i have like 370 hours of factorio, and i've only really played it over the period of about. 4-5 months, though i've owned it for a year or two now.
Factorio is just one of those games. For anybody that likes open world sandbox games and technical stuff, you already own factorio, yell at me in the replies.
Have to agree. I've played through a couple of times myself and a couple times with friends. Always fun. If you've never touched mods on it I recommend taking a look. Will further diversify your playing time.
absolutely. Personally i've just been enjoying varying my playstyles over time. It's added enough variety for me so far. I will presumably also enjoy building and design different base metas over time as well, though i have only done a few things so far, so i have hundreds if not thousands of hours to go before i start to get interesting things.
yeah, it's like that. Took me about a 100 hours to get fully acquainted. I've had several different play-styles through my various saves, all trying different things, and seeing how they go. I'm sure it'll continue for quite some time.
I like factorio but the game never even asks the question of whether destroying an entire planets ecosystem just so you, one person, can get home is ethical or right.
I don’t know, it is a small thing, I totally get why people get addicted to factorio’s gameplay loop not disputing how amazing that is it is just the basic premise of the game makes me uncomfortable in it’s disinterest in the planet you are on being anything but a resource to conquered and consumed or in thinking about how you are actually the villain in this situation from the planet’s perspective.
I always felt like the fact that you get attacked by local fauna when you cause pollution was a comment on that. As in the planet recognises that you are not doing a good thing.
ironically, it seems almost as if the planet itself was designed to counter your existence. The biters literally feed on your pollution and evolve multiple magnitudes of strength, multiple times over.
I like factorio but the game never even asks the question of whether destroying an entire planets ecosystem just so you, one person, can get home is ethical or right.
yeah, but the game isn't about social commentary, it's about logistics, factory building, and to some degree, tower defense. You don't like biters? You can just disable them, you don't actually need to play with them. You can just roleplay as if you're living on mars.
I feel like if anything factorio does a great job of explaining why the human urge to industrialize exists, and makes you experience all of the negatives of it. If we're taking it like a social commentary sort of thing. Ultimately it's nothing worse than human history has done at any given point of time. By a large margin.
By the way, you might want to check out nullius, it's the inverse of the gameplay loop. The planet is barren, and you are analogous to god, you need to create everything in order for the "normal" gameplay loop to begin.
It's also kind of interesting to consider the impacts of the biters themselves, they aren't really a life form, they're more akin to a bacteria, just on a macro, insect scale. They literally only do something productive for themselves once you get in their way. Their entire evolutionary lifeform is predicated on you being a negative influence on their environment. They consume your pollution, and use it to grow and become stronger. However, left to their own devices they seem to spread across the entire planet, almost like a cancer, just without the consumption of life that is typical, because biters seem to be magic?
It’s also kind of interesting to consider the impacts of the biters themselves, they aren’t really a life form, they’re more akin to a bacteria, just on a macro, insect scale. They literally only do something productive for themselves once you get in their way. Their entire evolutionary lifeform is predicated on you being a negative influence on their environment. They consume your pollution, and use it to grow and become stronger. However, left to their own devices they seem to spread across the entire planet, almost like a cancer, just without the consumption of life that is typical, because biters seem to be magic?
I mean I would accept magic, but anything less of an explanation of the biters behavior seems like a problematically reductive view of life.
Even the behavior of bacteria is complex and more nuanced than a cancerous process.
I get that it is a game, but I think these things do matter, especially for computer minded people who want to understand everything as a computer programs and recklessly ignore the reality of the environment around them. Media like this severs the salience of the surrounding landscape to people, and contextualizes it simply as a resource to exploit.
Idk, I mean factorio is amazing, I totally get why people love it, and I know the focus of the game isn’t on this but still…
I mean I would accept magic, but anything less of an explanation of the biters behavior seems like a problematically reductive view of life.
magic is definitely an option, but we're talking about an entire field of science here. How are we supposed to define something without reductive reasoning? The only other real possibility would be religious in nature.
All we know, or more specifically, all i know about the biters is that they're a seemingly persistent, constant across any given world. They don't seem to be feeding on anything. They don't even consume the player when killed. They seem to be explicitly aggressive against the player, for who knows what reason. They seem to benefit explicitly, and massively from pollution, and they also seem to direct targeted attacks towards the source of that pollution, all of which in an evolutionary sense would take billions of years. So presumably, there must be more than one person on this planet, and this must be a very regular cycle. Or perhaps it's a sort of multiverse deal where this simply loops forever?
Even the behavior of bacteria is complex and more nuanced than a cancerous process.
yeah, i mostly just meant it in comparison to like tigers, or something. We hate ants, wasps, and insects in general, we seem to have little problem killing them on the regular, however when it comes to things like tigers, we seem less receptive to it. It's certainly an interesting choice to base the biters on an insectoid type species.
I get that it is a game, but I think these things do matter, especially for computer minded people who want to understand everything as a computer programs and recklessly ignore the reality of the environment around them. Media like this severs the salience of the surrounding landscape to people, and contextualizes it simply as a resource to exploit.
It's definitely interesting, but i feel like exploitation of resources is probably the only good setting for this game. We can look at something like shapez for instance, similar to factorio, but it's a sterile environment, where you produce shapes. Suddenly that seems even more dystopian by nature. Are you just a dude shipped to a massive sterile warehouse and told to create various different shapes as a method of commoditization? Who knows.
At least with resource exploitation, there's a very clear driving path, there's an entirely independent motivation (not being on that planet, because lore wise, you crashed there, and aren't supposed to be there, and how else are you supposed to leave without exploiting resources? Sure you could wait for someone else, but they also exploited resources, and them arriving isn't a guarantee, so you might as well keep busy and do it yourself.) Though to be clear, i haven't played shapez, so maybe there is some kind of weird lore behind it, i'm assuming there isn't.
