Spooky free-to-play open worlder Once Human is out today, and the devs have some crash and performance tips

rockpapershotgun.com:

From Zenless Zone Zero to The First Descendant, we seem to be experiencing a free-to-play explosion. Despair, ye time-constrained adults, for your carefully engineered shortage of pocket money offers no bulwark against the onslaught of games that want a slice of your evening or weekend. Today's big release, Once Human, at least features a giant schoolbus on monster legs, together with a less exciting but customisable van that just has wheels. In this open world survival shooter, you are a "Meta-Human" making your way around a landscape corrupted by Stardust, which has warped the scenery and will slowly drive you nuts.

You'll get to chop down trees, build bases and craft/obtain weapons of colour-coded rarities. It's a familiar blend, but I'm intrigued by the touches of Control-esque and Ghostwire-adjacent monster and level design in the trailers. I'm going to try the game out this evening. I'm hoping it'll be a bit like The Division 2's Dark Zones but New Weird. On which note, developers Starry Studio have done a launch FAQ in advance of the probably inevitable release day bugs.

Let me pack it down for you: at launch, you only get one character per account. Once Human is cross-platform, but not on Steam accounts, for the moment, "due to their inherent limitations"; the developers suggest using NetEase's Loading Bay launcher instead, which I don't have much experience with myself. The game also doesn't officially run on Steam Deck right now. More vexingly, it doesn't yet support controllers either. "Our development team is actively working on changes to bring controller support as soon as possible," the FAQ promises. "We expect to complete this by August."

Once Human will get seasonal updates with new scenarios offering different rules and environments, with players able to carry resources between seasons via their "personal domain" at Eternaland, which sounds like the name of a web3 Second Life rip-off but is seemingly just a customisable base. There will be