One Hour One Life Forums

When I was a child named Christine, you gave me everything you had. In exchange you asked me to kill the Queen, Sunshine. I didn't understand why, but I promised that I would.

It took me ages, but I did it. I hope you're proud.

http://lineage.onehouronelife.com/serve … &id=280930

I just played OHOL for about...8h straight? 9? Let me summarise my experience, the way it ended, and why I've decided that unless something drastically changes, I'm not going to come back. This is going to be really, really, rambly, 100% unedited thoughts, because I badly need sleep, but I need to get them out now before I forget.

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Alright, so 90% of the time I get reincarnated as an Eve or an Eve's first baby. It doesn't really matter which, because I end up dying anyway. As a newly born Eve without a stable food source, I cannot raise a child, so I immediately abandon any children I get. In the beginning, I would take the time to apologise to them, but that quickly stopped when one of them spelled 'F U   B I T C-' before dying. Great.

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So, I decide that I'm going to rush and make a good base as soon as possible. Then I can have kids, right? Within a minute of my next reincarnation I find a good location. Plenty of food, 6 ponds really close to each other, plenty of milkweed and clay. Seeds are a little bit far, but it can't be perfect, right?

I get to work. After about 25 minutes, I have a clay bowl and water my first batch of carrots. I'd abandoned like 6 children at this point, so I'm glad to see that my new kid is a girl. She takes one look at my stuff, starts walking around in circles, then dies when I can't get to her in time. Great. Soon I get grey hair and I can't have kids anymore. I commit suicide. God, it's nearly impossible to get a base going in time alone. So okay, I decide, I need to have a kid to help. Instead of abandoning every kid, I need to raise one kid and then get them to help.

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In my next game I try just that. At this point this is like my 5th time in a row trying to start my own colony. My kid dies within one minute of growing hair. Before raising her, I had asked if they were experienced. They said yes. I commit suicide.

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At this point I have had it with trying to build my own colony from scratch. I commit suicide a bunch of times and finally, finally end up in a civilisation. I get swept up in it. The Norths had a beautiful thing going, and I wanted in. I started farming, telling the newbies what to do and teaching them the sustainability laws and stuff. I wanted to do more, maybe expand the berry farm, but it was all I could do to keep the village afloat. Eventually, I die, loved by my family. A good life. The only good one, really.

I get reborn into the Norths. Some bitch eats the seeding carrots in an attempt to survive. Everybody scatters. I saw maybe two men left before I kicked the bucket. People were dying left right and center. I walk willingly into Terry, the family pet snake. What was the point of my old life? Everything I did was erased.

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I go through a few more Eve, first child of Eve, die, rinse and repeat cycles. Eventually I end up in a nice town. Everybody is working hard. I once again start teaching. Don't empty the ponds. Only pick fruiting milkweed. Hunt family rabbit only. Water the domestic bush after you pluck the last seed or I will pluck your damn eyes out. The usual.

Some guy starts planting gooseberry seeds in the carrot farm. 'Mesashe?' I can't remember the name his in-game mum gave him. He claimed to be the highest playtime player. Most of the villagers were pissed that he was converting all the damn soil into bare bushes, and we tried to make a knife to kill him at some point.

The new meta is convert all the soil to bushes and live off that or something, I think because the bushes are technically infinite. That's all we players ever seem to be doing. Taking advantage of the infinite, and as the game gets harder and harder all we do is cling to them tighter and we get less wriggle room. All the laws are designed to try to take advantage of theoretically infinite resources. 'Everything runs out,' and I know that you want people to move, Jason, or collaborate or trade or something. That doesn't happen in the game right now, not to any significant extent. People just die. If you spend time talking, you die.

Eventually all the villagers die. It's just me and him now. Pissed, I ask him if this was his idea of a perfect village. We were both men, you see.

He tells me that no one was born because of an upcoming update. Also, he has a coordinate tracker. He can find the village again using these coordinates. I point out that if the game is resetting because of the update, everything will get wiped. He says, not necessarily.

And honestly, all I could think of at that point was my poor in-game family. They built the village up from scratch, working hard to get a forge going, a farm going, bakery going. It takes hours upon hours of collaborative effort to even get to this point. Mr Highest Playtime hadn't even asked if the people there wanted to transition to berries. He just planted them, acting like we didn't have any part in getting the soil there, in building this place up, and then when the carrot harvest inevitably went down my family all died. And I get that it's because of the meta. I believe that his exact words were "I'm sorry I know how to play the game". I get that if you want to stay in that place for any lengthy period of time, you need to transition to berries and compost. Seeding carrots IS a waste of soil. Soil is hard to get. I know all this!

But. What's the point of a village without people? You have your good, sustainable village now, but nobody is in it. You can get people in it, sure, by I don't know, recruiting via discord or something, but the beauty of getting complete strangers to work together for a common goal is gone. It was all so empty. So pointless. I was the last one left and all I did was wander around the place in circles before I ended my life prematurely.

Is this what the gameplay balance is going to be? Work insanely hard for 60 minutes, die, and watch inevitably as new people make reasonable mistakes and screw up the collaborative effort of so many others? Do the same thing, over and over again as Eve? Go meta and end up killing half your family? The game isn't going to get easier, according to Jason. He wants "I want villages to go to war FOR REAL based on true gameplay reasons.  Resource shortages, fertility issues, etc." He wants "Where is trade in the game?  That is what I want.  Real trade, not role-playing trade.  But there is no reason to trade if food is infinite and everything you make lasts forever."  He wants all this stuff, and I feel like what he wants in a game and what I want to play is fundamentally different. 

"You don't care for your baby in this game because you're roleplaying mother.  You care for your baby because it's your only chance at a future after your own death." -Jason.

The thing is, I do care for my children in this game because I'm roleplaying mother. There is no point in trying to invest in a future beyond my death, because it is almost guaranteed that some idiot will come along and plant berry bushes in the carrot field or eat the seeding carrots or dry up all the ponds and then everybody will just die. I call my children 'Kiddos'. I ask them to stay close to the farm so they don't die. I give them clothes. I get happy when I see them. I joke with my family, if they're the talkative kind. In that moment, I am their mother/aunt/family, and I want to see them live. That is the thing keeping me running to the ponds for what feels like the 100th time.

The point of a game is to have fun. It's not fun now. It's 60 minutes of frantically trying to keep myself and my family alive, and at the end of it I get rewarded with a black screen and the knowledge that they will probably die after I go.

I'm just so tired of all this. I'm leaving. Maybe permanently. I was tempted to ask for a refund, because this is not the experience I thought I would have at all, the trailer is incredibly misleading, but I stopped myself. It wouldn't be fair to Jason.

If you got through it all, I wanted to clarify that these are my personal thoughts and feelings. I might be factually wrong on some points. That's the sleep deprivation talking. Tell me about it. Or don't. I'm not exactly planning on coming back.