You Don't Have To Be Mad To... Oh, Wait, Yes You Do. Once Human First Impressions #3

Boy, there's a lot going on in this game! I played for another two hours last night. A couple of hours seems to be my limit before I get mentally exhausted. And by that I mean me, not my character.

In that session, I feel as though got so much done and yet I also feel like I made so little progress. It's that kind of game in the learning and leveling stage. Honestly, the session itself was frankly chaotic, something I fear may be represented all too convincingly in this post.

But hey, there's nothing wrong with a bit of chaos now and then! Creative chaos can be a whole lot of fun. Also surpisingly productive. It's not like I didn't get anything done.

My first big project was making that camera. I said I was going to and I did. It wasn't hard. I just had to gather the materials. 

I thought I'd have to find specific items as listed in the recipe but in fact all I needed to do was raid a nearby Stronghold, grab everything that I could find, throw the whole lot in the dissassembler and presto! Out came all the mats I needed!

Sneaking round the back of a building in a stronghold to avoid being sniped from a watchtower, I discovered this charming graffitto. Serendipity rocks!

Before I get to the camera itself, which is amazing by the way, I'll just unpack some of the jargon there. Bear in mind I've only played for about six or seven hours in total and I'm all of level 6, so I probably have no idea what I'm talking about.

A Stronghold, as far as I can gather, is any structure still standing after the Starfall that's been overun by Deviants. Oh, hang on a moment... I'm just making things worse, now. This game needs a glossary.

Starfall is the apocalyptic event that caused the world to descend into anarchy, chaos and surrealism. Don't ask me how it happened. Half the plot revolves around explaining it but various NPCs seem to disagree on the facts and anyway none of it has stuck with me for longer than it takes to listen to them explain their theories.

Deviants are what you get when someone (Or something.) gets... I want to say "infected" but I think "contaminated" might be closer... by Stardust. If I'm understanding things correctly, most humans flat out died in the Event and they may have been the lucky ones. A minority survived as various kinds of zombie-like monsters, which is the part that makes the game feel really like New World. Well, that and the scenery. And the combat.

It's been a long day...

Okay, let me start again. Forget the terminology, most of which I'm probably mis-using or misunderstanding anyway. The point is, just as in New World (Oh, hey, there's this too...) every building is a potential source of crafting materials, consumables and general loot. You can find it in boxes and crates or just lying around, where people left it when they turned into mindless zombies. Or had TV sets grafted to their heads.

That does seem to be quite a common occurence, people and animals melding with objects. Stardust doesn't just affect organic life. It affects anything. I had a fight with a refrigerator about an hour ago. (I won!) and yesterday I fought two footlockers and a television set. It's even weirder to do than to read about, trust me.

As well as all the useful stuff you can pick up in Strongholds, the mobs drop materials too. Animals can be skinned for hide. There's XP for killing things. There are Journey objectives that take you to Strongholds both general and specific and so do Tasks and what I would call Main Story Quests, although it's not what the game calls them. Basically, you're going to be going into Strongholds a lot for all kinds of reasons, so it's a good thing it's a really fun thing to do!

Don't make me use this thing!

At this point I'm going to add a caveat: one of the reasons I'm finding it so much fun is that the mobs are dumb as rocks. It reminds me very much of that period in New World's development, before Amazon beefed up mob AI and nerfed a bunch of overpowered advantages player characters had over the Corrupted and the rest.

I'm guessing that by the time Once Human goes live, you won't be able to rampage around Strongholds,
whacking Deviants with a yard-long monkey wrench so they rag doll all over the place on the first hit and drop dead on the second. I'm also betting you won't be able to walk up behind them and "backstab" them by belting them on the back of the skull without them even turning around.

In short, combat at low level is very weighted in the player's favor right now and I'm planning on enjoying it while it lasts because I'm certain it won't stay like this forever. Gather mats while the sun shines as the saying goes.

It's actually just as well it's easy because healing can be a bit of a pain at the moment. The survival elements of OH are considerably more to the fore than they have been in most games of this type I've played. Don't even get me started on ammunition. There's a reason I'm using that monkey-wrench...

There are four main stats that have to be maintained - Health, Hydration, Food and Sanity. The actual names might be slightly different but that's the gist.

Balancing all four is tricky. They all have multiple possible consumables or actions that could affect them but many of those increase one while reducing another. Failing to keep a stat topped up to an acceptable level rsults in a debuff. There are lots of those.

Health (By which I mean hit points or "Energy" as I think it's confusingly called sometimes.) doesn't regenerate naturally unless you sleep in a bed. In the field you have to jab yourself in the arm with a hypodermic, which I quite enjoy. 

Who are you callin' crazy?

I think food can restore health too but only if you cook it and I don't have that option yet. Mostly food stops you being hungry. You can eat it raw if you're desperate enough, which helps with the hunger but also lowers your sanity, as does drinking standing water to increase your hydration. The reason for that is obvious: anything growing or flowing out in the open is drenched in Stardust and Stardust makes  you crazy.

Or something like that. I'm pretty sure there's more to it but that'll do for now. The point is, you're highly motivated to develop the skills to cook your food and collect rainwater in a purifier but so far I've not had either the time or the mats to make the crafting stations so I have to make do with berries, raw meat and foul water. It's no wonder I'm losing my mind.

Ah, but is insanity really so bad? As with being hungry or thirsty, going nuts from eating nuts gives you debuffs but unlike the physical debilitations, mental deterioration also gives you Whims. 

I'm a big fan of whimsy. That's got to be good, right? Well, it kind of is... 

