One of the most common critiques leveled against games is that they 'need more content.' Sea of Thieves is the latest to take that flak, joining other big, open-ended games such as No Man's Sky and Destiny 2, which have also been accused of 'not having enough.' But what do they not have enough of? 'Content' can literally be anything, as can 'things to do,' so we've gathered some of our open-world aficionados to discuss what we're really saying when we talk about 'content' and our insatiable need for more of it.

Tyler (who reviewed Sea of Thieves), Chris (who just finished reviewing Far Cry 5), our MMO and EVE Online expert, Steven, and our resident Destiny 2 apologist, Tim, discuss below. 

Tyler: Sea of Thieves is the sort of game I dreamed about back when Bolo was the height of networked multiplayer, and I'd have lost my shit back then if I'd somehow learned that A) such a game would exist in the future, and that B) people would be saying it 'sucks because there's not enough content.' But here we are, and I do intuitively understand the criticism, even though I think it's terribly vague.

Chris: I think 'content' can mean a few things. For one, a big variety of distinctly different things to do. I really like Sea of Thieves, but I can still recognize that beyond treasure hunts, fighting players, and killing skeletons, there's not much besides sailing around. I happen to really like sailing around, scrapping with other boats, and digging up treasure (not as big a fan of fighting skeleton waves), so that's kind of enough for me.

For No Man's Sky, I feel like procedural generation is counted on to always provide interesting discoveries, but it really didn't. Just because everything you see is slightly different doesn't mean it's exciting, and after a while you begin noticing that it's the same parts and pieces being used in different combinations. Flying around becomes less satisfying and you start wanting more to do.

Tyler: It's completely contextual, though, right? Rocket League, which I've played over 350 hours of, has very little 'content' when you strip away all the cosmetic stuff. It's always whacking a ball (or puck) around, and that's far fewer 'things to do' than sailing, fighting players, and hunting for treasure. But no one complains because the 'content' of Rocket League is 'getting better at it.' I think what happens with Sea of Thieves and No Man's Sky-type games is that the framework is 'adventure' more than competition or improvement, so 'content' becomes 'I should be seeing and doing new things all the time.'

Steven: I also think the 'why' really matters here. People play EVE Online, which is a game where you can spend four hours doing absolutely nothing but sitting somewhere and waiting for something to happen, but they do that because those moments coalesce into a larger narrative that is, ultimately, meaningful to them. But games like Sea of Thieves and No Man's Sky don't really have a greater purpose. You fly for the sake of flying or sail for the sake of sailing, and once the novelty of those activities wears off you're desperately wishing for something new. It's a shame because, like EVE Online, Sea of Thieves is fundamentally a sandbox game, but there's just not a lot of sand in that box. If there were more conflict drivers inspiring you to interact with other players in exciting ways and more ways for players to build a compelling narrative out of those high-seas adventures, I could see the game being a smash hit.

Tyler: I'm pretty sure it's a hit anyway! But that's a good point.

Tim: Please can we disable the comments on this article because I'm about to talk Destiny.

Tyler: No, but I'll wait until you're out of the office to publish this.

Tim: I logged north of 2,000 hours in the first game (which itself drew criticism for content droughts of Saharan proportions), and am one of the few people still plugging away at the sequel on PC (where the problem is even worse). To my mind, Destiny 2's fundamental issue with lack of content isn't that there aren't enough missions, or destinations to visit, or even types of activity. It is that there is almost no reason to run any of it now. What unifies most of these games is that they're fundamentally about building some sort of collection—usually by acquiring and upgrading loot—and that system needs to have oceanic depth to keep players coming back. In Destiny 1 that meant giving guns random rolls so that each drop would potentially have a tiny chance of a god tier combination of perks. The sequel did away with that system in favour of fixed rolls—largely because a bunch of babies complained about grinding for the very best guns—which it turned out was no sort of replacement at all. I must have acquired and auto dismantled every weapon in D2 a dozen or more times over now, and it's robbed me of much desire to keep going. Bafflingly, Bungie knew this was going to be a huge issue and shipped the game without an answer. To bring the conversation back to Sea of Thieves, the fact you can't get a better cutlass or collect a sweet flotilla of increasingly flashy ships seems like a massive and obvious problem to me.

