One week after the launch of The First Descendant, One Human dropped. Considering that for-pay video games offered during the recent Steam Summer Sale didn’t wow me in the least, having two F2P games bust through the door, arm in arm, is a pretty good deal in my opinion.

I’ve already dropped my impressions of the game from previous betas, but I kind of want to reiterate and expand a bit. I’ve not gotten all that far in retail, for reasons I will actually explain, but something weird happened to me while playing Once Human, and I feel that this is more important to me than the mechanics of the game itself.

As mentioned, Once Human is a survival sandbox set in a world which has been warped by something called “Stardust”. Continuing a long tradition of “creatures altered by some weird microbial force”, we are a new category of human, a “Metahuman”, who is positively affected by this dust. As such, we agree to take on the mantle of surviving in this new interdimensional Hellscape not just with some spiffy new powers, but with machete, shotgun, and Kevlar.

Since people like comparing A to B, I think one initial vibe one might get from this game is “The Division, but with Magic”. That’s not entirely untrue, but only about 5-10% true. It’s third person, the world has been ravage by an apocalypse, and 95% of everything that moves should be gunned down as a matter of course. It’s also got that survival game aspect to it; there’s eating and drinking required (annoying as hell), enemies drop materials like plastic bottles and duct tape, and any cache of goods you find in the world is going to have a bunch of materials that are useless until you break them down to their constituent parts that are used to build things that are actually useful to you.

As if shooting and crafting weren’t enough, there’s base building. I love me some base building. A lot of recent games from recent memory (Valheim, Palworld, Nightingale, et al) which have had base building have shipped with construction in some kind of half-assed state, making it difficult to put walls, floors, and roofs for crissakes, together. Once Human’s building system is pretty tight. I have had no issue throwing down the initial platform that the tutorial demands, after which I took it upon myself to add some privacy walls and a simple, flat roof to keep the rain off my equipment. It’s here that we build different workstations like the dismantler that turns junk into useful materials, the basic workbench that allows us to craft arrows, bullets, and simple tools, the smelter that turns copper ore into copper bars, a gear bench for weapons and armor, and a stove for cooking food and purifying water. These are just some of the items we can create, the ones I’ve set up so far.

We get to build things by spending points (I forget what they are called) to unlock “memetics” across four different categories. In the above shot, you see how I was looking to unlock some blueprint categories in the “Crafting” section. There’s also tools, decor, and building sections to spend in. While this point allocation allows you to build certain things, blueprints can also be found in the world that we can use once we unlock that category of mimetic crafting.

Unlike The Division, Once Human is an MMO, which means you will see other players in the world. Normally I like “playing alone” with others, but in this game it bothers me to no end. The main reason is what I’m calling “urban sprawl”.

In this screenshot, the building on the extreme left is a developer-placed shanty in which enemy NPCs can be found. All of the other buildings are player-built; this screenshot was taken from the backyard of my own bunker. Since this shot was taken, however, this landscape has become more crowded and more “urbanized” as folks get around to building up their plots.

I don’t know why this bothers me, because I’ve just realized that this is basically what Ultima Online looked like, only in third person. Naturally, in UO the gist was that people could build houses and form ad-hoc towns — or castles. It made sense in the milieu, but here we’re supposed to be survivors of a supernatural disaster, yet houses are getting thrown together at a rate and density that would make any suburban developer green with envy. It’s hard to worry about the future when the population is hoppin’ and everyone seems to be doing so well and there are so damn many of us.

Another issue I have — but also kind of like in certain cases — is with “notes” that players can leave in the world. I remember seeing these for the first time in beta, because people were dropping them in key areas and were writing helpful notes for players who came after them on how to find secret items or complete certain objectives. Of course, everyone wants to get the credit, so certain areas are chock full of notes from people reiterating the same things, but I believe that’s because notes are cross server. I have found a few in my house which irritates me to no end, but each note explains who posted it and from which server; as you can see above, I set my house right outside a massive deposit of copper, so it’s a popular place for people to loiter no matter which server they’re on, and as a result there are a lot of notes in my yard and in my house. Thankfully, we can block the notes which removes their markers from view.

