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Once Human is a MMO-like game, with a server list for players and communities to play around PvP or PvE objectives. There are lots of MMO-ish features, helping players join communities and work together on projects, alongside server identity, world shards, layering known player names, and more. Here’s a closer look at just how MMO-like Once Human is.
Is Once Human similar to an MMO?
Once Human is an MMO-like game. There are certainly similarities to the MMORPG genre, however, there are a few differences. Firstly, when creating characters players will select server and server type. This will be where their main character will progress, and as a result, remain for the season. When you get onto the season, each server will have world layers. This is to help give players room to build, alongside reducing congestion in questing areas and events. Starry Studios stated that the Once Human server capacity is about 4000 players, hence the split into shards for the busy days for camp sites and early game quests before players eventually spread out.
While on these servers, you can join Warbands, which are essentially guilds. These guilds offer players different features like Hives. Hives are where parts of the Warband come together and build on a much larger plot of land to create super bases. This is important when it comes to some of the end-game PvP like the Territorial defence mode for Echo events. The more space and people to defend, the better your odds. These events also put you on the map as a PvP threat.
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In addition, there are many activities for Warbands to take part in. PvP servers have guild versus guild-type combat, while PvE servers get more world boss events. Certain areas of the map unite all layers of a server together, so, any player from any shard on that server will see each other in world map PvP events.
Not so MMO
For these reasons, the Once Human is very MMO-like. Yet, in other ways it is not. Unlike traditional MMOs, Once Human uses a seasonal server reset system. When the season ends, servers will go offline, wipe, and restart. You won’t lose all progress, as there’s an eternal world you progress via playing games in regular season content. This gives you permanent structures and ways to bring things into the next season.
Also, Starry Studios is aware that as seasons go on, player servers may start declining in population. To make sure players always have other active players, there will be server merges called the Mirror World. Server merges take roughly 30 minutes to complete. When they go back online, any building plots competing for space will go into the person’s stored base settings to redeploy anywhere for free. Again, you’re not getting persistent servers like traditional MMO.