Tyler: It seems to me that 'content,' then, is the ability to set lots of short-term and long-term goals (the 'why'), and to be surprised (have intrinsic fun) in the process of achieving them. In Destiny 2, the big goal is collecting stuff, and when you run out of stuff to collect, the 'not enough content' complaints come in. And with that definition we can see why it isn't a problem in Rocket League, where winning each brief match is a short-term goal that's full of surprises—eg, the final score, weird bounces, moves I didn't think I was going to pull off—and getting better is the long-term goal, to which there's no end (players are still showing off skills I haven't seen before in the subreddit). And in EVE, you've got your eye on a new ship, so even boring-ass mining is working toward something, and then there are all the big goals you mentioned, Steven.

Steven: Yeah, to expand on that just a wee bit, in EVE you're also working towards communal goals. It's not just about you, but what you can do to help achieve success for your corporation. All of those are powerful motivators that keep people invested.

Tyler: As Chris hit on earlier with regard to Sea of Thieves, when you first start playing there are loads of sub-goals to work toward such as learning how to sail, sinking your first ship, exploring islands you've never seen. Those first five or so hours are great. But once you figure out the game, the rate of achievement falls off a cliff, and there are only a few short-term goals left: go get some treasure (with a few simple methods) and sell it, or fight another player ship (usually just because). The only long-term goals are to buy cosmetic stuff and reach a vaguely-defined 'endgame,' as 'getting better' isn't something I'm all that concerned with. I really enjoy the relaxed pace of Sea of Thieves, but that's when players start saying, 'Well, this game doesn't have enough content.' It comes from that drought of goals.

Chris: I also kind of feel like price has become this bar against which games are judged. NMS took a lot of extra flak for being priced at $60, which is seen as an 'AAA price.' Sea of Thieves is the same, and I see a lot of comments saying "This is a $40 game" or "This is a $30 game." We've come to expect full-priced games to be stacked with stuff even though games like NMS are built by a comparatively small team.

Tyler: That's definitely an issue. What you're buying with Sea of Thieves is a marvelous pool of physics—those waves are just brilliant, and co-op sailing is always pleasant to me—and a framework for PvP battles which I think are super fun. But $60 is a lot to spend, and people are thinking, 'Well, for that price I can get Far Cry 5, and it's full of all these mo-capped characters and bears are gonna attack me, and I can go fishing and fly a helicopter,' and so on. I love Sea of Thieves but I can't argue with bears and helicopters.

Tim: A big factor that runs through all these 'live' games is the core fantasy on which they're sold. Take a look at the first Destiny game's E3 reveal and the players are mindblown when this sweet-looking spaceship swoops in and drops off a tank to fight as part of a public event. And of course it is cool the first time you see it, but when you've seen the same event literally thousands of times and can in fact set your clock by it, the fantasy of being in this dynamic world dissolves.

Tyler: Yeah, our own imaginations totally outpace what's actually possible, because these games are open-ended prompts ('live in this world') rather than codified genre-games, where your expectations don't exceed other examples of the genre. 

Tim:  It's easy to pick similar comparisons with games like No Man's Sky and Sea of Thieves, where the core fantasies—Explore the infinite depths of space! Be a completely freeform pirate with your friends!—are so evocative, that whatever actual slate of content those games end up launching with inevitably feels anemic compared to what players imagined it might be like. The exception is something like EVE, which is able to keep surprising the audience because its vast scope and robust systems that enable the kind of weird, funny, scary emergent stories that Steven writes about on the regular.

