After two weeks, I'm forty-five hours deep into Once Human. Level 37, two-thirds of the way to the cap. In most MMORPGs about now, I'd be in position to offer something a bit more informed than a few First Impressions. Not quite so easy this time. Everything I think I've learned could blow away with the wind when the first Season comes to an end next month.
It's frustrating to feel I have to keep reflecting everything through the lens of the Season concept but the further into the game I get, the more progress I make, the more it becomes clear no real assessment of the game can begin until we've been through at least one full cycle. Even then, since Starry says there will be different lengths and kinds of Season, it's far from sure any conclusion drawn from the first will hold much relevance for the rest.
Of course, most of the fundementals won't change... probably. The graphics will remain excellent, along with the world-building, vibe and aesthetic, all of which are top-notch. I've seen absolutely no slippage in the high-quality English translation as I reach the middle levels either, so I'm confident that will continue.
Eternaland means that if your main focus is building, Seasonal changes should barely be noticeable. For those most invested in the main storyline or the many side quests, the picture is a little less clear but the intention there is certainly to keep full continuity across Seasons.
The very big deviated elephant in the room is the core survival gameplay itself. Bizarrely, that appears to the main element Starry are prepared to throw away in favor of a fresh start every six weeks. Progress? What progress?
Survival games in general tend towards a really simple gameplay loop. Start with nothing in a hostile environment where everything is trying to kill you, then find the world is stuffed to bursting with resources so all you have to do is find them, take them and learn how to use them to make your life so much better.
Naturally, those resources aren't all immediately available so you have to range further and further afield, exploring new environments and facing new challenges. As you do so you become more and more proficient in using those resources to raise your technological/supernatural/magical/psionic threshold, thereby opening the way to even more complex processes. And repeat.
All of this takes quite a while but eventually you plateau, reaching a point where there's nothing left to discover and nothing new to learn. At that point, survival games that also focus on PvP can keep going indefinitely on the emergent gameplay that comes from throwing a bunch of people into a pit together but for PvE titles, as we've seen with other successful survival games like Valheim, players tend to consider the game over until a new biome gets added.
That seems to be the business model for many and it's been pretty successful. The games do well, players seem happy. But most of the games we default to calling "Survival MMOs" or survivalboxes, if we want to denigrate the genre, are really co-op games at most. They aren't fully massive, shared, open world MMORPGs. Once Human definitely is.
Co-op games have plenty of leeway over how and when people play them but true MMORPGS don't have the same luxury of letting everyone leave until the next biome or expansion is ready. Many have to put up with that cycle anyway. Some developers purport to be comfortable with it. Still, none of them really want it that way. They all worry about player retention and do whatever they can to encourage it.
When Starry chose to weld survival gameplay onto an MMO chassis they were already giving themselves problems but by yoking the game to an unending cycle of server wipes they seem determined to make things as difficult as possible both for themselves and for the players. I really didn't want to focus on this aspect of the game yet again but after everything I've done over the past couple of days I don't see how I can avoid it.
Here's the thing: until very recently, I wasn't feeling the same degree of discomfort or anxiety that many players have been feeling over the Seasonal resets. As I wrote a little while back, I was ready to set my own goals, go at my own pace and play my own way. That seemed quite realistic when, as I claimed, there was far more to do at low level than I was likely to get through in a Season and I wasn't particularly interested in climbing the tech tree anything like as quickly as the game seemed to expect.
Things have changed. After I wrote that post, I made the mistake of getting curious about what would happen if I did knuckle down and get on with things, after all. I haven't made any more progress in the main storyline but it turns out that's no obstacle to progress. Unlike almost every other survival game I've played, Once Human doesn't really gate anything behind the narrative.
I can't off-hand think of much that's directly linked to a stage in the MSQ. Eternaland was, but isn't any longer. Some things come with a level requirement but as I pointed out earlier, levels come extremely easily in the game, so that's not much of a roadblock.
In fact, speed of leveling was the main reason I ended up pushing further ahead than I'd intended. At Level 37 it began to feel a bit limiting, planning to spend the rest of the Season in the starting zone and the next one over. I'd already done a bit of exploring but I decided I'd do more. I got on my motorcycle and went cruising down the deserted highways to see what was out there.
To my great surprise and considerable excitement, what I found was a whole lot of completely safe countryside with little or nothing to stop me doing as I liked. There were ore nodes absolutely everywhere and crafting materials just lying around waiting to be picked up, mostly off the back of abandoned pick-up trucks or the trunks of broken-down cars. The highways are a treasure trove of trash.
That changed my whole attitude to the game. Until I went touring, I'd assumed there wasn't much point in spending my Ciphers on Mimetics farther up the tech tree than I'd already gone. I wouldn't be able to make most of the advanced work stations, or the weapons and armor they produced, due to all of them requiring resources from areas full of much higher level mobs than I would be able to handle, so why bother? Once I realised I could get just about everything without having to fight a single deviant, though, suddenly I wanted to spend all those Ciphers I'd been saving - more than two hundred of them.
In two lengthy sessions, totalling over four hours, about all I did was ride around on my motorbike, opening Teleport towers, mining ore and looting storage crates. I skipped the Level 35 Settlement and its hinterland completely. It's still fogged over on my map even now. Instead, I went straight to the Level 45 hub, Blackfell, in the Red Sands region and the top-level region above that.
