PlayStation announced October 22, 2026, as the planned PlayStation 5 launch date for Once Human’s largest free expansion, Isles of Abyss. The expansion introduces a new oceanic adventure where players can set sail across five new regions and confront unique threats. Check the PlayStation Blog for the original details.
In Isles of Abyss, the ocean is portrayed as a living entity called 'The Sunken Lord,' a massive conscious force that reacts to players' presence. The water surface serves as its physical body, while lighthouses named 'The Tower' and spectral ships called 'Voyagers' function as its organs and manifestations of its dark will.
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Players will encounter dynamic regional threats such as suffocating fogs, violent black tides, and skies raining temporal fire. To survive, they must defeat regional bosses anchored in colossal towers and ultimately face The Sunken Lord.
The expansion allows players to build and customize a mobile Sea Fortress that acts as their forward base, workshop, and heavy artillery platform. Options range from classic wooden pirate ships to industrial drilling rigs and sci-fi aircraft carriers, with designs tailored to specific oceanic challenges.
Isles of Abyss features a land-sea dual progression loop, where resources from exploring islands fuel naval tech and weaponry, while deep-sea exploration unlocks materials that enhance terrestrial gear and base progression. Underwater exploration includes sunken ruins, rare aquatic resources, and deep-sea hunting.
The expansion is optimized for PlayStation 5 with features like DualSense haptic feedback for feeling the Sunken Lord’s heartbeat and crashing waves, adaptive triggers for realistic resistance during combat, and lightning-fast SSD loading for seamless transitions between environments.
The announcement presents the five regions as a choice-driven journey rather than a fixed sequence of levels. After reaching the starter island, players can visit the remaining four regions in an order they choose. Each area brings different environmental threats, so a crew planning a long expedition will have to weigh which resources to collect and which risks to take before heading into rougher waters.
The ocean's identity as the Sunken Lord gives the expansion a specific survival theme: weather, lighthouses, and ghost ships are all tied to the same supernatural threat. The PlayStation Blog describes those environmental details as part of the world and progression, not as separate playable characters. That distinction matters when interpreting the announcement's dramatic descriptions of the sea watching or reacting to a player's actions.
Shipbuilding is more than a visual customization feature in the developers' outline. A mobile fortress also serves as an operating base for crafting and weaponry, and the option for several friends to sail together allows fleets of different ships. The examples shared by the studio illustrate the range of possible builds; players should still check in-game requirements before assuming every design can be constructed immediately.
For PS5 players, the announced controller features are tied to specific events, including cannon fire, grappling lines, waves, and impacts against the hull. That adds tactile feedback to exploration and combat, while the SSD is intended to reduce loading interruptions between sailing, island exploration, and underwater sections. The developer's feature list describes a planned console experience rather than measured independent performance results.
Isles of Abyss was announced as a free expansion arriving on October 22, 2026. As always with timed launches, regional storefront rollout and access conditions should be checked on the official PlayStation listing. The full announcement on PlayStation Blog explains the expansion's five regions, land-and-sea progression, maritime threats, and PS5-specific features in further detail.