The First Descendant doesn’t make it easy for players to unlock new characters without playing for them, leaving players frustrated with the RNG-based grind for materials.
While there’s the option for players to purchase the base Descendants ($6-20USD) or Ultimate Descendants ($70-100 USD), people clearly want to sidestep the steep cost and unlock all these characters without paying.
However, the process of getting enough materials to get new characters takes a long time. Base Bunny gets spoon-fed to the player early on via the main quest, but other characters aren’t so simple.
Bunny is a supercharged speedster.
For those unfamiliar, here’s a brief and somewhat simplified rundown of how unlocking new Descendants in The First Descendant works:
First, you have to acquire enough materials to craft four different research materials, three of which you have to wait 8 hours for (18 hours for Ultimate variants).
Crafting each of these requires you to obtain a blueprint as well, with drop rates that vary from as high as 38% to as low as 2-3% on the Ultimate Descendant components after completing certain missions.
You also have to get the right Amorphous Material from an entirely different set of missions, something that gives you the opportunity to roll for those blueprints. If you beat a boss but don’t have the Amorphous Material to roll for the blueprint you need, you’re out of luck.
Then, after all that, you have to wait 16 hours (36 hours for Ultimate variants) for the Descendant to craft, although you can pay your way past that timer as well.
Getting just a single new character can take days of grinding and waiting if you don’t feel like paying for them.
It’s also possible for the character you worked so hard for to be a downgrade compared to who you already have, although that’s a problem that can be avoided by reading our The First Descendant character tier list.
This led to a variety of posts with players showing just how close they were to unlocking the character they wanted. They’ve been spending hours upon hours grinding through missions only to get gated by one material RNG just won’t give them.
“Done this same mission for 5+hrs and not once has it dropped the singular piece I actually need. I do now have a boat load of amorphous mats but only a few shape stabilizers,” the original poster said.
“You have every run 20% chance that it drops…. that theoretically means you can run 100 times and get nothing…. because every time the game roll the dice new with a 20% chance to get it… it doesn’t memorize or make a note how many time you have played the mission,” one player explained.
The truly random nature of these drops means it may take players days of grinding the same missions over and over just to get a new Descendant.
Drop rates on these blueprints are so inconsistent that players believe the developers are lying about the odds, though no evidence to back that up has been presented.
Nevertheless, they’re frustrated with the system, calling the RNG process “rage inducing” and “abysmal”.
That said, this sentiment isn’t entirely universal. Though the majority of players think gating base character unlocks behind a progression wall of this size is frustrating, some people love the grind.
“I’m ashamed to admit this but I kinda love grindy looter shooters. Already 6,260 hours into Warframe, I could see myself putting a couple thousand into this if they improve and further support the game,” said one player.
Those who love putting dozens and dozens of hours into getting new gear love the challenge required and the reward at the end of it, and those players are likely to be the ones who stick with the game long-term.
Considering The First Descendant has consistently hovered around 200k players at peak hours on Steam since it launched, the difficulty of getting new characters hasn’t convinced people to put the game down.
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