We recently released Isles of Abyss – the largest free expansion in Once Human history – on XBOX Series X|S. Now that players have had taken some time to chart these dangerous waters, we wanted to take this opportunity to pull back the curtain on how this major expansion came together and how we managed to take our signature “New Weird” and strange worlds survival into the open ocean by completely rethinking our world design. We didn’t want the sea to be an empty transit space connecting dry land. We wanted the ocean itself to actively hunt you.

When our team began brainstorming this expansion, we didn’t start with endless waves, reefs, or nautical maps. It all started with a single, jarring image: a lighthouse standing where it had no right to be.

Drawing inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, we wanted to subvert a familiar symbol of human safety. On land, a lighthouse guides travelers to harbor; in the distorted reality of Once Human, an anomalous light piercing the dark felt invasive and watchful.

From that single wrong-feeling image, the ocean began to grow outward. That solitary lighthouse became an eye. An eye needed a body. And that body became the sea itself—a colossal, living organism known as The Sunken Lord.

We anchored the expansion’s entire atmosphere around a single guiding feeling: sinking into oblivion. Out on these waters, drifting ghost ships like Sworn Never to Port and No Return Voyage act as displaced organs that have forgotten how to make landfall, while anomalous lighthouses serve as glaring eyes tracking your every move.

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