Remember indie sandbox MMO One Hour One Life? We covered it last year when it finally popped up on Steam. As pitched, it was a truly unique MMO where you joined the gameworld as someone’s baby, growing for 60 years over an hour of gameplay, as you try to make the world a better place for the next generation of characters – or worse, as the case may be.
At the end of July, the one-man dev team patched the game with a pretty big update that was meant to make it “fundamentally different” with activities to “matter on a grander scale than just your individual life or even just the life of your village.” Apparently the first couple of rollouts were a bit rocky, partly due to exploiters.
“The goal in all of this is to enable a collective challenge: How long can you all survive together before civilization collapses globally? The most recent record was 44 hours,”dev Jason Rohrer wrote this week. “But there’s enough oil on the map to support farming for 100 people for at least ten days. I’m guessing that 44 hours is just the beginning, and you’ll all be gradually getting the hang of it over time.”
Wellllll maybe not so much. Steam reviews and Reddit threads are concerned that the game’s experiments have made it much different from what they originally purchased. “Didn’t Expect to Play Fortnite Tonight” reads one thread bummed that the game is becoming a bit more kill-or-be-killed than it set out to be (“Fortnite Battle Royale: Lorax Edition” is my favorite reply). Of course, with the developer being so agile and keeping such a close eye on just what’s becoming of the simulation on any given day, it’s probably worth watching to see just what happens next.
