From Zenless Zone Zero to The First Descendant, we seem to be experiencing a gratuitous explosion. Desperation, you time-strapped adults, for a lack of carefully crafted pocket money offers no shield against the onslaught of games that want a chunk of your evening or weekend. Today’s big release, Once Human, at least features a giant school bus with monster legs, along with a less exciting but customizable van that only has wheels. In this open world survival shooter, you are a “Meta-Human” making your way around a landscape corrupted by Stardust, which has warped the landscape and is slowly driving you insane.
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You’ll be able to chop down trees, build bases, and craft/obtain rare color-coded weapons. It’s a familiar mix, but I’m intrigued by the touches of the monster model and the Control-esque and Ghostwire-adjacent level in the trailer. I will try the game this evening. I’m hoping it’ll be a bit like Division 2’s Dark Zones, but New Weird. On that note, the Starry Studio developers have made a launch FAQ ahead of the inevitable possible release day bugs.
Let me break it down for you: at first, you only get one character per account. As Human is cross-platform, but not on Steam accounts, for now, “due to their inherent limitations”; the developers suggest using NetEase’s Loading Bay launcher, which I don’t have much experience with myself. The game is also not officially running on Steam Deck right now. More worryingly, it still doesn’t even support controllers. “Our development team is actively working on changes to bring controller support as soon as possible,” the FAQ promises. “We expect to complete this by August.”
After Human will receive seasonal updates with new scenarios offering different rules and environments, with players able to carry resources between seasons through their “personal domain” in Eternaland, which sounds like the name of a rip-off of Web3 Second Life, but apparently it’s just a customizable base. There will be separate PvE and PvP servers at launch, with a small amount of PvE items exclusive to the PvE server.
Now then, how about some system requirements! Below is apparently what you need to run Once Human in 1080p.
The minimum:
OS: Windows 10 (64-bit)
CPU: Intel Core i5-4460
RAM: 8 GB RAM
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti, 4GB or AMD Radeon R9 270
DirectX: Version 11
Available storage space: 60 GB
Recommended:
OS: Windows 10 (64-bit)
CPU: Intel Core i7-7700
RAM: 16 GB RAM
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060, 6GB or AMD Radeon RX 580
DirectX: Version 11
Available storage space: 70 GB SSD
For 60 fps performance:
OS: Windows 10 (64-bit)
CPU: Intel Core i5-12400F
RAM: 16 GB RAM
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 3060 or AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT
DirectX: Version 11
Available storage space: 70 GB SSD
Sound a bit demanding? The developers are aware. “Once Human offers a high-quality audiovisual experience,” explains the FAQ. “This requires a lot of storage space for HD images, textures, sound effects and map files. In addition, as a survival MMO game, we aim to give long viewing distances so that players can see structures in world as much as possible. We are constantly working to optimize the game for the best possible experience.”
On a related note, Once Human does not yet support DLSS “due to ongoing optimization and integration of certain features.” It supports DirectX 12, but this may cause “a slight frame drop” compared to DirectX 11.
Starry Studio has also put together some basic tips to improve performance – in particular, lowering the resolution, lowering the quality of textures and special effects, and lowering the rendering quality. The developers further note that if you try to connect a controller — including “pedals and gearbox controls for driving games, or joysticks for flying games” — there may be compatibility errors that lead to crashes.
If you’re reading this in the distant future hours from now, after Once Human goes live, I hope the advice helped. Past experience of free-to-play launches suggests there will be plenty of gremlins to weed out. And beyond that, who knows? Once upon a time Human was the most popular demo during Steam Next Fest 2024. Again, there’s no shortage of competition right now in the loot-ridden realm of F2P, but it’ll probably be another big hit this year.