Free-to-play survival game Once Human is offering the archetypal survival game launch experience: it's a giant, buggy to-do list that everyone you know is playing. With well over 100,000 concurrent players at its peaks, it's one of the top games on Steam right now.
One of the slightly less conventional aspects of Once Human is its seasonal structure: Each server is associated with a "seasonal scenario," and at the end of the season, it disappears and new seasonal servers launch with new scenarios. Some players have braced for a total progress wipe at the end of the first six-week scenario, but in a post on Steam today, developer Starry Studios explained that the system isn't quite that extreme.
"We are aware that many players are concerned that their in-game progress will be reset in six weeks, but we are here to reassure you that this will NOT happen!" wrote the studio. "We value the time and effort you put into this game, so the items and gear you have obtained from the seasonal scenario will be retained in various ways."
It is true that characters revert to level 1 at the start of a new season, and that they'll start on a fresh, unrevealed map, but players will be able to carry a good deal of progress between seasons, including their blueprints, furniture formulas, cosmetics, and custom house blueprints. Completed story tasks will be remembered, and players will be able to redo "streamlined" versions of them to get their associated rewards. Resources like ammunition and medicine will also be "partially" carried over.
Here's the full list of what you get to keep, in the developer's words:
- Important Currency: Starchroms, Crystgins, Mitsuko's Marks, Stellar Planula, and Sproutlets.
- Gear Blueprints (and their stars), Blueprint Fragments, Weapon Accessories, and Mods.
- Furniture Formulas (except those gained through your Memetics).
- Cosmetics, Expressions and Poses, Namecards, and more.
- House Blueprints. After a House Blueprint is saved, you can reconstruct the building at any time (if advanced materials are not available, basic materials will be used in building instead).
- Main story and side story task progress (for the tasks you've already completed, you can accept more streamlined versions of them in the new season but still get all the rewards).
- Your friend list will fully carry over. Furthermore, you can check which players joined your Warband in the previous seasons and add them to your friend list.
- The following content and resources will only be partially carried over when you decide to enter a new season and start a new journey: "Essential resources like materials, medicine, and ammunition can be carried over into a new season based on item transferring rules so you can progress faster in the new season."
So it's not a total reset, but enough, presumably, to challenge players with new seasonal threats by making them climb the tech tree again: Starry Studio says that new seasons will introduce "different seasonal objectives or special gameplay mechanics" which vary depending on whether you're on a PvE or PvP server.
So far, I wouldn't describe my Once Human experience as challenging—see the clip below of me riding up to a zombie dude, awkwardly parking my motorcycle, and then executing a mob hit on him—but it's still early days.
I'm so good at videogames the monsters don't even fight back anymore. They know it's hopeless... pic.twitter.com/9gXbcnbgUGJuly 11, 2024
Starry Studio also says that it may introduce permanent scenarios in the future, as well as scenarios that are longer or shorter than six weeks. You can read the full post here.