A Whim is a debuff that also has a positive aspect. For example, it might raise your swimming speed by 30% while at the same time increasing the rate at which you lose hydration by the same amount. You can have up to six Whims at the same time. I can imagine circumstances where players are actively going to seek specific Whims when they need a boost in those areas. I bet at endgame, OH is going to be a min-maxers dream.

At least, that's my ill-considered, uninformed guess. As I said a at the start of the post, there's a lot going on in this game and as must be clear to all by now, I'm not really coming to terms with most of it. Not yet. It's perfect for me, given how much I enjoy both chaos and learning new stuff but it really makes it hard to predict what the game is likely to feel like once I know what I'm doing.

Kind of old school, really.

Getting back to something I actually have experience with, that camera I made is just awesome! It's a physical object in the game that you keep in inventory and equip when you want to use it. I slotted mine onto my hot bar and hit the key to see what would happen and my character put her weapon away, took the camera out of her bag and held it in her hand.

I had a little think and then I wondered if it worked like a weapon. Maybe you just press LMB when you want to take a picture? So I tried it and you do!

It's the most organic screenshot conceit I've seen and one of the coolest things I've seen in a game. Your character raises the camera and points it the way she's facing and then a new UI opens and you're in Camera Mode. 

You have access to a whole set of controls from the technical (Field of View, Focus, Depth of Field) to the magical (Weather, Time of Day). You can keep your character in shot or leave them out. You can move the camera to different points of view with WASD. You can rotate the view 360 degrees. All of that I've seen before. 

The best part, though, is something I've never seen anywhere: you can save the shots directly to a folder of your choice. And name them! For me, that's a major step forward. Almost a paradigm shift.

So much time I've wasted over the years, trying to find screenshots I've taken in different games. You wouldn't believe where some developers choose to hide them or what strings of gibberish they use for filenames. (Looking at you, DCUO.). In Once Human, not only can you store them in a place of your own choosing, with a file name that means something to you, you can also upload them to the cloud, share them via social media and even add them to an in-game album, all from the camera's inbuilt U.I.

The downside is I spent a lot of time taking screenshots - but then I was always going to do that anyway. At least now I can find them straight away. And I don't have to go to Uncrop to remove the UI any more. That saves me a ton of time, although I can't deny Uncrop is fun to use.

Apart from making my camera, the other big thing I did last night was go to Deadville.  It's one of the first things my bird pal wanted me to do and there's been a map marker and a big beam of light in the sky to remind me of my obligations the whole time I've been playing but I had other priorities. 

Welcome to Deadville.

It's not as though it was a big trip. There are handy distance numbers with every map marker so I knew it was only about a kilometer away. It doesn't sound like a lot but you can never be sure. In almost every mmorpg I've ever played, distance in game bears very little ressemblance to distance in the real world. 

In this case, though, it seems about the same. According to the internet, it would take a fit, "intermediate" runner in their mid-20s, which is what my character looks to be, about four minutes to cover 1km. I didn't time it but that's about what it felt like.

This might be a good point to say something about travel in Once Human. It's very comfortable. That seems like a strange thing to say about a weirded-out, post-apocalyptic disaster zone but it's true. 

Mob density, one of my personal bugbears with the entire MMORPG genre, is very light indeed, at least in the low-level areas. You can wander around largely unconcerned about being jumped by monsters or zombies. Deer are the most common creatures I've seen and they don't want trouble, just to stay out of your gunsights. 

Here's the road. Now all I need is the car.

Even the Deviants aren't overly aggressive. Or rather, they are homicidal but they tend not to notice me  unless I come right up to next them and stand there for a moment. And then I hit them with my monkey-wrench and they fall over, so that's fun.

There are environmental hazards like swamps and water but you can run or swim through those. Of course, that slowly sends you insane from the pollution but insanity turns out to be nothing a good night's sleep won't fix, so why worry? I mean, I've been drinking water straight out of the swamp and I'm just fine!

The game does have vehicles and there are plenty of big, clear highways still around but I haven't seen a single person driving so I'm not sure if that's an option in beta. Maybe no-one's managed to build a car yet or maybe it's something that happens in higher level areas. The map is level-ranked by region although it's a fully open world with no zone transitions, as far as I can tell.

You can glide, if you find somewhere high enough to jump off, but the area I'm in is fairly flat so I haven't tried it. I have a couple of gliders that came from beta or login rewards (Claiming those rewards is a story in itself but not one for this post.) but apart from when I came in hanging onto the feet of my bird pal I haven't tried gliding yet.

At the teleport station. Not sure what Rosetta was but I think it was something important.

Finally, there are teleports. Oh, yes. This is the future, remember? There are teleport towers dotted around the map that you have to visit to unlock, which has always been one of my favorite mechanics. I stumbled on the first by accident in a very good example of what's right about the world design in the game; I saw the installation from a distance, thought it looked curious and worth investigating, clambered over some rocks to get to it and boom! New game mechanic! That's how you do it.

I have several teleport points unlocked now but I haven't needed to use them. I'm having too much fun exploring. I think you just click the map to teleport between the towers but I'm not sure. Probably should have checked that before I mentioned it. 

Clicking on the map is how you return to your base, though. I did that last thing last night before I logged out. It's good to have somewhere to come home to after a hard day's slaughtering, stealing and talking to ghosts.

Talking to ghosts? Didn't I mention that part? Oh well. Too late for this post. It'll have to wait 'til next time.

Unless I have something more pressing to talk about then. I did say there was a lot going on in this game, didn't I?