Idk, I mean factorio is amazing, I totally get why people love it, and I know the focus of the game isn’t on this but still…
I always like to think of it from the perspective of something like a lion. Killing animals for sustenance. At the end of the day, we all must cause some level of destruction to progress. In this case we cause very little destruction once we do leave, because inevitably the base will cripple, run out of power, and the biters will overrun it, destroying everything in it's place, claiming it as theirs again, and expanding back over it. Just at an extremely high level of evolution now instead.
I personally haven’t played factorio, but I know enough about it to prefer satisfactory.
any reason specifically you prefer satisfactory?
I think i'd have to look into satisfactory more, but factorio is more explicitly focused on the gameplay loop, and meta elements of the game itself. Having really good balance, great game design, and super functional gameplay styles.
Whereas satisfactory seems to focus more on the game itself, less than the gameplay styles. I.E. the game creates the gameplay style, the player will follow, as opposed to in factorio, it's explicitly designed around having certain styles of gameplay, which make it very easy to adopt and utilize.
Not to say that you can't with satisfactory, it just seems like it would be a lot more work. Like in factorio i have a set of rail blueprints that are perfect. Space optimally, designed optimally, and work optimally, they're designed so that i can just plonk them down and do as little work as possible and have them functional. I'm not sure satisfactory has that level of gameplay.
Satisfactory has added blueprints. They've been part of the game for a while. You can design, build and disassemble blueprints wholesale. They're not super large, which is part of the challenge. For something like a rail line, the placement of blueprints won't connect the rail line together even if you put a rail from end to end; so those blueprints usually are all the infrastructure surrounding a rail line, and the rail line is run down the infra after the blueprint is built.
There's plenty of quirks with it, as I'm sure there are in factorio, and there's no "perfect way" to do anything. A core mechanic in satisfactory is alternate recipes. I'll give you an example. Screws are an early item that's usually a pain point for new players early game. To get them, you have to mine iron, smelt it into iron ingots, then construct rods from those ingots, and finally, convert the rods into screws. It's a pretty involved recipe for the early game. Most other recipes are more simple, concrete is raw limestone, constructed to concrete directly, it's a two machine setup to get it rolling. Rods are another, and plates are similar to rods (both three machine setups, miner, smelter, constructor). Screws require at least four.
There's a popular alternative recipe called cast screws, which creates screws from iron ingots directly. Not only that, but you get more screws per ingot than the vanilla recipe.
To take that example further, there's an alternate for ingots, which is a "pure" ingot, which uses a mid-game machine, the refinery, to combine raw iron and water, and produce iron ingots, which has a higher yield than simply smelting the raw material.
So you can do the og recipes, and build a field of miners, smelters, and constructors (to make rods, then screws), so that you get enough screws in sufficient quantities, or, with a little legwork and some alternative recipes, you can use the pure iron ingot alternate, and cast screw alternate, and get a lot more with a lot fewer machines, and fewer iron nodes (less raw iron).
There's Infinity variant building methodologies, from building right on the ground, to large towers filled with many floors of machines to do the work. The layout can be chaotic and spaghetti, inefficient and a mess, to varying levels of perfect input to perfect output, building a variety of things continually.
You can focus on design, or efficiency, or simply the speed at which you can throw things together. The options are endless.
You can rush towards coal, fuel, or nuclear power, or flatten all of the biodiversity of the map into biofuel and run everything on plant and animal matter.
Personally, I focus on alternative recipes early on, as well as logistics (faster conveyor belts, etc), and power (mainly coal/fuel)... Collecting biomass generally sucks IMO, plus the nature in the game is quite lovely and I don't like to destroy more than I have to.
With the verticality, you can have production floors of machines where the inputs and outputs go into the floor, out of sight, into logistics floors below, to be carted around between machines, and to storage crates, or whatever you need.
If you run out of space, you can expand, or build more floors above your current build and expand that way.
Trying to solve logistical issues in three dimensions can be a challenge.
There's caves to explore, a variety of wild animals of varying strengths and abilities in the game, even some that are radioactive, or spew toxic gas. There's even flower looking plants that kind of stand up when you come nearby, and if you hang out near them, they emit toxic gases too... Or you can play on passive mode where the fauna generally ignore that you exist unless you attack them.
I could keep going, there's a lot of interesting stuff in the game, including a lot of things we don't have the story about (they've had placeholders in the game that won't be explained until 1.0 gets released, hopefully later this year). I have over 970 hours in the game and I will be starting a brand new save once 1.0 is available. I'm certain I will be playing that for many more hours to come.
If you want to know anything specific, please ask. I can point you at beginner friendly YouTubers, or streamers that push the game to its absolute (and ridiculous) limits with mods, or anything in-between. I can also just discuss the mechanics or what we know of the story so far.
For me, satisfactory is an extension of the same concepts I enjoy and employ for my profession. I'm in IT, and getting everything working just right, then seeing everything working perfectly is the take away I like to get from doing a thing. Troubleshooting it when it's not operating correctly, and ensuring everything stays running 24/7, is huge.
Satisfactory has added blueprints. They’ve been part of the game for a while. You can design, build and disassemble blueprints wholesale. They’re not super large, which is part of the challenge. For something like a rail line, the placement of blueprints won’t connect the rail line together even if you put a rail from end to end; so those blueprints usually are all the infrastructure surrounding a rail line, and the rail line is run down the infra after the blueprint is built.
yeah i know it has blueprints, i'm just saying it feels more like it's been shoehorned in than it has designed to be integrated fully, as it has in factorio.
