Once Human’s maintenance is now complete, and the F2P open-world shooter is back online with a plethora of QoL improvements and optimisations, including a desperately-needed revision to vehicle handling.
Whilst players received a bundle of Stardust and health-related items to make up for the downtime, Once Human’s long-promised controller and Steam Deck support is still nowhere to be seen (although, confusingly, the “controller” in-game item remains in place).
In terms of Memetics, you can now pick up memetic specialisation memory fragments in the wild and trade them between players. All memetic fragments will be destroyed at the end of the season – which is in a couple of weeks time – and cannot be sent to Eternaland, so be mindful of that.
The team has also “enriched” the Highway Pursuit game mode, added a new route, and fixed the starting time to 9pm local time on all servers. The map has also been revised to make it easier to see landmarks, as well as send invitations to other players via chat channels.
There’s loads more – combat, planting, trading, wilderness, deviations, cosmetics, performance, camera; pretty much everything’s had a tweak, it seems – so head on over to Steam for the full details.
Starry Studio has also provided a new storage crate to all players in compensation for “recent server stability” when unsuccessfully trying to implement cross-character paid content sharing.
The team also outlined what to expect from the new August Event.
“On Nalcott Island, the month of August itself is an anomalous event,” the team teases. “During this ‘forgotten summer’, we will receive additional produce from harvesting every week. More events will be gradually unlocked in the game. All Metas are welcome to participate!”
In terms of controller support; despite a lot of players hoping support would come in this patch, the team says it’s hoping to roll out functionality by “mid-August”.
Finally, players affected by the territory glitch should find any resources they used to build their base returned to their backpacks.
I gave Once Human a modest three out of five stars when I reviewed it earlier this month for Eurogamer, saying it offers a deeply moreish open world scavenge-em-up, but weak action and generic clutter hold it back.
“Not for one moment did I expect a F2P live service offering to be anything other than an unmitigated slog stuffed with the pitfalls and unforced errors of every other game I started and stopped playing, so wildly over-saturated is this genre. But here I am, late at night again, fashioning myself a Slippery When Wet sign to put beside my water tank.”
