As The Seasons Turn: Speeding Up And Slowing Down In Once Human

About two weeks and twenty levels into Once Human, I'm beginning to get a sense of the shape of it at last.  It's my impression that the whole Season mechanic has been throwing most peoples' estimation of the game right off and I believe that won't really change until the first seasonal reset, which ought to come about a month from now. For the moment, though, I do finally feel as if I'm getting some clarity at last, at least in relation to the way I'm choosing to engage with the game.

Here's the thing; the way Once Human works makes it something of a paradox for me. It's all at once too fast and too slow. The accelerated pace comes with the game, the slowness is something I'm bringing with me.

Before I get into the specifics, I ought to caveat everything from here on in with the usual warning that I may very well not know what I'm talking about. I know, I know, same as ever... but in this case this is a brand new game with systems no-one has yet seen in action. With that in mind, I'm not going to speculate about how successful the Seasons mechanic is likely to be over the months and years to come. I'm just going to speak to how it's affecting me already.

The current Season is split into six phases, each of them approximately a week long. All the phases have names as well as numbers: we're currently in Phase 3, Wrath of the Rift. 

Each Phase comes with its own set of goals and plenty of them. There are four tracks - Territory, Exploration, Secure and Challenges - each with a number of specific tasks, targets, requirements or benchmarks. Completing any of these goals earns you a currency called Mitsuko's Marks.

You can spend the currency in the Season Shop, where you'll find various cosmetics, furniture items and the like but just acquiring the Marks pushes a blue line around a circle on the left of the screen. Around that circle are one, two and three star markers and when the line reaches each of those you get a reward - a few items, some Starchrom (Another currency, used in the Wish Machine.) and most importantly Ciphers aka Meme Points.

Ciphers are used to buy Mimetics, the game's name for the skills and abilities in the four tech trees that comprise most of the progression in the game. In the betas I played, the only way I remember getting Ciphers was by leveling. It made progression feel steady and manageable. Everything opened up at just about the time I was ready for it and it all seemed quite natural and organic.

With the Live build, that rhythm has been disrupted. Ciphers come mainly from the Seasonal Goals and at a pace I find far too fast to feel comfortable. 

I'm not one to complain about anything in a game being too easy but it's undeniable that many of the Seasonal Goals are very simple. I didn't even they were there at first, although the game does prompt you to look at the UI page whenever you complete one. Just playing the game normally will quickly fill out some of the goals and once you start actively working on them, more can be completed very swiftly indeed.

They need to be that way because there are new ones every week and the whole thing only last a month and a half. There isn't time for too much that's long, complicated or difficult. All of which would be fine if the rewards weren't so generous. 

The first Phase was okay. I completed all three sections of the wheel without any pressure, which gave me a nice glow of satisfaction and thirty Ciphers altogether, a nice boost. I appreciated it.

Things began to change in Phase Two, when the reward for hitting each of the Star markers jumped from ten Ciphers to thirty-five and then forty. I didn't fill out the whole wheel to get the third batch before Phase Three dropped but I still got seventy-five ciphers. We're now a couple of days into the new Phase and I've already passed the first star, netting myself another forty.

I have no idea what to do with that many. I wasn't even using all the ones I'd gotten from leveling. When I realized just how many I had, I spent a long time yesterday, going through all of the options and even after I'd bought everything I wanted, I still had 165 Ciphers left. Skills do cost more than one Cipher each - the most I've seen so far is seven - but even so that represents a lot of spending power. 

Obviously, I could just spend them on whatever and there is a button that lets the game choose them for you but either of those options completely breaks the natural progression that was part of what I found so compelling about the game in the first place. Worse, I'd end up with a whole load of abilities I couldn't use because they all require mats that are only available from parts of the game-world I haven't reached yet and where I couldn't hope to survive at my current level.

A little of this comes from my personality. I strongly dislike buying things I don't immediately need, either in real life or in games. I'd far rather save the money, virtual or actual, for when I can spend it on something I'm going to use right away. That quirk aside, though, the developers clearly expect players to be progressing at a far faster pace than I am, which I'm not at all sure can be healthy for anyone.

I already feel mildly uncomfortable about the amount of time I'm spending with the game. From my perspective, I've been playing Once Human a lot since launch. It's been out for less than two weeks and Steam tells me I've played for almost 33 hours. I do occasionally wonder if I've been playing too much. I've certainly chosen to play the game once or twice at times when I knew I should have been doing something else, which is never a good sign.

And yet, with all of that, I am clearly far behind where the developers expect me to be by now. It's not just the avalanche of Ciphers. Some of the Phase Two goals and most of Phase Three's relate to things I haven't done yet or happen in areas of the game-world I haven't reached.

The level cap in Once Human is fifty. The map is made up of six very large regions, each with content appropriate for a specific level range. I guess that could be meant for one region per Phase, meaning players would take just a week to complete each of them. (Contradicting that theory is the fact that all quest progress, including regional and side stories, is carried across into the new Season, suggesting the devs aren't expecting anyone to do all, or even much, of it in a single Season.)

I am still in Dayton Wetlands, the starting zone. The content there goes to about level 15 or so. I haven't even explored the whole of the area yet, far less seen all the content. I have a dozen side-quests in my Journal and there are plenty more markers on the map where I could pick up more. I haven't even visited all of the marked areas of interest on the map, let alone done what there is to do in them, and by no means is everything shown on the map.

