I don’t want to claim that I necessarily hit a wall with my time in Once Human during my playtime for Choose My Adventure last week. After all, I did feel as if I made some pretty good progress overall, and I also found myself settling into something of a rhythm with my time in the game.
And yet I started to get the sensation that the progression slope was turning upwards into a much steeper curve, as if I were nearing the point of maximum tension between my movement through the game’s story (such as it is) and my equipment. Anyone who has played survivalboxes or RPGs or even certain MMOs knows what I mean: that uncomfortable realization that there is a lot more progress to be made but getting there will turn into a part-time job.
For the most part, my playtime rolled on as it has before: I took a few moments to gather and craft and made sure that my equipment was repaired while investigating whether I could make something new at the same time. That rather neatly brings us to the results of one the polls, by the way: I did indeed pick up a weapon blueprint for a pretty tasty automatic shotgun that’s fast become a favorite boss fighting weapon.
Also as instructed, I pushed forward into the main quest lines, which at one point were telling me to… stop following the main quest lines and get to level 15, apparently. So as it turned out, I was pretty much following the other poll choices, which saw me wander around to clear out outposts and pick up side quests. And again nothing really felt different here. I still was enjoying the gunplay, and I was still having fun rummaging around for goodies while swimming in Once Human’s creepy atmosphere.
Eventually something I did – I’m not entirely sure what, to be honest – saw a new main quest objective sprout that instructed me to investigate an anomaly. This brought me into some more story things involving the affliction of pregnant women becoming trees that ultimately had me fighting a giant treant boss made of stars, a feat that I ended up doing fairly handily even though a couple of comments posted by players in the boss lair’s front door suggested that I needed to get Tier II gear. I’m going to say that my new shotgun got me the win.
That very much leads me into the sensation that I was referencing at the opening of this column. After a certain point in the progression tree, I was beginning to run into some limitations on what I could unlock, as the next tier of building items, crafting stations, and other recipes were suddenly asking for massive amounts of a resource known as energy links.
Now, getting this resource seems pretty simple on the face of it since you earn it by completing missions or clearing outposts (aka the stuff I was doing already), but then I also noticed that the amounts of this resource I was raking in seemed pretty thin when stacked against the progress tree’s demands. And that’s only the first hurdle I noticed, as I also saw that many of the other materials I needed to place new crafting stations were things that I either had not run into previously or were in extremely scarce supply in my inventory to begin with.
It’s entirely possible that I was looking too far down the horizon. Perhaps these next things were not really meant to be unlocked until much later on. But at the same time, I started to worry that I needed to do some more focus on finding mats for Tier II crafting. I was beginning to stress that I was pushing the envelope of my gear. And I wasn’t really playing with anyone all the while; I might feel better about all of this if I had a team with me.
And then to compound all of these thoughts, I realized that, as far as I’m aware, I would have to do this all over again once the server I was on closed up for its season. It does certainly feel as if seasons run for a very long while, and I also deeply appreciate that I was still able to get rewards from previous weeks without feeling like I was behind. But do I really want to go through this all over again?
Don’t get me wrong; there is actually quite a lot about Once Human that I’ve ended up liking. I’ve obviously said enough about its deliciously spooky setting, but I also am finding the survival stuff to have been largely acceptable and fine while fighting enemies was much more fun than I thought. It’s all an effective game loop that, while very obviously taking inspiration from several other sources, doesn’t manage to feel extremely derivative at the same time.
I just don’t know that I feel the urge to experience all of this again.
Who knows, maybe there’s something I’m missing. Perhaps when the season wraps up, I won’t feel quite so much as if we’re being fully reset. Or maybe I’m just staring too far down the road before me instead of focusing on the things that are closer. It’s hard to say, and it only adds to my general confusion about how I feel about Once Human.
This game is very much a tale of two halves for me. On the one hand, there’s a much more interesting world being built than I supposed and far more fun gameplay than I was expecting. But on the other hand, that feared shoe-drop of suddenly limited materials and currencies that hamstring my progression is always going to make me feel a bit bad about playing further. But still I kept playing. And I think I might still keep on playing even after we move on.
Really these seem like questions I should answer in my own due time because it is indeed time to move on to our next gaming adventure. So, as ever, here are the choices I’m leaning toward for the coming few weeks.
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Polls will close up at the usual 1:00 p.m. EDT time on Friday, October 4th. For right now, I’m going to ponder whether or not this game is worth my continued attention. I should point out that, as I type that sentence, I’m already thinking about hopping back in again.
Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.
