The First Descendant: Some fixes for lower end systems

This one might seem a little bit obvious but make sure if you’re using a lower end system to turn your graphics down to the Low preset. Use this as a baseline for all of your other fixes, and if something else in this guide works better then you can slowly start raising the graphics until you find the right balance of aesthetic/performance for you.

You also want to turn Motion Blur and VSync off (unless you experience mind shattering screen tearing, then turn VSync back on) and make sure you keep all types of DLSS or upscaling off. Enabling these made my game look 10x worse and made my PC run a lot slower.

This one worked the best for me and honestly the difference is night and day. For whatever reason, despite the minimum requirements not explicitly saying you need an SSD, you absolutely do. The frame drops and random freezes all stopped as soon as I moved it, and the loading times were reduced from about ~110 seconds to ~10 seconds at most.

This is a problem I’ve seen in a few games that also seems to be a problem with this one. Your polling rate is how much data is interpreted from your mouse every second, with the default for modern gaming mice being ~1000hz depending on the product. You can use software like iCUE, GHub, Synapse, or whatever flavour of software that comes with your mouse to change its polling rate. You can also do this in windows from your control panel. I recommend pushing it down to 500hz and testing to see if you get frame drops when looking around.

This one sounds like a lot, but is deceptively simple.

1. Close the game.
2. Navigate to your \AppData\Local directory (you can do this by typing %localappdata% into a run prompt)
3. Navigate to \AppData\Local\M1\Saved\Config\Windows and open Engine.ini with notepad.
4. Append the following to the bottom of that file:

5. Save the file and open the game. Make sure the contrast in the display options is set to 5.

Big thanks to MNCLY for having their own guide on this, link to it is here

There are a lot of things you can do to check if your PC is performing the best it can when running games:

• Enable XMP/DOCP in your BIOS. There are loads of different guides for this depending on the type of BIOS you have so take note and look one up. XMP/DOCP usually aren’t enabled by default so chances are if you built your own PC and haven’t looked at that, then you need to do it.
• Change your power settings to High Performance. This probably won’t do a lot for you, but it’s worth checking. Go into your power settings and make sure your power plan is set to high performance, or another preset created by other software.
• Check Task Manager for other programs that might be limiting your resources. There are a lot of apps open on your PC that you have probably forgotten about. Close the ones that are taking up a lot of your CPU or RAM and see if that makes any difference.
• Bonus round! There’s an app on Steam called Lossless Scaling. This app allows you to run your game in a lower resolution and upscale it to your native resolution. This is useful for a lot of different games including this, so it’s worth giving it a look regardless.

This game isn’t optimized very well, that much is clear. There is a chance that the developers will work on a fix for this game, so it’s worth waiting around a little for that to happen. If that never happens though, this probably isn’t a game you should wait around for. Give Warframe or Destiny 2 a go, maybe Outriders if you really want a game to fit the third person co-op looter shooter that doesn’t run very well hole in your heart.