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Hype is a dangerous beast. Getting caught up in hype can drown your brain in so much excitement that your critical functions submerge in a sea of serotonin, and before you know it you’ve invested your time, money, and perhaps even emotional well-being in something that could very well fail to meet your expectations. Disappointment after lofty hype can be a harsh fall, and if you’re old enough to remember waiting in line for the premiere of Phantom Menace you may know what I’m talking about. In video game circles we had the debacle of Cyberpunk 2077‘s original release in 2020, and more recently the disparity of promises versus reality in Bethesda’s Starfield. Sometimes the hype gets out of control on the user end, but hype is certainly an age old tactic to sell people on something, precisely because you turn your brain off and reach for your wallet. The gaming industry has pulled some really nasty tricks over the years like having someone on a stage pretending to play a game on the screen “live” when it’s really just curated and pre-rendered footage that ends up never making it to release. I personally am at the point where I don’t care how pretty a trailer is if there’s no actual gameplay shown, and even then see above in terms of having to be skeptical if it’s truly actual gameplay.
There’s still a want to believe, though, especially when something seems tailor-made to fit your tastes. An open-world exploration and building game where you fight weird-ass monsters with modern tech in a post-apocalyptic environment? Where magic and science mix and dreams and reality intertwine? Hey, what’s this?
It looks amazing, but everything about this should be a red flag as far as hype, right? Especially when you dig into it and find out it’s a Chinese game being published by NetEase which is mostly known for mobile gachas and abandoning their decent IPs not long after release. This is a problem track record that shouldn’t be ignored.
And yet, Dawn and I were lucky enough to get into their latest closed beta test over the Holidays and man, despite dealing with all the bugs and not quite completed content, the gameplay loop is there and quite compelling at the moment. It looks beautiful, even in the more grotesque designs of monsters and infected places. Combat is fun, including some Control-esque telekinetic powers, stealth kills, and lots of customizable guns to shoot things with. You level up, you build your home/base, you fight giant boss monsters in confrontations that could easily rival Resident Evil encounters.Even the enemy AI is annoyingly good, at least where the human enemies are concerned. Fighting a squad of soldiers with assault rifles and grenades is a lot different than gunning down zombies — okay they’re not called zombies but the “first stage” infected are totally zombies. There was an event about twenty years back in the timeline called Starfall where a partial dimensional merging caused Earth to suffer global catastrophe and mutation as Lovecraftian horrors and their detritus (called Stardust) ravaged the planet. Humanity struggles on, and new hope has emerged in the form of the PC’s who are not only immune to Stardust but have evolved the power to wield it and strike back. The writing and dialogue are not overly stellar but not terrible, especially considering English is not the primary language for the developers.
So the game is living up to a lot of the hype, especially since we’ve got our own grubby little hands on it and so can be assured we’re not being spoon fed some carefully curated cutscenes. But naatually, no monetization has been enabled yet, and since the game is currently set to be Free to Play on release you know it’s going to be chock full of stuff to spend real-world cash on. They claim that will be purely cosmetic items, but even if they hold true to that, what about NetEase? Will Once Human be abandoned like other games before it?
I mean, I’d hope not since what I’ve seen has so much potential both realized and possible, but the hype beast has to stay in check. This beta run expires in a couple of weeks and final release is set for several months down the road (Q3 2024). A lot could happen between now and then. A lot could happen after it goes public. Either has the potential to bury the good here under a heap of bullshit. There *is* something here, and it’s pretty great, and I’m thinking some of you folks would get a big kick out of playing. But first we’ll have to wait and see if it survives its own dimensional collision with the real world…