The First Descendant players have found a strange way to turn the game ‘pay-to-win’

And it doesn’t even involve spending money in the game.

Image showing Yujin in The First Descendant.
Screenshot by Dot Esports

A group of The First Descendant players discovered an incredible exploit/oversight. Basically, the more FPS you have on your display, the more damage you do. This essentially means you need to buy a better TV or Monitor to take advantage of this method.

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On July 18, content creator Ryechews Games posted a video explaining how to perform the exploit. At first, Ryechews and a few people on his Discord channel thought this was a glitch with one of the game’s weapons, but it turns out it was tied to the number of frames The First Descendant generates in a second.

To take advantage of this feature, you simply need to turn off your V-sync setting, set the frame limit to either 120 or 144 (anything beyond that doesn’t make much difference), and enable additional frame generation settings such as AMD FSR or Nvidia Reflex Low Latency. 

Content Creator explaing an exploit in The First Descendant
Ryechews did the math. Screenshot via Dot Esports

The damage increase is roughly 25 percent from 40 to 144 FPS, which doesn’t include Modules that further boost your fire rate.

Even though all of these settings and tinkering sound limited to PC players, console players can take advantage of this, too. The PS5 and Xbox Series X versions of The First Descendant both support 120 FPS modes if you have a TV that can support higher than 60 FPS.

If you want to do more damage in The First Descendant, you need to buy a better monitor or TV, which kind of makes the game “pay to win.”

According to Ryechews, fixing this exploit won’t be easy or possible. The developers will either need to limit everyone’s FPS to 60 (which is unlikely) or do some heavy programming to eliminate this issue. Until then, if you want a 25 percent damage increase, get yourself a display that supports 120 FPS.

Author
Image of Aleksandar Perišić
Aleksandar Perišić
Staff Writer at Dot Esports. Aleksandar has been gaming ever since he can remember and has been writing game reviews long before he joined Dot Esports. He loves MMORPGS, Nintendo and Indie games. He also steals gifts on Christmas but then gives them back when everyone starts to sing.