The First Descendant – How To Reduce or Remove Motion Blur

The Beta version of The First Descendant is finally out for players on Steam. Previously, it was closed beta and only a handful of players got access to it. Starting on 10.20.2022 – at 12:00 AM PDT, you can get access to the open beta of the game and it will remain for 6 days. I also started playing the game and noticed some not-so-good visuals in the game.

The main issue or concern for me was the always ON motion blur and the overall blurry graphics and look to The First Descendant. I know that this is an early test version of the game, but I have played several BETA versions of different games that gave the option to turn these off. This game, however, does not have any such option.

There is a simple way to go about this problem that I will discuss with you so that you can maybe at least run the game before quitting the desktop at the earliest. Take this guide with a grain of salt since this is just the BETA version of the game and hopefully, NEXON gets the message to include all these options for their final release.

How To Reduce or Remove Motion Blur

I tried a number of different settings to find certain fixes to my problems. Let me list them down below so that you also have a checklist of the things you can or would have done to fix this. Take note that these options DID NOT WORK for me:

  • Changing Resolution To lower scale – Looks very bad and did not work well at all. Definitely not recommended.
  • Using upscaling option – Setting the DLSS to Performance with Very Low or Low Settings gave me a good FPS boost without Blur. Make sure to set it to High Quality if you want to use it. FSR an XeSS were okay and did not help me much here.
  • Changing FOV – This did not fix my issue and made the FPS even lower by rendering more from the background environment. Definitely not recommended. I keep this to 90 or 95.
  • Changing Display Mode – I am currently using a 2K monitor so I am taking more FPS hits than a normal 1080p user. Hence I am using Borderless Window mode to lower the CPU load while I ALT Tab. This did not help me but it aided me in reducing the system load.

Working Method To Remove Blur

First of all go to: C: > Users > Your Username > Appdata > Local > M1 > Saved > Config > Windows

Now Head over to the Engine.ini file and open it. Now Copy and Paste the following code in order to turn off motion blur:

[SystemSettings] 
r.DepthOfFieldQuality=0 
r.MotionBlurQuality=0 
r.FastBlurThreshold=0 
r.BlurGBuffer=0 
r.SceneColorFringe.Max=0 
r.SceneColorFringeQuality=0 
r.Tonemapper.GrainQuantization=0 
r.Tonemapper.Quality=0

Now just save the file, and start the game. Hopefully the always-on-Motion Blur will be gone by now. The above method is a foolproof way to remove Motion Blur in the game. I will also show other methods to reduce the blur effect if you do not want to do the settings file changes.

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The only option that significantly reduced the Motion Blur or Blurry Graphics is the Graphics Option. Simply Lowering the settings from Auto to “Very Low” did the trick for me! You can also use Medium or Low Graphics Options and Put the upscaling to DLSS High Quality to get decent FPS.

I have no idea why it is like this but no other option seems to work for me. One explanation is that there must be a preset with each option that keeps the Motion Blur ON. Since there is no way to turn that OFF in the current state of the game, you cannot use them to reduce blurriness in-game.

Hence, the only thing that worked for me to remove or reduce Blur significantly, and increased the FPS to about 90-95 is dialing down the Graphics Option to Very Low or Low. Here are two comparison images that show how it made the changes:

The First Descendant Graphics Adjustment 1

This image was taken before changing the Graphics Option.

The First Descendant Graphics Adjustment

This was taken after the adjustment was made. As you can see, most of the visual noise is gone which was present before. Even though the game may not look that great, it is playable to some extent in its current state. Before this change was made, I was having a tough time to even making it through one cutscene or phase.

I am using an RTX 3060Ti and a Ryzen 5 5600x with 32 Gigs of RAM. I am quite sure that the issue is not from my end but from the developer’s end. This is a medium-level rig in the current time that can run modern games at medium to high settings


I sincerely hope that NEXON takes note of this and includes the option to turn Blur settings ON or OFF. I will update this post if the full version of the game makes this change in the future. Until then use this guide or short tip to play the game for the time being. Leave your thoughts in the comments below.


Thanks for dropping by!


Last Updated on October 20, 2022

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