As I mentioned in
yesterday's post, Once Human is the latest game to rejoin my ever-lengthening list of
daily should-plays. Unlike Dragon Nest Classic or
DC: Dark Legion, this one's not much of a surprise. I'm always on the
verge of going back to Once Human. It's a truly excellent game, hugely
underrated and unfairly ignored.
True, Starry, the developers, did their best to scupper the whole thing with a long series of bizarre choices over crucial aspects like persistency and continuity. Their stubborn determination to keep to that ill-considered model almost certainly held the game back from becoming as popular and successful as it might have been, but those flawed philosophies have largely been rescinded now, leaving the game in a much more comfortable, if still somewhat unnecessarily complicated, place.
Which is not to say Once Human is doing badly, even so. After two years, peak concurrency on Steam has rarely dipped below 20,000. Over the summer it was more like 30,000 and the new addition to the game, Isles of Abyss, a huge content drop they're even calling an expansion, has improved on that again. The peak for October so far crests 40,000. A lot of games would be very happy with those figures and especially with that consistency.
Even so, it always seems to me like a game that's flying under the radar. I think there's a lot of confusion about what sort of game it is. Is it survival/crafting? An FPS? An MMORPG? Open world gacha?
Yes.
It's all of the above but if any of those elements is putting you off, feel free to discount it. Well, possibly apart from the crafting part. I'm not sure how far you'd get if you tried to avoid doing any crafting at all. Might be interesting to try, though.
As for the rest, you can pretty much pick and choose. Survival is mostly a case of remembering to eat and drink so as to avoid a debuff or to get some bonuses. If you don't like guns, just use a machete or a baseball bat. Melee works fine for most mobs, so long as they aren't up in the air but even then you can use a bow.
If you like grouping, there are instances and world bosses that encourage it. If you don't, you can do everything on your own with a bit of GW2-style hot-grouping, once in while. There is a gacha system but it's just a way to get gear and not the best way, either. There are no gacha characters to collect. The only character you'll need is the one you made at character creation.
I feel i need to reiterate all this because even I forget just what a great game Once Human is until I play it again. It's just so much fun. And it all works. The vehicle driving is so good compared to most games that aren't actual driving games. The setting and the lore are quirky and weird and surprising. The scenery is gorgeous. The world is huge and open and fully explorable at your own pace and in peace, for the most part. Best of all, the dress-your-darling game is second only to The Secret World's.
And now there's an ocean to explore as well. Isles of Abyss adds sea travel,
through a scattered archipelago of islands, large and small, in boats you
build yourself. That's the bait that brought me back and so far, five hours
in, I've been very happily hooked.
Coming back after many months, I had the option of moving an existing character out of the scenario where I'd left them or starting afresh with someone new. I chose the latter. It seemed like the best plan since all cosmetics, house items, and a few more things, are shared across the account, and because each scenario always seems to begin again from Level 1 anyway. (It actually says "Level 50" against my new character but all her skills were back at zero and all the mobs she's fought so far have been between Levels 1 and 5. That 50 is notional at best. Might even be a bug.)
Once my new character, who I named Califa, was ready to step into the world, I was very pleased to see an option to skip the tutorial. It's a really good tutorial but I've done it at least half a dozen times now and I'd be quite content never to do it again. If you skip it, you do miss out on the gear it gives you, but that's never going to be much of a setback.
The new scenario begins at the point where the old one used to end, tipping you out into the sky above the world. Only this time you don't get to glide down to a point of your choosing, hanging from the talons of your cybercrow buddy. In Oceans of Abyss you just fall into the sea.
And sink. Which is when the woman in the picture at the top of this post appears out of nowhere to dive down, grab you and bring you back to the surface. A few brief words and she dumps you on a raft and disappears again, leaving you to find your own way to shore.
It's a dramatic opening and it really works to set the mood. Just don't ask any awkward questions about how you got there in the first place because you won't be getting any explanations. Maybe they were all in the tutorial.
Who cares, anyway? I already know the set-up. I don't need the details. I just need to get this raft to shore and start building myself somewhere to live.
I did notice later - a lot later - that there's a little image in the corner of the screen with a Valheim-style puff of wind to show wind direction, so presumably that has some impact. I can't say I was aware of it, though. And anyway, this being a game with technology, you can always add an engine.
But that's jumping ahead. First you have to land and get yourself set up. That all goes along exactly the same as it's always has in just about every survival game. Punch some trees (No, you get an axe from the get-go. And a pick.) Find a spot to build. Put up a shelter. Add a bed and boom! You're home.
Except this time you also get to build a boat. This is the part I didn't see coming. I mean, I knew you were bound to get a boat. I just though it'd be like the car or the motorcycle. You'd be given one in a quest or you'd craft one at a boatyard.
Nope. You make a boat the same way you make a house. It uses the same building system. Hit B and you'll find there's an extra tab. Open that and see a whole lot more tabs inside. Build-a-Boat Workshop!