There’s plenty of quirks with it, as I’m sure there are in factorio, and there’s no “perfect way” to do anything.
there are definitely some quirks, but for all intents and purposes, anything you want to do with blueprints, can be done with blueprints. You can align them globally to the world chunk size, to make your blueprinting incredibly idiot proof, you can align it relative to the blueprints dimensions itself and change how that alignment is configured and setup, such that it will perfectly paste continuations in perpetuity, until you let go of the shift button. One thing about factorio that doesn't exist outside of it is that the devs don't settle for "good enough" they either do it right, or implement it so minimally that it can't be wrong. A good example of this would be robots, they have an incredibly minimal implementation, though annoying, it's forgivable because of how simple they are. Where as something like blueprints, basically anything you could ask for, is already inside of a blueprint. The one thing i want, is better blueprint navigation, because it doesn't support forward and backward navigation quite perfectly, and that's it.
There’s Infinity variant building methodologies
this is actually one of the things i appreciate about factorio, to my knowledge in the vanilla game, there are no alternative solutions or recipes. You make gears with two iron plates. There are different tiers of assemblers and modules, but those are the only things that change that. Everything is balanced to be self contained perfectly. It's annoying sometimes, for example boilers burn solid fuel, but not liquid fuel, it's not a huge deal because you can just make solid fuel, but it's somewhat annoying because of pollution. Ideally burning solid fuel would be less polluting, though it isn't in vanilla, i'm sure it could be modded in. But generally, the balance is really good, very well thought out, and explicitly designed around building and manufacturing things. Which makes for a really nice gameplay experience. I'm sure satisfactory is similar in that regard though. (a lot of factorio mods will introduce alternate recipes btw)
You can focus on design, or efficiency, or simply the speed at which you can throw things together.
same thing in factorio, like i mentioned with modules, you can just put three prod 3 modules into the rocket silo and make it 25% cheaper, or you can stack prod everywhere in your manufacturing line up, reducing your usage of raw material by at least 50% total.
You can rush towards coal, fuel, or nuclear power, or flatten all of the biodiversity of the map into biofuel and run everything on plant and animal matter.
this is actually one of the interesting things for me with factorio, there is a very explicit gameplay advancement. You could get to end game on coal power, sure. But the game really incentivizes you to at the very least, build solar power, if not nuclear power. Once you get to solar research, your power costs immediately start to increase significantly, building yellow and purple science basically double your raw material costs, while doubling the production of your factory. You need lots more power if you want that to go over well. You often go from about 50MW on blue science, to 500MW on a full 60spm base. It can be a little strict but the game is designed around it so well it's not a huge concern of mine.
With the verticality, you can have production floors of machines where the inputs and outputs go into the floor, out of sight, into logistics floors below, to be carted around between machines, and to storage crates, or whatever you need. If you run out of space, you can expand, or build more floors above your current build and expand that way.
this is probably the most interesting thing to me about satisfactory, the fact that you can just immediately stuff things into an additional dimension is huge. Factorio kind of has this with a few mods, like warehousing, though it's different. Though in factorio everything is just 2D, which makes for a rather aesthetic building style, as well as pretty clearly demonstrating where everything is, as well as where bottlenecks and problems are, which i find rather nice.
If you want to know anything specific, please ask. I can point you at beginner friendly YouTubers, or streamers that push the game to its absolute (and ridiculous) limits with mods, or anything in-between. I can also just discuss the mechanics or what we know of the story so far.
personally i'm not a huge lore fan, i like to follow along with it as i play, if i ever do though. As for questions, one thing i'm kind of curious about, though i've never looked into is building logistics. Do materials just magically materialize out of thin air from your base/root storage? Or do you have to do a bunch of handling logistics to cart materials and buildings from one place to another as you build stuff like you do in factorio. That's probably my biggest gripe with factorio, though it does have robots, i find them lacking in aspects.
For me, satisfactory is an extension of the same concepts I enjoy and employ for my profession. I’m in IT, and getting everything working just right, then seeing everything working perfectly is the take away I like to get from doing a thing. Troubleshooting it when it’s not operating correctly, and ensuring everything stays running 24/7, is huge.
it's similar for me, although i find factorio is sterilized a bit more, as far as my general taste goes. It's more interesting for me on a macro level, than on a specifics level, for me i really enjoy experimenting with different play style metas in factorio, i've gone from belt based mega base, to bot based belted megabase, to train logistic based megabase, to presumably in the future, a proper belted mega base, and a proper bot based megabase. As well as all of the various overhaul mods and play style changes you can make to make it more interesting to play.
Factorio is lot less about the individual build, although you can still hyper optimize those, and i do that from time to time, and more about figuring out how to fit them together effectively. Anybody can build an oil setup, it's integrating it properly into all of your other stuff that makes it hard.
So, to address your question, raw materials only come from nodes, which require miners. Obviously miners require power, but produce raw materials (output via a belt) indefinitely. The rate of extraction depends on the quality/purity of the node (poor/normal/pure) and the level of the miner. Miners can be placed anywhere there is a node. So building smaller modular factories is definitely possible and one of many legitimate strategies.
I think that answers the question, let me know if I misunderstood. I'm not 100% familiar with all the factorio mechanics so I'm not totally sure if I fully understood the question.
Between locations, you can move materials by truck, train, or drone. You can run trucks across the ground or build roads.
