“Ever look at a flower, and hate it?”
March 21, 2019 5:25 AM   Subscribe

Satisfactory [YouTube][Game Trailer] “While Goat Simulator was about chaos, Satisfactory is about control. Available now in early access on the Epic store, Satisfactory is a base-building and resource management game in line with Oxygen Not Included. It plays a little bit like Minecraft for adults, given its first person perspective and checklist style gameplay. You play as a representative of Ficsit, a megacorp that wants to you rob an alien planet of its natural resources in order to build increasingly complicated machines. As you play, you gain the ability to craft more and more buildings that help keep your assembly lines efficient. [...] You’re here, on this lovely, calm, peaceful planet, to fill its vistas with machines belching black smoke.” [via: Kotaku]
posted by Fizz (34 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
So, Factorio but it's 3d
posted by timdiggerm at 5:40 AM on March 21, 2019 [6 favorites]


So, Factorio but it's 3d

This but also minecraft/rimworld/oxygen not included with a bit of Half-Life and Portal thrown in, only you're an employee for Black Mesa and hell bent on ruining the planet.
posted by Fizz at 5:44 AM on March 21, 2019


There's also a No Man's Sky kind of feel to it. Less alien and more corporate, but it has similar vibes.
posted by Fizz at 5:46 AM on March 21, 2019


I'd like a game where we have to create a vibrant, self-sustaining natural ecosystem? From a kyriarchal post-capitalist hellscape?

Oh wait, shit, that's real life. DAMN IT
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:48 AM on March 21, 2019 [14 favorites]


I'd like a game where we have to create a vibrant, self-sustaining natural ecosystem? From a kyriarchal post-capitalist hellscape?

Oh wait, shit, that's real life. DAMN IT


Maybe if we had more video games about this it would seem like an easier thing to approach.
posted by bile and syntax at 5:56 AM on March 21, 2019 [8 favorites]


It plays a little bit like Minecraft for adults

Meanwhile, in actual Minecraft's modded community, a ton of adults are out there already clear-cutting forests and flattening the beautifully generated terrain in order to build systems to automate the generation of resources and the production of ever more energy to make ever larger systems for same. I have a bad cold/flu thing at present and spent last night automating the production of large quantities of salt from a cooking mod in order to produce brine to produce chlorine gas, which will later become liquid chlorine to use in the refinement of titanium to build... more machines.

Not to say this is going to not turn out to be a fun game, just like, the fact that you saw a kid once play about 1/10000th of Minecraft's possible total gameplay does not mean that's the whole game.
posted by Sequence at 5:56 AM on March 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


It is interesting that so much of base-building simulation games fall into the camp of destroying nature so that you can profit from it. This is reverse Stardew Valley. I mean even SV is kind of destructive, it just has a cuter aesthetic but you're still destroying the land and growing things for profit.
posted by Fizz at 6:17 AM on March 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


But ... Factorio already exists....
posted by Pendragon at 6:26 AM on March 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


"The planet is fine; the people are fucked!"
posted by I-Write-Essays at 6:27 AM on March 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


+Eleventy Million Generic Flippers for the post title.
posted by whuppy at 6:30 AM on March 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


I started playing this yesterday when I was home sick! Some thoughts:

It’s much more structured and friendly than Factorio. You set goals (Produce n stuff) and finishing those goals opens up new tiers of stuff. It’s been well paced so far.

The 3D mostly works well as an added element. There’s some funk around building placement and it’s hard to master plan your gigafactory from the ground. I’d kill for an overhead view. And labels.

The exploration and alien planet part feels really perfunctory so far.the game is ins early access but after about 3 hours I have yet to have to leave the area around my base. It feels like they haven’t figured this out yet, not in the way something g like Subnautica did, always urging you forward.

Lots of little quality of life nods over Factorio but also some real annoyances. Totals towards a milestone only get counted if you’re holding that object in inventory. You could have 10k wire in storage but it’ll say 0 unless you get it out. You also can’t label a building so good luck telling which of the 10 identical structures is producing the thing you want.

