On The Changing Of The Seasons In Once Human - or - I Guess I'll Just Sit Here Then...

For once, I seem to be playing some games that are actually quite popular. I know! Weird, isn't it? 

One of them is Wuthering Waves, developments in which I'll get to another time. Today I'm going to ramble incoherently about the other, mostly in the hope that talking about it out loud might help me to work out what the heck is going on with it...

Once Human seems to be doing pretty well for itself. It's on Steam so it's easy to see how just how well. It's still in Steam's top ten by current players but perhaps more importantly, unlike many recent hits, it's also holding an audience. 

The game never reached the kind of seven-digit population highs of the likes of Palworld, peaking at a concurrency just under a quarter of a million. Since total downloads have apparently just hit ten million (!) I'm guessing there must be a lot of players on Epic's Game Store too and presumably other global platforms, too.

Sticking with Steam, six weeks after launch, Once Human is still hitting daily peaks of well over a hundred and fifty thousand players and the graph shows a remarkable consistency throughout the time it's been available.

Palworld, by comparison, hit a peak of more than two million players in its first month but had lost three-quarters of those by month two and ninety per cent by the month after that. It's now bumping along with an average concurrency of between thirty and forty thousand, which I'm sure is a very healthy population for most intents and purposes but which remains, undeniably, a great deal fewer than two million.

Palworld is following the  traditional development pattern, wherin players create characters who inhabit a permanent world to which further content is incrementally added. Once Human... isn't doing that.

I'd love to be able to explain just what Once Human is doing. I've written about the proposed seasonal structure before and speculated about how it might work but as must have been fairly obvious, I didn't really understand it. That's why I was waiting with considerable interest to find out exactly how it worked in practice, when the first, six-week Season came to end.

Well, now it has and I'm still none the wiser. I spent a good deal of my limited playing time yesterday and the day before reading all the in-game information that came with the latest update as well as everything in the supporting documentation on the website and in the official statements put out by Starry and/or Netease, along with discussions about it on Steam, Discord and Reddit and if anything, I have less of a clue now than I did before.

Oh, there are plenty of things I do know and understand. All the stuff about what you can keep and what you're going to lose is clear enough. I also know what happens if you do absolutely nothing and just wait, which at the moment looks like what I'm going to be doing.

After spending a while last night, pressing buttons and seeing what happened, I even have a vague idea how the new Seasonal server options work and how to choose between them, although there are some details there I'm still not clear on. 

What I'm not getting is why I'd want to do any of it right now. I read a lot about people wanting to farm Starchrom but I have more of that than I know what to do with already. Also about avoiding dead servers but since I play almost entirely solo, the fewer people there are around the better.

The only reason I can think of to move is to see new content but so far there isn't any that I can't experience just as well where I am. I'd like to take a look at some of the new, non-seasonal content like the revised fishing system and the animal ranching, not to mention the world boss that's a cross between a whale and a plane that you can apparently ride about on but I think I can do all of that on the server I'm already on, which won't close for another four weeks, so I guess I might as well stay put until then. 

Would there be any benefit in moving before the server kicks me out? As far as I can tell, there will be two new Scenarios but they're not coming until September and October. If the server you play on has reached Phase 6 already, though, which mine has, the choices right now are either to carry on just as you are for another month or move to another server running the same scenario on Normal difficulty, which is a step up from Novice, what we've all been on since launch.

There's also Hard difficulty but that's not quite ready yet. It'll be here in a couple of days. It was going
to be longer but enough people complained about the delay for Starry to push the date forward.

I'm quite happy with Novice difficulty but I'm not averse to trying Normal, just to see what the difference is. To that end, I spent about twenty minutes last night on server select, scrolling through all the options and I still couldn't figure out how it worked. 

As I read it, there are currently four types of server: Novice PvE and PvP and Normal PvE and PvP, each of which has a funny name (Manibus for PvE, Evolution's Call for PvP.) That all sounds fine but if you click on any of them it always shows the difficulty as "Novice" on the right panel. Even if you click the "Scenario and Seasonal Details" button it still says the same on all of them: "low difficulty... entry-level scenario."

Then there's the whole thing about "Signing Up" and "Entering" a server, which appear to be entirely different things. You can sign up without entering. If you do, you stay where you are until your server closes and kicks you into Eternaland, which is exactly what happens if you don't sign up at all. It seems signing up reserves you a place but you on't have to take it.

All of which would be fine if I had any clue what "entering" a server meant or how to do it. It would be easy enough if I was making a new character but for the one I'm playing I assume there has to be some kind of transfer process. 

How, when or where you access such a process, I have no idea. Maybe it becomes obvious when you do sign up but since I can't currently see any servers that look any different to the one I'm on I don't want to risk tying myself to an identical server for another six weeks and have the next scenario appear while I'm still on Phase 4 or something.

I am certain I'm missing something but other than playing russian roulette with the one character I have, I'm a bit stuck for a way to find out what it could be. I did consider making a second character on one of the new servers but then I couldn't think what that would tell me about anything so I gave up on the idea. I really son't do alts any more, do I? That's a change I didn't see coming.

Although, the more I think about it, the more it seems the big attraction of the seasonal system is new content, I'm wondering now whether it would actually be an option to keep playing the current content at Novice level by signing up to another Novice level server. It looks like that's possible. Actually, at the moment, it looks like that's all that's possible...

God, I'm confused.

While I dither, I'm spending most of my time in Eternaland which, as the name suggests, won't be going anywhere. I've blueprinted my Season One house and rebuilt it on an offshore island so it doesn't spoil the view. That process had some oddities that could have made a post on their own but I figured it out in the end. Just remember to press "F" not "G" at the crucial moment and you'll be fine.

Of course, while you can replicate an entire home that took you weeks to build in seconds, it won't ever fit exactly on a different piece of land, so I started making some modifications and now my copied house is quite different from the original. So much for the Eternaland Architectural Archive I was planning.

Despite all of this confusion and uncertainty and despite all the prophets of doom claiming the population would drop to near-zero as soon as people found out about the six-weekly "wipes", so far the upheaval doesn't appear to have had any significant impact on numbers at all and the complaints about it I can find on Steam or Discord are minimal. 

My own complaint is mostly that despite any number of attempts, I still can't figure out how the whole thing works! It's hard to say if I like it or not when I can't even understand what it is!

I guess that's what I get for playing a popular game for once. If and when I figure out what's going on, I'll be sure to come back and pass it on. Until then, I think I'm just going to carry on as I am until I get kicked to Eternaland in a month's time and worry about it then.