NetEase-owned Starry Studio looks to have some big plans for the survival MMO Once Human in 2025. That’s the message being offered from the studio in a 30 minute-long year-end broadcast that offers up some advance looks at features that are planned for the new year.
First off, the game is getting a feature known as the Visional Wheel system, which effectively adds new wrinkles to the game’s existing scenario servers like new rules, mechanics, and weapons. These rotating adjustments will run for roughly two to three months, with the first called Lunar Oracle arriving January 16th.
This wheel adds a blood moon at night that applies a status effect that makes enemies stronger and causes player characters to slowly lose sanity; the only way to keep sanity up is by defeating enemies. The blood moon also increases material yields the lower character HP is and adds new red crystals that can be used to craft new items.
This doesn’t mean that new scenarios won’t be coming: Three more scenarios, codenamed Purification, Deviation, and Broken, were announced.
- Purification is a PvE scenario where players must work to clear pollution from areas in the game map.
- Deviation is a PvE scenario that focuses on the capturing, raising, and fusing of pets (aka deviations) to form a team and pit them against other deviations.
- Broken will be a 10 day-long scenario that allows full-on FFA PvP everywhere on the map and let players craft superweapons.
Starry is also planning on making improvements to existing scenarios like Way of Winter and Prismverse’s Clash based on player feedback. All of the scenarios – both new and adjusted old ones – will have “early access” testing servers that will be open for roughly two months before their ultimate release in the third quarter of 2025.
The broadcast provided additional overall announcements for Once Human too, including plans for custom server features that will let players customize the game to their liking in the first half of the year, a full release on mobile in April, new escape room and shooting minigame building pieces for Eternalands, and cosmetic updates like the ability to hide the backpack and change character gender.
Finally, the presentation closed with details about the survival MMO’s new update, which adds a new system that lets players earn starchroms without forcing themselves into scenarios they don’t want to play, adds some seasonal celebratory goodies to chase after in a holiday event running until January 12th, balances several weapons, and lets players earn extra rewards by unlocking and upgrading blueprints.
