Once Human's Isles of Abyss Ocean Expansion Launches Free on PS5, Xbox and PC

Once Human has spent its first year and a half entirely on dry land. That changed this week, as NetEase's free-to-play survival game shipped Isles of Abyss, its largest content update since launch, pushing players off the coast of Nalcott and into open water for the first time. The expansion went live October 21 in North America (October 22 elsewhere) simultaneously on PC, mobile, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, with full cross-play and cross-progression across every platform.

The update was detailed in a PlayStation Blog post from Vincent Tao, Lead Game Designer on Once Human, who framed the ocean not as a backdrop but as a character in its own right. "The entire ocean is a massive, conscious entity known as 'The Sunken Lord,'" Tao wrote, describing a sea that actively pushes back against the player rather than simply hosting new map geometry.

A living ocean that fights back

Isles of Abyss casts the sea itself as the expansion's antagonist. The Sunken Lord manifests through environmental set pieces scattered across the water: towering structures called "The Tower" and drifting, crewless ghost ships known as "Voyagers," both of which hint at the entity's reach long before players encounter it directly. Regional hazards compound the danger, with rolling fog banks, corrosive black tides and bursts of temporal fire rain forcing players to read the weather as carefully as any enemy encounter.

Those hazards build toward colossal regional bosses housed in dedicated towers, each guarding a slice of the map before the Sunken Lord itself becomes a reachable, fightable target. It's a structure closer to a raid ladder than a typical open-world checklist, and it gives the ocean a sense of escalating stakes that Once Human's original Nalcott map never had to sustain.

Shipbuilding takes center stage

The centerpiece system is the Sea Fortress, a fully customizable vessel that starts as little more than a patched-together wooden boat and can be rebuilt into anything from an armored sci-fi carrier to whatever a player's scrap materials allow. "The design is entirely up to your imagination," Tao said of the system, which lets players swap hulls, weapons and utility modules as they gather better components. Individual ships can also be docked together into larger player fleets, turning sea exploration into a group logistics problem as much as a combat one.

Five regions, one progression loop

Once players push past the starting island, Isles of Abyss opens into five distinct oceanic regions that can be tackled in any order, each with its own hazards, resources and boss encounters. NetEase built the expansion around a deliberate land-sea feedback loop: resources gathered on islands upgrade a ship's naval gear, while materials hauled up from the ocean feed back into land-based gear and base progression. Players can also dive beneath the surface entirely, exploring sunken ruins, harvesting aquatic materials and hunting underwater predators in a dedicated submerged layer that sits apart from the surface map.

That loop is meant to keep veteran players who have already built out their land bases engaged without resetting their progress, while giving the ocean its own independent gearing path rather than treating it as a reskinned extension of existing systems.

DualSense support on PS5

On PS5, the update leans on hardware features that console players haven't had reason to use yet. Adaptive triggers add resistance to naval cannons and grappling lines, haptic feedback is tied to collisions and weather events at sea, and the platform's SSD speeds keep loading between islands and open water close to instant. None of it changes the expansion's content, but it's a notable investment for a free update on a game that only brought console support online in August.

The expansion is available now at no additional cost to anyone who already has Once Human installed, with new players able to download the base game free through the PlayStation Store, Xbox or Steam. NetEase has not announced a follow-up content drop yet, though the studio's news hub continues to post smaller balance and bug-fix notices on a near-daily cadence as the expansion's first week plays out.

“The entire ocean is a massive, conscious entity known as 'The Sunken Lord.'”Vincent Tao, Lead Game Designer on Once Human

What it means for Once Human's roadmap

Isles of Abyss is the clearest sign yet that NetEase intends Once Human to keep growing well past its original launch window rather than settle into a maintenance cadence. Pairing a full new biome with a parallel progression system and console-specific hardware support is a heavier lift than the game's previous seasonal content drops, and it arrives at a moment when free-to-play survival games are increasingly judged on how often they reinvent their own map rather than just rotate cosmetics. Whether the Sunken Lord becomes a recurring fixture of future seasons or a one-off centerpiece is something NetEase hasn't addressed publicly, but the scale of this update suggests the studio is treating the ocean as a long-term pillar rather than a side excursion.