Jul 20, 2018

Two years later, the hype for No Man's Sky is back

No Man's Sky

Some posts on the NMS subreddit over the past few days.

I looked at the Steam Top Sellers list yesterday morning and noticed that No Man's Sky was sitting at number 12. This was just for my region—on the global top sellers it sat around 34th place at the same time—but it represents a bump in recent sales of Hello Games' space sandbox. And surely those sales are the result of the trailer for No Man's Sky's fourth free expansion, Next, which shows the upcoming multiplayer features.

While Steam doesn't give us any indication of how many new copies are being sold, it still feels kind of remarkable to see NMS climbing the Top Sellers list because Next hasn't arrived yet: it comes out on July 24. In a way, this makes copies of No Man's Sky being bought now a bit like a pre-order—you can obviously play the game and first three expansions, but you'll have to wait until next week to see how the multiplayer in Next really is.

Which means the game that came out in the summer of 2016 that deeply disappointed so many players who had pre-ordered it based on its impressive trailer is once again selling copies (and still, by the way, at the launch day price of $60) based on an impressive trailer. Round and round we go.

The hype and excitement for No Man's Sky is back! Yes, it's definitely (and thankfully) a dim shadow of the stratospheric hype prior to the original launch, but a look through the No Man's Sky subreddit (which has gained 2,000 new followers this week), and the fact it's creeping back into the Steam's Top Sellers list show that a lot of people are incredibly pumped to play Next when it arrives.

This reaction isn't out of the blue. Hello Games has spent the time since that troubled initial launch working (mostly very quietly) to produce three big, free updates. Those expansions added a lot of new player-requested features like base-building and base-sharing, ground-based vehicles, new lore and story quests, additional planet types, interaction tools for players to communicate with each other, plus a ton of tweaks, fixes, and improvements that have enhanced everything from the visuals to the UI. The updates have been well-received, which is reflected in No Man's Sky's 'recent' Steam reviews, most of which are positive. (This is including a sizable spike in positive reviews over the three days since the trailer appeared.)

There are also plenty of players for whom the hype has never really subsided: lots of people who enjoyed No Man's Sky from day one and have continued to play it since its release in 2016. They've been supportive and positive (and patient!) throughout the entire life of NMS. So, it's natural they're pumped: the game they've always enjoyed is getting even more free stuff.

Being hyped for a game you already own that's getting a bunch of new stuff added is perfectly understandable, but if there's something that worries me a bit, it's posts like the one shown in the image at the top of the page that reads: "Next is everything I wanted and more." And I've seen a few posts from people saying they're thinking about buying the game now, before Next actually arrives.

It's those kinds of posts and comments giving me this "here we go again" feeling. Deciding No Man's Sky was everything we wanted based on a trailer that didn't accurately reflect the game at launch, putting expectations so sky-high that they had so much farther to fall, is what made the reaction to No Man's Sky so explosive the first time around.

It's not quite the same situation with Next: we've seen and played No Man's Sky, we've seen steady improvements over the past two years, and the expansions so far have been, as far as I can tell, faithful to what we were told they'd be. I'm guessing, at the absolute minimum, the multiplayer features described will actually be in the game this time. I am fairly confident this will not be a repeat of 2016.

So, sure, yeah, we can get pumped! We can be excited and we can be hopeful. Heck, I'm excited to try the expansion, too. The multiplayer in Next both looks and sounds like it could be a lot of fun, and I'm personally eager to check it out myself. It also doesn't sound like Next is the end of the road for No Man's Sky: the post on Hello Games' site states it's "just another step in a longer journey", so it sounds like further expansions or improvements could be next (after Next).

But by now we know, or at least we should know, the dangers of too much hype and the peril of expecting a game (or expansion) to be everything we want it to be (and more!) before we've actually played it. Be excited, be hopeful, but let's not launch the hype rocket before the actual launch of Next.

Jul 20, 2018

No Man's Sky planned a 'very light' multiplayer that was spiked before launch

No Man's Sky

No Man's Sky's NEXT update rolls out next week. Billed by the devs as its "largest so far", it brings with it overhauled graphics, a new third-person perspective and full multiplayer support. Read Pip's words on what it's like to explore No Man's Sky Next with three other people, and know that a "very light" multiplayer component was envisioned, but spiked, before launch.