Tyler: To play armchair designer a bit, if that's almost always going to happen when these sorts of games are pitched, how do they address it? 

Tim: I mean, I question how much they care to a degree. Bungie took payment for Destiny 2 and its DLCs from most players up front. Sinking endless cost into keeping players as busy and engaged as possible seems to be something they deemed a diminishing return. But I think the short, patronising, answer is these games need to find ways of injecting new stuff on a close to weekly basis. For Destiny the best example of that was the Black Spindle mission, which was hidden at launch and only uncovered some time later when a time gate swung open to reveal this brilliant secret challenge which awarded an awesome weapon. I think balance can play a part too. D2 went something like six months with no nerfs of buffs, leading to an unbelievably stale meta. For all these games, I think the answer to to build an engine and workflow that its tuned towards regular, small updates, so the developer can keep delighting players. Procedurally driven content, as per The Division's Underground mode, and user-created stuff, like Halo's Forge World, also have the potential to take some pressure off the studio having to constantly create time-consuming new assets.

Tyler: New, surprise events could obviously help Sea of Thieves, but I think there's a structural problem with it. The only difference between you and anyone else in Sea of Thieves is how 'good' you are at it, how long you've played, and how you show off your success with cosmetics. I like the boldness of that decision, but opportunities to test your skill (fighting other ships) are fairly rare, whereas Rocket League and CS:GO—which operate on the same principle of skill and cosmetics—are always all about showing off skill and learning new moves and practicing cooperative tactics. A couple probably-bad potential solutions: increase the complexity of ship battles ('moves' to learn) and include a combat-only arena mode, or scrap the idea that pirates are all the same and let players work toward functional upgrades like you suggested, Tim. I have no idea how you'd successfully do either of those things, but as it is, I feel like I'm in stasis: neither working toward the long term goal of 'getting better' at ship battles (and I'm not sure how much better I can get as it is now) nor working toward earning some fun new toy, like a new gun in Destiny 2.

Chris: No Man's Sky has added a lot in the last year to give players more to do: base building, terrain editing, new mission types, additional story elements, new vehicles, and the ability to explore with other people, sorta (other players are represented by floating orbs). The changes are good ones, and most of them come from direct player feedback about stuff they really wanted. But the structure hasn't changed, and neither has the somewhat disappointing core of the experience. Some new planet types briefly made exploration exciting again, but once I'd seen them I was left with the same opinion about the game as I originally had: the procedural generation just doesn't create enough mystery and wonder to keep me going. It's great there's a lot of new stuff for players to do, but simply adding gobs of 'content' doesn't fix what's broken.

Tyler: Yeah, exactly. That's why we need to be specific when we talk about 'content.' Rare could add ten new events like the kraken to Sea of Thieves, and that would create ten new goals—see each new thing. And then what? They just brute-force add new goals as fast as players can achieve them? That does constitute 'adding more content', but even though it would be welcome (fishing minigame please) it doesn't truly solve what players are complaining about and isn't sustainable. What we're looking for are short-term goals to achieve on the way to exciting long-term goals, and that's as much 'content' as it is 'the design of the game.'

In the wake of its fairly sophisticated Atlas Rises update, Chris returned to No Man's Sky and found a better game that still lacked magic and mystery. The space survival sim's next venture is due at some point in "Summer 2018", is billed as its "largest update so far", is free to existing players, and is named No Man's Sky NEXT.

"Really thanks to the community, each previous update for No Man's Sky has been more successful than the last," Murray tells us via email. "Atlas Rises, our most recent update, was surprisingly so. That represented a real inflection point in the legacy of No Man’s Sky. This team has never stopped running at sprint pace over the last few years, so perhaps it would have been tempting to stop after that. Surprisingly though it had the opposite effect on this team, and it emboldened us all to go further and faster."

