Can Once Human (a survival game) succeed as an MMO?
28The poll question for today on my YouTube channel was “Do you think an MMO Survival Game in a persistent world can work? Or are survival games single player/co-op games that can't transfer to the MMO space?” (https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxKluC3iguOqsoKoVCUDek8imjusKLwCDa)
While the poll sampling is too small to even take the poll into consideration, it is an interesting question.
Last year we saw the controversy behind the Day Before,the open-world MMO survival game and how large of a failure it was. This was a huge blow to the genre, as the survival game fans had been waiting a long time for a MMO to bring the survival genre into the mainstream. This isn’t to say DayZ and Rust, the two current premier survival games, aren’t amazing games, but they are very niche and oftentimes hard to find good communities. For a while, Amazon’s game New World looked like it was going to scratch the itch for survival fans looking for a Massive Online game, but the design shift early on moved it away from being a survival game. From the AGS news Article: Amazon Games Devs Reflect on Two Years of ‘New World’
“It’s well documented that New World began its early life in development as a PvP-focused Survival-Crafting MMO. But in the spirit of “player obsession,” we engaged early and often with our community well before launch and learned a lot about what players liked and also where they perhaps wanted a different direction.”
https://www.amazongames.com/en-us/news/articles/amazon-game-devs-reflect-on-two-years-of-new-world#:~:text=It%27s%20well%20documented%20that%20New,perhaps%20wanted%20a%20different%20direction.
Interestingly enough, it looks like another major studio, this time NetEase is going to take a crack at unlocking the code on a MMO survival game. From today’s MMORPG article “Once Human Reaches 7.7 million Pre-Registrations, Unlocking New Surprises” “The developers at Starry Studios and NetEase have announced that their upcoming action survival game Once Human has reached 7.7 million pre-registrations, and if they reach 10 million, they will unlock even more content at launch.”
https://www.mmorpg.com/news/once-human-reaches-77-million-pre-registrations-unlocking-new-surprises-2000130866
Once Human takes the survival game genre and adds a little bit of a twist, with what appears to be the stronghold contest, which adds slightly more organization to the game that most open-world survival games have. With an anticipated release date of Q3 2024, this adds another game into an already busy release quarter with a FFXIV Expansion, a WoW expansion, Brighter Shores expected to launch (https://youtu.be/Vd64GMV2HUY?si=P7sKZfJZJBvqOqtT) as well as Ashes of Creation being expected to enter in Alpha 2 testing, and probably more things not even announced yet will drop into the schedule.
The big question now is, do you think an MMO Survival game can make it? Or will Once human be yet another failure of an online game that is trying to be too big for a genre that is too small?
If you want to check out Once Human’s Steam page you can do so here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2139460/Once_Human/
Or their official website here:
https://www.oncehuman.game
#jahlon #oncehuman #survivalgames