Once Human - The View From Level 50

It's about time we had an update on Once Human, I think. Especially since it now seems to be the only game I play.

Steam tells me I've spent seventy-one hours there now, which puts Once Human at #6 in my Library by time played. Of the five games ahead of it, three are survival/crafting games (Valheim, Nightingale and Dawnlands). With Palworld just behind at #8, that means half of my top ten most-played Steam games are survival games of one kind or another. I think it's clear this is my new genre of choice.

Unlike all the others, though, Once Human is also a true MMORPG. I did say a couple of times that it often felt like I was on my own while I was playing but in fact there are people all over the place. The only reason it doesn't feel crowded is that the world is so damn big. 

Yesterday the initial Season, Manibus, moved into Phase 5, the moment where the eponymous Great One descends from the sky and tries to kill us all. There were half a dozen instances of The Prime War on the map when I logged in, all with people doing them. A couple were full, meaning forty people were at each of those locations. Based on that, I'd guess there were probably at least a couple of hundred people on my "world", which is what the game calls the instances it splits the server into.

You can swap worlds at will but so far I haven't felt any need to do it, so I'm not entirely sure how it works. I imagine it's much like it used to be in Guild Wars 2 before the arrival of the dread Megaserver, when everyone would hop from server to server in search of specific events. Or a better comparison might be The Secret World, back when enough people played that game to spin up multiple Channels and I was always chasing word bosses across them during holiday events.

Wait a minute... How did we get onto this topic and why am I speculating about a mechanic I haven't even experienced? I suppose it's because after more than a month I'm still quite vague about much of how the game works.

I probably shouldn't be. I hit max level - 50 - a couple of days ago. I have all my gear upgraded to the top tier - Tier V - although not all of it is fully-calibrated yet. (Calibration is a secondary upgrade process that makes gear stronger within its tier. You can upgrade Tier V weapons ten times and gear six... I'd have to log in to check it but I think that's right...

See how vague I am on the details? There are a lot of systems in the game and I haven't experimented with all of them yet, much less come to understand them in detail. 

For example, I know there's a lot more I could do to make my character more powerful. I have finally added Mods to all my gear and weapons but those mods can themselves be heavily upgraded and I haven't done anything about that. 

I also haven't fitted all the available accessories to my guns - sights and magazines and such - only the ones I happen to have found as drops. There's a vendor who sells accessories for a currency I have plenty of but I just haven't had the time to figure out what's worth buying yet. As for consumables, I've barely even looked at them and there are dozens!

There are also plenty of options for combat other than guns and knives that I've yet to explore. I was lugging a whole bunch of grenades and molotov cocktails around with me for a while but I never seemed to find the right moment to use them so I ended up storing them all in a crate in my base, where they'll do me no good at all. There are a couple of goals that relate to killing stuff with thrown items, too, so I really ought to try tossing a few bombs about once in a while.

Speaking of my base, I did a lot of work on it at the start but once I got it looking like someone had converted two Nissen huts into a squat I mostly forgot about doing any more. I hang out there a lot and it feels really comfortable. Like somewhere I actually live. That's always a good sign in any game with housing.

I'll blueprint the whole thing before the Season ends so I can instantly rebuild it next time but I suspect that, much though I love where I'm living now, I'll be glad to take the opportunity to start over with a different design. I'll find a spot somewhere in Eternaland to archive my first Once Human home for posterity but it'll have to be somewhere well-hidden. It's not exactly an eyesore but it's not going to win any design prizes, either and Eternaland is far to scenic to spoil with ugly buildings.

One aspect of the game that wasn't going so well for a while was what my character looked like. The game sells some really nice outfits in the cash shop - so nice, in fact, that I've several times considered spending some real money on them, which would be a first for me in a F2P title.

Fortunately, before I got my wallet out, I finally found out how to switch off the visuals for armor slots so I no longer have to go around wearing a gas mask and a combat helmet. Even better, I got a pair of tiger-striped pants from some compensation reward and a short-sleeved T-shirt from a drop and now I look like an actual person instead of GI Jane. I have several hats, too, which is always good.

One of the reasons I don't know as much about the mechanics of progression as perhaps I should is that Once Human is extremely flexible in letting you play however you want. I have now beaten the first three MSQ bosses, the Great Ones who skulk inside the huge Monoliths, which send red beams of light into the sky that you can see from miles away but I was able to fight them at a time of my choosing, not to some schedule forced on me by the game. 

I chose to over-level all of them to make it easier, something the game almost encourages, which made me much keener to keep on playing. I'm almost looking forward to taking on the fourth boss now. Almost...

There's no rush. While there are a few things you can't do until you clear each Monolith stage, the most important being to unlock Rift Anchors in that region, none of it really affects general gameplay. If you can't unlock Rift Anchors, you can't complete Settlements, although what difference that makes, other than to make a couple of Goals inaccessible and deny you the final reward for ticking the last box on each Settlement's list of tasks, I couldn't say.