In conversation with The Guardian, Hello Games head honcho Sean Murray discusses No Man's Sky's turbulent launch—which led to personal death threats and bomb warnings at the developer's office. He speaks about the angry mob nature of the internet, and acknowledges he and his team's mistakes with regards to communication pre-release.

One particularly contentious issue for players at the time was the space explorer's absent multiplayer—a feature some players expected from the off.

“A very light multiplayer was envisioned for launch," Murray tells The Guardian, "and we fought right up until the end to add it, but it was immensely challenging and we knew it was something that only a handful of people would experience due to the size of the universe.

"We later added a version of it for the Atlas Rises update, and it was nice, but not hugely impactful to people’s enjoyment. What players really wanted was the kind of multiplayer we are adding now."

When asked specifically about the absence of multiplayer at launch, Murray tells Eurogamer that Hello Games "talked about the earlier than we should have". He speaks to Hello's small team, and that certain aspirational, but not practical, features were axed along the way.

"We would go way down some routes sometimes and they wouldn't turn out to be a good idea," Murray tells EG. "Other things we were fighting to get into the game until the last breath, basically. Multiplayer was one of those things. To be super clear—multiplayer at that time was the way we had talked about it.

"It was something that'd happen to people super infrequently. In play-testing it was of almost no value to the player—it was just a cool thing, a cool moment that some people would have, and we talked about it with the press that there's this cool thing that would maybe make a story sometime. But it's a big complicated thing for that payoff. We were fighting for it until pretty much the final hours of the game."

Murray reckons NEXT's multiplayer "totally changes the game"—which is doubly important, given it feeds into its pre-existing features. Murray explains things like base-building, riding in vehicles, and owning freighters weren't intended at launch. "None of these things existed," he says, "and we've kind of had to build the game out for multiplayer to make sense."

Check out both The Guardian and Eurogamer's interviews with Sean Murray via those respective links.

And let me again point you to Pip's words on what it's like to explore No Man's Sky Next with three other people—which also includes commentary from Murray.

Jul 20, 2018

What it's like to explore No Man's Sky Next with three other people

No Man's Sky

Three of the four of our little squad are huddled in a tiny cabin, waiting out a life-threatening blizzard on a snowy planet. I’m playing No Man’s Sky Next—the fourth update for the game since launch and the one which brings true multiplayer to the game’s enormous universe—with three of the development team. All four of my team started a new game for this demo so everyone is working through the new version of the game’s introduction. We’re learning the basics of resource gathering and tech creation needed for the meat of the experience: base-building and adventuring. To that end it introduces you to base-building and freighters earlier than before.

But right now I’m out of Sodium—a new harvestable resource which I need to recharge my exosuit’s thermal protection—and my life support system is also perilously low. Hence hiding in a cabin after collecting a piece of tech I need to repair my starship. The jog here nearly killed me so the jog back seems a bit of a gamble.

Where I’d usually have to figure out a survival strategy on my own, multiplayer offers a new lifeline. One of my new friends drops a heap of Sodium (and some Oxygen for my life support) into my inventory and I’m suddenly good to go.

To share resources you hover over the element in your inventory and can choose to transfer it to a fellow player in your immediate vicinity. Sharing is also why the game now lets you split stacks of resources, so you don’t need to absolutely inundate someone with all the Carbon you own when they only need enough for a floor tile. I attempt to return the favour at a later date, offering up a supply of Copper as we build the necessary bits to unlock a base computer.

A base computer is what you need to start a base and thus we start throwing up walls, floors, lights and goodness knows what else, with surprising speed. I decide to build a magnificent bridge from the slope we’re on to another peak. I run out of Carbon after placing about five floor tiles and curse my hubris. Luckily my squad helps out and, by the time I return from another round of mining, it covers a far more impressive distance.

Obviously, co-operating like this is the nicer way to play. The devs are helping me rather than e.g. letting me die slowly; a courtesy they don’t always extend to one another, if my eavesdropping on their chat is accurate. To be fair to them, though, given the choice between saving a friend and letting them die hilariously and unnecessarily, I’d always pick the more amusing option. I also notice I’m tempering my own worst impulses. I mean, I ask what would happen if I shoot them with my mining beam rather than just opening fire like I normally would. (Apparently it would hurt them a bit.)

Because we’re working through the tutorial bits we’re all doing similar activities, but Hello Games’ managing director, Sean Murray, explains that you can dip into multiplayer with friends or random travelers using any of your existing saves, across any of the game’s modes. “You can have played for a hundred hours. I can join you on your game and if I collect stuff or do stuff then I have that and that’s in my save when I go back to playing single-player.”

