Seasonal Drift

Meaningful posts are likely to be thin on the ground around here for a while (So what's new?) thanks to seasonal factors but I like to keep to the schedule all the same. In that vein, here's an extremely brief observation on Once Human, which I logged into for the first time in around a month today.

The Season thing really isn't working for me. I've given it a fair shot but it's just too jumpy for comfort. Partly, that's down to the scenarios as much as the process. 

I really enjoyed The Way of Winter for the first three phases. I played for something like forty hours across the first four weeks. Then Phase Four arrived and made my playstyle mostly untenable. I couldn't even log in and get the heating on in my house before the cold killed me.

That led to me dropping out of the game entirely. I could have moved my house to somewhere less directly affected by the Chaosweaver blizzards but it wasn't directly within one of the danger areas anyway, so how much difference that would have made seemed uncertain.

The upside, from my perspective, was that I immediately forgot all about the game. Even though it's probably my favorite MMORPG of the year and certainly the one that got most of my votes in the Steam poll and even though it had been my main game for several weeks, I found it remarkably easy to stop playing.

Partly, that's down to the repetitive nature of the Seasonal structure. The Way of Winter was very different but prior to that I had a long run in beta and then two Seasons, all of which were basically the same. Mostly, though, it's down to lack of continuity, which is very much a double-edged sword in terms of retention.

The negative effect is it makes me feel nothing really has any permanence so there's no point making much of an effort. Eternaland is nice for what it is but it feels completely separate from the "real" game. It's more like a place I store my stuff when I'm not playing than an actively playable alternative.

The impermanence obviously makes it a lot easier to drop the game and play something else instead. Everything I've done is going to be wiped at the end of the Season anyway. No point getting too attached.

On the other hand, the cyclical nature of the Seasons means it's easy to come back any time I feel like another run. Better yet, every time there's a new Season I can take a look at the scenario and if it sounds interesting I basically have a brand new game to play.

My server is now in the wind-down phase. The moment I logged in I got a prompt telling me to consider my options for next Season. The problem with that is, as far as I can tell there's no new scenario in prospect just yet. Another Season is going to be the same as one I've already played.

I don't think there's much chance of me signing up for another tour. I'll have a look but I imagine I'll sit it out in Eternaland until there's some actual, new content. Then I'll most likely come back and play the heck out of it for half the Season before drifting away again.

It's not a bad deal from my perspective. A lot better than, say, Valheim, where the devs' main goal with every update seems to be to make the game no fun to play at all . How well it will work for Starry, commercially in the long run, I'm not so sure. I can't help feeling a more traditional MMORPG format with a good deal more permanence would have locked in more people for longer but who knows?

Certainly, numbers have fallen a long way. As I write, there are just over 21,000 playing, which is pretty good as it goes but still a 90% drop from the peak last summer. 

That said, these days, a hold of ten per cent after six months is solid.  Steam charts show the game's population trending very consistently downwards as the Season comes to its conclusion but it will most likely trend back up as soon as there's something new to do. When that will be, though, is anyone's guess.

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.

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.

Just Like Starting Over: New World Aeternum X Once Human: The Way Of Winter

After yesterday's extended diversion it's time to play catch-up. Two of the bigger gaming stories of the week were the relaunch/rebranding of New World as New World Aeternum and a new season for Once Human. And as it happens I've played enough of both to have some first impressions, so here they are.

The first thing I want to say applies to both of them: these are two highly playable games that give me very little of that familiar disconnect we've all felt when coming back after a layoff. Granted, it hasn't been all that long since I last played either of them but the core gameplay loop and the functional mechanics of each is so clear and clean it's hard to imagine it would be much different, coming back after a much longer time away.

Then again, in both cases the latest updates do strongly encourage, if not mandate, a restart. It's always easier  if you come in at the beginning instead of halfway through.

While the gameplay in each may be extremely easy to pick back up, I very much cannot say the same for the look and feel in the case of one of the pair. I spent more time - considerably more time - fiddling with the settings in New World Aeternum than I did playing the game itself, trying to make it look like the game I remembered or even just a game I was willing to spend more than thirty seeconds in. 

