Once Human Beta 3 - First Impressions Plus Comparisons With Beta 2

I've sometimes claimed that one of the big benefits of having a blog is being able to look back and compare my memories with what I actually said at the time.  Now, for once, I'm actually going to do it.

The game I'm revisiting is Once Human, which I started playing during Beta 2, back in December of last year, and which I stopped playing, before the beta ended, in the following January. In that relatively short time, I wrote about it quite extensively, posting my First Impressions on 13 December, with lengthy follow-ups on the 14th, 15th, 18th, 19th, 21st, 25th (Yes, Christmas Day!) and 28th.

On 1 January, I posted a very positive "Mid-beta Review" in which I said 

"As far as I can tell, the beta has about another three weeks to run, although I've yet to find an official date. I'm torn between carrying on as I have been, spending almost all my gaming time there and making the most of my access while it lasts, or quitting while I'm ahead to avoid bitter disappointment, when the mean devs take my new toy away. 

What I should probably do is wean myself off the beta gradually, reducing my play-time slowly as I simultaneously re-introduce other, much-neglected games to the mix." 

It seems that's what I did because I didn't post about the game again until 10 January, my last substantive post about it until the start of Beta 3. I skimmed through all of those posts last night. It wasn't a quick read by any standards. I didn't run them through a word counter but I'd be amazed if they come to less than twenty thousand words altogether. Might easily be thirty.

I made some notes as I was reading but given that level of verbosity I imagine I missed a lot. Still, I pulled out enough salient points for a short post. Maybe not that short, if precedent's any guide...

Before I get into the details, I have to say it seems like a lot has changed. Starry, the NetEase studio behind Once Human, is clearly engaged in a genuine beta process here, not just a marketing excercise, although inevitably there's plenty of marketing going on, too. I'm always wary of comparing subjective impressions like this but it was only a couple of months ago I was last playing and the feeling of change in the new beta I was already forming is largely supported by the record.

The whole game feels different this time and I'm not convinced it always feels better. Let's have some details.

Communication Breakdown

There's plenty of praise in my posts on the last beta for both the writing and the voice acting. Nothing I read last night mentioned any jankiness or glitching there. This time, as Scopique observed in his post about the current beta, conversations now sometimes repeat when you reach a decision point in the dialog tree. 

There also seems to be some confusion over whether the player character talks or not. Last time I mentioned my character didn't sound quite how I'd imagined she would. This time she seems to have been afflicted with selective mutism. Sometimes she speaks, other times she settles for gestures and facial expressions.

I'm also noticing more variation between the on-screen text and the voice acting than I remember and for the first time I'm seeing translations that aren't wholly convincing. On the plus side, almost all of the untranslated Chinese text has disappared. 

It seems apparent that both translation and voice-over are works in progress. I hope the final versions match the best on display, which would mean a high standard but I worry things might go the way of so many other imported titles, with quality translation at the start and sporadically in key scenes but something less satisfactory elsewhere. Fingers crossed on that.

The Easy Life

This is a tough one. My immediate impression is that everything feels much easier but when I come to examine why and how that might have come about I find myself somewhat at a loss. I can't nail down any specific changes but on an objective level, comparing my progress now with what I recorded in the last beta, it's undeniable that I've progressed much faster and had far fewer difficult moments. 

It's true that back then it was all completely new to me, while now I'm going through the same content for the second time but I really don't think familiarity and foreknowledge can account for the sheer speed with which I'm flying through the storyline. I've only played a handful of sessions, most of them quite short. but I'm already further ahead than I was by the time I stopped playing last time and, as must be evident from those posts, I played a lot.

Back then, I clearly remember having any number of long, tough fights with regular mobs. There was a lot of running away, healing up and some dying. In one post I mention having to leap out of a window to escape being overwhelmed and in another I talk about being mobbed by wolves while trying to do a quest hand-in. I recall stuff like that happpening pretty much non-stop.

This time there's been nothing like it at all. Everything's been very comfortable, even though in comparison to last beta, my character is far less prepared and not as well-equipped. In fact, I've done almost no prep at all. I've just been winging it with whatever armor and weapons I happen to find. For a while I was even just using whatever ammo I looted from chests although I have now finally made myself some bullets.

I haven't done anything about buffing myself and I haven't looked at any guides or walkthroughs and yet I've somehow managed to beat the first two instance bosses on the first try. Last beta, I didn't even dare take the first of those on until I was four levels above what the game reccomended and I made sure to supply myself with a ton of ammo and healing consumables before I went in. 

This time I rocked up two levels below the suggested minimum, went in with whatever I had on me and won easily, even though I ran out of ammo and had to melee the boss for the last quarter of its health. It felt inevitable I would win and it was fun even though I was totally half-assing it.

As for the second boss, I didn't write about that one last time but as far as I recall I don't think I ever beat it. I remember trying and the attempt being a total pain. No fun at all and it took ages. This time, when I got to to that point in the story I went in to see what would happen and ended up I finishing the instance quite easily, even though the game was throwing a hissy-fit and crashed just after I killed the boss, which unfortunately may have bugged my quest.

I probably need to do a bit more thinking on this but it does seem to me that everything is just a lot easier now and not just the fighting.

No-One Uses Cameras Any More!

Back in December I dedicated much of a post to raving about how great the screesnhot feature in Once Human was. To summarise, at the time you needed to craft an actual, in-game camera before you could take screenshots. Once made, the camera operated like a tool in the game. You had to equip it and point it at things to take pictures. 

