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If you’re into Rust or Tarkov, you understand the highs and lows of the wipe cycle. You spend a few weeks or months grinding, sweating, fighting, and dying, but in the end, it’s all erased. Your trophies and triumphs turn to dust, along with the base you labored over and the gear you crafted or stole. Everyone starts fresh again. Everyone starts with nothing. Once Human uses a variation of the season wipe system by clearing the map but allowing players to keep certain items. Wipes tear at the fabric of the MMORPG premise, but Starry Studio is gambling that it won’t all unravel.
The Problem and Importance of Season Wipes
Waking up naked on the beach is a classic Rust experience, where seasonal wipes have the inevitability of sunrise. You have nothing but a rock, a torch, and a dream. Where those things will take you, no one can say. Wipes perform an essential function in PvP survival and base-building games. Like a wave crashing through sand castles, they scrub the map clean, evening things out for the next season of war. Without wipes, you’d never unseat powerful clans. Control over crucial POIs would remain in the same hands forever or pass back and forth in an eternal, pointless war.
Unlike Rust, however, Once Human is first and foremost an MMO. Imagine erasing three years or even three months of character progress in WoW or FF14 on purpose. Though some may delight at the thought, many would resist with good reason. MMOs are some of the closest experiences to a “second life” we have and can occupy as much of our minds and social calendars as our real-world responsibilities. Raids, guild events, and the legendary loot grind all orbit around the idea of persistent progression. You earn and build, and your earnings and buildings stay. In Once Human, that perfect base location won’t matter.
What’s Lost and What Remains in Once Human
The servers reset every six weeks in Once Human, sending everyone’s character back to Level 1. Your Memetics (tech tree knowledge) and base vanish, forcing you to grind your way back to comfort and power. You keep your cosmetics, story progress, and some material, medicine, and ammo, as well as items like Starchroms and Crystgins. With this system, Starry Studios is trying to have its cake and wipe it, too. With the first wipe roughly a month away, it’s too early to say if that’s a wise gambit. Perhaps retaining some of your items for a jumpstart means the grind won’t feel pointless.
Eternaland solves some of these problems but not all. Preserving your base in an instanced location is an imperfect solution. We develop an affinity for our bases, rooted in the stories they helped us tell. We remember the raids we scraped through thanks to high walls and rattling turrets. We remember the funny encounters, the supply runs that ended in disaster. Those memories cling not only to the buildings but also to whatever corner of the map you called your own. Can you uproot the seat of your MMO self without spoiling it? Will fun be put out to pasture in Eternaland? Either way, you can’t unshake this Etch-A-Sketch.