You can pursue the No Man’s Sky story path together or just explore or muck about, racing exocraft, creating scenic trails, taking on missions as a group, or building extravagant structures.

The ability to experience the world alongside other people is turned on by default. Players can switch it off if they want to be truly alone, but the way Murray explains it, having it enabled won’t suddenly lead to those strange agglomerations of player characters you see in MMO questing hotspots.

There s potential for cities, or at least neighborhoods of some kind, as other people can build bases alongside your own

Instead, it’s about the game’s universe feeling more real, more alive. He describes a scenario from his own experience:

“There’s a new marketplace in our space stations which looks really cool and has got loads of NPCs dotted around and whatever. I had this fucking amazing moment where I went in there and there was somebody else at one of the shops. Initially I just assumed it was an NPC but they’re not normally there. I was like, ‘It’s another person! It’s one of the team!’ It was so good! I didn’t know what to do with myself. But that then coloured the whole rest of the time I was playing.”

He comes back to that story later in the day to illustrate how the existing No Man’s Sky experience sets up slightly different multiplayer expectations than other games.

“In any other game that [moment] wouldn’t be surprising, but because of the scope of No Man’s Sky it’s like, ‘Fuck! I’ve been playing for eight hours and never seen anyone,’ and it just takes you by surprise. In another game you might instantly think to kill that person. But with this it’s like, we’re both having a moment and doing a silly little dance of ‘What should we do with this? Let’s go and build a base together!’ It’s cool to have those feelings.”

I only reached base building towards the end of my hands-on with the game (partly because there was a certain amount of hiding in cabins, barging one another with starships, and deploying all of the emotes in the quick task bar to see what they did). So it was in conversation with Murray where I learned about the rest of what Next will bring.

Until now you could only set up home by finding an abandoned habitable base on a planet, so you weren’t able to just set yourself up near an attractive cave system or a glut of useful resources. You could also only build your base out a certain distance from that point. Next will remove both of those restrictions, letting you build anywhere and letting you sprawl all over the place.

For a brief rundown: there are hundreds of new base building parts and you can own multiple bases per solar system and per planet. From what I saw, the new building components also make the building architecture look very different—they tended to be more angular and more wood-focused, although that could be due to the materials available or what gets unlocked early versus later as you research new parts.

There’s potential for cities, or at least neighborhoods of some kind, as other people can build bases alongside your own, or you could simply throw down another base computer and start a new structure yourself. Given my particular group of friends, it’s also good to know that when playing together there’s nothing too destructive they can really do to my base, and when I’m not online they can only see my base, not edit it.

Personally, I’m most interested in setting up a base underwater, so I ask if there are any extra restrictions there in terms of pressure or oxygen. “What is it with you and underwater bases?” he asks. “Nope, you just build underwater if you want (I means it’s harder to do, and harder to get to, but you are safe once inside).”

Murray says that you can now assemble fleets of frigates, too, walking around on them, repairing them and specialising them for discovery, trade or combat. He adds that you can also build rooms for captains on freighters and then deploy them on missions.

Depending on your fleet you can take on different missions, explains Murray. “When you send them off they go to those places for real. You can follow them round, they sometimes get into trouble—things like that. And when they return they will potentially give you rewards, they will give you a big report of everything that’s happened which is quite fun.

“They send you messages when they’re away as well and sometimes call you for decisions. When they come back, as well as getting rewards and stuff, they might need repairs—you can fly out to them and repair them—and they can level up so you can send them on more missions.”

In terms of the missions you and your team of human players can take on, I see things like resource collection and scanning creatures on one list, but apparently there are also activities like freighter battles.

While we’re on the subject of freighters, Murray points out that you can now land on them. The layout has changed too, to make it more obvious that you can base-build in freighters. I gather that’s something people often missed, like the adjacency bonuses you can get by organising your inventory in a particular way.

To go back to my hands-on experience, I was tentatively excited by how quickly the experience slipped into that “titting about with mates” headspace, sniggering as a copper deposit I’d tagged but then mined out led a companion to an empty hole. The mood felt somewhere between Viscera Cleanup Detail (a game about being a space janitor which you can play with your friends and ruin their clean floors by treading blood everywhere) and Minecraft (where I tended towards pottering about on a server, occasionally collaborating, but mostly working on my own projects).

