2024 has seen a real flood of strong new contenders to challenge the best survival games on Steam, with the likes of Palworld, Enshrouded, and Sons of the Forest joining long-time stalwarts such as Rust, Ark, and Valheim. Once Human might have slowed down a touch from launch, but the free-to-play game is still riding high. Of course, that also means a flood of player feedback. In a new blog, developer Starry Studio outlines “major balance adjustments” coming to weapon builds in December, but promises that it will try its best to avoid nerfs where possible.
“We have been closely following your feedback on weapon build balance,” the Once Human developer writes in its latest update. “We want every build to have its moment to shine, so we’re planning a balance update on Thursday December 19.” You’ll have a little time to prepare, then, but it could mean some big changes for one of 2024’s best survival games. While the prospect of this might be scary, Starry emphasizes that it wants to avoid taking away players’ hard-earned loadouts.
“We understand that you’ve invested a lot of time and effort into collecting and upgrading your weapons,” it says. “That’s why we’ll do our best to avoid nerfs in this balance adjustment, focusing instead on buffs and environmental changes.” It will also be providing more blueprint conversion attempts alongside the updates, which should allow you to more easily adapt to a new-look build if you want to try out one of the upgraded options.
The actual list of changes, which Starry says is “not all the adjustments or final values,” is already pretty colossal. Top of the list is a complete rework for Bounce. When triggered, it will now cause your shot to randomly bounce to one enemy within 15 meters, or off the environment, with the potential to bounce one more time, and each bounce deals 40% of your attack as weapon damage. This change also means a complete overhaul to weapons, gear, mods, cradles, and tactical items that make use of the skill.
Random gear effects have been enhanced with a new “pseudo-random trigger algorithm” to avoid the frustration of a bad run of luck. Essentially, this acts as a pity timer by increasing a given effect’s chance to happen each time it fails to trigger, lowering the frequency of extreme cases where it consistently fails to pop. Several weapons that are dramatically affected by trigger conditions have also been adjusted.
Next on the list are calibration blueprints, which Starry is aiming to make easier to get your hands on. Dropped weapons will now always carry general calibration blueprints, while the refined blueprints earned from defeating Super Anomalies will always be seasonal variants. The legendary calibration blueprint drop rates from Super Anomalies have been dramatically increased, while melee weapon drop rates in dungeons are going down.
Beyond that comes an extensive list of additional reworks, redesigns, and rebalancing. In total, there are adjustments to 21 weapon types, seven armor categories, 15 mods, and two calibrations, as well as the Mitsuko deviation and the Bounce Rampage cradle. Starry says that it’s listening for feedback on these initial proposed numbers and will “continue to adjust and optimize after testing and gathering your input” before the update lands on Thursday December 19.
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