Factorio
2021/06/19 - The benefit of making a post is that if one of the main developers on the game turns out to be a bit of an ass, then I can just edit the post and say that, which is what I'm doing now. This is an excellent thread from CaseyExplosion about the whole thing if you would like context. You can do what you want with your money, of course, but I recommend you spend it elsewhere - Dyson Sphere Program or Satisfactory are both games that are shaping up to surpass this one and are more worthy of your time and money; made by developers that (hopefully) don't suck.
Whether you like it or not, Minecraft has been very influential. Despite being made by a man who (allegedly) spent a small fortune on a room made of rotten candy and spends his remaining days getting booted off of Twitter by the man that shows up to the site three times a month, it's been the source of inspiration for a lot of developers. It's not just the games that it inspires either. It's the games that inspires the games that it inspires. Back before the game was even officially launched, some mod developers made a mod that let you pipe items from chests into other chests. Others made a mod that gave you a machine which doubled your ore smelting. You could use these mods to create automated factories that turned Minecraft from a fun cave diving romp full of monsters into a fun spreadsheet diving romp full of monsters. Ten years later and we have Factorio, the end of the production line in this rather strange game of Telephone.
While I was loathe to give that history lesson, I think it's important to note the genre that these games have spawned. People often say that Factorio is a game about automation when that's only half the truth. Factorio is a game about processes. You start stranded on an alien planet full of trees to chop and ores to mine. Despite your reservations that you're going to be Doing Minecraft Again, the game quickly shifts tactics. You create miners to mine for you; furnaces to smelt for you and belts to shift those items about. These belts can be used to feed items into assembly machines which do the crafting for you. Before you know it you are designing a factory, solving logistical problems and setting a defense network of turrets to commit some genocide on the native alien bugs.
Factorio has the benefit of being specifically designed for this purpose. The problem with modded Minecraft was that there was only so many resources you can fit into the world. Many mods would require recipes that reach the hundreds or thousands of diamonds. These modpacks were a hodge-podge of conflicting ideas with their own views on balance. Factorio on the other hand is made by a single development studio who have spent 10 years having a think about how all of it is going to work. Ores spawn in clusters which means you can usually stay in one spot and don't have to quarry out several continents worth of land to find that one resource that you need.
There was a cluster of coal ore on our recent playthrough on an island. Nothing goes to waste in these parts.
Much like with Minecraft, a lot of the fun in Factorio lies in the discovery. The first couple of factories will be crude and inefficient with no regard for ratios or throughput or any of that nerd shit. The game is full of magical moments from figuring out how to put different items on a single belt, to figuring out how trains work, to realising that that single line of belts simply isn't going to hold the iron you need, so you'll need another one. You'll soon tear down your old factory and replace it with a better, more efficient one as you traverse the endless checklist of things to do. It's all about what you're going to do next. There is always something to do which makes it difficult to stop playing when the next breadcrumb of progress is visible on the horizon. It somehow has that TV show binge-like quality of 'just one more' except you can't really say 'Oh I was up playing Factorio last night, I had to fine-tune the ratios on my blue science production' because you'll sound like the biggest nerd on the planet. Just say you were watching Community or something.
The game is a smooth ramp in terms of progression and complexity. It does a good job at coaxing you into making small production changes as you learn more about the game. It lets you take everything at your own pace. There isn't a way to lose unless you make a huge mistake and if you want, you can turn the alien enemies that attack your factory off (which is secretly the best way of playing the game). You can play however you want as well. I'm a big fan of putting all my resources on a bus of belts that stretch as far as the eye can see, while others might like to tinker around with robots or trains or perhaps you might want to say fuck it and create the biggest gelatinous mass of factories and ecological hazards since the BP oil spill.
Eventually the game reaches its end. After sifting through checklist after checklist, research after research you finally launch a rocket into space. And you ask: what was the point?
Factorio just isn't a very exciting game to actually talk about, because it's work. You're not seeing a thrilling story to its conclusion; you're not raising a virtual household through generations; you're not building a living, breathing city and taking care of its residents; you're solving a sequence of problems. Factorio is about finding the satisfaction in solving these problems, which is actually quite scary when you think about it. It reminds me of MMOs such as Destiny and Old School Runescape where the goal is to Get to The Shiny Thing. Did you get to the Shiny Thing? Here's another Shiny Thing you can aim for. Did you get to that Shiny Thing? Look at that other Shiny Thing over there. I'm probably being a bit too negative, but I think there's something sinister there. Sometimes the game feels exhausting to play, and the strive for perfection turn it from a Videogame What You Play For Fun into You Must Solve This Problem as Efficiently As Possible, when there's really no need for it. If I was a Kotaku reviewer, I'd probably say "Factorio is conditioning us to accept menial labour in our capitalist hell-scape while corporations legally take over the world", or something similar but I am (fortunately) not, so we'll leave it at that.
I wish there was a little bit more complexity towards the end. Once you reach the rocketry research, your factory is already prepared for anything else that can be thrown at it. You have a choice of spending half an hour to make the rocket launch more efficiently, or just take break with a cup of tea and some biscuits while your silo fills up. There's a slew of mods that seem intent on taking the game to ridiculous levels of complexity if that's your bag. I like the idea of it, but I also like the idea of moving into a city or doing meal prep Sunday - it's a lot of effort and is probably going to suck. Still if you have a year to spare and vanilla Factorio just isn't enough for you, it might be cool.
Factorio provides a unique sense of fun that, while feels a little bit sinister, is still a good time for the hundreds of hours it gives. Many games are trying to go in the direction that it's paved, such as Satisfactory, but I think there's a way to have this style of game without the constant demand for optimisation. Funnily enough, I think if developers looked back at Minecraft - the game that started all of this - we'd find a way to balance that interesting serotonin dump it provides between the crushing feeling that you're just doing homework.