The First Descendent (Open Beta)

Several of us played a beta test of this a year ago, and its was alright, but certainly needed work / content. Well, they are releasing a crossplay open beta this week, Sept 19th (2AM CST). Lots of videos up on YouTube, so check it out there.



Homepage with some Dev Notes, worth reading if interested in the game:

THE FIRST DESCENDANT

At the moment, aside from the new stuff they've added (characters / zones / missions), the appears to be the same quality. Yet, after watching some Steparu videos, the game sounds like total ass... as in all the gun related sounds...annoyingly bad. I'll try it, but I think I'll stop once I start playing Witchfire.

They did add stuff for sure, different missions, different mobs. The main story doesn't go as far as the beta last year, all the classes seem to be the same as well. Better guns, but worse sounding guns (to me). Still has an issue with the Global Illumination setting. Running the game on High, with DLSS Quality and its very smooth gameplay.

The female characters all have nice asses, and outfits that show it off. Praise Korea.

Yea, in the last beta, it seemed more common to have other people running around in the zone you were in. Not so much in this beta. I suppose most people, after the initial Story run, are spending their time in the various instanced missions getting to 40, then their other characters to 40. At least matchmaking is super quick.

You can farm the lvl22 Void Boss for lots of the character specific augments, though I haven't seen any drop there for Jayber, Blair or Gley. Some are pretty good, like one for Leipic which changes his ultimate skill to only use mana when its fired.. with crits regaining mana, very good for trash clearing. Haven't had a pug clear the lvl36 Void Boss yet, but most ppl are still gearing up.

Sabbat said:

Took me a good 10 runs to get the Devourer killed people just couldn't solo their orbs for the heal/enrage mechanic. It took even longer for me to get a group to beat Deadbride the level 40 hardmode boss, around 25 runs.

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Well, for Dev, its a pretty big dps check after Executioner, and its early in the game, so the vast majority of people are still just messing around (and in the beta, messing with new characters) and wasting a lot of resources or lacking knowledge on how to get said resources. The difficulty feels off for it being at that point. Might be better at launch where people are going to be stuck with their starter character for quite awhile. Most people find Bride+ to be easier than Dev, which makes sense because they are much better geared and have more knowledge.

This beta was kinda weird. Less story content than previous beta, and different. At one point I think they wanted an overworld people could just run around in and kill shit, but then they changed their minds and pulled back. Given one of the Dev Notes mentioned that they now just want to give players content that they can easily manage (as in allowing ppl to focus on material from various missions), I think it'll stay an empty space. I'd like them to simply make those zones into patrol zones like Destiny had... where you had missions you could spawn, but also have the space populated by mobs and events. If they could manage to pull that off (which I doubt), they would be golden.

As for how the game looks? Hm, the character models are nice... someone edited the models and found out that all the female asses had higher polygons then other body parts (makes sense!). The overworld terrain looks good too. Yet, everything else is trash. The design aesthetic for buildings / structures / camps and most enemy mobs are pretty low budget trash, imo. Warframe and Destiny have a much more sophisticated look to them than TFD.