The First Descendant: Best Settings Guide

The First Descendant gives you hundreds of customization options. From modding weapons to altering your character's appearance, there's no shortage of options at your disposal. This also extends to the game's options menu, which has over a hundred settings you can adjust.

Many of the default configurations for graphics and keybinds can be cumbersome, which is why you'll want to adjust them before you delve deep into the game itself. In this guide, we'll cover the best settings you can use in The First Descendant to streamline your controls, increase your FPS, and toggle some useful quality-of-life improvements like a larger grappling cursor.

Best Gameplay Settings

Under the "Damage Display" section, we highly recommend toggling on Show HP/Shield values. This will give you exact numbers for your HP and shield values while in combat, making it easier to gauge how much HP you actually have. You might also want to toggle Show HP/Shield Increase/Decrease to see how quickly your shields regenerate. The rest of the settings can be left as default.

You might want to toggle status effect text on allies to get an idea of what debuffs look like. Once you have a grasp on each debuff type, toggle it off to save screen space.

Under the "Control Method" tab, you'll want to ensure that Sprint Control is set to "Toggle" so you don't have to constantly hold the sprint key while playing. Grappling Hook Connection should be set to "On" by default. If not, toggle it. Finally, we highly recommend you change your Grappling Hook symbol; the default one easily blends into the environment. We recommend the second icon, which is a spinning red circle that typically fits nicely on your reticle.

Best Audio Settings

There's only one major suggestion we have here. Turn off Battle Voice. This refers to small dialogue quips your character makes when casting skills, reloading, or otherwise performing actions in combat. Turning this off removes these dialogue chirps entirely. Beyond that, make sure your audio mix matches your sound setup. Every other setting is down to preference.

Best Controller Settings

Controller aim assist in The First Descendant is quite aggressive by default. It makes landing headshots virtually impossible if the target is strafing. We suggest reducing your aim assist stats to 50 as a starting point. This feels reasonable to us, but if there's still too much fighting with the aim sensitivity, you can drop Camera Auto Rotate Level to 30 or lower. This should make aim adjustments much smoother. Adjust sensitivity and keybinds to taste.

Best M&K Settings

The first setting you'll want to change is Hardware Cursor. This makes the cursor significantly more responsive on most systems. You'll also want to tone down the Sensitivity settings. They are absurdly high by default. We'd suggest starting at 30 and modifying it from there. An exact sensitivity calculator can be found on GamingSmart. Select any game you're familiar with, then convert it into any Unreal Engine game (such as Ark).

For an 800 DPI user aiming to hit 550 eDPI (roughly 0.2 in-game sensitivity on Valorant or 0.67 on CS2) , you'll want a sensitivity of roughly 30-33.

Keybinds are going to depend on your personal setup and preferences. Personally, we highly recommend you rebind your roll key to something more accessible. Shift is a great key for it, but then you'll need to rebind sprint to something else. We use Control. You don't have to press sprint often since it's a toggle by default.

If you don't like how skills are bound, you can configure the game to work similarly to a hero shooter. Bind your abilities to keys next to your movement keys (Q, E, F, C, etc.). If you use a smaller keyboard or dislike that configuration, you can set your skills to numbers 1-4 and use your mousewheel to swap weapons. It's not perfect, but it makes casting abilities much more seamless than the default binds.

Best Graphics Settings

Before we discuss recommended PC settings, let's cover consoles first. If you play on a console, set the game to "Performance" mode and disable motion blur. This game's quality mode has serious frame rate issues and will dip well below 30 FPS on PS5 and Xbox Series X. Performance still has FPS dips and other technical issues, but it's far more stable than the quality mode.

There is also an option to toggle frame generation on this title, inserting artificial frames in between real frames to increase your FPS. We discourage console players from using frame generation. Its implementation in this title is less than stellar, warping certain HUD elements like the health and shield bars. Since the console version uses FSR 3.0, frame generation also yields a noticeable increase in input delay. The tradeoffs simply aren't worth it.

Motion blur looks terrible in fast-paced shooters, and The First Descendant is no exception. Sprinting as Bunny or using your Grappling Hook will heavily blur your screen. Turn it off.

PC Graphics Settings

If you're struggling to run The First Descendant at a high frame rate, we suggest activating a source of upscaling first. Nvidia GPUs can use DLSS (labeled "NVIDIA" in-game) to drastically improve their FPS with a minimal loss of quality. Start with the "Balanced" setting and work your way down to "Performance" until you find a sweet spot. Non-Nvidia GPUs can use FSR (labeled "AMD" in-game) instead.

Another way to increase your FPS is by scaling down your advanced options. Set your graphics settings to "low," then manually adjust your visibility, textures, shader quality, and object quality to higher settings. These settings don't have a major FPS impact but drastically affect the game's visuals. The other settings can safely be floored to "Low." You can always adjust to taste.

Finally, we do not recommend using Ray Tracing, even for RTX 40 series users. Ray tracing seems to only affect ambient occlusion in this title and comes with a significant FPS dip, at least 30% for most systems. The game doesn't make great use of Ray Tracing, so we suggest turning it off. Frame generation should also be left off. DLSS 3.0 and FSR 3.0 have issues with HUD warping and object ghosting as of the launch version.

As of launch, DLSS 3.0 can sometimes cause severe stuttering upon entering a new zone. This persists until you turn off the setting or reload the area. Until this gets fixed, we'd suggest you avoid using frame generation.