It’s impossible to say how the experience will settle over the longer term—over the hundreds or even thousands of hours the No Man’s Sky community pours into save files—but the foundations feel promising to me. And I say that as someone who has previously played a determinedly lonely version of the game, just skipping from planet to planet and making videos of particularly dorky animals or taking screenshots of weird landscapes.

The community is getting a particular shout-out after Next launches, thanks to the Galactic Atlas website. It seemed to be part travel guide, part activity hub from the screenshots I saw. The idea is to be able to offer context for the galactic map, pointing out places of interest or information about galactic hubs and their discoveries.

There’s also a shop. Not in the sense of a microtransaction or loot box experience, but as a place where players can spend in-game currency earned through doing community missions. The idea is that people can pick up unique cosmetics, emotes, base building parts and so on which mark or celebrate their community involvement. It made me think of the emblems and shaders I amassed in Destiny as a kind of “I was there!” statement for raids.

Speaking of cosmetics, you can also customise your player character, either taking on the form of a space traveler in the human astronaut vein, or as one of the game’s NPC races, like the Gek or the Vy’keen. Customisation feels more important in Next than other updates, partly because in multiplayer it’s nice to be able to tell people apart at a glance instead of using a default form and relying on the coloured markers on your HUD, and partly because the game will now default to a third-person camera view, meaning you’ll spend a lot of time looking at your character unless you switch back to first person.

As with the previous mega updates, Next feels too big to be able to summarise everything here, and a lot of the changes which will make a lot of difference to players will be under the quality of life heading rather than the eye-catching trailer stuff which gets prioritised in top-level explanations. For example, I’m excited about being able to build a base underwater, but ecstatic about being able to drag and drop resources from one inventory slot to another.

After Next launches, the team will be watching to see what players do with multiplayer. “It’s such a different stage,” says Murray. How players engage with the game, with these new tools and experiences, will inform how it evolves. But it will start to do so on via a smaller, more regular cadence.

Until now we’ve seen massive updates which tend to rewrite both the philosophy of the game and large parts of the player experience. But shortly after Next is out in the wild, Hello Games will switch to weekly updates as the team continues to work on the game. There’s no confirmed date for that yet, though.

“It’s really important for us that people look at the game, look at Next, and they understand that this is a game that continues to evolve,” says Murray. “This isn’t like us saying here’s Next and it’s finished now. Maybe one day I’ll think No Man’s Sky is finished, but I don’t currently feel that way—the team doesn’t, I think.”

Jul 18, 2018

No Man's Sky: Next multiplayer trailer breakdown

No Man's Sky

The trailer for No Man's Sky Next arrived yesterday, and feel free to give it another viewing above before reading on because there's a lot to take in. Hello Games provided a rundown of what its fourth free expansion will contain, including the long-awaited multiplayer feature and third-person perspective, but it can't hurt to dive in deeper and see what other details we can wrangle out of the footage.

Here's a breakdown of everything we spotted in the trailer, as well as a few things we didn't see.

Co-op appears to be four players max

It appears as though the multiplayer or team cap may top out at four. The only thing I've seen Hello Games say in terms of numbers is 'a small group' or 'a small team.' The screenshots shown contain no more than four players, and the various trailer scenes show a total of four players at any given time (with one possible exception I'll get to in a bit).

This could mean your team is maxed out at four, but what's unclear is what happens if you run into another team or solo player? Or two other teams? Or, like, 10 teams? I assume we'll find out very soon after Next arrives, as dedicated NMS players have already begun planning mass meetups.

One of the players is a Gek

There are four factions in No Man's Sky: the Korvax machine race, the grouchy Vy'keen warriors, the Travelers (players), and the birdlike yet aquatic Gek. Except in the trailer, one of the players is a Gek rather than a Traveler. Or, at least is a Gek who is a Traveler.

That's pretty cool, and I'm curious to see if players can also choose to be Vy'keen or Korvax, and if it's simply a cosmetic choice that can be swapped at will or if it has some deeper impact on the game.

Underwater bases?

There were random structures that could spawn underwater in No Man's Sky, and players have been able to build bases underwater with some clever terraforming, but water would still fill all the chambers of the base. It's hard to tell from the opening scene in the Next trailer, which shows players swimming around near some underwater buildings, if those structures are player-made or randomized spawns.

There's also a frame or two where you can see a much larger structure that looks like it could possibly be a player-built base:

According to Hello Games "Bases can now be built anywhere on any planet." This is great since it sounds like we won't need to have to find a randomly placed habitable outpost to begin building, but I'm hoping it also truly means anywhere, including at the bottom of an ocean where you could construct an air-tight habitat.

