It's been a whole week since the last time I wrote anything substantive about Once Human, not counting that Christmas Day squib about the santa hat. Rest assured, I have been playing every day. I just thought we probably all needed a break from the apocalypse over the holdays.
Yesterday I put in one of my longest sessions yet, almost four hours straight. I don't often play any game for that long without a break these days but survival games in general do lend themselves to rambling, extended sessions and this one makes those more immersive than most.
It does to me, anyway. When it comes to gaming, particularly the persistent, open-world RPG kind, I have a preference I don't think I've mentioned before, one that I'm not sure is necessarily apparent from the games I choose to play and write about.
I have said, many times, that I prefer, whenever possible, not to play human characters. I'd rather play animals, animal-human hybrids or, failing that, humanoids of dimunitive stature like gnomes or fairies. If I do have to play a human character, though, my favorite setting to play them in, by far is contemporary or near-future.
I also have a penchant for modern buildings that have fallen into disrepair or ruin, something I very much enjoy exploring in real life, should I ever get the chance. It's evocative and fascinating to be able to wander through the decaying detritus of a dead or dying commercial sector or prowl around the dusty, tumbled furniture in a deserted suburban home.
These kinds of
environments tend to elicit more complex emotional reactions from me than the
gosh-wow awe and amazement that comes from graphic artists' joyful renderings of
royal palaces and stately homes. Not that those aren't fun, in their own way, but they don't resonate the way a beat-up filling station does.
Obviously, I like the pretty stuff, too, but given the choice I'd generally go for gritty, urban realism and sylised streetwear over fairytale fantasy and frou-frou frocks, every time. The Secret World is a long way from being my favorite MMORPG in terms of gameplay but it's been my benchmark for playing dress-up for over a decade and it comes in close to the top for set design, too.
It's too early to say whether Once Human can topple TSW from either of
those positions but it's got to be in with a chance. While I don't see any
sign yet that it's going to compete with Funcom's game for leather-jacketed street cool, the depth of detail in both architecture and interior
design look increasingly impressive the further I explore.
Which is not to say there's anything particularly ground-breaking or exceptional here. It's much more likely I just don't get to play many games with these kinds of settings. I mostly play MMORPGs, which as we know, are mostly fantasy or sci-fi. I'm fairly sure I'd have been equally as impressed, or more so, by any number of well-known titles, if only I'd played them, but since nothing I've noticed between TSW and this also came with a New Weird overlay, my points of comparison are necessarily limited.
That's a very round-about, long-winded way of saying I often find myself spending longer playing Once Human than I mean to because I take so much time gawping at overturned vending machines or staring at broken billboards as though they were exhibits in a gallery. I'd rarely stop and gaze at a sumptuous ballroom in a fantasy game the way I stare in delight at a run-down, out-of-town shopping mall.
Even so, my capacity for taking screenshots of urban decline, considerable though it is, has its limits. I wouldn't be spending this long going through every trash-filled room in every run-down building if it wasn't for the hook the game sets every time you enter a new location.
As soon as you cross the threshold of a named settlement, be it a farm or a factory or a mall, a set of objectives appears on screen. These are similar but not identical for each place you visit. Usually you have to kill a certain number of the inhabitants, find a "mysterious" but unspecified object, loot a couple of gear or weapons containers and maybe kill an Elite mob.
It's astonishing how effective a motivator this can be. It turns every delapidated show house or deviant-infested repair shop into a hidden object puzzle. Not that the objects are hard to find per se. They light up or glow or stand out from the background, bordered in white. To be absolutely certain, you can press Q, sending out a pulse of energy that illuminates anything you may have missed.
A recent patch added extra glow to chests to make them even easier to see. And if that wasn't enough, best of all, the game uses a very effective graphical trick to make life easier, one I haven't encountered before. When you enter a building, the ambient light alters automatically, effectively emulating the real-world experience of your eyes becoming accustomed to the gloom. It's very effective and immersive, too.
All things considered, I get the strong impression the developers focused closely on encouraging players to feel good about exploring the environment, fitting the gameplay around the experience rather than the other way around. It's not so much that it feels natural - theres' nothing natural about braining a zombie with a monkey-wrench - as that it feels bizarrely comfortable. Very little is awkward or frustrating and yet it doesn't feel insultingly easy, either.