When it comes to generation, coal plants can burn just about anything solid, from raw coal to more complex materials derived from by-products of oil production. Fuel generators take any liquid fuel, from regular fuel, turbo fuel, and even liquid biofuel. Additionally there's a bunch of different ways to arrive at each type of fuel, for solids, you can use refineries to refine coal or petroleum waste into compacted coal or similar, and with liquid fuel, there's blenders and refineries, recipes for turbo blend fuel, heavy fuel, even turbo heavy fuel, diluted fuel, and packaged fuel too (used for jetpacks and vehicles). It gets.... Complicated.
With satisfactory, you can build small and just wait, or build big and use a lot of power, and things get finished much faster.
With progression, there's two main sections, milestones and phases. Each phase unlocks more tiers of milestones, and each milestone unlocks more buildables which will allow you to complete future milestones and phases. You can complete them in whatever order you want, but some of the progression requires that certain milestones get completed before progress can be made. In that way, there's some linearity with the progression.
The first person perspective of the game and the three dimensional design is what draws me towards satisfactory more than factorio. I'd happily give you a personal tour of one of the multiplayer servers I play on and host. No pressure, I just thought I'd offer in case you wanted to ask questions and get shown around the game by someone.
It just seems like you would enjoy the game. If you ultimately decide to play, that's fine, if not, no worries.
So, to address your question, raw materials only come from nodes, which require miners. Obviously miners require power, but produce raw materials (output via a belt) indefinitely. The rate of extraction depends on the quality/purity of the node (poor/normal/pure) and the level of the miner. Miners can be placed anywhere there is a node. So building smaller modular factories is definitely possible and one of many legitimate strategies.
i have a rough understanding of this part, my question was more so "do i have to cart a billion thingamajigs from point A to B in order to build a thing" It's already a thing in factorio, so it wouldn't be a deal breaker, but i feel like satisfactory is the type of game to make this a non problem.
Between locations, you can move materials by truck, train, or drone. You can run trucks across the ground or build roads.
similar to factorio, though factorio is more restricted, which i like. There are four directions (8 if you include diagonal rails) and there are explicit tiles that machines and belts take up, which often means you can make super braindead blueprints.
For example, earlier today, i just shit out a blueprint book with a bunch of perfectly tiling walls, where everything aligns perfectly, all based on absolute positioning, so i can easily plonk them down anywhere, and know that i can make my walls line up as needed without having to think about it, along with that i made a roboport blueprint that coincides on the half grid of the wall prints. So that i can print it down inside of the wall without it being in the way, while still having it align perfectly and be super clean.
I imagine you can do similar things in satisfactory, but i suppose this is probably my minecraft roots coming out to play with this one. I'm sure the 3rd dimension and less restriction would be fun, is there any sort of grid alignment? Or is everything manual, i think that would be the one big thing i'd miss, is the ability to align things automatically.
When it comes to generation, coal plants can burn just about anything solid, from raw coal to more complex materials derived from by-products of oil production. Fuel generators take any liquid fuel, from regular fuel, turbo fuel, and even liquid biofuel. Additionally there’s a bunch of different ways to arrive at each type of fuel, for solids, you can use refineries to refine coal or petroleum waste into compacted coal or similar, and with liquid fuel, there’s blenders and refineries, recipes for turbo blend fuel, heavy fuel, even turbo heavy fuel, diluted fuel, and packaged fuel too (used for jetpacks and vehicles). It gets… Complicated.
sounds about right. I'd definitely enjoy that if i got into it.
The first person perspective of the game and the three dimensional design is what draws me towards satisfactory more than factorio. I’d happily give you a personal tour of one of the multiplayer servers I play on and host. No pressure, I just thought I’d offer in case you wanted to ask questions and get shown around the game by someone.
it's definitely interesting, but the thing about factorio that makes me really like it, is that the game seems to be explicitly designed around being a factory builder, where as something like satisfactory is more a 3d open world sandbox game that is also a factory builder, but then again i also havent played it so.
If i ever do buy the game i probably won't take you up on the offer because i'll be too busy figuring the game out already, lol.
For grids, there is a "world grid" which players were given access to some time ago, if you build properly on the world grid, then when you meet up one section from a factory to another section from another factory, they'll meet properly.
I always use the world grid to get a starting point before laying anything down. I don't want to struggle later on trying to make things fit, and doing it this way it's a no brainer.
For rail lines, they're completely dynamic, if you want to build it into a pretzel, you can do that. I'm not sure the trains would love it, but you can easily do that. There's actually a problem most new players have that after going around a corner, their rail line goes all wavy because the rail curves a little bit depending on where you place it, and what it's attached to. The solution is, at the end of the curve, when you have your ending point, remove the last section of rail at the curve, then build a perfectly straight section of rail where it will continue, then rebuild the last bit of the curve. This ensures the next section will start perfectly straight and any curve in the rail will be isolated to where the rail is meant to be curved. Then continue building as normal and the rest of the line will be straight.
Of course the rail lines can go up/down as much as you want (within the bounds of the world), so it's not uncommon to see sky bridges with long rail lines that span most of the map. In that configuration, either very tall conveyor lifts being materials up/down from stations on the line, or there's long, looped spirals of track to bring trains down to stations. I've seen both, and both methods are valid.
There will be train and truck stations frequently above or below factories for transit. I've also seen long bridges of conveyor belts bringing materials from one place to another. The main benefits to conveyors over trains/trucks/drones is that they're very consistent and don't require any additional power or fuel to run (trucks need fuel, trains use power), but a lot of people think they're ugly, so trains or trucks are common. I'm more of a fan of consistency so I tend to do conveyors, but I don't fault anyone for making different choices. Trains always need infrastructure, at least a rail line, trucks usually need some kind of infrastructure, though, not always. Drones don't need any, so if you want to preserve nature in the game, you can go that way, but drones are very late-game and require batteries which are difficult to build in sufficient quantities. Not impossible, but not easy either.
