At Gamescom 2024, I had the chance to speak to Derek Qiu, Head of Overseas Operations for Once Human, the ‘New Weird’ free-to-play survival game published by NetEase and developed by Starry Studio. The game launched on PC on July 10 and immediately registered strong player numbers.
Qiu discussed the upcoming features and updates, answered some questions from the Once Human community, and confirmed that the mobile and console launches are on the way. The plan is to merge everything into a single unified community thanks to cross-play.
Tell me about the recent launch. How is it going so far?
It’s beyond our imagination and expectation. It’s been over one month after the launch, and we have reached $110 million. Most importantly, I think the record we achieved cannot be achieved without gamer support, so often, we also ranked number 5 globally in the most played games on Steam. Last week, we reached number 2 in the revenue ranking, so the launch is actually really beyond our expectations.
I think you already published an update. What’s next in your Once Human roadmap?
We are going to publish another PvP scenario, which will come in September. This one will be a refreshing gaming experience for the PvP players, and then in October, we will have another PvE scenario, which is still in progress. But we will have new Tyrants, and new monsters. In the long-term pipeline we will also go on mobile and on consoles. We haven’t published our official announcement on those yet, but it will be published very soon.
Will the game have crossplay?
That’s going to be crossplay enabled, yes.
With everything, even mobile?
Yes, it’s gonna be a very big community.
I have also been watching some of the feedback from the Once Human community. Many people would like simplified currencies, as they believe they are confusing.
What do you mean by simplified currencies?
Consolidating currencies, so there are fewer and it is clearer what they are for.
I haven’t received that feedback. I noticed that recently, on the 15th of August, we launched a monetization event, and that came up with a new currency. If you are referring to that, we will modify and adjust the monetization system. But if you are referring to the current currency system, we haven’t received a lot of feedback from the players yet, not as I understand. So, we don’t have that plan yet.
Are you planning to expand customer support? Some users believe it is a bit lacking in that area. Are you going to hire some more people for customer support?
Actually, we’ve been discussing for a while that we need to have more customer support for our games. The current user base is beyond our expectations, so we need to catch up for sure. That’s in the pipeline.
The thing is that we have only qualified customer support for English speakers right now, and we are seeking more people to cover other languages like French and Spanish. So, it’s pretty hard for us. Actually, NetEase is responsible for the publishing, so we have to request other resources for that as well. So it’s kind of like in the process, but we are trying our best to fulfill the manpower for the customer support. In September, we will launch another website to collect the player’s feedback and suggestions as well. That will probably solve some players’ concerns about customer support issues.
I don’t know if you’re aware, but there’s been a report of people being erroneously banned from Once Human following a recent premium currency bug. Do you have a statement on this?
Oh yeah, I am aware of that. Yes, so actually the players used a bug to get permanent currency. We’re discussing the resolution to that one. We have zero tolerance for people using our bugs to get a profit. That’s the baseline because that’s unfair to the paid users.
But on the other hand, is there another solution that we can show our baseline to those players without banning them directly? So, for the resolution, we’re still working on it, and it’s not a final decision. We are still debating on this. It’s a quite hard decision for us.
Are you still working on improving the performance?
Yes, that’s also one of the reasons we delayed the mobile plan as we promised. We wanted to stabilize and improve the optimization for the PC gamer’s user experience. We also want to implement some technologies, such as NVIDIA DLSS. After that, we will stabilize the mobile experience and then we’ll launch it.
Are you open to allowing a mid-season server progression transfer? Some people are saying, you know, that the server they are on is not very populated, and if they change server, they need to start over from scratch. What do you think about that?
When players have played a scenario or a season for six weeks, they will have the option to change to another scenario, but within the six weeks, we don’t have a plan for them to transfer to other servers or scenarios, so they have to start over. That’s also because we want to stabilize the players in the server because if they left in the middle, that would not be fair to other players who are playing the same scenario and season with them, and it would also impact the server’s ecosystem. The current design is that they have to finish at least six weeks. So after that, it can change to other scenarios they want.
Are you still adding voice work and translations to Once Human?
Oh yeah. Voice translation is also one of the things that we are looking at right now. Previously, we didn’t do it because the cost was relatively high. So, if we want to do it, we have to do all the languages, and we don’t have the budget and manpower to cover all the languages. But we will re-evaluate. Currently, we only have English, so we are evaluating which language should be the next one.