Another minor annoyance that I have with the game is the mass of “perks and tracks” that the game features. It’s become de rigueur for games to include these, especially Eastern games (The First Descendant is also lousy with them), and I always equate these features with mobile games because that’s where I think we all first encountered them. For everything you do, there’s going to be a tracker so that once you actually do that thing, you can click a button and get a reward. Built a platform? Reward. Added a workbench? Reward. Changed the look of your outfit? Reward. Reward. Reward. Someone somewhere would speak about this Pavlovian response of teaching us to perform tasks by associating it with gain, but the fact is that we’d be doing all this shit anyway, because that’s what gamers do. We’re not mobile gamers who need to be prodded to take actions; we’re seasoned gamers who take actions just to see what would happen. We take actions the developers themselves don’t even think of. And we’re always progression-minded. Although free stuff is always welcome, I don’t like having to stop my gameplay at intervals to “clean out” a dozen other screens where I click buttons to collect 20 different currencies or random items that only clutter up my inventory. In addition, Once Human has jumped on the “season” train, a system that game have started to rely on as a vehicle for pushing player action, replacing a decent narrative. This track has it’s own set of currency as well as rewards, but there’s been some confusion about what a “season” actually means. Will the world reset when this season ends? Will our seasonal currency reset, or worse — become useless when a new season begins? What’s the point of seasons in an always on, long-form game anyway? To sell access to a “premium track” of rewards, that’s what.

Once Human has a “battle pass” and a cash shop, of course, and once again, I don’t begrudge a F2P game having these if it keeps the lights on. There’s the usual cosmetic items for characters and weapons; the featured character skin at the time of screenshotting, the “Shadow Panther Set”, cost 2280 Crystgin, which as you can see from the graph above is about $30USD. Meanwhile, a less exotic skin costs 1080 Crystgin, which is about $15USD.

I have found some transmogs in the game, and I have earned some from some lever pulling I became eligible for through some mechanism I forget, so at least the cash shop isn’t necessary in any way, and in many ways seems less predatory than the one featured in The Last Descendant.

I had been contemplating throwing Once Human under the bus after an hour or two of play. I was still deep in The Last Descendant because I have friends playing, the housing situation was annoying, and I felt that I was spending more time collecting-for-clicks than I was playing the game.

But then I started playing the game and I got kind of weirded out. One of the reasons I dislike the Fallout series is because it’s so dark and depressing, a credit to Bethesda for doing the exact thing they set out to do; some people like it, some people bear it, and some, like me, can’t handle it. I was kind of getting the same vibe with Once Human, but at a lesser scale — one I could actually deal with and enjoy. Sometimes I found myself in an abandoned building, looking through rooms, and got jumped — in the game, and out of my seat — by an enemy who just appeared from outside of camera range and started attacking me. Digging through houses and finding garbage that I take, as quickly as I can so I can bug out as quickly as I can, has some level of thrill to it. Moving through the area I am level-qualified to play through started to click with me. Once Human ticks a few boxes that are familiar: the gunplay of The Division, the vibe of The Secret World, the technomancy of Control — all games I like or love.

That’s why I stopped playing. I have thus far been playing solo, because I convinced friends to play The First Descendant and have thus spent my influence capital with them for the time being. While I am still in TFD, I’ve gotten to a point where the difficulty is ramping up. I also think the release of Once Human has syphoned off some TFD players because the common areas seem less thickly populated while Once Human servers have/had been experiencing queues. It might be coincidence, but it might also be myself trying to justify spending less time in TFD and more time in Once Human. Still, it’s a game I really do not want to play solo for some reason, so mark that on your bingo cards. I’ll have to duck in now and then to see how I feel on a day to day and mission to mission basis, though, because despite the things I really dislike about the game, they fall away when compared to the things I really do like about it.