Winter Is Coming. (But I Couldn't Wait.)

In a few days, a new Once Human scenario, awkwardly entitled Prismsverse's Clash, will go live. That will make three, along with the original PvE and PvP scenarios Manibus and Evolution's Call. There's a further three-way split, with each of the latter two now coming in three difficulty settings, Novice, (The only difficulty at launch) Normal and Hard.

The original Seasons lasted six weeks, after which you either moved to a new server and started over or hung around until your server was switched off a few weeks later. You also had the option of footling around in Eternaland, an option that, as the name implies, is always on the table.

I wasn't all that keen to repeat the same content that soon after I'd just finished it - or at least got as far with it as I was going to - and I was less than clear on exactly how the Season mechanics worked, meaning I was loathe to go ahead without learning more. Which is why, without really meaning to, I stopped playing Once Human back in August. 

The last time I logged in before today was three weeks ago, when all I did was wander around Eternaland, trying  to figure out how the whole Season thing was supposed to work but not really getting all that far. When I logged into Steam this morning and saw a big announcement about the imminent arrival of an actual new scenario with different content, I thought it was probably about time I made some kind of decision so I logged in and spent a while looking at the options again and reading such information as I could find. 

Here's a tip. When it comes close to the end of the Season, make sure you're wearing your cosmetic gear. Everything else gets stripped.

I can't say it helped a whole lot. After what must by now add up to a couple of hours of reading official handouts, reddit threads and blog posts, I think I've got the basics but I'm uncomfortably aware there are probably plenty of details I've missed and I'm quite sure there will be implications I haven't grasped. Still, you have to make some kind of choice eventually. Either that or stop playing altogether. (Eternaland doesn't really count. It's lovely but it's a toy not a game.)

As far as I could tell, the choices available to me this morning were:

• 1) Manibus Novice: play exactly the same scenario again, on exactly the same difficulty but with a brand-new character. I may be wrong but I don't think an existing character can go back to the introductory difficulty. I wasn't offered any Novice servers when I finally clicked on the New Season button, anyway. I could only see them on the main server list.

• 2) Manibus Normal: Play exactly the same scenario but on very slightly harder difficulty. From what I can glean, what makes Normal harder than Novice is a small increase in damage output for the mobs and a couple of new, tougher types of mob, although I'm not a hundred per cent sure those aren't only in Hard. Such info as I could find was confused and contradictory.

• 3) Manibus Hard: Play exactly the same scenario on a significantly harder difficulty level. The tweaks there are the same as for Normal plus some bosses that are immune to certain types of damage, more onerous survival mechanics and more vicious base raids

• 4) Evolution's Call: Difficulty settings and scenario as above but on a PvP server.

•  5) Prismsverse's Clash: Sign up for the new scenario, for which there already seems to be some kind of waiting list and which developers Starry are clearly expecting to be a bit of a land rush. That sounded like a plan until I checked what was different about  and realised it was just the same scenario yet again, only with factional PvP bolted on. No idea if it also comes in varying difficulties.
  

• 6) The Way of Winter: Wait for the fourth scenario, arriving sometime in October. Not only does that one have a much better name, it's a PvE scenario and it comes with some new, explorable territory as well as additional survival mechanics (Cold-related ones, presumably.)

• 7) Give up playing for the foreseeable future.

Speaking of cosmetic gear, this is new and it's so special it gets its own promo video.

I didn't want to start over completely from scratch on a new character so I discounted #1.

Playing the same content but significantly harder seems like pure insanity to me so I discounted #3.

I don't much enjoy playing PvE content in a PvP environment so I discounted #4. 

I do like factional PvP but I am very bad at it and generally need to be surrounded by people who aren't before I can actually enjoy myself so, since I definitely didn't want to go shopping for a guild or whatever they're called in OH, I somewhat relectantly discounted #5. 

I like Once Human, so I discounted #7 too. 

That left two options. I realise now, all too late, that I should have had some patience and taken  #6 but I was in a bit of a gung ho mood so I didn't. I took #2 almost solely because I was fed up of not really knowing how the mechanics of choosing a Season actually worked and I wanted to find out and write a blog post about it.