In doing so Murray describes NEXT as "an important next step" in No Man's Sky's journey—one that is "far from over"—and is confident he and his team can surprise the game's community with what lies ahead. I think the following images are new, but the colours are gorgeous even if they're not:

Besides Steam, No Man's Sky will also feature on Tencent's WeGame (formerly the Tencent Games Platform), with China forming the game's second biggest audience.

Not much to go on beyond the announcement, then, so expect more information in the coming weeks and months. And, if history has taught us anything, I wouldn't rule out an ARG between now and summertime. 

It appears that things are once again happening in the No Man's Sky 'Waking Titan' ARG that began way back in May 2017. As noted by Game Detectives (via Eurogamer), the Atlas Passes that were promised in an earlier stage of the ARG have begun to arrive, and rather than answering questions they are deepening the mystery.   

In late December, the tenth of 15 glyphs along the bottom of the Waking Titan website unlocked, leading to a password prompt and a Google Drive folder called 1.5 that's filled with images of the NMS logo reflected in various arrangements of mirrors. The names of the images, when strung together and converted from hex, decode to the letters "moirrr," an anagram for "mirror." The Myriad website, uncovered during an earlier stage of the ARG investigation, also contains the hex code for the word.   

An image in the background of the most recent glyph link makes reference to the completion of 10,000 passes, and says that "you should have them in time for the next phase." The first of those passes reportedly turned up on January 17: It was made of cardboard with a "textured pass" on it, a CSD category ranking, and another hexadecimal number that translated to "Phoenix." More numbers, including a CSD-ID and serial number, were on the back.  

Those numbers are now being collated in this Google Docs spreadsheet. All the entries so far appear to originate in Canada, although whether that's a matter of timing or something more significant is impossible to say. Gaming Detectives recommends that anyone submitting a pass includes all numbers on it, and a photo of the front as well.

No Man's Sky creator Sean Murray contributed to the tease with a January 10 tweet that also referenced mirrors, and contained an image of the Netflix series Black Mirror and an excerpt from an interview with Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker, in which he says he's playing No Man's Sky and "there's an idea for the second season that's sprung from a procedurally generated universe." 

The whole thing seems incredibly complex, and there appears to be quite a bit left to come, as five glyphs on the Waking Titan site are still locked. The 1.5 references are also perplexing, because there hasn't been a 1.4 update yet: That could suggest that 1.4 will be a surprise drop, or too minor to warrant all this fuss, or perhaps will be skipped altogether. Or it might mean something else entirely—I'm bad at ARGs so while I find them interesting, I'm rarely much use when it comes to moving things forward. 

I am, however, happy to see that No Man's Sky is still a going concern, and I continue to hold out hope that it will eventually evolve into the game we were promised—or at least as close to it as we can reasonably expect. A full rundown of what's happened so far in the Waking Titan ARG is available here. 

Our Ongoing Game award goes to No Man's Sky. After a rocky 2016 launch, the game's in better shape after this year's updates. Check out our other GOTY awards here.

Phil Savage: Here's a new category for this year's awards, designed to recognise an older game that had a great 2017 through patches and free updates. And whatever you originally thought of No Man's Sky when it released last year, this year marked a period of significant growth and improvement.

Andy Kelly: At launch No Man's Sky felt like a shell of a game. I squeezed 20 hours out of it, which is not insignificant, but in that time I felt like I'd experienced everything this supposedly infinite universe had to offer. But over time, thanks to a procession of hefty free updates, the game has evolved into something much deeper and ultimately much better. Whether it's base-building, vehicles, new biomes, or the story's clearer, more hand-crafted structure, Hello has slowly been transforming the game into something approaching the grand promise of those early demonstrations. I still think there's a lot of room for improvement, including more varied planet surfaces, but the developer's efforts to expand, deepen, and improve its colourful space simulator is something I think we should celebrate.

Philippa Warr: I was one of those people who actually loved No Man’s Sky when it came out. Not in an all-encompassing passionate frenzy which blinded me to its shortcomings, nor the differences between marketing and game, but there was so much in that ambitious universe which already gave me joy. It was built for pottering in a way that reminded me of meandering along country trails with my camera, investigating pleasing views and tailing odd creatures. 

