Seasons, Single Characters And Security Issues: False Steps And Fixes For Once Human

Watching the reaction to the launch of Once Human on Steam has been very interesting. The game has been reasonably successful, cracking the top ten on the Steam chart, peaking just a shade under 150k concurrency. That puts it in Steam's Top Ten biggest launches this year. It's not Palworld but it's not bad.

Those numbers, while impressive, don't tell the full story. You don't have to play Once Human through Steam. You can use Netease's own portal or play through the Epic Games Store. Neither of those offer the same kind of access to population data as Steam but it's reasonable to assume the number of players there is substantial, too. 

It's probably fair, then, to call Once Human a hit. The launch was also very smooth by MMO standards, with the servers generally staying up and no wide-spread, game-breaking bugs requiring emergency patches. There was a minor issue with server lists not displaying correctly right at the start but that was fixed almost immediately.

Despite these indicators of success, the aggregate review rating on Steam is only "Mixed". More than half of the twelve thousand reviews are positive but there are a lot of naysayers and it seems most of them are unhappy with something other than gameplay or performance.

The three main areas of concern appear to be:

• The single character per account rule.
• Use of the Netease launcher.
• Confusion over the Seasons system

All of those issues have already been addressed by the developers, which does at least seem to have gained them a modicum of respect for responsivity but of course the damage has already been done. It remains to be seen whether newer reviews will shift the balance towards the positive. 

Of more interest to me than the reviews is the substantive value of the concerns and whether they could have been avoided in the first place.

Single Characters

I'm not sure how unusual it would be for an MMO to limit players to a single character per Steam account. I'd bet plenty of players only have a single character anyway and might not even notice. My guess it that it would be fairly standard only to allow one character per account per server but to pare that down to one character, period, would be very rare.

Still, I don't think even that would have caused quite so much uproar if Starry Games hadn't made the bizarre decision to make that one character undeletable. I'm sure plenty of players, who end up happily playing just the one character, go through a few that don't stick first. Being forced to carry on with whatever character you made on your first attempt does seem harsh.

It was always clear from the start that the intention was to allow multiple character creation eventually. but the uproar was sufficient to bring the date forward - really forward. Multiple character creation was enabled almost immediately, the same day the game launched.

The given reason for not having it in the game from the start is very revealing: 

"Our initial decision to close multiple-character creation was due to the imperfect experience of playing with multiple characters."

This seems to come up a lot in MMORPGs from both East and West. Developers make assumptions about what would be good for players without taking into consideration the implications for players' sense of agency. I'm sure it's true that limiting players to a single character would avoid a number of potentially awkward and unsatisfying experiences, not least for Customer Service, but going so far as to make it impossible to start over without making a whole, new Steam account seems like insanity.

I find myself oddly out of sync with the whole thing. A few years ago, I'd have been outraged to be limited to just the one character. These days I hardly ever make a second in any game. I suspect that if this change hadn't had so much publicity, I'd have been one of the players that never even noticed the restriction existed.

External Launcher

I must say, of the three major issues, this is the one I have by far the least sympathy with. Once Human is far from the only game I've played on Steam that requires use of an external portal or app of some kind. It's nothing new or strange.

In this case, the main objection seems to be the China connection. Because Netease is a Chinese company, a substantial number of Steam players seem to believe any software it might install on their computers is going to harvest their data and send it straight to the CCP.

And I guess it might, although what the CCP would want it for I have no idea. I suppose it depends what kind of data you might have on your PC...

I never really understand what the fuss is about with data gathering. Obviously, from my own perspective, having played dozens of imported games over the last few years, most of which have needed to install launchers to run, all my data must have been sent to Beijing and Seoul many times over. 

In the specific case of Once Human, I already played it directly through the NetEase launcher for both the betas I took part in. I'm hardly going to balk at letting Steam pass-through to the same launcher now.

Plenty of people feel differently, which is why the Once Human Team had to issue a lengthy clarification on the situation. Naturally, they make great play of their integrity and purpose when it comes to safeguarding data but they also completely deny that Steam (Or Epic.) players need to download or use the launcher at all:

"Players who play the game from Steam or Epic will NOT need to download or use the launcher."

Now, that does seem odd. I could have sworn I had to go through some kind of hand-over between Steam and the Netease launcher the first time I logged in. And if that wasn't the case, how come everyone was up in arms about it to begin with? 

Whatever the truth of it, my feeling is that for most gamers, the ship on data privacy probably sailed long, long ago. Most of us have probably clicked on all kinds of things we shouldn't have, just to get a first look at some game were were over-excited about. Any data we ever had has probably been all around the world many times over by now. If we really want to keep our data private, we'd almost certainly need to stop playing online games altogether.

Seasons

This is the one that really stumps me. I completely understand why people are confused and anxious about it. I've read all the avaialable information on the proposed Season system for Once Human, including the lengthy clarification released yesterday and I still have no clear idea what the heck it all means.

In fact, I found yesterday's "explanation" raised a lot more questions than it answered. If anything, I  feel more confused now about how it's all going to work than I did before I read it. 

The specific detail about which currencies and items will carry over between seasons is fine. that I can understand. What mystifies me is the underlying structure. I've read and re-read the details and I just can't visualise how the mechanics are going to work. Apparently, when a Season ends, you'll have a choice:

"Once a season concludes, you can embrace a new challenge by joining a different scenario or taking on your current one with renewed vigor."

At first I thought this meant you could just opt out of seasons altogether and carry on as you are, almost like not buying an expansion in an MMORPG, but now I think it means something quite different.

As far as I can tell, the worlds "Season" and "Scenario" have separate and distinct meanings in this context. I think they're saying you can opt out of new scenarios but you'll still have to join a new season. That's highly significant because a new Season is a reset. Everyone goes back to Level One and starts over fresh:

"In each new season, your character begins at Level 1, and all exploration progress on the World Map is reset. "

It looks as though there's no way to avoid having to begin again from scratch every six weeks (Or however long the season is. The first couple are six weeks long but later ones could be shorter or longer.) What you could do is replay the same content again by not opting into the new "Season Scenario", although quite why you'd want to do that I' not sure. It'd be be like playing WoW Classic in January 2005.

If my interpretation is correct, I'm not convinced the argument about not losing progress really stands up:

"We are aware that many players are concerned that their in-game progress will be reset in 6 weeks, but we are here to reassure you that this will NOT happen! "

That can only be true if you don't class gaining levels and opening up the map, including activating all the many instant travel nodes, as "progress". I'm not at all sure most players are going to agree with that definition.

My feeling, which I've seen expressed in a few places now, is that we're going to have to wait to see how all of this works in practice before we can be sure whether we like it or not. It does seem like quite a radical departure from the way most online games with "permanence" work. 

That's not to say it will turn out to be a bad idea. I think it's quite easy to imagine some considerable advantages to having a partial reset every so often, especially if it brings new explorable areas and storylines.

On the other hand, most MMOs manage to do that already without sending everyone back to the starting line. Whether this kind of leveling of the playing field is really necessary is unclear.

If it turns out a lot of players really don't like being set back in this way, then based on the speed of reaction so far, I'd guess we'll see a quick re-assessment by Starry/NetEase. By then, though, the game will have been out for a month and a half. Based on previous high-profile launches this year, that may already be too late for most people to care.