At Gamescom 2024, I had the chance to speak with Derek Qiu, head of overseas operations for Once Human, the free-to-play survival game ‘New Weird’ published by NetEase and developed by Starry Studio. The game launched for PC on July 10 and immediately registered strong numbers of players.
Qiu discussed upcoming features and updates, answered some questions from the Once Human community, and confirmed that mobile and console releases are on the way. The plan is to bring everything together into one 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 a month since the launch, and we’ve reached $110 million. Most importantly, I think the record we’ve achieved can’t be achieved without the support of players, so we’ve also regularly ranked 5th globally in the most played games on Steam. Last week, we reached number 2 in the revenue ranking, so the launch is really beyond our expectations.
I think you’ve already posted an update. What’s next on your Once Human roadmap?
We will be releasing another PvP scenario, which will be coming in September. This will be a refreshing gameplay experience for 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 be going to mobile devices and consoles. We haven’t published our official announcement about them yet, but it will be published very soon.
Will the game have crossplay?
Yes, this will enable crossplay.
With everything, even with your cell phone?
Yes, it will be a very large community.
I’ve also been noticing some of the feedback from the Once Human community. Many people would like simplified currencies as they find them confusing.
What do you mean by simplified currencies?
Consolidate coins so there are fewer of them and it is clearer what they are for.
I haven’t gotten that feedback. I noticed that recently, on August 15th, we launched a monetization event, and that came with a new currency. If you’re referring to that, we’ll be tweaking and adjusting the monetization system. But if you’re referring to the current currency system, we haven’t gotten much feedback from players yet, not that I understand. So we don’t have that plan yet.
Are you planning to expand your customer support? Some users feel that it is a bit lacking in this area. Will you be hiring more people for customer support?
We’ve actually been discussing for a while now that we need to have more customer support for our games. The current user base is beyond our expectations, so we definitely need to catch up. That’s in the pipeline.
The problem is that we only have qualified customer support for English speakers at the moment, and we are looking for more people to cover other languages like French and Spanish. So, it is quite difficult for us. Actually, NetEase is responsible for publishing, so we have to request other resources for that as well. So it is kind of like the process, but we are trying our best to fill the manpower for customer support. In September, we will launch another website to collect players’ feedback and suggestions as well. This will probably solve some of the players’ concerns about customer support issues.
I don’t know if you’re aware, but there has been a report of people being wrongly banned from Once Human after a recent premium currency bug. Do you have any statement on this?
Oh yes, I am aware of that. Yes, so players did in fact use a bug to obtain permanent currency. We are discussing a resolution for this. We have zero tolerance for people using our bugs for profit. That is the baseline because it is unfair to paid users.
But on the other hand, is there another solution that we can show our baseline to these players without banning them outright? So for the resolution, we’re still working on it, and it’s not a final decision. We’re still debating about it. It’s a very difficult decision for us.
Are you still working to improve performance?
Yes, that’s also one of the reasons why we delayed the mobile plan as promised. We wanted to stabilize and improve the optimization for the PC player user experience. We also want to implement some technologies like NVIDIA DLSS. After that, we will stabilize the mobile experience and then launch it.
Are you open to allowing a mid-season server progression transfer? Some people are saying, you know, the server they’re on isn’t very populated and if they change servers they have to start from scratch. What do you think about that?
Once players have played a scenario or season for six weeks, they will have the option to switch 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. This is also because we want to stabilize the players on the server because if they leave in the middle, it wouldn’t be fair to other players who are playing the same scenario and season with them, and it would also impact the server ecosystem. The current design is that they have to finish at least six weeks. Then, after that, they can switch to other scenarios if they want.
Are you still adding voice work and translations to Once Human?
Oh yes. Voice translation is also one of the things we are looking at now. Before, 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 reevaluate. Right now, we only have English, so we are evaluating which language should be next.
We don’t have a plan to cover all languages. We are trying to support as many languages as possible for voiceover translation, but if we try to make a voiceover for all languages, the package will be too large for players to download. Secondly, we need to make sure that no country feels neglected while we are doing voiceover for other countries, so this is also a difficult decision for us to make.
Do you think there will be more ways to get Starchroms in the future?
Yes, there will be. We’re already working on it, whether it’s with the current season’s rewards or with events, we’re trying to give more Starchroms to players.
Another thing people are wondering is whether you should decrease the number of channels on a server. They say that there are a bit too many channels, so it seems like the server is not very populated because there are so many channels. Especially on PvP servers, they think it would be better to have 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 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 is one of the directions. If the server has too few people to play, and they can’t even start a fight, we may consider merging servers, so that will also be a direction.
Are you going to add transmogrification to Once Human?
That’s a really good question because our monetization model is based on cosmetics, so we’re definitely interested in giving players more options to change their look for their gear and their weapon. But I would say that’s still a long way off, and so we’re trying to figure out the best way to produce all of those features in the future.
Do you think there will be new full maps in the future?
Yes. As players can see now, the map is kind of locked, and there are a lot of unexplored areas to be filled, so all of these maps will be designed, and we will have a new map in October, so yes, there will be an update on that.
Are there any plans to expand your development studio to accommodate the content pipeline?
Yes, we are already expanding that. We currently have 300 people, but we are expanding our development team now. We are looking forward to getting to 400 and seeing if that is enough for live content production and bug fixes.
Are you looking for cheats and exploits in Once Human PvP? Are you doing anything to improve it?
Yes. What we are currently doing is that we will regularly post a list of everyone who has used cheats. We are also trying to invest more in investigating these issues. Since we have a PvP game experience, we have zero tolerance for any action that breaks the fairness between our players, so this will be the top priority for our game.
The community also says that Prime Wars is a bit slow right now. Are you trying to improve this?
Yes, we actually did some deep research on Prime Wars. We collaborated with our community to find out what kind of issues Prime Wars has. Laggy is one of the issues, so we identified the root cause and are reworking it. I hope the new version of Prime Wars will be released to players very soon.
How often are you looking to add new weapons? Is it every season?
The weapon system is something we are trying to enrich because we want to provide different playstyles to players, so we have the weapon enrichment system and we are also trying to adjust the current balance of the weapon system. And yes, in the future there will be more and more weapons introduced into the game.
Once Human is powered by its own proprietary engine. Do you plan to add any cutting-edge features like ray tracing? I know you work with NVIDIA on PC.
Oh yeah, that’s something we’re working on for DLSS and other cutting-edge technologies that we’re trying to implement in our game. However, we still need to collaborate well with the third party to fit it into our own built engine because it’s not Unreal Engine or Unity, so it takes longer to fit.
Are there any new projects in the next season of Once Human?
Yes, there will be. There will be new designs for weapons and armor as well.
Since seasons reset progress, will you add some sort of progress retention for existing players at some point? Long-time players feel like they’ve lost everything and would like some recognition for their past work.
We don’t actually call it a season reset; we call it a season refresh because they don’t lose what they have even if their level is reset to level one. This is due to the consideration of providing fairness to 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 game rules.
So even if they start over from level one, they’ll still enjoy the game as much as possible. It won’t be a very repetitive growth path for them, even if they have to explore the same map or they have to level up from level one, but we have to make sure that the content we provide in that scenario is interesting enough for them to do that.
Maybe some kind of badge, some indication in their display name that they are a veteran Once Human player.
Yes, that would make sense. The system I would say is not perfect yet, so we are trying to introduce more rewards for old players, and the achievement system will be enriched in the future, so we are working on that, yes.
Thank you for your time.