I tend to build a road with conveyors hanging underneath. The road is for me to get there and to provide the necessary structure to place the conveyors.
One thing I've heard of that factorio has that satisfactory lacks is the idea of pollution. In satisfactory, you can spew all the toxic gases you want and the environment doesn't change at all. Plants still grow and the world keeps looking the same. IDK, it's a difference I know about.
The first-person style of satisfactory is more like building in Minecraft (I would assume) so getting things lined up is sometimes a challenge until you get to the hoverpack. But the hoverpack requires power, and to get it, you have to be within a certain proximity to a power post.
In any case. I was thinking the tour would be a "before you buy" kind of thing, maybe over discord or something, where I can stream my game and you can ask whatever questions you want, and I can show you the mechanics. If you're not interested, that's fine. There's plenty of that kind of tour content on YouTube too if you want to look around.
For transporting materials, you don't have to. If you build modular factories right next to where your nodes are you can produce your items and store them at that location. The only down side is that when you need that stuff you'll have to go to that location and pick up what you need.
A lot of players like to build a resource hub and dump all their finished products into bins there, so they have a single location to go to when building anything. Just pick up whatever mats you need, and head out.
I have a lot more I could say about the nuances of design and structure in such a place, but it's all up to the person playing for what they want to do to put it all together. I tend to keep cramming too much into too small of a space and I have to engineer my way around the limitations. I need to plan better.
Anyways, I hope you enjoy factorio, as I enjoy satisfactory. My offer stands if you change your mind. If you ever buy the game and want to play some mp, let me know, I usually have a server running.
There will be train and truck stations frequently above or below factories for transit. I’ve also seen long bridges of conveyor belts bringing materials from one place to another. The main benefits to conveyors over trains/trucks/drones is that they’re very consistent and don’t require any additional power or fuel to run (trucks need fuel, trains use power), but a lot of people think they’re ugly, so trains or trucks are common. I’m more of a fan of consistency so I tend to do conveyors, but I don’t fault anyone for making different choices. Trains always need infrastructure, at least a rail line, trucks usually need some kind of infrastructure, though, not always. Drones don’t need any, so if you want to preserve nature in the game, you can go that way, but drones are very late-game and require batteries which are difficult to build in sufficient quantities. Not impossible, but not easy either.
This is actually kind of interesting to me, because in factorio belts are an option, you can certainly use them, but they are almost definitely more annoying (or atleast more strict) than using trains or bots, you get access to bots just after trains, though you don't get logistics until end game science (so you can compare them pretty closely to drones, though the batteries are fairly cheap)
also, one thing that i've seen in satisfactory is all the little "tidbits" that you have to sometimes do, you mentioned it with the curved rails for trains, that kind of stuff is why i really like factorio, because it has almost none of that. Rails are a little funky sometimes, but there are only straight rails and curved rails, so it's only going to be so wrong. Super fiddly stuff is something i often find really annoying though. I assume a lot of that stuff will either, eventually be fixed, or is not a significant problem since you can just play the game around it and ignore it most of the time.
There are no vehicles, unless you play with AAI vehicles or something, so those aren't an option, but generally rails are a literal "paste and place" type building option, you can plonk shit down wherever, as long as you're connected to your rail network and have those materials on the rail line, it will service what you want.
One thing I’ve heard of that factorio has that satisfactory lacks is the idea of pollution. In satisfactory, you can spew all the toxic gases you want and the environment doesn’t change at all. Plants still grow and the world keeps looking the same. IDK, it’s a difference I know about.
yeah, it's pretty minor, and there are things like efficiency modules which actually counteract about 80% of your pollution when used properly (as well as power consumption, though it's not usually causing pollution, because of solar and nuclear power) Really pollution is just meant to make the biters angry so they attack you, their attacks are actually a function of how much pollution they consume, as well as their evolution. Which has a handful of stages in increasing orders of magnitude, though it does also damage trees, trees will absorb a set amount of pollution continually, and regularly, however if you go above that, you will damage the trees, and the trees will no longer be capable of absorbing as much pollution, leading to more biter attacks, more than likely. Usually trees get in the way more than anything, and it's also worth noting that ground tiles also absorb pollution, grass does quite a bit, sand does less, landfill does none, but nuclear "tiles" (ones that were hit with an atomic bomb) will absorb very little pollution, which is a way of making landfill absorb pollution. Water absorbs very little as well, biters tend to path around water alot, unless you landfill it or something.
You can also just turn it off, if you want, as with most things in factorio, the world is very configurable, since it's all procedural.
In any case. I was thinking the tour would be a “before you buy” kind of thing, maybe over discord or something, where I can stream my game and you can ask whatever questions you want, and I can show you the mechanics. If you’re not interested, that’s fine. There’s plenty of that kind of tour content on YouTube too if you want to look around.
ah i see, i probably won't take you up on it then, it's a factory builder, so i can only hate it so little after all.
Anyways, I hope you enjoy factorio, as I enjoy satisfactory.
absolutely, same to you, i've been working on getting a proper megabase setup, i currently have 120spm, and i'm fixing more for something like, 500SPM now. So i need a considerable jump in resources and production, which is what im working on setting up right now.
Just avoid AAA slop from big publishers, problem solved.
Quite ironic you're using an AI generated image for it considering the same AAA publishers are considering using it. I really hope you don't think "DEI" and "wokeness" are responsible for these AAA publishers pushing multiplayer-first games on us.
If he never played the original I think it’s good he starts with it. Black Mess is great, but the original Half Life has a certain historical value (and is still a great game).
Black Mesa is literally just better looking Half-Life approved by Valve. I can really only say the same thing so many times before you understand that what I'm saying is what it is lol.
