Once Human's Season Wipes Won't Compete With Rust's

Highlights

Once Human is an open-world survival crafting game with satisfying combat and complex building.
The game features seasonal wipes every six weeks, which can be appealing for some players but demotivating for others.
To improve player retention, the game could offer persistent servers or an offline mode for those who prefer not to lose progress.

Once Human is an always-online multiplayer open-world survival crafting game. If you’ve recoiled from that sentence and are now shaking your head in disgust, I completely understand. But bear with me. Once Human is not revolutionary in its design, but from what I’ve played so far, it takes a lot of concepts familiar to the genre and makes them better. Combat is satisfying, though it definitely needs a few tweaks when it comes to PvP balance; building is complex and gratifying; the grind for materials isn’t even that bad (with better tools, trees can drop thousands of pieces of wood at once); and the world design is downright bizarre. Take a look at these nutcrackers as an example.

However, I foresee one major, glaring fault with Once Human: seasonal wipes. Once Human is a bit like Rust. In that game, players fight over resources, build bases, and generally get up to a lot of nonsense over the course of a ‘server wipe’. Servers wipe once a month on Rust, the last Thursday of every month. In Once Human, server wipes will occur every six weeks, over the course of six ‘phases’ in the server’s life cycle—each phase introduces new monsters and new battles for PvP players, with better loot and rarer resources.

During server crossover, your character will retain some skills, blueprints, and some other bits and pieces (we don’t know for sure yet, we’ll just have to wait and see). However, all other progress is lost. That huge base you built and grinded for over the course of a month and a half? It’s gone. Your resources, weapons, absolutely everything else? Gone.

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Some players love this. It levels the playing field for new and returning players alike. It’s impossible for a 100-player guild to hoard wealth, resources, or otherwise dominate a server indefinitely. Each new server wipe inspires new gameplay narratives between players, emergent conflicts, and dynamic scenarios to enjoy. Cosmetic currency and items earned during that server wipe are persistent in your game, which means you should always have something to show off for actually playing the game.

However, if you’re like me – and apparently many others across the community who’ve already expressed their disappointment in Once Human’s server wipe model – this doesn’t sound good at all. I don’t want my progress to be removed. The idea of grinding for hours and hours only for it all to disappear is the most uninspiring, demotivating aspect of games like Path of Exile, Diablo, and even Rust, although I haven’t touched that game for quite a few years now. Maybe wipes are part of the reason why…

This sort of seasonal wipe model suggests that the game simply isn’t engaging enough to hold its player base for a long time. I often think this about Diablo. If the game is so great, why do I need to start it from the beginning every couple of months? Rust, of course, has its own special kind of audience, but the same logic applies there. What’s the point of a game that wipes all your progress?

This problem could be resolved in a couple of different ways.

The ability to pick between persistent and wipe servers.
A permanent offline mode that can be shared co-op if you want it to be.

A persistent server would attract an entirely different kind of player, and while its obvious there are game mechanics that wouldn’t work on a persistent server (the game’s evolution via phases, scripted PvP events, and so on), I can still see this attracting a large-enough demographic to warrant its own attention from the developers.

In terms of a permanent offline mode, I think this should probably just be the norm for survival crafters going forward. A lot of people like to relax on these games. Building, grinding, farming mobs. Nightingale was rightfully criticized for being always-online during its launch, and a couple of months later the developers released a single-player offline version. But it was too little, too late.

I’m speculating that Once Human will have an excellent launch on Steam – it’s a shiny new free-to-play game after all – but those numbers will start to slip after the first server wipe. And then slip some more after the next one, and so on. Once Human needs to have the unbelievable sticking power of Rust to contend with its rivals. The main issue is that a six-week wipe is a lot longer than a three-week wipe. Rust is temporary, ephemeral – progress always comes and goes. But Once Human is a much longer, hard-fought slog. People will only stick around if they feel like it’s worth it. And whatever else the game does well, it’s going to have to do it extremely well to keep people coming back every six weeks.