It’s an age-old tale at this point, isn’t it? A new game emerges, it makes big promises, and when the time comes to put up, we have a steady lineup of cosmetics jammed down our throats while glaring issues are seemingly ignored. I was in the process of writing this article when yet another of these cosmetic packs were revealed, while again ignoring the game issues, by the looks of things.
This is, in part, what has led to Once Human clocking an all-time-low player base on Steam, just a week before the Way of Winter scenario drops. But let’s look into it with a little more detail, shall we?
What makes Once Human such an amazing game?
My early opinion on why Once Human was so much fun, was that the Chinese developers understand addiction theory very well, and the dopamine loop in this game has a highly addicting nature — on purpose, of course. But addiction theory alone does not make a game good. There’s more to Once Human.
The building mechanics, while flawed, are some of the best we’ve seen in games like these. I mean, compare this to the building mechanics in DayZ. You just can’t.
Then there’s the world we play in. Such weirdness! The horror is great in the beginning, while you don’t really know what you’re doing. The music adds tension and you never know what new and challenging monster you might find.
And then you discover builds, and you get stronger, and suddenly you fear nothing. The horror, sadly, goes away. The game becomes way too easy.
The universe remains intriguing, however. Prime wars or their PvP equivalent make socialization in the game pretty much mandatory, and you end up making some good friends (and enemies, of course). And then LEA Labs opens up, and the difficulty is back!
But even this doesn’t last, as we begin to casually speedrun LEA in 12 minutes just for fun. Our builds are now too strong for even the most challenging dungeon in the game.
But still, we can tinker on our house. We can farm more mods. We can chat with our new friends. There’s always something to do in Once Human. Until there isn’t.
What is holding Once Human back?
Since the beginning, there have always been these weird lag spikes during normal gameplay. Enemies will teleport, they’ll go invisible (yet still attack you), you’ll fall through the floor, and so much more.
Most of the time it’s actually pretty funny… until it breaks something. I witnessed first-hand as a player fell through the floor in PHI, and we all got a level 5 Chefosaurus. All except the player that was stuck in purgatory, of course. He quit the game at that very moment.
In hindsight, the Get Unstuck feature might have saved him, but likely after experiencing various similar bugs, his tolerance just snapped, and I’ve not seen them on the game since.
But there is good news. The Once Human developers have been responsive about bugs and have been fixing them as we go, almost daily. So while this is an existing issue, it’s likely not what’s caused more than 80% of the player base to leave.
Luckily I hadn’t published this yet, and I can now say that with the newest update, only one tweak has been made to the melee combat. Other than that, here are more cosmetics for us! Another hellishly expensive loot crate, no doubt.
We are getting a new map, I guess, for The Way of Winter. But players will have to start seeing more acknowledgement about existing issues in the game if these cosmetics are going to have a player base to be marketed to.
To save you from what might become a long and, sadly, meaningless rant, let’s just move on.
Ongoing server and event lag
You’ve no doubt seen the insane lag we’ve experienced in the Prime Wars and Warfare. Especially the Prime War at Shadowfall. At some point, it was impossible to even complete!
But have no fear, the developers were on it and working on a solution. Eventually — and I do mean EVENTUALLY — they got around to it. Last season, even with a full 40 players in the Prime War, we saw way less lag. Fantastic.
The only problem was, we were now experiencing far more lag in the open world. The problem seemed to have shifted, and not been solved. High-Risk public events appeared to become the new Prime Wars, with that famous reload glitch and other annoying aspects of lag rearing heads there.
But in the Prismverse’s Clash, this culminated into the worst lag I have ever seen in any video game, and I used to play with folks around the world on a 200kb/s line back in 2007. So you know it’s bad.
The dirty Mayflies stole the Rex, and they were trying to secure it. So us honorable Rosetta went there to stop their shenanigans. Only, we all got stuck in the sky and couldn’t actually shoot anyone or do anything. We were totally stuck. This lasted for about twenty minutes, and it took about five minutes for my TP home to actually happen.
In that moment, the Mayflies and Rosetta came together as one to make fun of the game. One player gave me a laugh, by saying “Don’t worry, another $600 loot crate will save us!” (and his words turned out to be rather prophetic, don’t you think?)
This portrays the current feeling about Once Human. There certainly seems to be some genuine resistance to upgrading the servers properly, since the issue is no longer being addressed. This is mostly fine for PvE, where the servers don’t need to be 100% smooth, but just barely playable — which is the case right now.
It’s inexcusable in PvP, however. Combine this lag with a worrying amount of cheaters and tower-camping players who get off on killing lower-level farmers, and you’ve just ensured that no PvE player will ever try PvP again.
And this, mostly, is what I believe has led to the major drop in the player base. But there is one more thing.
The lack of new content
We were led to believe that there would be a new map every six weeks or so, with fresh new content on the regular, to keep players engaged. I, for one, thought this to be unlikely yet possible. How? I figured that to make that statement, the developers of this gem had created the entire map already, and just cut it into parts for us, so we could see new content after every scenario.
This does not appear to be the case, however, since we’re still waiting on the new map. It has been announced that we’ll get to experience the new map in the upcoming Way of Winter scenario from the 17th of October.
This is exciting but well overdue. We can now safely say that it’s unlikely we’ll be getting new content after every new scenario, and so the fluctuations in the player base are likely to remain. That’s not uncommon in the modern gaming scene, where we see spikes after every new DLC and then a decline back to a steady baseline.
The gameplay mechanics, while immensely satisfying at first, are also becoming a bit tedious. Having to go out on your 100th Tungsten Ore run no longer feels like a potentially exciting adventure, but rather a chore that just needs doing.
The final point I’d like to discuss here is whether Once Human has a future at all.
Will The Way of Winter save Once Human?
The Way of Winter is finally giving us a new map, and that’s great. But how bad will the lag be? How ‘unfinished’ will this new map feel? One major positive of the first map is that it feels logical, lived-in, real. If this second map has been a rush job, we might not get that same feeling.
I love this game, and so I retain hope that it’s going to be every bit as good as the first map. I also hope to see some new gameplay mechanics, new gear (which they do seem to have included), and new challenges that offer some actual difficulty.
We will no doubt see a spike of returning players, but whether Once Human thrives or just merely survives after that depends on how well things are handled here.
Returning to PvE will mostly solve the cheating issues the game has faced. It doesn’t affect other players quite as much in PvE if there are cheaters around. The lag issues, however… we’ll see.
I’m personally hoping that we get new and attractive building options that aren’t locked behind an expensive loot crate. As a mostly free player, I’d love to see more variation in the building items we can find in the open world.
I’m also hoping for a new and interesting battle pass soon though. That’s a great way to support the game while getting massive value at an affordable price.
I’ll say it again. I love this game. However, with the emphasis on premium content seemingly designed to extract as much money as possible from the player base, I can’t help but feel — just a little bit — that as soon as Once Human stops raking in the cash, it’ll be swiftly abandoned and the next money-making project will kick off.
I really, really, hope I’m wrong.