Hello Games

With NEXT, we introduced community missions, which were a sort of precursor to today's community expeditions. We had the idea that we wanted to bring large groups of players together on the same planet, working towards the same goal, and that collaborative progress would unlock special rewards for the whole community.

The name of the special new reward currency, Quicksilver, was a suggestion from our ARG partners from Waking Titan. Quicksilver is an archaic word for mercury, which has the atomic symbol Hg. "The mercury process" was the name we gave to messages from HG - Hello Games - during the ARG.

In late 2019, we started running community missions regularly on weekends. They began with some light narrative that eventually evolved into a deep mystery involving the inhabitants of the Space Anomaly. We've never completely revealed all the secrets of that storyline. Special missions are still available every weekend, and are now procedurally generated rather than hand-authored.