Back On The Bus - or - Once Again Human

I've been going on and on lately about new games and expansions and updates, gushing about how much choice there is and how hard it it is to decide what to play when everything looks so tempting and shiny and fresh. And it's all true. There are far more new, interesting games than there's time to play and the old ones are getting updated faster than ever, with more and better content. 

I do lose patience sometimes, when I read jaded vets claiming otherwise, but I'm not here today to call anyone out or make a big thing about it. We all have our issues - days or weeks or months when it's harder than we'd like to find the good in anything, let alone everything, the way annoying polyannas and panglosses like me seem to do. I know I've felt that way at times. Just not right now.

It's all very well, though, handing out bouquets in all directions for great work done but the real question is what am I actually playing? How am I voting with my feet or my wallet or, most importantly, my mouse?

Going into this month I had quite a list of options for new, revamped or updated games I said I wanted to play:

• Throne and Liberty
• Once Human
  
• New World Aeternum
• Wuthering Waves
• Nightingale: Realms Rebuilt
  

Then there were the old favorites I was intending to carry on with or revisit:

• EverQuest II
• Star Wars the Old Republic

And there were a couple of new-to-me games I'd bought, meaning to play right away:

• X-Com 
• X-Com 2

There were plenty more but those were the ones I specifically mentioned expecting to play in October. How did that go?

Taking them in order, I was playing Throne and Liberty every day until suddenly I wasn't. Two weeks since I logged in, now. New World Aeternum I played on the day it launched and not one time since. Wuthering Waves I haven't played for a while. Maybe not even this month. Nightingale: Realms Rebuilt I played a lot for a week or two then dropped completely. Haven't even patched it up for the new Halloween content. EQII I don't believe I've logged into in October. Ditto SW:tOR. 

As for those X-Com games, that purchase has not been a success, to put it mildly. I probably ought to do a post about that sometime.

So what have I been playing? What's missing from that run-down?

Once Human. That's what I've been playing. Once Human and pretty much nothing else. Well, and all those demos for and around Next Fest, of course, but playing demos is to playing MMORPGs as leafing through a slim volume of short stories is to embarking on a full read of A Dance To The Music Of Time. 

I've played at least one session of the new scenario in Once Human, The Way of Winter, every day since it arrived. Steam tells me I've played for more than 24 hours over the last ten days. Cumulatively, OH is now my fifth most-played game on Steam and as of the next time I play it will pass Dawnlands to move into fourth place. 

I really like Once Human. It's a great game. I understand it has all kinds of issues with monetization that affect people who want to be either The Best or The Best They Can Be but since I'm not competing with anyone, even myself, none of that has any impact. All I see is a beautifully rendered, fascinating, quirky world laid out for me to explore, a world that has literally doubled in size with the release of what, in a game of an earlier era, would have been classed as a full expansion.

The Way of Winter scenario adds three huge maps to the immediate north of the area we saw in the opening Season. One of those didn't open for play until the end of the first week, which is how the seasonal structure works, but even if it had been available from the start, I wouldn't have gotten to see much of it yet. I've probably explored less than half of the first two maps and in doing so completed far less than half of the available content there.

In terms of scale, the new season isn't just the equivalent of an expansion, it's the equivalent of one of those super-old-school expansions that tacked a whole new game onto the old one, like Ruins of Kunark did for EverQuest. Granted, those old MMORPGs had vastly more replayability and also took far longer to get through than a modern game like Once Human but the fact remains that this literally doubles the amount of content that was already available.

It also matches or exceeds the quality of the existing material. The new maps are visually as detailed, there are as many quests, the storyline is as well fleshed-out, the voice acting is as complete and polished... 

It's basically the same game again only picked up and put down somewhere else and having to restart from Level 1 makes it feel like an actual new game, maybe a sequel. It's weird but it's good weird. I very much do not believe Starry can keep this up although it would be very interesting if they did. It'd be like when Sony Online Entertainment pumped out two expansions a year for EQ.

But no, that's not going to happen. I imagine future seasons will mostly be rules tweaks and changes to events, things that don't require the construction of multiple new maps or lengthy new plotlines. Maybe we'll get one or two big content drops like this a year. Even that would be a lot.

Why speculate about the future when you can enjoy the present, though? I've been having just the best time, building my new house on the coast or tooling around the mouintain highways on my motorcycle. Just those two activities alone probably account for more than half of the 24 hours I've racked up so far.

Speaking of the bike, I was surprised and delighted to find I already had one. They're easy enough to make but when I hit the point in the Journey where it suggests you do that, I hit "G" and one appeared. It also has a skin, "Ghost of the Wasteland" which I have no memory of obtaining and about which Google is willing to tell me almost nothing.

This is one of the many reasons I find Once Human such an amenable game. Yes, there's a cash shop full of highly desirable cosmetics and yes there are gacha mechanics and lockboxes but none of it matters when there also plenty of freebies and giveaways and, most importantly, drops.

I do not like games that think drops are old-fashioned and unnecessary. It's all very well having points systems and tokens and quest rewards and all the rest of it but nothing beats the dopamine hit of looting a mob or opening a chest and seeing something you really wanted flash up on the screen.

