Once Human is it hitting all the sweet spots to earn the customary 15 minutes of Steam fame. It’s a free-to-play survival crafting MMO about fighting through a world infested by a strange alien lifeform called Stardust, and its first week out has already been full of ups and downs.
Made by NetEase Games’ Starry Studio and out on PC as of July 9, Once Human is currently the seventh most-played game on Steam and the fourth best-selling. While the game revolves around killing things and building stuff, there’s also a lot of exploration as players roam the open world and run into one another. But for all of the initial buzz around the game, it’s also racked up plenty of launch week woes.
The trouble started with a furor over NetEase’s privacy policy which stated the company collects personal data from players including “first and last name, title, prefix, email address, telephone number, (instant) messaging account, postal address, date of birth, age, gender, country/region, and government-issued ID, such as passport information, as required by applicable laws for age verification and correction of personal information.”
The suggestion of overly broad data surveillance coming from a Chinese company led Once Human’s Steam review rating to plunge into the negative before barely anyone had even played it. However, former Blizzard dev Jason “Thor” Hall pushed back, arguing there was nothing unusual about the policy, with many other games containing similar language. Starry Studios itself also responded stating, “Once Human takes our users’ data privacy very seriously. We would only use personal data if we have a legitimate legal basis, such as providing requested services or acting with your expressed consent.”
The game’s rating has since improved to “mixed” with thousands of players praising it as a mashup of The Division and Rust with a lot of different layers of gameplay. In the words of one Steam reviewer, “Pros: It’s fun. Cons: It’s jank.” There’s a piano mini-game. There’s a motorcycle that makes it feel more than a little reminiscent of Days Gone. And of course, no survival crafting game is complete without fishing. Yes, you can make your own aquarium. Players are already hard at work making cool homes at the end of the world.
There have been plenty of gameplay design choices that have rubbed players the wrong way too, though. You can unlock rare blueprints from a Wish Machine which is basically a glorified gacha device. It requires an in-game currency called Starchrom, which, as some defenders point out, has to be earned and can’t just be purchased with real money. Once Human also initially limited players to one character locked to a single server which couldn’t be deleted. That decision, however, was quickly walked back.
Starry Studios also walked back another controversial aspect of the game: limiting cosmetics to a single character. Once Human players were shocked to discover that microtransaction content was initially only unlocked on a single character rather than being accessible account-wide. The developers announced on July 12 that a fix for that is planned to arrive in August, a reversal that’s helped the team earn back good will from the existing player-base.
Most divisive of all is how Once Human handles seasonal resets. Basically, every six weeks or so the game will wipe much of players’ progress, rebooting maps and sending characters back to level one. As an MMO centered around grinding, it’s struck some fans as a raw deal. In response, the studio has tried to clarify precisely what will and won’t change every time one of these resets happen and the thinking behind them.
“In the new season, your character will be reset to Lv.1, and the exploration progress of the World Map will be reset as well,” read an explainer that noted players would retain blueprints, various currencies, and certain other materials in-between seasons. “This ensures all players start the new season on an equal footing and can enjoy playing together. New scenario types often offer different map designs, providing new exploration experience and rewards. Each season server will also offer new season challenges to earn new rewards.”
At the end of its first week, Once Human now faces its toughest challenge: maintaining server capacity for everyone who wants to play. Characters are locked to a particular server once they’re created, and servers max out at around 6,000 to 8,000 players, at which point people are forced to wait in queues before they can start playing. That has to do with the developers wanting to keep instances of the open-world MMO from getting overcrowded.
In the meantime, though, Starry Studio says it’s raised those server limits and added more capacity to alleviate some of the issues, with more fixes coming in August. Once Human’s next patch on July 18 will also add “compensation” for players who spend too much time waiting in queues, presumably rewarding them for the time spent idle instead of grinding. For now, the studio is giving players lists of servers that are overcrowded for people to avoid. The worst fate in Once Human isn’t getting killed: it’s building an awesome base your friends can never visit.