We don’t have a plan to cover all the languages. We’re trying to support as many languages as possible for the textual translation, but if we try to do a voiceover for all of the languages, the package will become very big for players to download. Secondly, we need to make sure that no countries will feel neglected while we are doing voiceover for other countries, so it’s also a hard decision for us to make.
Do you think there will be more ways to get Starchroms in the future?
Yes, there will be. We are already working on this, either with the current season rewards or with events we’re trying to give more Starchroms to the players.
Something else people are wondering is if you would lower the number of channels on a server. They say there are a bit too many, so it feels like the server is not very populated because there are too many channels. Especially on PvP servers, they feel like it would be better to have like three or four channels instead of 10.
For this one, we are trying to have a server monitoring system that can dynamically monitor the server’s capacity. So far, we have opened a server manually, to be honest. So, if we see that a server has less population, we will stop opening more servers. That’s one of the directions. If the server has very few people to play, and they can’t even start a fight, we might consider merging servers together, so that will be a direction as well.
Are you going to add transmogrification to Once Human?
That’s a very good question because our monetization model is based on cosmetics, so we are certainly interested in giving players more options to change their look for the gear and the weapon. But I would say it’s still on the way, and then we’re trying to see the best way to output all of those features in the future.
Do you think there will be new full maps in the future?
Yes. As the players can see right now, the map is kind of locked, and there are a lot of unexplored areas to be filled, so all of those maps will be designed, and we will have a new map in October, so yes, there will be an update on this.
Are there any plans to extend your development studio to accommodate the content pipeline?
Yes, we’re already expanding that. Currently, we have 300 people, but we are expanding our development team right now. We look forward to reaching 400 and seeing if that’s enough for content production and live issue fixes.
Are you looking into cheats and exploits in Once Human PvP? Are you doing something to improve that?
Yes. What we are currently doing is that on a regular basis, we will post the list of everyone who has used cheats. We are also trying to invest more into investigating those issues. Because we have a PvP game experience, we have zero tolerance for any action that breaks the fairness among our players, so this one will be the top priority for our game.
The community also says that Prime Wars are a bit laggy right now. Are you trying to improve that?
Yes, actually, we’ve already done quite a profound research on Prime Wars. We’ve collaborated with our community to discover what kind of issue Prime Wars have. Laggy is one of the issues, so we identified the root cause and are revamping it. Hopefully, the new version of Prime Wars will come out for players very soon.
How often are you looking to add new weapons? Is it every season?
The weapon system is absolutely something that we’re trying to enrich because we want to provide different gameplay styles to the players, so we do have the weapon enrichment system, and also, we are trying to adjust the current balance of the weapon system. And yes, in the future there will be more and more weapons introduced to the game.
Once Human is powered by your own proprietary engine. Do you plan to add some high-end features like ray tracing? I know that you work with NVIDIA on PC.
Oh yes, that’s something we are working with for DLSS and other high-tech, high-end technology we’re trying to implement into our game. However, we still need to collaborate well with the third party to fit into our self-made engine because it’s not Unreal Engine or Unity, so it takes longer to fit in.
Are there any new blueprints in the next season of Once Human?
Yes, there will be. There will be new blueprints for the weapons and armor as well.
Since the seasons reset progress, are you going to add some kind of progress retention for existing players at some point? Old players feel like they’ve lost everything and they’d like some acknowledgment of their previous work.
Actually, we don’t call it season reset; we call it season renewal because they don’t actually lose what they’ve got, even though their level will be reset to level one. That’s due to the consideration of providing fairness to the new players. Imagine if you were level 15 and you played against a level one; it’s not fair to new players, and that’s also the reason why we bring the scenario features because different seasons will have different rules of play.
So, even though they start again from level one, they will still enjoy the game as much as possible. It will not be a very repetitive growth path for them, even though they have to explore the same map or they have to level up from level one, but we gotta make sure that the content we provide in this scenario is interesting enough for them to do it.
Maybe some kind of badge, some indication on the display name that they are veteran players of Once Human.
Yeah, that would make sense. The system I would say is not perfect yet, so we’re trying to introduce more rewards for the old players, and the achievement system will be enriched in the future, so we are working on this, yes.
Thank you for your time.
