Actual video from the game doesn't qualify as hype! And the code is rock solid and wicked efficient.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DR01YdFtWFI&ab_channel=Facto...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVvXv1Z6EY8&ab_channel=Facto...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqaAjgpsoW8&ab_channel=Facto...
It’s almost a perfect game for a software developer. Unlike software which is difficult to visualize, factorio is all about the visualization. It makes it really easy to see your “hacks”, your “scaling”, and your “async”. It also makes it really easy to see your bugs as well. It’s like working on a program that is always running, in a debugger, but with the ability to dynamically add and change the running code in real time.
Another observation: it’s kind of like Excel. The sheet is always live and the sheet acts as a debugger (you see the data and not the code, you see the outputs not the transforms).
Can’t recommend it enough.
[1] https://twitter.com/sriramk/status/1339257751873064961?s=21
Which is actually pretty true of actual real world environments like SmallTalk.
The multiplayer gameplay also reveals a lot of fundamental truths about collaborative engineering as the player must debate architecture, prioritize and balance between the short term and the long term, join individual efforts into a group product, discover Schelling points, and so on.
You factory isn’t big enough if the game is still very performant ;) The factory must grow.
One of my recent side projects has been building out a modded multiplayer server that allows me to sell plots of land to players. My idea is to create a city of player-owned museums and shops, all with the backdrop of a custom story narrative in a high-end designed mall of sorts. My inspiration for doing so has been from watching first person videos of people walking in Japan, wanting to experience that but being unable due to the lock-downs. My favorite aspect has been creating an in-game 'paid' train line that lead the player out of the dense concrete shopping district and into one of the beautiful blue and green tree parks, the visual switch-up makes the experience fantastically enjoyable. I'm not really sure I'll end up making any real income from it but the process has been a complete blast. Playing the game in this fashion feels the same as Minecraft did, just with more automation and potential for world building.
Although not strictly Factorio related, something else I've pursued within the game has been setting up a semi-interactive self in my room. I have a few small monitors all linked up playing, and I just set my character to hang out in various places online. One game sits in a train-world just cruising along, another sits in a beautifully animated forest, another still hangs out on a pristine beach that I found. Sitting inside a small room day after day due to the pandemic has been brutal but this setup has greatly improved my sense of connection to the outside. Apart from getting to look over and see something that is visually appealing (and green now that bleakness of winter is here), I'll occasionally see random people join a server and become friends trying to build something together, it's awesome! My shelf has become an interactive, aquarium, IRC, hybrid, all thanks to this game.
I am looking forward to its complexity :)
Designing big factories in Satisfactory feels awkward - it’s very hard to refactor and redesign because the buildings are so big and you need to build them one by one. The engineer in me is always vaguely dissatisfied with what I make in satisfactory. Satisfactory’s world is beautiful to explore - but that makes it a different sort of game.
And shapez was ok, but it lacks factorio’s loop. In factorio you build things out of what you mine and construct. Shapez needs its artificial level structure to motivate you to do anything - and I find that much less satisfying because it saps my intrinsic motivation. Factorio feels grounded in the world, whereas shapez feels like a puzzle game with almost no constraints.
The factorio modding scene is also incredible. Their are so many alternate ways to play factorio - complete with way deeper tech trees, or a base that teleports between planets every 10 minutes, Seaworld - where you start on a tiny island with nothing but ocean in every direction. And as others have mentioned, the game is rock solid. Multiplayer is an absolute blast.
I have to imagine that if you tried to take a Factorio mega-factory (like a 1 rocket per minute factory) and load up the equivalent in Satisfactory, with its 3d graphics and off-the-shelf rigid body dynamics, it would crash to desktop immediately.
Don’t get me wrong, Satisfactory looks like a fun game! But nothing can match Factorio’s depth.
It doesn't matter anyway. A good copy can be better than the original.
Also, a lot of the stuff that's kind of tedious and awkward, like laying out complex belt systems, gets a lot easier when you get construction bots and can start building from blueprints. It's like a different game from that point.
A theme of the game seems to be to make the player do things that are hard or laborious but which can be accomplished in an easier way by using the the tools at hand more effectively, or eventually the problems can be worked around with new technology. It's not quite like a puzzle game where you have to solve each problem in front of you correctly before you can advance; rather you can keep advancing until the point where you're overwhelmed by technical debt (e.g. you end up spending most of your time running around fixing train deadlocks).
Not everything that's awkward or hard is a deliberate game mechanic, though. In the 1.1 release they've said they're planning to change some things that have been pain points for users.
I would say to enjoy the game you really have to play it to the point where you build robots. Factorio is a game that is amazing for many reasons, but to me the main one is exponential growth.
At a certain inflection point you can basically tear down everything you've ever built by hand, and have robots recreate it all in a minute or two.
The combination of blueprints and robots turn the game from some tedium to a game purely of mind and very little tedium.
It turns out the UI is fairly configurable and after I made it so right click cancels I sort of adapted.
But yes, when I first played it the UI was horrible. It needs some sane defaults like more common RTS games.
...and after a few minutes, a new goal comes to mind: Launch one rocket every minute. And that’s when the deep game begins. You’ll need massive power production and manufacturing infrastructure, you’ll start using the online calculators to figure out ratios of this to that, and when you get to 1 rocket per minute, you’ll want to see if you can design a system that does that while running completely untouched for 24 hours.
Before that, it was amazing.
"Do I fumble my way forward with my current way of doing things or try this new thing? (struggle struggle) Oh wow!"
Factorio is fantastic if you love automation and building complex production pipelines. The game gives you incredible control over building and controlling the manufacturing of stuff. The main motivation is to optimize that, and there are many avenues to do so. You care very little about your “person” (the being that you control) except to keep it alive.
Rimworld is much more rich in what you can choose to do, since it’s primarily a story generation game. You have a lot less control over your manufacturing pipeline. You also have to deal with the humanity of your pawns, who need to eat, sleep and enjoy recreation. You have to keep them alive through natural disasters and raids. Your pawns may die but the story doesn’t end there.
They’re really different games. When I get upset with stupidity of pawns and want more precise automation, I switch to factorio. When I get bored with the dreariness of an automated factory churning out trinkets, I switch to rimworld.
Rimworld is all about character management and anecdote creation in my view. The challenge and interest is about managing randomness and character driven conflict in a game designed to produce conflict.
They play very differently in my experience.
Rimworld is much more of a social/survival game, with hunting, gathering, cooking, diseases, invaders, exploration, character emotions, etc.
Factorio has basically none of that; it's much more about plumbing together inputs and outputs into increasingly complex and useful items. The survival aspect of Factorio is just that you are surrounded by bugs that will attack you if you pollute too much or antagonize them.
