Looking for something a little darker in your post-apocalyptic MMO, and Fallout 76 isn’t quite cutting it? Developer Starry Studio’s upcoming co-op survival MMO Once Human might be for you. The open-world survival game recently had a closed beta test on Steam that saw its initial 20,000 player count extended to 50,000 players.
Slated for a Q3 2024 release, Once Human sees players waking up after a cataclysmic event where everything has become infested by an alien entity known as Stardust. You yourself have been affected, turned into a meta-human with no memory of who you were. As a meta-human, your quest is to find the truth about Stardust, find out where it came from, and what it wants. Along the way, you’ll need to navigate between the five different factions in the world, which each have their own goals.
Just because you’re a meta-human, doesn’t mean you’re invincible. Stardust has infected everything, including the soil and water. Similar to what happens in Fallout 76, if you eat polluted food and drink dirty water, it will cost you. In this case, it’s your Sanity. When your Sanity drops, your max HP will also drop.
Seeing as this is an MMO at heart, Once Human will have you and your friends (or without, if you so choose) collecting gear, finding new blueprints for weapons (about 100 blueprints spread across seven different categories), building and defending your base known as a Territory Core, as well as tackling numerous enemies that are once human. That includes challenging bosses from another dimension to reap the rewards of powerful items, and to ultimately ease the spread of Stardust.
Or, much like Hunt: Showdown, you can choose to reap the rewards from those who did the heavy lifting, and kill them for the gear. The choice is yours. You can head on over to the Once Human official site for more info, along with signing up for potential future beta tests.