Once Human is a buggy unfinished game with a laundry list of what should be fatal flaws. It has no right to be as popular as it is.
The biggest violation is that cash shop purchase are specific to one character. I bought my battle pass premium on my first character but since my server locked I had to change servers and thus characters so dont have access to my premium rewards now. And they are delaying fixing that to August 15th. How this was ever a problem in the first place is baffling!
Speaking of servers. The server design in Once Human is not ideal. Servers are divided into numerous world shards which spreads players out to a point that its basically a single player game. Even with this low player density servers are locked which prevents friends from playing together.
The game has a season model where content resets every six weeks and players start over leveling, unlocking the map, and rebuilding their base. While some progress carries over such as end game blueprints the entire unfun part of the game has to be repeated.
Seasons also gate content so players can only progress to certain points and the most rewarding content is available. This leaves players without much to do while waiting for season phases to unlock and condenses the main end game progression to late in the season. If you miss out you are out of luck and have to start over in a new season where you wait for the phases to unlock again.
Each server has its own season schedule so if you started on servers at launch and your friends started later you will arrive at the next season at different times. Characters are tied to servers and can't be transferred (yet). Its a nightmare to play together with friends if they all don't join at the exact same time. It is nearly impossible to join friends if you are late.
If the servers and seasons weren't strikes enough; the basic game play is unfinished (to put it kindly).
Enemy AI is brain dead. Enemies can barely manage attacking players let alone actually killing them. The only real danger is one shot kills to players which often happen due to bugs.
Players are also ridiculously overpowered. With the right build solo players can clear the hardest content in the game in a matter of seconds. Even if there wasn't the issue with player power the braindead AI makes most of the fights in this game easy.
Even the main attraction open world "massive multiplayer" events are plagued with bugs and easily abused enemy AI. Big open world bosses where the best strategy is just building fences everywhere. PvP events where the first player to shoot wins. Base raid extraction events totally negated by simply building on a cliff or in the water.
Speaking if PvP there are hackers everywhere. The games PvP isn't even good but yet ruined further by aimbots, wallhacks, and abusing every bit of terrain in the game.
The world itself is just a copy and paste masterpiece. The same buildings, cars, and set pieces are used everywhere. In the entire game players will only encounter a handful of enemies.
Most of the voice lines in the game are not voiced. The quests are amateur at best and click through material. Towns are deadzones with few characters but lots of empty set pieces; rarely do you see a player.
This unfinished nature of the quests and towns and they want players to believe they are going to deliver exciting new story content every 6 weeks with the new season? They are dreaming.
Many quests are supposed to do something unique but are often just bypassed by dumb enemy AI or buggy game play. For example a chest inside a fortress that you can just place your car next to and use your car to jump over the wall to get it.
This bypass mentality permeates the game. If there is some sort of system in the game there is some way to cheese your way by it and chances are you don't even have to willingly cheese... the game just cheeses itself.
Memetics are literally a meme in the game with their "meme points". They are meant to be the crafting tree for base building and crafting, but players can just assign/un-assign points in the system whenever they want so they can spec to get something and then un-assign the points while keeping what they made. At that point why not just let us get all the trees... we literally have to start over from level 1 for the next season.
Oh but specializations that go with memetics are totally random and sucks to be you if you don't luck into the best specs. Your character will just have to go without. Or you will have to rely on other players that did get the lucky spec to bail you out if it's something like refining gold/silver ore. Why is gold/silver refining a freaking specialization in the first place!?
We didn't even touch on the true progression for blueprints being a complete random lottery system. Sure they added some direct buy options but good luck getting enough of the key resource to buy everything you want. You still have to gamble for enough extra pieces to actually rank up. At least you keep the progress between seasons when you start all over again...
This game has so many issues and feels mailed in with the copy/paste and limited enemy variety. This game has NO RIGHT to be popular.
Anyway... I am still addicted to it and playing every day. I really like the game and so do many others. The Steam charts don't lie: peak concurrent players went up after launch and are staying steady. So I'm not alone. Maybe as gamers we just like our broke buggy games that lack polish and feel incomplete?