And here we are!

The question is, now I've taken the plunge, am I any the wiser? Well, a little. I do know how the transfer of items from one Season to the next via Eternaland works, at last. Well, kinda.

Almost everything comes with you into Eternaland. Not just the stuff that was in your backpack when the server closed but everything in your storage chests, all your armor, weapons, tools and all your deviants. I wasn't sure what would happen to the deviants so I was happy to see they all made it.

Anything you made, like all your workstations, your vehicles and your furniture vanishes. All your dropped or found furniture stays. Your main currency gets converted in Eternaland currency so you can go nuts there. Seasonal currencies go poof. 

There's more to it than that but that's the gist. More importantly for the purposes of this post, when you choose a new scenario you get a stipend to spend on bringing items across with you. Each item has a set cost, which varies quite a bit. My stipend was 20k and one very nice piece of armor cost 5k to move but some dropped house items that for some reason hadn't been included automatically were free. 

You can swap stuff in and out to see the costs before committing, something I did a lot of before making a final decision. In the end I took four pieces of armor, a weapon, a couple of tools, a mod and anything that was free. 

Unfortunately, even though I read the decriptions very carefully and double-checked before committing, almost all of it turned out to be useless, at least for the time being. I specifically picked gear and weapons that did not show any level restrictions, something that many pieces had clearly marked, but when I went to equip them on the new server, they all had somehow acquired Level 40 Required tags.

To be fair, it was obvious they were going to be ridiculously overpowered for a low-level character but I naively assumed the lack of level restriction - when other items clearly had one - meant there was going to be some sort of scaling. Nope.

Oh, well. They'll come in handy if I get to Level 40, I guess. Which obviously I won't, even though, as I said when I was writing about my recent return to Nightingale, the fundemental survival gameplay loop is always compelling. I had no intention today of spending any more time in Once human than it took to gather information for this post and yet I ended up staying for more than two hours, most of which was finding a location to build a house (I picked a really great spot with huge potential.) then chopping trees and smashing rocks to start work on it.

I also did a couple of quests, mostly with research in mind. One final option I haven't yet mentioned, which can, at least in theory, also affect your experience as you retread the same ground, is the Simplified Task toggle. If you can find it... and if it really exists.

When I picked my Normal Manibus server I thought I was done with making decisions but there was one more choice to make: Task Mode. You can choose to replicate your previous experience precisely, completing all quests, missions and tasks in full, just like last time. Or you can opt for Simplified, described as "a more streamlined version with only essential task guidance". 

Not just a Scenario
a Scenario Festival!

I dithered over this one for a while. I really wanted to go the Simplified route, as much to see how it worked as anything, but I was aware that I'd skipped a lot of possible quests first time around and I was wary of missing out on what would, to me, be genuinely new content. In the end what made the decision for me was the note that ran beneath beneath both options, which I read as indicating it would be possible to activate Simplified Mode on a case-by-case basis, even if you took the other option. 

That sounded like the best of both worlds so I went with Complete. Unfortunately, having seen no sign of any way to excercise the option when doing a task I know I did last time, I'm now wondering if that rubric refers only to Simplified Mode itself, meaning you have to choose it as an option in the first place before you can toggle it on and off. 

In the long run I don't think it's going to be a problem if that proves to be the case. Much though I love Once Human, I can think of better ways to spend my time than spending the autumn replaying the exact same content I worked my through over the summer. Choosing a new Season today was a useful excercise, in that I learned some things I didn't know and made some mistakes I'd sooner have made when it didn't matter, but other than that I would have been better off waiting for The Way of Winter next month.

As I understand things, it won't be possible for me to move my current character across to the new scenario until the Season on the server I'm on now comes to an end, which won't be for almost six weeks. If Winter comes sooner and I don't want to wait I'll have to make a new character to try it out.

Having seen what the options are for moving stuff out of Eternaland, that doesn't seem like it would be a problem but should I decide I can't live without my tiger-striped pants (Cosmetic items aways transfer, I believe.) at worst it'll mean waiting a couple more weeks. I ought to be able to manage that. 

That I didn't today proves nothing!