Here we are at last!

At one point I was strongly tempted to log back into my old (Now legacy.) character to check if I was misremembering how uncluttered the screen used to look. I have a vision in my head of New World as a clean, virtual world experience, not a jabbering mess of disconnected words and images but maybe that was beta. Whatever and whenever it was, I'm pretty sure the game never looked as chaotic and disorganized as this.

Some of it is personal preference, of course. I have a very strong dislike of seeing names and numbers bobbing about on screen so my first act in many new games is to go into the settings and turn off almost everything that displays over players' heads - names, guilds, titles - all the cruft no-one but the person playing the character ought to give a toss about. 

Then I do the same for NPCs, stripping out all the on-screen identifiers unless removing them fundementally breaks gameplay. Ideally, I like to have all information appear on mouse-over or, failing that, on a click. I want to be the one who decides what displays when, not the developer. 

I also switch off all floating damage and healing numbers, on myself and on the mobs. I can see that information far less obtrusively elsewhere on the screen or I should be able to, if the designers have done their jobs.

It took me far, far longer to get rid of all that crap in NWA (Unfortunate acronym, that, isn't it?) than it ought to have done. Far longer than it does in most games and, to my memory, longer than it used to in this one, too. Not everything I wanted to switch off had a toggle and it was a lot harder than it needed to be to find the off button for those that did.

At one point I even tried playing with the HUD off. Great for immersion but hardly practical.

In the end, even after I'd literally checked every single entry on every menu, I couldn't find any way to switch off player names,something that I have long considered to be a basic option in any multiplayer title. In a game with which I felt less investment, this alone would be enough to make me give up and play something else. Now I'm wondering whether New World ever let you switch the names off or if it was always this way and I was just too excited to care at the beginning, while later on there weren't enough other players around to make it feel like a problem.

The problem with names is, of course, always far worse when a game is new and popular. I don't know how popular NWA is going to stay but certainly when I played it was absolutely heaving. There was a huge crowd milling around the starting area and chat was a nest of vipers, spitting venom about platforms.

NWA is Amazon's attempt to launch New World as a console game and the new servers (Standard Servers as they're called.) all facilitate cross-play between console and PC gamers. That sounds very friendly and inclusive, on paper. In practice, not so much. 

I was surprised and irritated to find the acrimonious rivalry between these groups lives on. I thought it died out years ago. It seems no, sadly. A bit of friendly ribbing is one thing but this felt like a the supporters of a couple of rival sports teams taking it outside for a knock-down brawl.

It reminded me of the old days in MMORPGs, when every new game launched to the background of an ill-tempered debate in General on whether it was better than World of Warcraft. Back then it sometimes felt as though Blizzard stans bought new games as they appeared just so they could log in on launch day and tell everyone what suckers they were for playing and how they should all uninstall and go play WoW instead.

Eagle-eyed readers may notice this is the same screenshot I cropped for yesterday's post.

I prefer to have chat on but not when it's nothing but an endless argument between people with fixed opinions and others taking sides for the sake of an argument. That's no more entertaining when the sides are PC vs Playstation vs XBox than when it's game vs game.

It was, once again, a lot harder to work out how to dull that racket than it should have been. AS I say, I prefer to have chat on when possible, so first I tried some milder solutions, like limiting chat to only players on the same platform as me, an option whose very existence seemed like an admission of defeat by the developers, or dropping out of General. 

And that did largely alleviate the platform wars problem but only long enough to reveal a more fundemantal issue. Chat continued to scroll endlessly, filled with various invites and requests to join this or do that. There seemed to be a lot of links people wanted everyone to click.

For some reason I can't quite explain, but which has to relate to the font or the colors or both, even with the chat box safely tucked away in the lower-left corner of the screen, I just could not ignore it. Every time I looked elsewhere on the screen, something would flicker in my peripheral vision, low down on the left and I'd glance at it and lose focus on what I was doing. It was unmanageably distracting so in the end I caved and switched chat off altogether. This is not ideal in an MMORPG and it's something I hardly ever do or feel I need to do but I couldn't figure out any way around it.

