Satisfactory won the Game of the Year award from the Golden Joysticks!
this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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Satisfactory
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It's somewhat similar. As a 3D first person game it more complicated to get things to line up and get a good view of things. You do have the ability to build up which is nice.
Early game is a pain because it takes much longer to get automated power. You constantly are running back to get more wood and fill the power generator.
Combat is terrible. It's a pain in the butt and never gets satisfying. There are no turrets. Monsters don't attack the factory though just you.
Resources come from nodes on the map that never run out. So you get x per second from a node and can latter do things to improve the number.
So you don't run into things like when green circuits stop producing because a copper patch ran out.
Belts are single row instead of double row so no option of side by side or double product. Instead of inserters you have joiners and splitters. So a iron ore belt goes into a smelter and a belt of ignots comes out. You then join the output of multiple smelters.
Personally I find the belt system super tedious. Trying to run a triple stack of belts is a long boring pain in the ass. Fps target a stackable pole and then two on top. Repeat another stack hopefully less the a max belt length. Then target from a to b 3 times to build the actual belts. Repeat for the next section.
When you get blueprints they come late and are small. Then never get very large. No just dropping in a big smelter plant. You drop in small clusters of smelters and manually connect them. Blueprints don't tile like in factorio so you have to connect them manually.
There are never any interesting builds. Its just use a, b to make c, d, e, to make f and then c, f to make g.
The most interesting thing is alternative recipes. You hunt around the map for crashed ships and collect the drives. Research them and get alternate recipe for a part. They always have an interesting trade off. Fewer or different resources in exchange for faster, slower, simpler or more complex builds.
For example reinforced plates take iron plates and bolts. Bolts take rods and ignots. Stiched reinforced plates replace bolts with copper wire and are simpler to make but use copper.
In general it feels like every upgrade comes to late and is underwhelming. Blue prints, combat, transport, etc.
Overall I think it's ok not great like Factorio. I doubt I would have finished the final end game construction if I wasn't playing with friends.
There is also the writing which is annoying and the small story goes nowhere. It's mostly just a constant reminder that the company doesn't care about you and work harder. It's supposed to be funny I think but it's the same tired joke over and over.
You touch on good points about what makes them different, but I would say Satisfactory is almost as fun for me as Factorio. The combat is interesting in a different way, and there are recipes with byproducts. The scale is bigger, so it takes longer to traverse your factory, and it takes more time to get into the factory design, but these give me a feeling of grandeur and peace that I can't get from Factorio. I don't agree with most of your opinions, but I like that you shared them (so I upvoted you).
Another player of both chiming in here.
On combat, let's be real. Neither game has great combat. Factorio enemies mostly become tedious to deal with once they've blanketed the map. The enemies in the later biomes in satisfactory feel more intimidating and they don't get in the way often enough to overstay their welcome. So I probably give the edge to satisfactory there.
I'm going to disagree on scale personally. Especially once factorio trains get involved. I also feel it's more satisfying to watch the birds eye view of all the stuff moving around the factory (plus you typically deal with as many items per second in factorio as you do in satisfactory per minute). Some of the vistas in satisfactory are great, though.
Hard agree with the above poster on the tediousness of running stacked belts in satisfactory too.
And besides all that, I'll also throw a point to satisfactory for using intermediate products to unlock progression tiers. That smooths out progression a bit better. You get to unlock something with almost every new product you set up production for. While science packs in factorio take a lot more bulk work to open up lots of unlocks. On the other hand, factorio has some pretty great unlocks that really make you reconsider your approach to building out your factory and redesigning old parts. It does do that aspect of progression better.
Building on foundation pieces makes building those triple stacks of belts way less of a hassle, and trains and drones eventually remove the need to run those cross-map triple stacks at all. I actually feel the opposite, belting in Factorio is more tedious to me. Thinking about balancing and sidedness is way more nitpicky than anything in Satisfactory, and Satisfactory gives you the tools to simplify belt usage as you progress, whereas Factorio makes belting more complicated as you progress.
I actually think this is a good limitation for Satisfactory - it encourages you to think more modularly, and blueprint building blocks for yourself, rather than entire factories. It makes you spend more time in your factory, rather than just zooming out and copy-paste plonking down another red circuit column. I think this is on purpose because Satisfactory leans into the base building aspect more than the factory sim aspect, whereas Factorio is the opposite.
This is a wild oversimplification lol. Once you get into oil processing, a large number of processes require managing by-products which adds complexity, a majority of the mid- to late-game recipes require 3 to 4 inputs, and towards the late game, a lot of the subcomponents require large, complex, dedicated subfactories to make efficiently, which then forces you to think about the logistics of transporting all those subcomponents around to combine them into your end products, and making those subfactories scalable so you can increase production of that subcomponent without having to build a whole new factory. And that's not even getting into the base-building/architectural/beautification aspects.
The story was completely overhauled and expanded in the 1.0 update. Even in the early access versions though, I feel like that story had more depth than what little story there is in Factorio. I can understand not liking the writing, different strokes for different folks, but the story definitely goes somewhere now, as of the 1.0 update.