In Once Human that can be formulas for crafting or actual items. In the past week I've found a couple of guns, a pair of boots and a whole load of housing items as well as formulas and recipes to craft all kinds of useful things. You can find cosmetics, too. I found a great pair of sunglasses last night.

It's probably better to find formulas because, once learned, not only do you keep them forever but the items you make from them can be repaired. Dropped gear cannot and thus passes through your hands like a particularly impressive and long-lasting consumable. Drops, though, do have the advantage of being equippable immediately rather than requiring a trip to the crafting station and quite possibly a scavenger hunt to find the necessary mats.

I believe I've written before about what an excellently structured game Once Human is in terms of both progression and exploration but I feel I ought to repeat myself at least a little just to add some emphasis. There's a plot you can follow, with key stages at which you become more powerful and gain access to better gear and more abilities, but you can ignore it entirely if you want in favor of wrecking around the countryside like the star of a seventies TV show. I've been roaming the map, turning up in every town and hamlet, offering my services in the cause of righteousness, taking on random adventures out of sequence with no regard to my fitness or capability to do what's being asked of me.

The game totally supports this in both lore and mechanics. The player character is recognized everywhere as a representative of an itinerant clan of do-gooders, capable of just about anything. I take on all requests, meaning I now have tasks in my Journal tagged anything from Level 3 to Level 40 even though I'm currently Level 26. 

Better yet, I have a fair chance of succeeding at any of them and all of them will give both experience and loot worth having. Last night I took the opportunity to see a little of the new map, Ember Strand, and ended up doing a quest some seven levels above me. It required some careful pulling and a little thought but it was entirely manageable and a whole lot of fun.

I did that quest while still wearing T2 gear suitable for characters in their teens, which was fine because I'd upgraded it all, making it there or thereabouts as good as T3 stuff that hadn't been calibrated and modded. I'm choosing to skip T3 altogether since T4 becomes available at Level 30 and, due to another really excellent piece of design, it's entirely feasible to acquire T4 crafting mats by looting chests and abandoned vehicles without ever needing to fight anything, which is what I'm doing right now.

It might not be everyone's idea of a good time but I find it hard to think of much I've ever done in an MMORPG that's more fun than cruising along wide-open, deserted highways on a motorbike with the wide blue sky above and the snow-capped mountains ahead, listening to some fine tunes on the radio, jumping off every so often to rifle through the contents of abandoned vehicles. I'm living the post-apocalyptic dream.

Speaking of the radio, the new season added another 45 songs to the playlist across the half-dozen stations, which also all got their own unique DJs. The stations all now feature interviews with various NPCs and even with some of the more coherent Deviations. 

These are great to listen to the first time, although I think there probably ought to be an option to skip the interviews once you've heard them, leaving the radio to just play music again, like it used to. That said, I listen to Radio 4 Extra in real life, a speech-only station with a six-hour repeating program that I sometimes hear several times a day, so I don't really know why I'm complaining.

The new cold/heat survival mechanic is a net positive although it has its moments. Most crafted gear has enough cold protection to stop you dropping dead of hypothermia even at night unless you enter one of the areas where some kind of event is happening. I have died of the cold a few times, but mostly through my own fault. I do tend to ignoring warnings just so I can loot that one, last chest over there...

I also don't prepare properly. There are several better options for cold protection available in terms of warming food, carriable items or gear with higher thermal protection but I mostly don't bother with them for normal play. Regardlss of the risks, I do find having to pay attention to the temperature adds to my enjoyoment rather than detracts from it, which once again is a payoff for good design.

The way things are going, I feel I'll probably be playing Once Human pretty heavily for another two or three weeks, by which time I'll most likely be at or near the level cap with all my gear as highly calibrated and modded as it's ever likely to be. My house will be looking pretty much how I want it to look, accomodating as many Deviations as it can realistically hold and I'll be driving around on four wheels instead of two. 

At which point, once again, I'll probably feel like I'm done with the game until something new turns up. I suppose I might get into animal breeding or farming but neither really appeals. As for the storyline, I'll pursue it as long as it's fun to do and then stop. I can't actually remember now whether I ever finished the MSQ in Season 1 so it's clearly not a big issue for me either way.

How many times it's going to feel this satisfying to start over from scratch is quite hard to judge. My feeling is that I'd probably have about as much fun every time if there was this much new content. It's quite literally like starting a new game except it's also the same game. Everything I'm doing in this season mirrors what I did in the last, almost like an alternate timeline. It occasionaly feels strange but somehow it works. 

The two seasons fit together so perfectly I did wonder if it might be possible to slide from one into the other. I knew you couldn't engage with the content from both seasons on the same server but the new areas are contiguous with the old, as you can see on the in-game map, so I thought just maybe the geography might still be accessible even if the content wasn't.

It's not. If you try to follow the highway across the invisible border, the screen goes all psychedelic and Mitsuko's voice appears out of the ether, literally begging you to stop. If you ignore her increasingly hysterical warnings, you die. The last thing you hear is her stifled sob. 

They could so easily just have put up an invisible barrier or a visible force wall or just warped you back to the part of the map you were supposed to be in but no. Someone wrote a script, had the voice actor record it, had someone else come up with some visual effects and the whole lot got melded into an immersive and emotionally affecting whole, for absolutely no reason other than it makes the game better.

That's what I call good design and that's why I'm playing Once Human, even when I could be playing so many other games.