The first big update to the game—Foundation—came towards the end of 2016 bringing things like base building, freighters and farming. In terms of how that made the game feel, it didn't specifically impact how I played it because I wasn't interested in commerce or on settling down. I was content to drift along in normal mode.

But, taking a more general view, the update felt like a statement from developers, Hello Games, about how they would be approaching the game post-release. The update implied a willingness to be more flexible over what the game could be—instead of forcing players to keep moving, never settling, base-building was a specifically supported element of the game. There were also a couple of modes to tweak the difficulty should you fancy it. 

Foundation ended up being exactly that—a support structure and a statement of intent for 2017’s set of updates. Path Finder was the first and offered up vehicles, vehicle racing, base sharing, photo mode, permadeath mode, a whole bundle of quality of life improvements and more. It was photo mode which absolutely blew me away and either ruined or perfected the game for my purposes, depending on which way you approach it.

Photo mode was developed in collaboration with Dead End Thrills’s Duncan Harris. It lets you pause the game in the middle of what you're doing and switch into a free-ish camera mode. At that point you can line up your shots, apply filters as you might on Instagram, fiddle with FOV and depth-of-field, change the position of the sun in order to get the perfect shadows or the exact right time of day and more. Where I used to spend minutes on shots, I can now spend hours. I have previously spent entire sessions within the same five foot radius captivated by different light effects on a group of trees. 

I believe Chris Livingston rather liked photo mode too, but the big draw for him in that update was the ability to ram wildlife with his new space car. Perhaps we should have combined our interests for some kind of artsy inverse Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition. 

Atlas Rises came in August and, along with terrain editing and ancient portals, it seemed to sow seeds for co-op play. Multiplayer, or rather the ability to "see" other people in your game is one of the big sticking points from launch—the reality of the game didn’t match what had been described during development. The ability still isn't exactly in the game but there's a version of the idea in that you can see other players as floaty orbs with proximity-based chat, and Hello Games are billing that as a precursor to some kind of synchronous co-op. 

These updates don't erase launch criticisms but they do reframe the game. Hello Games are using the process of post-release patches to respond to those criticisms and flesh out the game in ways that reflect and expand how people play it. More specific to my own interests is the fact that the game just keeps getting more beautiful through a multitude of changes both big and small. In my current game I’ve discovered a planet populated with trees that sprout octopus-like tentacles. Finally I’m ready to call somewhere home. I just have to stop taking pictures of it long enough to find a habitable base and claim the world as my own...

For more recent No Man's Sky words, check out Chris's experiences with the game's synthetic planets and other varied environments.

If you're looking for a new way to explore the procedurally generated splendors of No Man's Sky, you can now fly around in the Millennium Falcon—once you find it. The Morships for Atlas Rising Mod for No Man's Sky adds a dozen new ships, including the Falcon, to the game's procedural generation lists, meaning that a) the new spacecraft don't replace any existing ships, and b) they'll show up randomly as you explore. So, if you want to pilot Han Solo's famed smuggle-mobile from Star Wars, you'll have to keep your eyes peeled for it.

The ships have been crafted by a number of creators—see the mod's page for all the credits. All the ships are pretty sweet looking, and there's even a pod racer from The Phantom Menace included, if you can stomach the bad memories. As the ships appear on various docking pads and space stations you can purchase them as you would other ships. They might even show up as pirates and attack you.

One warning from the modder: "...uninstalling the mod will result in a crash to desktop if/when any save game tries to load the ships from the uninstalled mod." That's pretty serious, so keep it in mind if you decide you want to install this mod. The MorShips Mod will also be included in the next version of the (hopefully) soon to come RaYRoD's Overhaul. (I'd link to the old version of it, but it's been taken offline while its creator works on the next version).