I have seen other boats going by that look more... ship-shape. Even then, they look pretty unwieldy but it's early days and I remember from the original game that houses didn't start to look like they hadn't come in a flat-pack until people had worked their way quite a long way up the tech tree. Sleek yachts might be the reward for all that effort.
In the meantime, I'm fine with my floating shack. It's a pig to turn sometimes
but get it pointed the right way and it really travels. The plot, such as it
is (It doesn't seem to be much yet.) has you adding a harpoon gun and then a
cannon with the intention of destroying (Or maybe it should be killing.) one
of the evil lighthouse monsters that fixes everything to the archipelago like
a nail. Even the dead,
That odd image isn't my flight of fantasy. It's how Malla, the woman who rescued Califa from drowning, explains it. Until all the lighthouses are destroyed, no-one's going anywhere. So that's my goal.
No, that's Malla's goal and now it's probably Califa's too but my goal is to goof around, explore the islands, build a house and a boat and maybe settle down in some picturesque spot next to the ocean. Of all the post-apocalyptic survival games I've seen, Once Human would offer one of the more manageable chances for a comfortable and possibly long-lived existence, I think.
You can travel a long way without really meeting anything you have to kill or that wants to kill you and you can do it in comfort, in a car. There are resources everywhere in abundancy, a functioning economy, some pretty safe settlements and the weather is generally not that terrible.
Of course, there are monsters in all the ruins, armed militias who shoot on sight and the occasional eldritch or intra-dimensional incursion. And there's no shortage of seriously weird entities that might do just about anything. But a lot of those turn out to be really quite friendly and co-operative, or they are once you whack them a few times and stick them in a glass cabinet.
Plus there's some really good music to listen to on a variety of excellent radio stations. That's something you don't get in Valheim. You can get a radio for your house and every vehicle in the game is wired for sound, even the most basic raft. Don't ask how that works. Just enjoy the vibe.
And the vibe in the islands, it turns out, is blues rock. Why? Don't look at
me!
For some reason Drifter FM, the default radio station that starts up as soon as you take the tiller, plays nothing else. It's like the early seventies out there on the ocean, those hazy, stoner days before punk blew the smoke away. I have no idea why someone thought blues rock would make an appropriate soundtrack for sailing the ocean because it really doesn't. But I'm enjoying listening to it, anyway. I don't get to hear a lot of blues rock these days, not since I was about fourteen, really, so it makes a change.
Outside of the expansion itself, a lot's changed since I last played, from the really striking new loading screen to a complete revamp of the way blueprints are acquired. I'd go into it in detail but a) no one reading this cares and b) I barely understand most of it yet myself.
You also get a choice of classes or roles (I forget what term they use.) at character creation. That's not quite as new. I do, vaguely, remember when it came in.
I went with Beastmaster. I'll often pick a pet class if there's one on offer. It's nice to have company. You get a choice of three animals: a boar, a bear and a deer, which has to be someone's idea of a joke. All we need is a rat and it's the animal population of the starting zone of every MMORPG in history.
The bear is a tank. I had a think about that because a tank would be handy but I really do not like bears. The stag apparently can come on long journeys with you. I couldn't, at the time, figure out what that meant although now I think it means it's the best mount. I didn't realize you could even ride the animals until I got into the game and found a saddle in my backpack.
In the end, I picked the boar. I don't like boars much more than I like bears but this one apparently is great at foraging for you and digging up rare items. That sounded too good to miss. So far, all he does is wander around my house and get in my way but I have yet to put any points into training him. I'm sure he'll learn to be useful one day.
One thing that was new to me and that I do understand is the addition of some new poses to the in-game camera. Using them freezes the shot, with your character in a fixed pose, as if caught in motion. I spent quite a while playing around with that. It makes for some excellent shots.
It would be easier to use if I wasn't playing on GeForce Now, of course. I love playing on NVidia's servers but just about the only thing I don't appreciate is the way all my screenshots go there. Mostly I can use GeForce's own screenshot function, which sends the file to my machine but if a game uses an in-game camera, like Once Human or Neverness To Everness, all doing that gets me is a record of what I see in game when I'm using it, which is not at all what I'm after.
For Once Human, there's an easy workaround. As you take the shot with the in-game camera, there's about a second when the UI vanishes completely before the framed photo appears. I just hit the button to take the shot, then hit the NVidia screenshot button a fraction of a second later and it gets me exactly what I need. There is a Hide UI function but it's part of the in-game camera controls, so that's not really much help.
Anyway, what with boat-building and the exploring and the playing with the new poses, I'm having a ton of fun in Once Human, all over again. As I keep repeating, I have too many good options for gaming just now so it's difficult to say whether this one is going to push past the rest but I'm into it for now. It's a very drop-in, drop-out kind of game, anyway, so I'm not feeling under any pressure to go one way or the other.
If anyone reading this has thought about playing the game before and not gotten around to it yet, or maybe didn't want to get too involved because of the whole impermanence issue (Now fixed.) this would be a great time to give it a go. I do recommend it. I think it's probably my favorite survival/crafting game, even including Valheim. It's also a proper MMORPG, if that's your bag.
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