It's instructive to compare that with my experience playing Once Human the next night. Even though the server I played on there was listed as "Nearly Full" when I joined it and it was only a few hours since the new Season had become playable, I had absolutely no problems with chat. Not only were people not behaving like nine-year olds in the schoolyard but the chat box itself, even though it was the same size and in the same location on screen, posed no distraction whatsoever, even when plenty of people were talking.

I didn't take any pictures of the horrible UI so here's one from a cut scene instead. Although, come to think of it, if anyone can tell me what that stupid timer thing at the bottom is and how to get rid of it, I'd be vey grateful. I couldn't shift the damn thing and it kept coming back.

This is a design issue more than anything. I notice it in various games. Sometimes chat imposes itself on the game, sometimes it sits back. Usually you can tweak it to push that one way or the other but in NWA it seems determined to be in your face, all the time, no matter what. Or not there at all, which is where it is for me now and where it's likely to stay. Amazon wanted to pretend the game wasn't an MMO so I'm meeting them halfway.

That's a lot of talk about the UI but it represents the amount of time and attention I felt I had to give it in the game to make it baseline playable. Once I'd finally managed to get that done, I was able to start enjoying myself. And I did.

New World has given us several cinematic introductions in its short life and now it has another to show off. They're always fun to watch, although I'm not necessarily a huge fan of mini-movies at the beginning of video games. The new one blends some of what was there before with some fresh scenes and does, I think, make more sense overall.

Indeed, the whole introduction, including the short tutorial section, is much tighter and cleaner now although I suspect that may only because someone at Amazon finally decided to sit down and work out what the game was going to be about. Probably about time that happened.

Character creation is still embedded in the introduction, which was always a nice touch. There are some new looks. It's a relatively limited selection by modern standards but that's fine. I know from long experience that if I make a character more than a few degrees outside my established preferences I'll fail to bond with them and not want to play them, so as long as I can make someone who looks there and thereabouts like all my other characters, I'm good.

Come on in! The water's lovely!

The basic tutorial tells you how to move and hit things and is extremely visual. There are lots of very bright colors and plenty of explosions. I think it's supposed to be exciting. Then it ends and you get to see the world where you'll be spending time and it feels slightly odd, as though you've come off a ride, back into the busy, bustling theme park itself, all lines and chatter and milling about.

Part two of the tutorial, the part where some very chatty characters give you simple tasks to do and praise you inordinately when you do them, as though you've somehow outpaced all reasonable expectations, takes place on the same beach it always did. The tasks are much the same, too - kill some boars, kill some corrupted sailors, loot some wrecked ships, recover some lost things, find the source of corruption in a cave and destroy it - but the flow is much better and the reasons for doing what you're doing seem a lot clearer than they used to.

Part of that is the dialog and voice acting delivered by the two new NPCs at the campfire, all of which is well above standard. The third NPC, the pirate captain, seems about as I remember her but she's fine, too. Not as good as the "king" and his long-suffering friend but good enough, even if her accent is a bit on the "Oirish" side.. 

I got as far as the first settlement in the one session I've played so far and there seemed to be a fair amount of new dialog, although it's possible it's the same old stuff and I've just forgotten it. Or indeed that it was added in one of the earlier revamps and I never played through it at the time. Whatever, it feels pretty solid; definitely better than I remember.

Yes! I knew it!

As for the physical feel of the thing, it's the same pleasurable experience it always was. New World has one of the best action combat systems I've tried. It feels fluid and natural and intuitive and they don't seem to have changed anything much that I can sense, which is just as well. 

The world looks great as always, there's lots to see and plenty to loot and there's a constant drip of dopamine as skills upgrade on use and new abilities come in. As has generally been the case, once I started playing I didn't want to stop. 

