Once Human: Delays, Errors And Corrections

It's always a good sign for a new game, when the first thing you want to do after breakfast is log in and play. That was my plan for this morning but unfortunately, when I fired up Once Human, the servers were down for an update. There's beta for you.

I wasn't sure at first whether it was downtime or just a terrible connection to the West Coast server farm so after a few failures to connect I went to Discord to see if there was any news. I wasn't sure if I was signed up to the game's Discord channel but these days it's pretty much part of every registration process so I figured I'd probably done it back in August, when I filled out the forms to get on the wait list for beta.

Discord is a weird entity. As far as I can see, for games at least, it's just forums on fast-forward. There are the same headings and categories, the same stickied posts, the same kinds of conversations, only instead of everything happening like a series of notices posted on a board outside the village hall, it's more like everyone's standing around that same notice-board, chatting to each other about what's on it.

Personally, I prefer the forum format but Discord works too. I couldn't see a Downtime notice but a bunch of people were in the game-chat channel doing that thing online gamers do when they can't play their game of choice, namely complaining about it while telling everyone else who complains to take the opportunity to get outside and see some daylight for once in their lives. 

Between all the banter I learned that the servers were down for an hour, which just about gives me enough time to bang out the bare bones of a post that I'll have to tart up up for public consumption later. After I play some more.

While I was on Discord I learned I was pretty lucky to be playing at all. There's been a much bigger response to the beta than NetEase expected. Apparently they only intended the beta to apply to North America, which certainly explains why there's only one set of servers on the West Coast, but they didn't region-block access so they got beta applicants from more than a hundred countries.

As I mentioned before, there were only supposed to be twenty thousand places in this closed beta but interest proved so great, NetEase expanded it to fifty thousand, which still wasn't enough. As the statement on Discord puts it:

"Under the current server testing conditions, we have found that the pressure to maintain continuous access is extremely high, which may affect the testing experience for existing players."

They halted downloads of the client on 13 December, the day after I got my invite. It's just as well I downloaded it immediately, even though I wasn't actually able to get in and play until the next day. It's also just as well I made a character on the 13th, right after breakfast, because following the clampdown 

"players who have already created a character can still access and play the game as usual".

Not sure what my position would have been had I downloaded the client but not gotten around to making a character until today. Luckily I don't have to worry about that.

If anyone's interested in joining the beta, the door is still open. There's a new process:

"We will not cease issuing testing qualifications. Instead, we will invite subsequent players to participate in our testing through a limited invitation system using activation codes. The rules for obtaining activation codes are as follows:

1. Fill out the questionnaire on our official website, www.oncehuman.game and wait for the activation code to be sent to the provided email address.
2. Every week, we will randomly select 3,000 players from the questionnaire respondents, and on each Friday, we will send the activation codes and game download links to the qualified players' emails."

Come to think about it, that may be why the servers are down right now. It must be around 4AM Pacific.

Those questionnaires they mention are interesting. I've filled out two already and the questions seem to be responsive to the answers given. 

The first popped up on Tuesday, after I tried to log in and couldn't, and mostly involved my previous gaming history. The second I opted into when I logged out last night. That one went much more deeply into my thoughts about likes and dislikes in the game itself and what ought to change. It was an in-depth examination, not just a surface trawl, and it certainly felt as though some sections were asking follow-up questions based on my earlier replies. 

Not sure they really needed to offer us bribes to play.

It's not to say anyone's going to do anything with the information but it does suggest the beta process is being taken seriously as a development tool, not just a marketing exercise, something I also felt was very much the case with Tarisland. Having become used to "betas" and even "alphas" that often seem like nothing more than wheezes dreamed up by Marketing to get the game in front of as many people as possible, particularly streamers and journalists, as part of the publicity blitz before an already-scheduled release for which nothing much can or will be changed, it's refreshing to be playing closed betas again that actually feel a) targeted at people interested in that specific game and b) intended to gather data to further ongoing development.

On the substantive gameplay available right now, I played for a couple more hours last night and continued to be impressed with the attention to detail and functionality of the game. So far, I haven't run into any significant glitches or bugs, most text has been translated and everything has worked the way it's supposed to, at least as far as I can tell.

Of course, I'm only in the opening stages, where many games show a much greater degree of polish than later on. There are levels, which give some kind of indication of how far into the game you are, and my character dinged Level 4 last night, albeit only after I realized you have to claim the XP for each task you complete in the Journey.

The Journey seems to be a Quest Journal of sorts, although there's also a separate category called Tasks that I've yet to investigate. It's a long series of activities to be completed, split into chapters and in stages within those chapters, although you seem to be able to do all of them in any order. In older games much of it would probably have been part of a formal Tutorial or possibly would have gone under the heading of Achievements, although OH has those as well.

In this case, it reminded me very much of Chimeraland's seemingly endless information drip-feed, where you were never quite sure if you've actually started the game proper yet. There are other similarities between the games, too, especially the gigantic, freakish, boss mobs that roam the open world in both, like Kaiju looking for a town to destroy. 

Chimeraland, however, is freakish in execution while Once Human is freakish only in content. In operation, everything is clear, considered and organized. I nearly said "concise" but actually that's one thing it's not. There are a lot of very detailed explanations and they can be quite lengthy.

In case it's not clear, that's a cabin that's grown legs. And breathes fire.

I'm going to hold off on giving a fuller account of the gameplay until I've played a few more hours because it's very easy to miss or misunderstand things in the early stages. Case in point, I need to correct or clarify a couple of things I said yesterday that turned out not to be quite the way I described them.

Most importantly, when I said Once Human was like The Secret World crossed with New World, I left out one very important factor: neither of those games offers open-world building. For that we'd have to throw in something like Valheim or even Landmark, both of which I was reminded of last night as I whacked trees and rocks to get the materials to build my base.

Construction in OH feels very similar to Valheim or even Dawnlands, which is just Valheim in an anime skin. Landmark offered much more complex possibilities although you probably had to be a computer graphics professional to take full advantage of them. I enjoyed building in Landmark but the results I achieved were never great and even getting those was a lot of work. I much prefer the prefabricated systems of the newer titles to Landmark's free-form, build it with bricks you baked yourself approach. In retrospect, Landmark was really hardcore...

Caution: Construction In Progress

I imagine I'll do a post on building in OH at some point but for now I just wanted to make it clear that fixing up your own place is a major element of gameplay. The other thing from yesterday's post I wanted to correct isn't just an omission but an error. I said there was no in-game screenshot or camera function. I was wrong.

There is a camera - you just have to make it yourself! I've only ever come across this once before that I can recall. In Genshin Impact you don't get to use the in-game camera until you do a quest, for which you get an actual camera as a reward. In OH, it's a crafting recipe.

I only found that out after I made myself a Workbench and settled down to see what I could make. Not much, as yet, because acquiring more recipes is another significant progression mechanic, but it transpires that one of the gimmes at the start of the game is, yes, a camera.

Not exactly how I imagined cameras were made...

I'm not sure how it works or what kinds of pictures I'll be able to take with it because I haven't been able to make one yet. It needs some materials I don't have, some of which (Copper ingots) I'm going to have to smelt from ore. For the rest I'll need to hunt mobs or search buildings, which should be fun. 

And that's what I'm going to do after I publish this post. It's a nice, achievable goal that's more personal than slavishly following my Journey and it should also give me a bit more insight into both combat and crafting, which I can then write about with something less than total ignorance another time.

Plus if the camera works, I should be able to post some better pictures at last! Let's hope so, anyway.