At a conservative estimate, I would guess that Dayton Wetlands alone would keep me busy and entertained for at least a month, even if I played fifteen hours a week, which is definitely more hours than I'd want to spend on it. I don't think I'd even out-level the area, going at that pace. The only reason I'm Level 27 and theoretically ready for the next region, Iron River, is the Commission system. 

Commissions are just what you'd expect: tasks you get from a notice board in the main settlements. There's a quest that introduces you to the concept but after that it's down to you to find the boards and take the commissions.

I hadn't been bothering with them until I decided I wanted to rush to Level 20 so I could get the quest to open Eternaland. (Separate post about that to come.) At that time, xp was coming steadily enough but it would have taken me several days of normal play to get to 20 and I was in a hurry, so I did a bit of googling to see how I could speed things up. Commissions seemed like the way to go.

You can take five Commissions per Phase. Most of them are incredibly easy, things like smelting fifty ores or driving 3000 meters. It takes literally a few minutes to do all five and each of them gives a huge wodge of xp. Pretty much a level every time. Since I started doing them just before the weekly reset, I was able to do ten in a couple of days, which jumped me from the high teens to the high twenties almost overnight. ( I just took ten minutes out of writing this post to take and complete the Phase 3 Commissions and now I'm Level 35!)

With the extra levels, I was able to do some exploring in Iron River, something I needed to do because the materials to make stuff I wanted for my house weren't available in the starting zone. It all went quite well. I was able to pick up quests and I could just about handle the mobs at the lower end of the level range. 

I considered staying there. Iron River is a nice area. Thanks to the excellent Move option, I could just pick up my whole house and everything in it and put it down again in a new spot but I'm don't feel ready to do that quite yet. I'm not usually one for worrying about "completing" a zone before I move on but in this case I barely feel like I've gotten started in Dayton Wetlands. 

Not only is there still a ton of stuff to do there, most of it still gives very decent experience. Plus I like the place where I'm living. I took some trouble to find it and I don't much want to move. If I did, it would be just a little way down the coast to an even better spot I happened on last night. I feel very much as though this is a both a game and a region where I could settle down for the medium to long term. Make my home there, you could say, in more ways than one.

The developers very clearly don't see that as an aspiration to be encouraged or supported. They want me to get on with the Scenario provided. I ought to be zipping through the levels and the regions, spending all my ciphers as I go, not slacking in the starting zone. They even upped the rate of gain on basic materials in the current phase just to make it clear you don't need to hang about in the starting zone, mining tin and copper, even though you can never have enough of either.

There's a fundamental mis-match between what they anticipate I'll find fun and what I actually enjoy doing but frankly it's been that way in almost every MMORPG I've played since EverQuest so I'm used to it. In pretty much every case, I've been able to work around the expectations of the designers and make my own way through the game, at my own pace.

This time that might not work. The entire game as it is now will vanish in about a month from now. My character will go back to Level 1. I'll lose my house, my furniture and all the Mimetics I've unlocked. The fog of war will roll in to cover the whole of the map once again. There seems to be some argument over whether all the Deviants I've collected will also be removed at the end of each Season but that does seem like the most likely reading. 

With that in mind, it's easy to see why progression is on fast-forward. If it went at the pace you'd expect from an MMORPG, most of the population would never get out of the mid-levels before they were back where they started. This way, everyone ought to be safely at the cap in good time, unless they play the way I do.

Whether it's a workable model for player retention is another matter. The sweetener for explorers, achievers and completionists, who might very well find both the pace and ephemerality off-putting, is that every Season supposedly brings a whole new tranche of content - new places to go, new things to collect, new goals to reach. Whether that's going to provide enough in the way of compensation for the perceived loss of status and the time spent acquiring it is something we won't find out until the first Season ends.

It does also raise questions in mind concerning the exact nature of such new content as may come. The second Season is rumored to be focused mostly on PvP, which seems like a risk. 

From a PvE perspective, there's mention of new regions to explore but I foresee problems even with that, given the way level has been linked to geography. It would suit me extremely well if a new season came with a new low-level area but I'm sure most players would see that as a pointless waste of resources, especially if the pace of progress means most will be through it and gone within days.

If  a new region comes at the higher end of the level curve, though, I imagine plenty of people will be unhappy about having to level through all the same content again just to get to it. I, of course, will most likely never see it at all.

Maybe the new Seasonal content won't be geographically linked in the same way. Perhaps it will stand separate from the areas we know now or operate in some kind of level-agnostic fashion. The information available at this stage is still so vague it's impossible to tell. 

I did say at the start that I wouldn't speculate on the longer-term prospects for Seasons so I'll stop before I take that line of thought any further. What I will say is that I can now see a way forward for myself, even with my preferences and predilections, one that might allow me to negotiate the intentions of the developers and adapt them to my own. What I mostly need to do is adjust my thinking.

It's going to take some effort but it could be fun to try. I just need to not get too attached to my little pets. If they'd let us take our Deviants into Eternaland with us, I think that would make a deal of difference. Because I've seen Eternaland now and I like the look of it.

More on that another time.