I loved it but it seems no-one else did because it's gone. Instead, there's an annoying radial menu you can access immediately. It takes you to the same functionality but all of that immersive granularity has been lost. Or all that irritating busy-work. I guess it depends on your perspective but it's certainly another example of how the game is being simplified.

What's The Driving Age Around Here, These Days?

Acess to everything players consider essesntial seems to have been speeded up. By the time I got a motorbike last time I must have been in my teens. I know I'd already moved house so it must have been a week or two into the game at least. This time I got my driver's permit in my second session. I think I was about level five or six. 

I didn't have to do anything for it, either. An NPC just gave it me. I thought it might be a loaner but I've still got it so I guess it's mine now. I appreciate the convenience but I think I'd rather have built it in my workshop from parts. I'd value it more that way.

Where's The Mayor? ^[1]

In the last beta I didn't post about going to the first town, Deadville, until I'd been playing for five days but I did say I'd already been there a few times so I don't think it can have been that much longer than it was this time. Still, I'm pretty sure I wasn't there in my second session. Both times I didn't go until I was prompted so I think they've bumped a few things up the schedule in the revamped "Journey".

Last time, when I did get to Deadville, it seemed like there was more going on. Claire is still there with her van, offering the same quest but I didn't get any prompts to talk to the Mayor, who used to give the long speech leading into the Keefer Sutherland storyline. I can't imagine that whole sub-plot has been taken out but maybe it's been shifted down the timeline. 

Conversely, I met another guy in Deadville, called Lowe. He's a sharp dresser, who could have come straight out of The Secret World. Was he there before? I'm pretty sure he wasn't but I do seem to recall hearing some of what he has to say, so maybe he's been relocated or his lines have been re-assigned. 

Which leads me to... 

Wow! You've Really Changed Since I Last Saw You!

Don't try to deny it. I have the screenshots to prove it. 

The mysterious girl you meet in the opening cut scenes, who apparently represents the ruined world's best hope for recovery, used to be called Cyo. Now she goes by Mitsuko. Then there's Mary. She used to be a blonde who dressed like a lab assistant on the way to a meeting. Now she's a brunette in Lara Croft's cast-offs.

I'm fairly sure a lot of other NPCs have had a makeover too but I can only prove it for the few whose photos I took.

A Possible Loss Of Whimsy ^[2]

I'm not a hundred per cent certain on this one but I think they may have removed the whole Whim mechanic. If so,  it would be a shame. It was an interesting one. 

The gist of it was that every time you allowed something bad to happen to you, like getting poisoned by polluted water, there'd be some negative effects but you might also gain a "whim", a potentially positive side-effect, like being able to swim further before becoming exhausted. There was a whole theoretical meta-game there, involving taking debuffs to gain specific, situational benefits, that looked like it might be fun. 

I said at the time I thought it would end up being complicated and lead to some awkward choices for min-maxers but it didn't seem like a bad idea altogether. It may still be in the game but I've had a couple of things happen to me that I think would have triggered whims before and nothing's happened. There's been no word of the mechanic in the tutorial yet, either.

I won't write Whims off just yet. They may just have been punted down the timeline or their apparent absence could be a corollary of my moving through content so much faster this time around. Perhaps my whims lie ahead of me still. I hope so, anyway.

In Conclusion...

I could go on but I'm all too aware much of this could resolve itself as I progress and I'd have to come back and explain myself, so I think I'll leave it at that for now. 

What I really wanted to convey is how whole enterprise just feels different, somehow. Specifically, it feels more like a game and less like a virtual world.

I'm not saying it's better or worse. Just different. It's swings and roundabouts, as usual. For every loss of immersion there's an improved quality of life. For each interesting choice that's gone missing, there's one fewer annoying obstacle. If nothing else, I certainly appreciate the less-arduous combat.

At this point I was tempted to invoke the "better-in-beta" argument but I'm beginning to understand that's a more nuanced phenomenon than I've previously allowed. I'm developing a theory that early-mid beta builds tend to include a lot of features that interest developers more than players, which means they tend also to appeal to Explorer archetypes like myself, people who enjoy discovery for its own sake.

In probably too many cases, a lot of those not so user-friendly systems and less-intuitive mechanics, the ones that fascinate those of us who enjoy finding out how things work but which frustrate everyone who just wants to get on with playing a game, get left in for launch and then have to be hastily removed afterwards. It has to be better, commercially and aesthetically, to get all that sanded down in beta but it does explain why I sometimes find the finished product bland and unsatisfying compared to the prototype.

None of which changes my opinion that Once Human is on its way to becoming a pretty good game. What I do anticipate is that when it does launch later this year it won't be quite as weird or wonderful as it could have been. Whether that will harm or enhance its chances of success I guess will depend on just how smoothly Starry are able to handle the transition from the game the developers wanted to make to the one they think players will enjoy. 

At the moment, it looks like they still have some work to do.

[1] - He's still in his room, standing in the dark. He also still has all the dialog that tells you about the area. He just doesn't offer a quest any more, or at least not to me.

[2] - Yeah, this is just wrong. I was misremembering how Whims work. They're caused by decreasing sanity levels, not environmental conditions and they're still in the game. Or the guide explanation for them is, anyway. I haven't gone crazy enough to become whimsical yet.