If there’s one thing we’ve learned recently, it’s that Survival MMOs can certainly be a mixed bag. It’s common to see lackluster combat, mediocre building options, and a common pitfall of placing too much emphasis on punishing hunger and thirst mechanics. Once Human by Starry Studio and published by NetEase Games takes these features and finds a way to balance them to enhance the gameplay, rather than punish players for it. Let’s get into a deep dive of this supernatural survival MMO.
If you haven’t heard of Once Human yet, that will probably change over the course of 2024. The game has been making waves for Starry Studio, as the developers have been humbled by the response to their beta, leading to an expansion of their testing scope. Originally the game was meant for 20,000 players, which was then extended to 50,000 players, and the player response was so overwhelming that Starry had to shut down free access and move to an invite-only testing plan so that they wouldn’t overload the servers.
From the start of Once Human you’re brought into a very unique, story-driven world, where you awaken as a Meta-Human with no memory of who you were. Your body was augmented by an alien power called Stardust. Stardust contaminates the entire world, and has changed it in wild and dangerous ways. As a Meta-Human you’re on the fringe of humans that can harness this power. You'll be brought up to speed by the titular character Cyo, who you'll meet during the tutorial. Then you’ll embark on a journey to capture Deviations throughout the world to increase your power and bring peace to this chaotic new reality. However, you end up hiding yourself under the guise of a Mayfly, which were a sect of bounty-hunter-like humans that harnessed deviations in a cradle (a backpack that houses Deviant energy) and used their power to rid the world of those atrocities.
Mystery and Intrigue
The main questline will find you taking down Great Ones, which are extremely powerful instanced bosses that you can tackle with a group. If you don’t dispatch the first Great One by level 8 or so, you will miss out on progressing your building and crafting skill tree, which is a major detriment to progression. Aside from the main quest though, there are plenty of side and secret quests throughout the world. You have a second sight that lets you see extra-dimensional rifts throughout the world. While you’re exploring, you may find puzzles and unique quests or maybe even random rewards that you would otherwise miss if you weren’t utilizing your second sight reliably.
In many ways, the puzzles that I’ve come across remind me a lot of The Secret World because some of them require putting a little more mental effort into than simply hacking your way to victory. One of my favorite examples of this was a Hospital side quest, where I had to enter a hospital to find life-saving medication for the quest giver. You’re then transported into a separate dimension where you essentially get stuck in four-door room. When you go through a door, it brings you right back to where you started. There’s a puzzle here that’s actually quite ingenious and not all that hard once you understand what’s happening, but it took me a hot minute to get it. (Hint: check the date on the calendar when you move through the doors). This was one example of many puzzles that kept me blissfully entertained during my journey.
When you’re brought into character creation, you have an overabundance of options and sliders to build your character as you like. Normally, I build characters that reflect my real world visage, to see how close I can get, but in Once Human I wanted to see how far the female character creation options went, and was pleasantly surprised that I could size and position my body paint and tattoos, and dial in the color of just about anything to the what I desired instead of simple presets.
Once done, the story kicks off and pulls you into a facility where you’ll get the basics beat into you. The developers have built a rather robust combat system that is more than just shooting and smacking enemies. You can sneak up on an enemy for stealth kills, perform finishing moves, and even use the environment to waste your adversaries. There are multiple factions of enemies, but at the beginning you’ll mostly find yourself battling Deviants, which are the monsters of this universe. Deviants come in all shapes and sizes, and many of them in the early game are walking-dead style zombies that shuffle along, and rarely pose much of a threat.
So Much More Than Zombies
Then there are Deviants with special abilities. They can fly, shoot explosive beams, shine harmful light rays, or stomp you with their sheer size. When you defeat specialized Deviants they can often drop parts of their body as interactable objects. It’s an ingenious system that not only helps you dole out damage I different ways, but it can also cut down on the amount of ammunition you waste and saves you from melee weapon degradation. Everything in Once Human degrades over time, or with use. That means you’re going to need to play it smart when you’re out adventuring. Packing supplies are a must, and picking up usable supplies while you’re exploring isn’t very common.
Outside of Deviants you’ll face human enemies as well. As expected, they are well armed with weaponry, none of which you can pick up. You won’t even receive ammunition from humans, but you do get some crafting materials for ammunition, so it’s well worth it to dispatch them when you come across them. Once you level enough, you’ll also be able to enter a Chaos state, which puts you in a PvP mode where you can battle other players. When you die, whether in PvP or PvE, you’ll lose some of the materials you gathered.