I didn't even feel annoyed by having to start over. It felt like an opportunity more than an imposition although whether I'll ever have the time to get a new character all the way back to where I left the old one is another matter. I wonder if it's safe to assume this will be the last time we're asked to do it?

Perpetual new beginnings is something of a feature in Once Human, where the need to keep re-starting been a major point of contention since launch. The seasonal structure there has met a certain amount of pushback from players and required numerous official statements and explanations from the developers who, if they ever feel they may have made an error of judgment in insisting on it, certainly haven't let that change their minds as they try to impose their vision on the game. 

Like quite a lot of people, even though I wasn't against the seasonal structure per se, I couldn't find the motivation to engage with it for the first reset, where the options were to do the same thing again at higher difficulty or do it again with other players trying to kill me. This time, with a completely new scenario taking place on an entirely new set of maps in a different part of the region, complete with new questlines and plot, though, this feels almost like the game just got an expansion.

Meet the baddies.

That's not such a leap when you think about it. Although The Way of Winter does require you to start over to some degree, so do most MMORPG expansions. You generally need to begin by replacing all your old gear just to be able to handle the new content and that's not much different from what happens here. The new gear you craft to get started may look like the old stuff you used to have but it isn't the same. The old stuff didn't keep you warm. This does. 

Expansions come with new features and that's the expansionesque feature of the new Season in OH. Now you can die of frostbite or heatstroke! What a thrill! In practice, it's just another stat to manage but I quite like it all the same.

I also like the new plot, which involves a really sinister new villain, the head of the Vultures, a criminal gang we've been slaughtering from the get-go. Nice to find out who they are at last and what it is they're up to. 

Their leader, Igna, is written and played with suitable arrogance and snark and I found him genuinely scary. So did Matsuko, the girl with the butterfly stuck to her face, who really doesn't like it when the he projects his image into her supposedly secret pocket-dimensional lair. That's how the new Season begins and I found it engaging and immersive. Once Human has consistently strong writing and voice acting and this is right up to par.

That's not threatening at all...

Things continue to go well after the introduction. There's a choice of starting points - a double choice in fact. You can opt to go into the scenario at a lower level, suitable for newcomers, or enter at a more difficult point, appropriate for experienced players. Obviously I chose the easier one, a choice which then  split into three possible locations on the same map.

I picked the one with the name I liked best and off we went. Once again I had to glide down from a hundred meters in the air, hanging on to the feet of a large hawk. It's a weird way to begin any game but it seems to happen a lot these days. Did it start in Fortnite, this falling from the sky routine? I think that's the first time I saw it. Hard to remember now, it's happened so often since.

Once I reached the ground I started to notice the cold right away. That, I think, was just bad luck. It happened to be just coming on nighttime when I arrived (Didn't I say it's always night when I log in to any game?) and the temperature naturally fell when the sun went down. Since this is an MMORPG, I don't think that time of arrival can have been set for me specifically. I was just unlucky not to get there in the daytime, when it would have been pleasantly warm.

It gave me an introduction to the new temperatue mechanic, anyway. And hypothermia. It gave me that, too. Luckly, hypothermia is just a debuff. It's freezing that kills you. 

I don't know, V. Why don't you tell me? I'm sure you're dying to.

I went straight into survival mode, built myself a camp, killed some deer (Reindeer!), striped their hides and made myself a whole new outfit with a bonus to cold resistance. I would probably have done just that anyway but as it happened it was what V, my glowing bird pal, told me to do because I was still in a sort of extended tutorial. Not surprising, since I had picked the newbie option, after all.

Naturally, by the time I'd gotten myself dressed and protected myself from the cold, the sun came up and it got warm and I didn't need protecting any more. Ho hum. So it was off to the nearest town to see what they had for me to do.

My welcome there wasn't the warmest (Hah!). There was some shouting and gun-pointing until the guard spotted my Mayfly backpack, which as usual worked like some kind of not-so-secret masonic handshake and I was in. Once again, the dialog and the voice acting was strong. It's always a good sign when I find myself wanting to listen to the end even though I've already read ahead and now what they're going to say.

