The Turning Of The Season

Once Human's third season, The Way Of Winter, has just entered Phase Four, The End of Ice And Fire. Like Phase Three, A Glimmer of Hope, it's scheduled to last for ten days, after which we're into the fifth and final phase, Break of Dawn, which is basically a month of downtime where everyone thinks about what they're going to do next.

Before the game launched and all through the first season there was endless speculation about the seasonal process, focusing on how - or more often whether - it would work. Plenty of people claimed they'd quit if their progress was reset. Plenty more told them to grow up and join the modern world because this is the way we do things now.

I was kind of on the fence about it. I could see the attractions of a fresh start every six to eight weeks. It didn't seem all that different from the (Really.) old days, when I would roll new characters in the same game and start over on different servers all the time. No-one had heard of account-based content back then, either, so every new character pretty much meant starting from scratch, unless you were into twinking, something very much frowned upon by most players, even if everyone did it.

In 2024, though, it does seem weird to think of spending a couple of months leveling and gearing a character in a new game just to have all that progress wiped so you can do it again. And again. And again.

The sweeteners for Seasons in Once Human are supposed to be a self-leveling playground that lets new players compete on an equal footing with veterans and a steady stream of fresh, new content. Since the game currently has nothing like PvE league tables as far as I know, the former really only makes sense for PvP but new content certainly ought to be an attraction for everyone.

Unfortunately, the official "second" season turned out to be a choice between a PvP-focused event or a cut&paste of the first PvE season with some knobs twiddled. I didn't see much feedback for either and I barely logged in long enough to register an interest before drifting away from the game altogether.

The Way of Winter, by contrast, offered a genuine and significant content drp - quests, storylines, items, features, the lot. It opened up the whole of the northern region for exploration and but doubled the amount of PvE content in the game.

Or it would have if it had been an expansion. As it is, since the seasons are separate and discrete, what it's really done is replace that amount of content with a near-exact equivalent, much of which I have now finished.

After more than fifty hours in The Way of Winter, even though there's still technically half the season left, I feel ready to sum up my thoughts. I'd be very surprised if anything happens from here on in to change my mind on very much.

The big question is Do Seasons Work? The big answer is... I dunno, maybe? 

I know! It's hardly a satisfactory answer, is it? I was hoping for something more conclusive, too. But that's just how it panned out for me. After a month of fairly intensive play I find myself still on the fence.

It all started well. Before the Season started, I was mildly excited at the thought of three new maps to explore and mildly curious to see how the temperature mechanic worked. When I got to play, that excitement ramped up enormously and I had a really good time in Phases One and Two. 

The oddest thing was how much it felt like starting a new game altogether. Even though I was playing the same character and meeting the same NPCs, the buzz was just like a new game had launched and I was deeply into it. The leveling process and the progression mechanics were just as much fun as they had been first time around and I became engrossed all over again in building a new base and gearing my character up to take on tougher challenges across the maps.

That energy began to dissipate around the middle of Phase Three, at which point I'd opened up most of the new territory and built my character up to where she could handle most of the overland content on all three maps. That was when a certain amount of ennui and disillusion began to set in.

It wasn't any kind of strong reversion. More a gentle falling away of interest and enthusiasm as I realised I was rapidly approaching an end-point. 

Even now, in the moment gameplay remains every bit as entertaining as it always has been. Once Human makes a great sandbox. I can drive around for hours and hours just listening to the radio, looking at the scenery and stopping to loot anything that looks worth taking. If you want a post-apocalyptic sim you can just live in, you could do a lot worse.

The problem is the looming sense of impermanence that pervades the later stages of the season. Yes, you can build amazing structures - I'ver seen some really incredible ones - and you can blueprint them for next season and for Eternaland. Yes, you can gear up to the max and hit all the Seasonal goals to make your character really powerful and you can take some small percentage of that power with you into the next Season. Yes, you can earn a great deal of all the currencies going and stash them in the bank for next time.