And you’re saying there’s no difference between playing Black Mesa today vs playing Half life today, and therefore he might as well start out with Black Mesa?
Or what is the meaning of your reply?
Hard disagree. Games like Half life have a huge historical value for their impact. Playing the original is worth it. Especially if one takes the medium itself seriously.
You wouldn’t say an original movie and a 22 years younger remake are “the same”, right?
I think you’re playing dumb with me.
Love the Wikipedia link btw.
I’ve played Black Mesa in its early access phase already and then later on again when they released Xen.
No, I just think you're kinda dumb now looking for a pedantic fight on Lemmy of all places trying to argue that Half-Life and Black Mesa aren't the same story and essential game lol.
I've played DSP, it's a great game too. I'll probably jump back to that when I burn out on Planet Crafter. The thing I don't like about it and Satisfactory is conveyor belt management. The constant battle to rewire the spaghetti.
DSP recently got localized small distribution drones, you can convert any storage box into a tiny logistics station now. It's pretty sweet, really reduces the spaghetti early on in recent playthroughs
I often use UT, Q3 and CS 1.6 as examples of how long a game can stay active when players are given tools to setup their own servers, as opposed to companies handling multiplayer themselves (and often killing it off in a few years).
I'm happy with a 17" laptop, though I'm having to use a usb keyboard. Also playing a game from 2015, Rebel Galaxy. Nothing really stands out, but it's interesting enough for my tastes.
It's an ok game, I think the first and biggest letdown is the 2D movement. While broadsides are fun, automatic turrets are taking care of everything for me so I only need to keep turning around to keep shields up.
I was so anti gaming laptop for years but my wife swears by them. I think I just got burned from crappy laptops around the 2000s - 2010s, because her latest laptop is a beast. Not to mention most PC games aren't trying to push to cutting edge specs anymore.
So I've turned around and I think gaming laptops are great!
I can relate. For a long time, I was all about a tower desktop, because I could upgrade it as needed. Last one I had I built in 2014, but didn't upgrade it in any capacity until 2017, when I gave it to my brother. If I wanted a better graphics card, I'd have to get a new PSU, and I also needed a better screen over my then 12 year old, 15" LCD screen. I didn't buy anything new outright as I was short on cash, so I spent the next 2 years using a laptop I bought back in 2012, which even played Fallout 4 on medium! That time with it really made me appreciate the form factor and portability
I moved to towers for the same reason years ago, but I basically never do major component swaps like I thought I would.
I've since realized that having a tower is really nice for other things though, namely maintenance and cleaning/airflow. My rtx 2060 seemed like it was on its way out a year ago (thermal throttling, even on way lower settings than it used to be able to run just fine), so I took it apart and replaced the thermal paste. Runs better than when I first got it. Got some new case fans recently as well and the whole thing runs cooler, quieter, and they use less power than my stock ones, which is nice.
Obviously the thermal paste thing applies to laptops as well, but laptops can be very tough to get open and dig around in.
Gaming laptops are great for those who don't understand they're getting a slower, harder to upgrade and more expensive system than a desktop.
Unless a college student in Tokyo with half a square foot of desk space, or travel a lot and like to game at the hotel, there are very few reasonable justifications for a gaming laptop. And even with those justifications they are a less-than-ideal situation. A desktop is always a better solution when feasible.
The thing I don't like about laptops are 1. Noise and 2. The bursty CPUs just don't mesh well if I want to run a swarm of VMs or need to just run a big compress/decompress process. I watched one laptop slowly throttle itself all the way down to 700mhz while I was messing with a bunch of VMs and it really made me miss having a desktop where it can just chill at 5x the speed at 100% utilization and chew through whatever is being thrown at it
StarFox 64 is so perfect in that arcade-game way, where you can technically finish it in a sitting but it's so cool to figure out different paths and stuff. :D
"Okay guys, let's ROCK N' ROLL!"
In case you haven't seen it, this video might make you very happy.
Wait, you play games to have fun and not as a duty? What about "pride and accomplishment"? ;)
The moment I embraced easy mode was when Assassin's Creed Odyssey was like: "Is the gameplay we designed for our single player game too tedious? Then buy some legendary items with IRL money or maybe our XP cheat!"
I hate that games started designing around microtransactions. Like who thought "hey let's take the worst parts of MMOs and put them into single player". I loved AC origins and was so looking forward to odyssey and then I just bounced off it within a few hours because so much of it just felt like doing chores.
Extra bonus: Odyssey was supposed to feature a female lead, rather than the choice, but a misogynistic Ubisoft exec vetoed it, which I can only assume was reason for the absolutely garbage dialog.
A lot of times I start out with Normal difficulty, and a game eventually escalates its difficulty past what I am capable of delivering. At which point I find that the only way to change the difficulty is to start over, so I uninstall it.
Toxicity is one thing for sure but I don't like how the commercialization of MP has shaped it.
Indie games have a very different feel in their online gameplay compared to "commercial" games.
Even way back, HL1 online and those online experiences felt so different because it was designed to be about the group experience rather than level up and get a skin, buy a weapon, our skill tree is massive.
Sure technology was holding it back but I wish I could see what it would've been without the massive push for $$$.
I only want to play single player games. I’m not a super big gamer, but I just want campaigns. I recently got a PS5 and I’ve been struggling to find newer games that have a great single player campaign. RDR2 is my style, it’s my favorite game. The gameplay itself is a little problematic, but it’s gorgeous and the story just gets me where I live. And that’s what I want.
It’s not the standard tho. Every style guide says this is an error it with the optional exception of single-character capital letters …such as Oakland A’s.