I started out somewhat nervously, mining Aluminum nodes close to the Blackfell safe zone but very quickly I realised there was nothing to be nervous about. Contrary to pretty much every MMORPG or survival game I've ever played, aggressive mobs in Once Human stick strictly to their designated areas, mostly abandoned buildings, complexes, strip malls or other facilities, all of which are always very obvious and easy to see, both on the map and in the gameworld.
So long as you steer clear of those, the game is safe as milk. There are almost no roamers or wandering monsters other than wildlife and even the animals tend to stay in their appropriate habitats. If you go wading through swampland you may get attacked by crocodiles and woodlands have their share of boars and wolves but even there, by the standards of most games, they're few and far between.
In Red Desert, all I saw were a few wolves, easily avoided in the daylight, somewhat less so in the dark. In more than four hours, the wolves only came close enough to attack twice and both times I was able to kill them before they killed me, despite a five-level disadvantage and some severely under-leveled gear. The one and only time I got killed was in the highest-level area, Blackheart Region, when a level 52 deviated wolf came out of nowhere in the middle of the night and one-shotted me as I got off my bike to loot a car.
As time went on, I became more and more confident. The countryside felt almost completely safe, anywhere I went. So did many of the smaller points of interest, many of which often housed only a handful of deviants, all of whom kept pretty much to themselves as I rooted around the dumpsters, or nipped in and out of deserted buildings to grab whatever I could find out of bedside cabinets and storage boxes.
Security was so lax I was even able to snaffle several Weapon and Gear chests, one of the more prized and usually better-defended looting targets. Twice, I was able to follow a trail of glowing lights to a Mystical Chest, the ones with the really good stuff in that appear mysteriously in unexpected places. I even completed a couple of non-combat puzzle quests and got the rewards with no difficulty whatsoever.
It was all hugely enjoyable. I had a really good time just riding around, jumping on and off my bike, hitting "Q" to set off the pulse that illuminates anything of note in a wide circle around the player, then stuffing everything I could find into my voluminous backpacks.
I interspersed looting with mining, which was even easier. There were ore nodes everywhere. I'd made the gadget that highlights them but I never needed to use it. I was literally bumping into ore nodes everywhere I went.
Once again, the game is very generous, a key design feature. Higher level areas add new metals but still keep the old ones, meaning you would never need to go back to the lower areas to mine copper or tin, which continue to be useful even after you graduate to aluminum and tungsten. I considered moving my house to one of the ore-rich areas of the desert so my two Digby Boys could supply me with all the ores I'd ever need (They dig up whatever is present in the local area.) but I actually find mining quite relaxing so I'm happy to do it myself.
As a result of all of this virtually risk-free scavenging, in what ought to have been but really weren't high-risk areas, after a couple of enjoyable sessions I was in a position to replace my Intermediate crafting stations with Advanced. I also had enough mats left over to start changing out my Tier 2 armor and weapons - not for Tier 3 or even 4 but for the top-rank - Tier 5.
I only had enough for a couple of pieces, though, which is when the full impact of the proposed seasonal resets really hit me. To get all the mats to upgrade all my armor and weapons, a process that would ideally involve multiple armor sets and weapon types due to the various functionalities and the kinds of situations that might call for each of them, is clearly going to take me several more lengthy scavenging sessions.
Even though I'll become much more powerful and capable as I upgrade my gear, meaning I'll be increasingly willing and able to exploit the richer pickings available in areas more densely populated by deviants, I would guess it will still take me the rest of this Phase and some of the next to get everything I want. Probably another dozen hours or so at a rough guess.
And that's fine, in and of itself. Gathering, mining and scavenging makes for a very enjoyable way to pass a few hours. Satisfying, too. In any MMORPG, if I could put in fifty or sixty hours in the first month and finish close to the level cap, in good, solo-end-game gear, I'd count it time well spent.
I'm really not sure how this is all going to work out. Right now, I feel emotionally out of phase with the game. I would really like to carry on working on improving my gear. It's fun and better gear will make the boss fights very much easier, strongly encouraging me to get back to the storyline. On the other hand, it seems like a hell of a lot of effort to put in for a benefit that at best is going to last me a couple of weeks before everything vanishes and I get sent back to the start to do it all over again.
It makes me feel as though the rational move would be to put Once Human on hiatus for the time being and play something else until I see how the first Seasonal reset goes. If I do carry on, I probably ought to concentrate on those parts of the game that will carry over to the next season - finding Blueprints in storage chests, building a really nice house, blueprinting it so I can re-make it next Season, working on stuff in Eternaland...
I probably won't do that, mostly because Once Human is so much fun, especially while it's fresh and new. I could just keep hammering away at it until it stops being fun any more, without giving too much thought to sunk cost and all of that. That would certainly work in the short term. If I end up playing for maybe sixty or seventy hours before moving on, well, that's a good run in any game.
Runs in MMORPGs, though, tend to be measured in the hundreds or thousands of hours. It's quite hard to see how that's going to work in this one. I guess only time and several Seasonal resets will tell whether Starry have invented a whole new way to play MMOs that everyone will be copying for the next five years or if they've holed their own boat and we'll all get to watch it sink.
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