Are those pilotable mechs?

Hm.

So, near the end of the trailer there's a cool sight: one player and three big stompy robots. I'm not sure they're player-controlled, though—a car can be briefly spotted in the same scene, which I assume is driven by a player. So if there is a four-player team cap, and one is in a car, and one is running around on foot, there probably wouldn't be three more players piloting mechs at the same time. Unless you could have more than four players on your team, or if this shows a team of four encountering a fifth player. I don't know. I don't know!

Those mechs just might be extra-large sentinel bots (there's a small quadrupedal bot as well) on the lookout for anyone blowing up trees or stealing expensive resources. They might all be chasing the guy in the car for some infraction of the planet's guidelines (you can see a few standard hovering sentinels following the car, too). But it would be pretty cool if we could pilot those stomping bots around as a new exovehicle. And if not, I'd be surprised if some modders didn't make it happen in the future.

Portal pals

It's not clear how you'll be able to link up with your friends in the vast expanse of No Man's Sky. It may be as simple as inviting a friend to a session and having them appear beside you. If not, it could require using portals to crew up, which were dormant in the original game and only became functional in the Atlas Update. There's a brief glimpse in the trailer of a couple players strolling out of one.

NMS looks great in third-person

We've been able to see our ships in third-person perspective since the Pathfinder Update added a photo mode, but we could only use it while the game was paused. It made for some great screenshots, but it's exciting to think about running and flying around in real third-person mode in Next. It looks like some thought has been put into extra effects you wouldn't normally see while flying in first-person, like the wake the ship leaves when flying over the water.

(Also I think that pilot hit a tree.)

At last, ringed planets

The best planets are ringed planets. Scientists agree on this (probably), and so do I. I'm personally in favor of a mission to blow up our dumb boring moon and turn it into a sweet rocky ring around the earth. Please call your congressperson and help make it a reality.

Modders addressed the ringed planet shortcomings of No Man's Sky long ago, but it's still nice to see long-overdue official rings around planets. I'm interested to see what they look like up close: is it just an effect or are rings made of actual, mineable rocks?

Exterior freighter docking pads

Being able to dock on a freighter (and buy one) was introduced in the Foundation Update. But I sort of didn't care for the way you docked with them: fly too close to the entry port and you sort of automatically get sucked into the interior landing area, which is a bit of a hassle if you didn't intend to actually land.

At the end of the trailer, we see what appears to be a couple of exterior landing pads (I slowed it down in the gif above) outside the freighter with some ships parked on them. That feels a lot nicer than having to always park in the garage.

This little backpack dude lookin' around

I'm guessing this is just a cute animation of our suit's scanner, but this little pod attached to the player's backpack looking around is a nice touch. Like visiting an alien planet with a curious kid sitting on your shoulders.

What we didn't see much of

If there was a big disappointment at the initial launch of No Man's Sky for me, it had to do with the randomized alien lifeforms. Once you saw a few, you began to recognize the base parts and pieces they were mathematically cobbled together from, until each life form just became a familiar mix of limbs and beaks and claws you'd already seen dozens of times before. There just wasn't much magic to them, and when they were strolling around the randomized terrain on procedural legs, they often appeared clumsy, graceless, and completely artificial.

There's not a lot in the trailer showing off alien creatures. There are one or two in the background, and one scene lasting a few frames (slowed down above) with players attacking one of them. I'm hopeful there's been some work done on creatures along with everything else, and that we'll see some exciting and truly different lifeforms in Next. It's certainly not shown in the trailer, though, and not mentioned in the post on the official site.

"You can help friends to stay alive, or prey on others to survive." That's something Hello Games listed as a feature in NEXT, but it's hard to say how it will work or if any of it is included in the trailer. There are a few quick pew-pew spaceship scenes, but I can't tell if it's NPCs or players fighting each other. Certainly no face-to-face PvP combat is shown.

If you can prey on others to survive, does that mean you can take their loot? Their ships? Their bases? We don't know yet, but it won't be long until we find out: No Man's Sky Next arrives on July 24.

Mar 30, 2018

Sea of Thieves, Destiny 2, and the problem with games that always need 'more content'

No Man's Sky

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.

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

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?

Sinking endless cost into keeping players as busy and engaged as possible seems to be something they deemed a diminishing return.

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.'