There are large-scale territories where Chaos players will face off against one another, but I haven’t spent any time in them so far. What I do find appealing about Once Human is the choice of PvP, where a lot of Survival MMOs make PvP mandatory and thrust it upon you. Once Human has just as many opportunities for cooperation without battling other players, and that’s a huge plus for me.
Almost everything you pick up will be used for scrap to craft the items you’ll need, with rare strongboxes and treasure chests holding any real usable goods. You can pick up food and water to keep your stamina high and keep your body in tip top shape, but in Once Human you’ll also have to manage your sanity. Sanity decreases when you receive diseases or are inflicted with certain statuses, and it decreases your entire health pool until your sanity returns to normal.
To fix your Sanity, you need to either rest in a bed, or take some kind of consumable to help you maintain your maximum health. In many ways it plays out similarly to the way radiation works in Fallout 76. The main difference is that in the early game you aren’t blessed with many ways to fix your Sanity, so building a base where you can rest when your Sanity meter is too high is a must.
Build Your Best Home
Base building is a lot of fun in Once Human. What I really enjoyed the most about it was that I didn’t have to grind indefinitely to make just a little progress. Most of the items I crafted took a few seconds and I didn’t have to baby my crafting queue at all. Gathering materials took very little time as long as I could find the resources out in the world.
Chopping down a single large tree would provide hundreds of logs, and I could easily gather excess and not have to worry about that again for several hours even if I spent that time building up a three-story river house. The most time-consuming part of gathering is finding the right scrap, and most of the time, as long as you’re collecting junk while exploring, you’ll have plenty to deconstruct when you get home which will last you a while.
There are numerous options on what you can build. Like Fallout 76 you can run electricity, build water gatherers, and set up turrets. Once Human has the same kind of post-apocalyptic feel that also doesn’t take itself too seriously, so the comparison with Fallout is an easy one to make. You can also build and maintain motorcycles, which requires that you build a garage first. Once you have the motorcycle, getting around is so much easier, and you’ll be able to change out parts to customize your bike as you level up. You do need to maintain the motorcycle and give it fuel to keep it running, which means you’ll spend quite some time searching for fuel if you run low. Like everything in Once Human maintenance is key.
The decay system is also a blessing and a curse. Your home does decay, and you need to add materials to your housing terminal to keep your home from being destroyed. The first day I played I set up a very large building. I built all the workbenches, placed materials in storage bins, and seeded my housing terminal with what I thought was plenty of resources to keep my home running.
Then I didn’t log in for a couple days, and when I finally did – poof – the house was gone. Not a trace of it left. Despite my disappointment this is probably a good thing, because players that abandon their home or stop logging in shouldn’t have prime real estate. The world was still plentiful with player houses when I logged back in, so I don’t think we’re going to be at a loss for player-built cities, but it’s nice to know that the game will take care of itself if some people stop logging in.
Once Human has been impressive so far. The game has a lot of great things going for it, but it isn’t without some issues. Bugs are present. After defeating my first Great One I completely bugged out, couldn’t open my map, fast travel, or get out of bed, so I had to restart the game which kicked off waiting through a 45 minute queue. Some of the quest markers and quest objectives can be obtuse.
You’re given an ethereal bird that’s supposed to help guide you, but if you get stuck, sometimes the bird is just as cryptic as the quest objective. The Deviant Display system in your base is also a system that probably could be explained a little better.
When you setup your home, you can place your captured Deviations in a capture case, and you have to maintain their happiness so that they generate Deviant power. You then use that power to unlock special items specific to that Deviant. While the tutorial explains this, you probably won’t set up Deviant containment for several hours after the tutorial is over, and in my case, it was days later. It’s like trying to keep a Tamagotchi happy, and I think players would benefit from a tutorial once they’ve gotten to the point where they’ve crafted their first containment.
Overall, at this stage, Once Human is shaping up to be a tremendous hit when it releases in 2024. In addition, Starry Studio could teach a masterclass on running a beta test. They implemented queues, the servers were stable despite an overwhelming number of players, and they even expanded their servers to meet demand.
This is launch-level problem solving that kept the game playable for the thousands of players in-game with next to no perceivable performance problems. We’ve seen early access launches with far less players perform much more poorly, so I’m happy to say that despite the issues I’ve seen, I’m wholeheartedly impressed with the game up to this point.
If you’ve missed the boat on getting into Once Human but still want to ty the game during its beta, Starry Studios is still accepting applications for beta players. They have stated they are inviting 3000 players to the game each week, so sign up as soon as you can so that you’ll be on their list when the next batch of invites go out. Good luck out there former humans.