And, also once again, that's where I left it; safely ensconced in the starting town, ready to move on to whatever comes next. I find myself in the happy position of wanting to carry on playing both of these new-old games, my enthusiasm for both seemingly refreshed by the forced re-starts rather than, as it could easily have been, set back.

Maybe because every time someone like you sees them you imagine we're your best mates and you give us the keys your house? Cos that's what keeps happening...

I suspect it's likely I'll get further with Once Human, which has actual new content, than with New World Aeternum, which is only offering a revised version of what was already there. Then again, The Way of Winter is only good for six weeks or so and then I'll have to start again, again, whereas this, hopefully, ought to be the last time I need to start over in New World.

As for which is going to be the more successful overall, at the moment, the clear leader in the relaunch stakes, as far as Steam is concerned, is Once Human. It has almost twice as many people playing as NWA, although there Amazon will be mostly be looking at the console numbers, I'm sure. Still, the PC game has taken a bump, too, so we'll see how that lasts. 

As for which of the approaches will have the greatest success in the longer term, I have no idea how well NWA might do on consoles but on PC I'd back Once Human, whichseems tohave burned fewer bridges and made a better job of hanging on to the players it already has so far.

I plan on playing both, on and off. I don't even mind if I have start over again at some point. Just let's leave it a while, now, eh?

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!

On The Changing Of The Seasons In Once Human - or - I Guess I'll Just Sit Here Then...

For once, I seem to be playing some games that are actually quite popular. I know! Weird, isn't it? 

One of them is Wuthering Waves, developments in which I'll get to another time. Today I'm going to ramble incoherently about the other, mostly in the hope that talking about it out loud might help me to work out what the heck is going on with it...

Once Human seems to be doing pretty well for itself. It's on Steam so it's easy to see how just how well. It's still in Steam's top ten by current players but perhaps more importantly, unlike many recent hits, it's also holding an audience. 

The game never reached the kind of seven-digit population highs of the likes of Palworld, peaking at a concurrency just under a quarter of a million. Since total downloads have apparently just hit ten million (!) I'm guessing there must be a lot of players on Epic's Game Store too and presumably other global platforms, too.

Sticking with Steam, six weeks after launch, Once Human is still hitting daily peaks of well over a hundred and fifty thousand players and the graph shows a remarkable consistency throughout the time it's been available.

Palworld, by comparison, hit a peak of more than two million players in its first month but had lost three-quarters of those by month two and ninety per cent by the month after that. It's now bumping along with an average concurrency of between thirty and forty thousand, which I'm sure is a very healthy population for most intents and purposes but which remains, undeniably, a great deal fewer than two million.

Palworld is following the  traditional development pattern, wherin players create characters who inhabit a permanent world to which further content is incrementally added. Once Human... isn't doing that.

I'd love to be able to explain just what Once Human is doing. I've written about the proposed seasonal structure before and speculated about how it might work but as must have been fairly obvious, I didn't really understand it. That's why I was waiting with considerable interest to find out exactly how it worked in practice, when the first, six-week Season came to end.

Well, now it has and I'm still none the wiser. I spent a good deal of my limited playing time yesterday and the day before reading all the in-game information that came with the latest update as well as everything in the supporting documentation on the website and in the official statements put out by Starry and/or Netease, along with discussions about it on Steam, Discord and Reddit and if anything, I have less of a clue now than I did before.

Oh, there are plenty of things I do know and understand. All the stuff about what you can keep and what you're going to lose is clear enough. I also know what happens if you do absolutely nothing and just wait, which at the moment looks like what I'm going to be doing.

After spending a while last night, pressing buttons and seeing what happened, I even have a vague idea how the new Seasonal server options work and how to choose between them, although there are some details there I'm still not clear on. 

What I'm not getting is why I'd want to do any of it right now. I read a lot about people wanting to farm Starchrom but I have more of that than I know what to do with already. Also about avoiding dead servers but since I play almost entirely solo, the fewer people there are around the better.

