Once Human

I really wanted to like this game in the betas because I love this sort of setting, but it feels squandered here with a story that is not even remotely in the same league as Secret World.

I haven't tried it in release because of First Descendant releasing more or less simultaneously, and because I played the final two betas and practically nothing had improved between the two. Shooting felt awful even for the survival genre where "bad" is about the highest bar attainable, and it wasn't just because of the poor optimization. The building reminded me of a watered down version of Fallout 4 (and I think Fallout 4's settlement system is an abomination to begin with) and about the thing I liked about it was that you could easily move your whole base to a new location easily + upgrading existing structure was simple. The survival 'needs' systems were more busywork than anything, especially prior to unlocking stuff like refrigeration. And progressing through the zones felt like hitting a reset button and doing the same exact thing over and over by about the third one I got to. I know that's something of a staple for the genre, but other games do a better job hiding it.

One thing I'm curious about because it was just so egregiously bad -- did they ever do anything to fix the motorcycle? I sent feedback like a dozen times in their various surveys about how the thing had so little torque and HP that it literally couldn't climb about more than about a 30 degree incline--even on a road--and the upgrades did little to improve it. In the last beta I just ran everywhere on foot unless I knew the road from A to B was completely flat.

Regarding the motorcycle, was that base or after upgrades? You can upgrade parts on the bike that increase things like handling and engine power

If yes, I wonder if that is intentional. You can make a 4x4 truck eventually, so it would make sense if they wanted different vehicles to be better at different things. That was an issue with 7 days to die - the truck had amazing storage, but it was a liability in certain biomes because you couldn’t avoid certain environmental obstacles and you would damage the truck. There was also a biker set bonus that made the motorcycle the fastest ground vehicle

I got tired of the grind in The First Descendant and wanted to try this, but it seems the server situation is completely fucked?

Cybsled said:

Regarding the motorcycle, was that base or after upgrades? You can upgrade parts on the bike that increase things like handling and engine power

If yes, I wonder if that is intentional. You can make a 4x4 truck eventually, so it would make sense if they wanted different vehicles to be better at different things. That was an issue with 7 days to die - the truck had amazing storage, but it was a liability in certain biomes because you couldn’t avoid certain environmental obstacles and you would damage the truck. There was also a biker set bonus that made the motorcycle the fastest ground vehicle

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I upgraded the motorcycle almost all the way in the last beta, didn't really change it much. Instead of not being able to climb at all it would move at a snail's pace and you were still better off running on foot on anything but a flat straight road that directly connected two town zones.

Never built the other vehicles because I'd seen a reddit post or YT video that said that they were really bad too.

Delly said:

I got tired of the grind in The First Descendant and wanted to try this, but it seems the server situation is completely fucked?

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Ignore the high/medium indicators - servers get full based on the number of players who create characters and make a base, even if they are offline. So pick a server marked new and try to enter game. All the mediums showed as full for me, but a high server let me proceed

My only complaint about the game so far feels network related, I get a lot of lag in highly populated areas but it's not graphical, more like people moving around without animating, sliding along the ground, enemy animations being janky (like they're moving at 10 fps while I'm viewing 90 fps).

Other than that it's been pretty fun so far. Got to my first monolith enemy and called it a day, might try to solo it later but I didn't expect this game to have stuff like boss matchmaking. That was nice to see.

I’ve been enjoying it as well. One annoyance is the dark souls messages sometimes get clumped on interaction points and you keep activating messages instead of the item

Also the thing where you activate an item and shit attacks your base, my base was on a hill and mobs kept teleporting through walls which was annoying

Cosmetics are a mix - like decided to buy the premium battlepass for $10 since I’ve gotten more than that in enjoyment from the game. But they have so many currencies - some you get for completing achievements, some you get from the battlepass, some are pure RMT. You’ve got that cat woman costume which is more than 30 bucks and you have some suit which is a dollar and a bunch of stuff in the 10-20 range. I think they’re testing the waters on what people buy and in what volume.

Also a warning on the wish machine - apparently every bonk in the whack a mole game costs 500 if the pink currency. I didn’t realize this and ended up blowing all my currency. So if you want to buy a blueprint from the wish shop, you probably want to avoid the mole game since rewards are RNG

May have fixed my performance issues by capping FPS and increasing my page file size. Ran around for a minute and the game felt much better but I'll have to play longer to see.

It's in the boonies, but found a cool location to put my base. It's right at the top of a waterfall on some land right at the edge. Nice view of the river/valley

Gutterflesh said:

Also this

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Perfect summary of my problem with these mechanics.

One change is like them to make is lower the cost of the base structure memetics from both an energy credit and memetic point perspective. I shouldn’t have to spend as much to unlock round shapes or stairs as I do advanced ammo or materials production

Rust has like 120k people playing it atm, averages 100k concurrent, and iirc server wipes on a quicker schedule (4 weeks?). It's not about creating artificial fomo, it's creating a reason to play the game at all once you've already experienced the content.

Gavinmad said:

it's creating a reason to play the game at all once you've already experienced the content.

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And if that reason is "Because we just took all your shit away. Now you get to do it again!", people will be understandably upset.

Rust isn't really analogous, it's a pvp game. The reset is because the economy is tuned to where it's basically impossible for newbies to enter after a certain point.