But none of it feels connected and for me that's a problem. I was really surprised by just how much this Season felt unrelated to the last two. I think the real capper was when I decided to try and ride my motorcycle south into the region where seasons One and Two took place. It's all part of the same land mass. You can see all the old places on the map and the highways still go there but if you follow them beyond a certain point you get a series of warnings and then you die.

That experience made me reassess what I was doing. It made it harder to maintain the necessary conceit that my character lives in a real place and more apparent that there were arbitrary rules in place that could change at any time. It makes it significantly less attractive than it could otherwise be to spend a good deal of time and effort on anything much more than the basics.

That, however, has atractions of its own. It takes the pressure off. It's quite counter-intuitive but the ticking Season clock actually makes everything feel less urgent.

For example, as I write this, I'm aware that I have almost a hundred and fifty unspent Ciphers, the currency that buys you Mimetics, the equivalents of Talents or Abilities in other games. In the first season I spent all my Ciphers as I got them and opened as many options as I could, partly because I didn't entirely know what they all did. 

Now I only buy the ones I intend to use plus any I have to take as pre-requisites. Similarly with Starchrom, the currency used to play the Wish Machine or buy blueprints from its internal Store. I spend only as many as I have to get what I want and then I stop. Making good choices is simultaneously easier through experience and seems to matter less through impermanence.

This attitude now pervades everything in the game. I'm not bothering to pursue the plot to the end because I know it will reach a point where I need to farm more mats to gear up enough so I can beat the necessary bosses and there just doesn't seem like a lot of point if it's all going to stop in a few weeks. I'm already just about tough enough to see every part of the map so I feel like I can do without a couple of instances. If I want to know what happens, I'll watch someone else do it on YouTube.

In a way that sounds negative but it's also oddly liberating. At the half-way point of the season I can now explore everything purely for fun (The maps are huge. Really, really huge. There's still so much I haven't seen.) I can take my time and just play for pleasure. With no real purpose to progression the world once again becomes somewhere to hang out and have fun - if you can have fun in a freezing/burning hellscape populated by monsters, that is.

It seems strange to say it after a hundred and fifty hours of play but I really don't know yet if this Season thing is going to work for me, long term. I do know that I'd prefer a traditional MMORPG set-up, with updates and expansions and content that sticks around but that was never part of the plan and I'm cool with it.

I can't argue that this season hasn't been loads of fun so far. Even now, after the intial rush has worn off and the doldrums of the "Settlement Phase" are just around the corner, I still have some things left I want to do and enough enthusiasm to get them done before I have to choose the next scenario.

That's the thing, though. I'll have to choose the next scenario. And the next after that. And the next after that...

How many times is that going to spark joy? It certainly didn't spark much in Season Two, when it was all the same stuff over again. Is engagement going to depend on genuine new content like The Way of Winter? How many times are we going to get a content drop the size of the original game? Not every season, for sure.

And even if somehow Starry managed to keep to a schedule like that, how frustrating would it be to have to choose between an ever-increasing number of disparate, unconnected regions in the same ostensible world? I'm finding it quite frustrating with just the two in play so far.

All of which gets us precisely no further ahead than we were before Season Three began. I still don't know if the seasonal structure is going to be satisfying enough to keep me playing steadily for months and years, the way I used to play MMORPGs in the past but then I don't know if that has more to do with my changing needs and desires than the way the game is structured anyway. 

How many new MMORPGs that use the traditional format have I stuck with for more than a few months in the last five years? Have there been any?  I can't think of one. Maybe eight-week Seasons do make more sense.

It very much looks as though I'm going to have to wait yet again, not just for the next season but for the next one that comes with a full slate of new content, before I can say whether it's possible to get swept up in the moment over and over in the same game. 

If I had to bet, I'd say it probably is but only for a couple of weeks at a time. If so, that's not so bad. A game that sits quietly on the back-burner, only flaring into life two or three times a year, pushing everything else aside for a few weeks, seems like it might be a nice thing to have in your Steam Library.

I await the options for Season Four with interest. If it's a redo with tweaks again, though, I think I'll pass.