anyway. They came from... no, I don't know that, either. Somewhere bad, I guess. 

Wherever they came from, we fought them and lost. And by "We" I mean Earth which, as always, immediately turned into a single, unified military-political entity in the face of existential threat because that's what would happen, right? 

Then another existential threat, bigger than the last one, arrived and kicked both our asses (That's us and the original bad guys.) or at least I think it was both but maybe the new bad guys were on the old bad guys' side...

Oh, who frickin' cares? None of it matters. None of it will have any consequences. It's there because it's expected and that's all.

It doesn't make any more sense when you get into the game proper either but no-one is playing this thing for the story. In my case, it didn't help that the Tutorial has noticeable narrative similarities to parts of the Black Shores storyline that I'm the middle of in Wuthering Waves, and when I say similarities I mean similar in the way your four year-old niece's fairy cycle is similar to a Harley Davidson Electra Glide.

Let's forget about the storyline. Nexon clearly did. What works a lot better is the voice acting and dialog. Not that anyone says anything that makes any sense there either but they say it with more conviction than it deserves and they say a lot of it, too. There's endless chuntering in the background, even during missions, as the various NPCs talk amongst themselves. It makes the place feel lived-in, if nothing else.

Did I skip Character Creation? No, not really. You don't get to make your own character. It's pick one from a list. A short list. There's a choice of three. There's a blonde woman, a guy who looks like he used to be in a boy band before he was drafted and some musclebound giant in an suit of armor that looks like one of Tony Stark's rejects.

Guess who I picked. Yes, obviously. I did at least look at what they all could do before I made a decision but even though the pretty boy had the abilities I liked most, I still went for the girl.

She has a name. They all have names. I've spent two hours playing her, though, and I can't remember what it is. I know it begins with a "V". Wait! Is it Viessa? I think it might be. Let me check... Yes! I remembered! She must have made more of an impression than I thought.

Viessa has cold powers. She can freeze things. I know she can because it says so in the mouseover descriptions on her skill bar. I certainly didn't know it from anything she did in the many, many fights she won for me. 

A lot of the time the icons had padlocks on them to show they weren't available but even when they were unlocked and I pressed the right keys, I couldn't tell what they were doing. Except for the "Q" key. That one fired missiles. I used it whenever it was off cooldown. I couldn't see anything freezy about the results, though. It just seemed to blow things up.

Mostly I stuck with the gun. Or the guns, I should say. She carries three because in games like this everyone lugs around a sniper rifle, a semi-automatic and a shotgun. It would be irresponsible not to.

In fact, by the time I stopped, Viessa had well over a dozen guns on her. Somewhere. I have no clue where she got them all let alone how she could walk while carrying them. I imagine they dropped off mobs I killed and I picked them up by running over them. That seems to be the preferred method of acquisition here.

And I like it. Saves time. Most of the mobs spew out power-ups - red for health, blue for "MP",which I assume doesn't stand for Mana Points, green for... not sure what green is. Ammo, maybe? 

Ammo is color-coded. It comes in green, amber and purple, which I think tells you what kind it is not what quality. Honestly, I'm going to have to go read an out-of-game guide if I carry on playing because there's just waaaay too much information coming at me in the game itself. 

The First Descendant is very clearly a game for people who like a lot of details. The kind who take notes and fill out spreadsheets. For fun. It would be intimidating if the game wasn't so darn easy.

It was the promise of unchallenging content in Tyler's review that attracted me to the game in the first place and so far I have not been disappointed. I managed not only to finish the Tutorial but the first sequence of missions as well. I think I leveled up at least three times and I opened the second mission area.

It was fun. The environments are visually appealing, for a war zone. Movement is fast and fluid. There's double jump and a grappling iron and you can climb. I bet there are gliders later.

At starter level, mobs seem to have the armor class of a wet paper bag and the hit points of a sickly gnat. Most die in one or two shots but nothing survives a volley. The main way they manage to inflict damage is by sniping or coming at you by the dozen, often in a conga line that means if you line them up just so,  you can watch them explode, one after another, like a string of fireworks.

Since they also drop heals all you need to do is run over them to refill your hit points, I found it next to impossible to go much below 90% health until I hit a bunch of mobs that didn't drop anything at all. That was the only time I died, mostly because I didn't notice it was happening until my screen went red around the edges.

It didn't matter because you get five attempts at a mission before it fails so I just respawned about ten yards away and carried on. I would have assumed this was purely for the newbie zones, to get you into the swing of things, had Tyler not strongly suggested the whole game is that way.

It suits me fine. I am not one of those people who gets bored quickly when things are too easy. More the reverse, really. There does come a point when I start to wonder what the point is but usually not until I start running out of interesting things to see or do.

That kind of attitude does mean I ought to avoid grouping with other players who'd rather take it all more seriously. TFD is a multiplayer game, if you want it to be. The tutorial tells you it's possible to set your missions to be either Private or Public but although I spotted that option, I missed how to set it, so my first time out I ended up in a group.

No-one said anything of course. Everyone just ran around on their own, barely in sight of each other. It was the first mission, after all. Most likely no-one had a clue what to do. My first session ended when I decided I'd better quit before I did something that would get me yelled at.

Next time, I made sure to set the mission as Private, which meant I could take it at my own pace and explore a bit. Not that there's all that much to see. The zones are more functional than scenic. Still, while it's new, it's interesting enough.

Performance on the laptop via GeForceNow's servers was excellent in private instances but the first time I zoned into the hub zone, where all the facilities are and where everyone hangs out, it turned into a slide-show. I could barely move and opening windows from the UI was hit or miss at best. 

I did manage to get Options open and as I expected the GeForceNow default for graphics was Very High. Once I'd changed that to Medium everything was absolutely fine again and the game looked almost as good, too. I see there are a lot of Optimization guides for playing the game on PC, most of which seem to recommend turning things off or down, so I'm quite happy to leave everything on Medium, at least for now.

When I was able to move again I went to the post-robot to check my mail. I had plenty. Even though I only started today, my mailbox was full of rewards for participating in various betas and events I'd obviously never done. I even got something for reaching Level 20, which was a surprise since I was Level 2 at the time.

I'm guessing this is an artifact of the GeF orceNow process but who knows. Tyler did say they were handing out a lot of freebies although I think he was talking abut the Winter event that's still running. I got stuff for that, too.

There was quite a bit of in-game cash in my mail, too. I looked in the shop to see what I could buy with it. I saw a good few things I fancied but I managed to stop myself buying any of them just yet. I think I need to do a bit of research first.

Which does suggest I'm thinking of playing some more. I'd at least like to get the dog. And maybe a few cosmetics.

That's how they get you, isn't it?