Same here. I spent about 30 minutes trying to play one (DoTA I think?) and figured out:
Each hero has a zillion upgrades and abilities
Each hero is basically on their own roguelite style upgrade path
The game has a dozen or more such heroes
icons and text too small to play on livingroom TV, controller play out of the question
at mercy of online match-making algorithm if I'm not in a league/clan/whatever
From this I could deduce:
There's no way in hell this is perfectly balanced - too many variables, it may as well be MttG
Going to take 20 or more hours to dial in a personal play style
Going to take probably 50-100 to develop a play style that can adapt to most situations
League play will probably kick my ass, requiring another 50-100 hours of practice/training
Causal play is out; likely can't pick up and play immediately due to lobby, variable match times
I'm not knocking the genre as a whole, but this is not for me. It's too far outside my typical mode of gaming and is likely to just frustrate me more than anything else. I'm familiar with hard to play online games like Quake, TF2, and even Soldat. But those have small power systems that, even with gross imbalances, were still playable because there were usually only one or two scenarios you couldn't overcome. Adding more on every axis just sounds like a wildly unbalanced system where the skill curve isn't steep enough, costing a lot of time invested in bad strategies before you figure it all out.
The appeal would be with a limited albeit large set of characters, items, & rules, you can have effectively an infinite set of outcomes due to the dice rolls of teammates but also champions/heroes chosen on team. It is almost impossible to see the same game twice unlike. There is skill expression & build mechanics that allow a player to outplay or recover matchups & adjust to the state of the game on the fly. With every game starting over at zero, you don’t get invested in building a specific character, but in mastering the gameplay which can go from micro mechanics to macro. I think a lot of folks liked it coincidentally at a time with better broadband for communications for this style of game, developers doing frequent patches to force meta shakeups & e-sports + streaming also taking off. But also a sunk cost fallacy of having invested the time to git gud not bothering to learn any game too similar.
Should I play Noita if it mostly caught my eye because of the cool physics? Hades and Vampire Survivors are the two roguelikes that finally clicked for me.
Haven't tried the other two, but I would say yes if you do roguelikes. The physics and reactions are the half of it, the wandbuilding mechanics let you build some completely bizzare and powerful wands, and with a little luck can start getting a godrun fairly quick.. but you're always vulnerable.
Highly recommend going in blind, there are a lot of secrets to find, different sidequests, etc, winning the game once is a milestone.
Don't forget the needless implementation of always-online single player games. Even for single/multiplayer games like PoE or anything Diablo, there's literally no technical need to have a connection. It's just fancy DRM for Blizzard and an excuse to milk you more microtransactions for PoE.
And before anyone regurgitates Blizzard's BS about anti-cheat, it's very possible to keep multiplayer characters on the server and single player on your computer and never have them interact or permit single player loot to be sold on their marketplace. Not to mention their regular online check for D2R. Blizzard has ALWAYS used aggressively hostile DRM. If they could virus bomb thieves' computers then they absolutely would.
I've been hmming and hawing in answering this. But I'm out for dinner and bored. So alot games original vision is to be a single player experience but then online features or an online overhaul is shoved by the aboves. IE SimCity was considered unplayable by thr online features, anthem was originally designed to be single player but was completely redone, etc etc.
Yeah I see that. I remember the disappointment of sim city.
It could be I don't follow games close enough to see what I'm missing. I find more SP games popping up in my feeds / friend recommendations than I could ever hope to play.
I definitely feel like mainstream AAA/AAAA and even iii to a certain extent have been progressively enshittified. But I've been at this a while, so I've seen how it's gone this way as more and more money got brought to bare on games.
The moment someone who wasn't involved in actually making some part of the game was expecting a fat return on investment was the moment the wheel of shit started to turn.
Don't care about achievements play games till like 70% then drop them. If it stops being fun I'm done, finishing a game is never a requirement don't have time for that
I got to like 98% in RDR2 before I realized the gambling ones were going to be a giant pain in the ass. At that point I was in too deep to give up. I watched all 3 Robocop movies in one sitting and still didn't complete the last blackjack one. Eventually got it but that was a frustrating experience.
Yea I was like looking for a solution online because I was like "there's no way you're just supposed to brute force this" and came across so many people that were like "no there's no trick but I got in like 30 minutes"
Yeah unless the story is good I'm rarely going to stick around for the last bit, which is usually just padding. Actually, good difficulty levels / other accessibility options have been a nice development.
Lets you turn down the volume on the gameplay so you can finish for the story.
Please recommend me your favourite story games. This is me and I'm in need of a good 'book.' :)
Edit: I'm going to tell you all to play Night in the Woods. Now, it is set in my home region and felt like a game made for me, but I think it has messages anyone could relate to.
I'm listening to the soundtrack right now and it's awesome. The story is decent and the graphics and design are top notch. It was so captivating that I pretty much didn't play anything else while I was working through the game.
Story first games: Tacoma, What Remains of Edith Finch, Life Is Strange, Botany Manor(more puzzle than story), Open Roads, Lake, Deliver Us The Moon, Firewatch, Kona, Day of the Tentacle (The remaster is incredible)
For more standard shoot or action games with good writing/story I love the remedy games, Alan Wake, Quantum Break, Control.
I was never a huge fan of Telltale style story games that much, but I really enjoyed the Back to the Future one that came out years back. Not sure if that’s still available anywhere though.
I picked up "Yakuza 0" on sale not too long ago, and I'm enjoying it so much that I picked up the rest of the remastered series while it was on sale. Based on how long I'm spending mucking around in the first one, It may take me the rest of my life to get through them all. I don't know how "Like a Dragon" compares to the earlier games, but I really enjoy the narrative, combat, sub-stories, and mini-games in "0".