Evennif you ignore the MSQ completely, nothing stops you from exploring every inch of the map, looting every Weapon, Gear and Mystical Crate, grabbing every Blueprint, capturing every deviant and basically strip-mining the entire continent of anything worth having. Neither is there anything to stop you leveling to the cap, acquiring every available Mimetic and making yourself strong enough to handle just about anything the game has to throw at you.

It's that degree of freedom that makes Once Human so much more compulsive for me than other, ostensibly similar games I've played. As many posts here attest, I loved Valheim, Dawnlands and Nightingale. I quite liked Palworld, too. In all of them, though, I found the extent to which progress was tied to completing the central storyline and particularly to defeating specific Bosses quite off-putting.

Once Human functions much better than any of those as a true open-world game, where exploration is rewarded not just with material gains but also with spectacle and surprise. All the above felt less distinctive, region by region, than Once Human, whose art direction is absolutely top-class, with all the areas of the map and many of the Settlements and Hamlets feeling very different from each other. 

There is a great deal of asset re-use but the contemporary setting makes that feel entirely appropriate. Anyone who's ever taken a road-trip will know just how often you see the same billboards come into view, hardly receding in the rear-view mirror before the next appears. Or how many filling stations you pull into to only to find the same snacks on the shelves and the same vending machines selling the same soft drinks.

Conversely, you always know that around any corner there could be a sight you've never seen before; that the next village might feel odd or uncomfortable or unwelcoming; that something unexpected could be just about to happen. That sensation is replicated perfectly in Once Human, only with the added frisson of the supernatural.

I turned off the highway to go visit one largeish settlement the other day only to find it was under continual bombardment from a rift in the sky. Huge balls of glowing purple light were spewing out of a hole in the clouds and splattering down across the roofs and yards of the town. I got out of my coupe and just stood there, gawking.

This being a game, I naturally thought I'd wandered into some Event, of which there are many, but no, it seemed not. I spent twenty minutes or so there and the barrage never stopped or even slowed. At first I avoided the globules as they burst all around me with a loud explosion and a spattering of fluid but after a while I realised that, disturbing as they appeared, they were harmless. 

There are strange vignettes like this happening all over the place. They may be pure theater or they might be connected to local questlines, of which there are many. I haven't found a fraction of them, I imagine. I haven't even finished most of the ones I have found. My journal is stuffed with notes on things I've agreed to do but haven't yet gotten around to.

When I do follow through on a quest, the storylines are often interesting and the characters and settings arresting. One quest involving a crazed clown has cliche written all over it but that doesn't make it any the less creepy - and there is an interesting twist to it, too. As for the one with the little, lost robot, well that one is just delightful.

Given the quality of the side-quests, it's surprising I haven't done more of them. I did, to begin with, but as I became more confident and extended my range, I found I didn't need as much in the way of guidance or encouragement to go poke my nose into everything that looked interesting. 

Exploring isn't just fun, of course. It's also highly productive. The whole engine of character progression runs on materials used in crafting, some of which can be mined or gathered but many of which either drop from mobs or are found inside buildings and storage crates anywhere on the map. 

It's extremely easy to get into a groove where you just ride around in your car, listening to the excellent in-game radio, moving from one scavenging location to the next. As compulsive gameplay loops go, I find it hard to beat.

When I started this post it was my intention to go over the high points of the game in a coherent fashion, describing my progress to the level cap and giving some kind of overview of the game so far. As you can see, that didn't happen. 

Instead, I appear to have unintentionally replicated in prose a typical session in the game, where I ramble about doing nothing very specific and somehow it comes together into a kind of patchwork that feels quite organic. Yesterday, for example, I did some work on the Main Quest, getting to the point where the next step takes me into the fourth Monolith and the fight with the Shadow Hound boss but I also spent a very great deal of time exploring Chalk Peak, the mid-30s region I'd skipped as I leveled up.

There were some nice lakes there, so I went fishing and caught a second Electric Eel, having only caught my first a few hours earlier off the dock outside Meyer's Market. The eel is a Deviant, albeit not one you have to catch in the Pokemon/Palworld fashion by chasing it, grabbing it and hanging on while a progress bar fills. Being a fish, you just catch the Electric Eel with your rod and line and then you can pop it into a Containment Unit in the usual way, after which it will happily increase the output of your various generators, provided you keep it happy with some lights and music.

And there I go again... wandering off the point, if I ever had one. Just like the game itself. 

For me, Once Human offers a perfect combination of guidance and freedom. Purpose comes through the very many Goals and Tasks and Quests and also through the excellent character progression, which always feels achievable. At the same time, despite the supposed ticking time-bomb of the Season, at the end of which all will be destroyed, it never really feels like there's any pressure.

I tend to find all these survival/crafting games relaxing, which I imagine is the main reason I enjoy them so much but this one is certainly the most relaxing of them all. Which is odd, given the horror-inflected setting and the mechanics, which lean heavily towards action-oriented FPS gameplay. 

It's a fine example of something I've always believed. - a good game sets the paramaters then stands back and lets you play the way you want to play. By that criterion, Once Human is a very good game indeed.