The only reason I can think of to move is to see new content but so far there isn't any that I can't experience just as well where I am. I'd like to take a look at some of the new, non-seasonal content like the revised fishing system and the animal ranching, not to mention the world boss that's a cross between a whale and a plane that you can apparently ride about on but I think I can do all of that on the server I'm already on, which won't close for another four weeks, so I guess I might as well stay put until then. 

Would there be any benefit in moving before the server kicks me out? As far as I can tell, there will be two new Scenarios but they're not coming until September and October. If the server you play on has reached Phase 6 already, though, which mine has, the choices right now are either to carry on just as you are for another month or move to another server running the same scenario on Normal difficulty, which is a step up from Novice, what we've all been on since launch.

There's also Hard difficulty but that's not quite ready yet. It'll be here in a couple of days. It was going
to be longer but enough people complained about the delay for Starry to push the date forward.

I'm quite happy with Novice difficulty but I'm not averse to trying Normal, just to see what the difference is. To that end, I spent about twenty minutes last night on server select, scrolling through all the options and I still couldn't figure out how it worked. 

As I read it, there are currently four types of server: Novice PvE and PvP and Normal PvE and PvP, each of which has a funny name (Manibus for PvE, Evolution's Call for PvP.) That all sounds fine but if you click on any of them it always shows the difficulty as "Novice" on the right panel. Even if you click the "Scenario and Seasonal Details" button it still says the same on all of them: "low difficulty... entry-level scenario."

Then there's the whole thing about "Signing Up" and "Entering" a server, which appear to be entirely different things. You can sign up without entering. If you do, you stay where you are until your server closes and kicks you into Eternaland, which is exactly what happens if you don't sign up at all. It seems signing up reserves you a place but you on't have to take it.

All of which would be fine if I had any clue what "entering" a server meant or how to do it. It would be easy enough if I was making a new character but for the one I'm playing I assume there has to be some kind of transfer process. 

How, when or where you access such a process, I have no idea. Maybe it becomes obvious when you do sign up but since I can't currently see any servers that look any different to the one I'm on I don't want to risk tying myself to an identical server for another six weeks and have the next scenario appear while I'm still on Phase 4 or something.

I am certain I'm missing something but other than playing russian roulette with the one character I have, I'm a bit stuck for a way to find out what it could be. I did consider making a second character on one of the new servers but then I couldn't think what that would tell me about anything so I gave up on the idea. I really son't do alts any more, do I? That's a change I didn't see coming.

Although, the more I think about it, the more it seems the big attraction of the seasonal system is new content, I'm wondering now whether it would actually be an option to keep playing the current content at Novice level by signing up to another Novice level server. It looks like that's possible. Actually, at the moment, it looks like that's all that's possible...

God, I'm confused.

While I dither, I'm spending most of my time in Eternaland which, as the name suggests, won't be going anywhere. I've blueprinted my Season One house and rebuilt it on an offshore island so it doesn't spoil the view. That process had some oddities that could have made a post on their own but I figured it out in the end. Just remember to press "F" not "G" at the crucial moment and you'll be fine.

Of course, while you can replicate an entire home that took you weeks to build in seconds, it won't ever fit exactly on a different piece of land, so I started making some modifications and now my copied house is quite different from the original. So much for the Eternaland Architectural Archive I was planning.

Despite all of this confusion and uncertainty and despite all the prophets of doom claiming the population would drop to near-zero as soon as people found out about the six-weekly "wipes", so far the upheaval doesn't appear to have had any significant impact on numbers at all and the complaints about it I can find on Steam or Discord are minimal. 

My own complaint is mostly that despite any number of attempts, I still can't figure out how the whole thing works! It's hard to say if I like it or not when I can't even understand what it is!

I guess that's what I get for playing a popular game for once. If and when I figure out what's going on, I'll be sure to come back and pass it on. Until then, I think I'm just going to carry on as I am until I get kicked to Eternaland in a month's time and worry about it then.