As an aside, I really enjoy a well-done pool mini-game. I probably spent more time playing pool in the various space stations in "Rebel Galaxy Outlaw" than doing anything else. Likewise, Kiryu spends a lot of time in the pool hall, as well as hanging around the batting cages, and fine-tuning his pocket racers.
Don't know that they'll all be ported to PC but the Supermassive standalones (Until Dawn, The Quarry) and Dark Pictures Anthology are great, if you like horror movies. I prefer to watch my wife play them. They're literally like interactive/choose your own adventure films.
I've read that comment a lot and it makes me feel like there's something big that I might spoil if I ever Google about it. But like I'm a couple dozen hours in at this point... After how many hours of playtime would you say the "don't look it up" advice expires?
Seconding the Blackwell series, with a caveat. The earlier games can be a little rough around the edges, resulting in a few Guide Dang It! moments. Walkthroughs are your friends.
Mostly in alphabetical order going down my steam list:
Great stories great games: Tales of Symphonia and Vesperia, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky trilogy, Metal Gear Solid, 2, and 3, Subnautica, Secret of Mana, Legend of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Hollow Knight, Spec Ops: The Line, A Hat in Time, Hades, Doom, Deus Ex, Eternal Sonata, F.E.A.R., FF6, FF13-2, Nier Replicant & Automata, Sleeping Dogs, Undertale, Valkyria Chronicles (admittedly haven't beaten it though).
Mindless fun simple stories: Ys (almost any of them), My Time at Portia or Sandrock, Resident Evil games, Rune Factory 4 and 5, Harvest Moon 64 and Friends of Mineral Town, Stray, Amnesia, Armored Core 6, Have a Nice Death, I am Setsuna, Life is Strange, Neon White, Cyberpunk 2077.
If you had to twist my arm I'd give you these variations of top recommendations.
Best typical JRPG: Tales of Symphonia
Best Metroidvania: Hollow Knight
Best where choices matter: Undertale
Best fps: Spec Ops: The Line
Best comfy story: My Time at Portia
Best environmental storytelling: Subnautica
Best simple stories in stories: A Hat in Time
Best story with a bajillion endings and things to keep playing for: Nier Automata (play Replicant too!)
Pillars of Eternity. I've owned the game for 8 years but finally sat down recently to learn how to play a classic CRPG. I haven't been this engrossed in a game since Mass Effect 2 or Skyrim.
I absolutely adored a low budget game called Firewatch. It’s first person and your only contact with another human is through a radio. You’re running away from your life and work for a summer in a fire watch tower in a national park.
The story is nice and the characters are interesting and flawed and relatable.
Buy it on sale and have a fun evening or two with it.
Witcher 3. The story is insanely good, just remember: your decisions matter (but don't look anything up).
Some people say it's hard to get into it and to be fair it is a bit complicated first but you don't have to use all mechanics, and it's well worth getting into it.
It just got an official mod creator (yes, that game from... 2015? (graphics from 2022 since there was a huge graphics update) still got a new update in 2024) and the community still is strong so it'll get even better over the next years.
Oh sweet nobody's mentioned it yet! One of my personal favorite "book-feeling games" is an FPS series.
Linear, tightly focused, and feels like a novel because it's based on one:
Metro: 2033 and Metro: Last Light.
(Haven't played Exodus yet)
You play a young fella named Artyom. Living in formerly-Russia's metro tunnels with other survivors after a nuclear apocalypse devastates the surface.
Your settlement comes under threat from seemingly psychic creatures called "the Dark Ones", and you're sent on a quest to go get help.
Across the way is a bit of a "coming of age" adventure. You run across really interesting and well-acted characters, sneak past hostile factions, contend with scary (and diversely behaviored) mutants, and risk dangerous excursions on the surface. This is a dark world where gasmask filters are precious and bullets are literally currency, but somehow it's still beautiful and fascinating.
(That intro guitar melody will stay with me forever.)
Like any good hero, Artyom finds himself in one bad situation after another, and along the way if you pick up on the hints, may even come to understand the world around him and the role he plays in it.
There's a morality system that's more subtle than "be boyscout or be a villain", and "ranger difficulty" is an amazing way to play because it makes gunfights feel tense and realistic.
You can only take a few hits in this mode, but unlike in most games, so can your enemies! It makes things feel much less "bullet spongey."
Everyone begged for an "open world" experience and we got Exodus which is supposed to be awesome, but something will always stay close to me about this post apocalypse story that takes you on a focused, well paced, and at times emotional ride to save a transformed world.
And that's just the first title mostly.
You won't be running between towns for hours or making rubber bands and glue into machineguns. You'll still feel like you're surviving, but know exactly where you're supposed to be going.
They go for super cheap on GoG and Steam all the time. Well worth the experience. :)
Martha is Dead. A tragic and frightening story. Heed to the warnings they give at the start, tho. My wife literally got sick from playing it. No other game or movie has touched me that deep.
"To the moon", it will take you 4h to finish and the story is awesome, it's worth playing in a single playthrough. I wish I could forget and play it again.
Steins;Gate. It starts slow, but once it picks up it's amazing and puts all that slow build up to good use. Not sure if it technically counts though. Visual novels are a weird middle ground that aren't really book or game, but there are some really good ones. Definitely the way to go if you're in more of a reading mood but want some art and music to go with it.
Disco Elysium. Its an RPG, but most skills have an application both in the world but also in conversations (of which there are a lot, and very well written). Its got a very bitter-sweet vibe to it.
You got a lot of great recommendations already, but I want to add one more indie game: Lost Words Beyond the Page. Gameplay is simple and it’s not very long, but the writing is excellent.
