Looks like pre-loading The First Descendant is the reason its performance is so terrible

The brand new free-to-play looter shooter RPG The First Descendant is here, and, while players love the gameplay, performance issues threaten to ruin the party.

When the game first launched, things seemed to be going oh so well. It quickly climbed up the Steam charts, even dethroning the new Elden Ring DLC – no small feat for a new title. However, there is trouble in paradise. Users are reporting a load of issues affecting the functionality of the game. These fall into two main categories: problems with frame rates, and problems with microtransactions. It seems we may now at least have a solution for the first.

Launch-day bugs and performance issues have become commonplace, especially with free-to-play titles, and some credit should be given to developers Nexon Games for keeping the community up to date with issues and fixes. On launch day there were extensive reports of frame rate drops with a megathread quickly being made on the games subreddit to try and find solutions for the issues.

The problem was soon acknowledged on the developer’s list of known issues and, by the early hours of this morning, the official Twitter account for the game had tweeted out a solution.

■ (Additional) Frame drop issues for pre-download
– We have received reports from some Descendants who pre-downloaded the game are experiencing frame drops.
– We are currently investigating this issue. In the meantime, if you encounter this problem, please delete and reinstall…

— The First Descendant (@FirstDescendant) July 3, 2024

It seems the issue stemmed from a bug within the pre-download version of the game. The developers acknowledge that they do not know the precise cause of the problem, but that deleting and re-installing the game should serve as a solution. For anyone experiencing frame rate drops, this solution is certainly worth a shot, with users on Reddit have reported this fix working for them.

However, many who did not pre-download the games are also running into performance issues. These include problems such as crashing, stuttering and broken microtransactions. While fixes have been issued for some of these now, many are still left frustrated. This has even led to the game being review-bombed.

If downloading and reinstalling the game has not solved your problem, keep an eye on The First Descendant’s Twitter account as well as the known issue list references above. If you’re lucky a solution to your issue may already be listed there, if not, one should appear soon.