One thing I've been less happy about is the way the game follows what seems to have become the standard model for crafting progression in these kinds of Survival games, where each tier is locked behind a boss kill. I first encountered it in Valheim, where I didn't really like it much, then I saw it replicated verbatim in Dawnlands, where I liked it even less.
Now, here it is again and I'm still not keen. It's not a pleasure, just an annoying necessity. Granted, a successful boss kill does release a momentary burst of endorphins but I'd happily forego the hit for a more straightforward, skill-based progression system, one bearing a more meaningful relationship to the crafting process itself. Mixing crafting and combat this way always seems counter-intuitive to me.
Still, if you're going to do it, at least make it manageable for players who prefer to craft rather than kill and therefore may not have the skills to handle challenging boss fights. That ought to be the rule. Again, it's too early to say whether Once Human achieves that standard - or even aims for it - but I can say that I have now killed the first boss and it went well.
The tool-tip suggests two level ten players for the fight so since I was going solo I tried to over-level for it. By the time I dinged 14, though, it had become apparent to me that, while you can keep on leveling up as long as you want, extra levels don't bring the same kind of innate, material advantages in this situation as they might in other games. What I really needed were better weapons but short of some exceptional luck with a Weapons Crate, I also needed the next tier of crafting to make them. Something of a Catch 22.
I watched a couple of YouTube videos of the fight and it didn't look difficult. Long and tedious, yes, but the tactics seemed easy to understand and not much harder to execute. My biggest concern was finding a time when Beryl wasn't likely to interrupt me mid-fight. In the end, yesterday afternoon, with Beryl sleeping in the armchair behind me, I just got fed up of waiting, made myself a thousand rounds of ammunition, repaired all my gear, ate, drank and restored my sanity and then teleported to the location and went in.
It was, as promised, a fairly straightforward fight. It followed what I'd seen in the videos quite closely although as with all these fights, there are always small variations. Still, there were no real surprises. I was concentrating so hard I didn't even think of taking any screenshots so the only record I have is the handy Victory screen the game pops up for you as you exit the instance.
The fight seemed to take a long time but that was mostly because the weapons I had, a couple of handguns, did relatively little damage. The boss, the Foul Shadowhunter, recently renamed from the perfectly acceptable Ravenous Hunter for reasons that escape me, has a massive health pool but it dosn't matter because you mostly can't shoot him anyway. He's immune from attack for much of the fight. Instead, you have to shoot his gigantic gatling gun, which has its own much smaller health pool.
When you deplete that to zero he drops the gun and just stands there like a lemon. You pick the gun up and empty the entire magazine into him. If you do it correctly, aiming for the head, it takes huge chunks off his health. When the ammo runs out, the dance begins again. There are a couple of other phases, where you have to run around destroying things to stop adds spawning but most of the fight consists of hiding behind barrels while the boss shoots uselessly at them, then popping out while he takes a breather to blast his gun until he drops it.
I got him down with three goes on his big gun, which seemed pretty decent from what I'd seen in the videos on YouTube, where everyone clearly had far better weapons than I did. I didn't time it but it felt like eight or nine minutes.
Longer than I'd have liked, sure, but not even close to being either as long, boring or annoying as virtually any instanced boss fight I'd done in a decade of Guild Wars 2's Living Story. I'd say it was about on a par with the first bosses in both Valheim and Dawnlands If things carry on like that way, it should be manageable enough. I wouldn't say I'm looking forward to the next boss fight but at least I'm not dreading it.
That, though, can wait for a good while. First I have a whole new tier of crafting to explore, something that will also require me to level up a few times to earn the requisite points to open all the options and learn all the blueprints. Beating the first boss also unlocks the Cradle, the device in your backpack where you store the Deviations you have to collect to give you extra abilities and buffs.
All that, though, is for another post. There's so much to talk about! I haven't even mentioned my new Gacha machine. It plays Whack-a-Mole and spits out blueprints. I'd tell you more but I don't understand how it works yet.
I guess I'll have to save that for next time.
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