On the whole, if you like these kinds of prod chain management game this is a great one, I’m just hoping that they have a plan for filling in the obvious gaps in the game.
posted by GilloD at 6:34 AM on March 21, 2019 [6 favorites]


So, Factorio but it's 3d

So, lke Infinifactory, but… like Infinifactory.
posted by rodlymight at 6:56 AM on March 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


Hmm.

I’d like to play one of these factory/production line games at a higher level of abstraction, with a backstabby interactive element: DealFlow: The AdVenture Capital Game.
posted by notyou at 7:02 AM on March 21, 2019


with a backstabby interactive element

So Monopoly. ;-)
posted by Fizz at 7:05 AM on March 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


Pet peeve: Not listing the platforms it runs on. Very annoying to find something that seems interesting and then having to search around to just to find out if I can play it at all.

(As far as I can tell this one is a Windows exclusive, via the Epic game store.)
posted by swr at 7:08 AM on March 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


in actual Minecraft's modded community

What's the status of Minecraft automation / factory-like mods these days? Way back in the day I played with some automated production thing as part of Feed the Beast's giant modpack and it was good fun, albeit unbalanced and buggy and kind of a mess. I'd love to see what's new in 2019.
posted by Nelson at 7:17 AM on March 21, 2019


I'd like a game where we have to create a vibrant, self-sustaining natural ecosystem? From a kyriarchal post-capitalist hellscape?

Check out Eco. It lets you do the usual industrial exploitation thing, but the underlying message of the game is that There Will Be Consequences.
posted by tobascodagama at 7:29 AM on March 21, 2019 [4 favorites]


The down side is that things are now in a state where I more often get stuck having to watch Youtube videos to figure out how things work because the wikis aren't always well-updated, but a lot of getting it to be less unbalanced is playing packs where the creators have put the effort into doing some of the balancing, which often involves a ton of modifying default recipes. So, Enigmatica 2 Expert requires that you make your way through a specific progression of magic and tech mods, but by the time you get to the ones that can generate resources out of thin air, they don't feel unbalanced because it took so long to get there. Specifically, the stage I'm at right now is involving a lot of NuclearCraft (which allows the construction of some fairly complex fission and fusion reactors but also a lot of work with chemicals) and Mekanism, which is a really broadly powerful industrial mod, with a lot of the automation assistance coming from RFTools and Applied Energistics 2, but parts of what I'm doing currently are coming from at least a dozen other mods.

It's always going to be a very niche sort of appeal, because the learning curve is pretty steep, but I wind up coming back to it for a few months a year or so and it still amazes me that I only had to pay for this game once back nearly a decade ago. All of these things can still be a bit buggy now and then, but honestly now the quirkiest part of the experience is the Twitch launcher, everything else I've run into lately has been pretty minor.
posted by Sequence at 7:41 AM on March 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


+1 for the Flipper reference in the title
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 8:34 AM on March 21, 2019 [2 favorites]


They should add natives who blow up your factories and cut your workers’ throats while they’re sleeping. Resist the invaders!
posted by freecellwizard at 8:34 AM on March 21, 2019 [3 favorites]


It’s all automated, I believe, so there’s only one throat to cut.
posted by rodlymight at 9:01 AM on March 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


He feels the wind is lifting up his people
He calls the wind to guide him on his mission
He knows his friend the wind is always standing by

posted by Meatbomb at 9:11 AM on March 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


Oh Epic? Guess I can't play it. Shame that.
posted by symbioid at 10:44 AM on March 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


I, too, remember the 10 minutes I was excited about the Epic Game Store.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 11:44 AM on March 21, 2019


Yeah, I mean Epic doesn't have blast processing.
posted by tobascodagama at 12:13 PM on March 21, 2019


(In case the context wasn't clear, that's a plea to not get into that stupid console wars-tier bullshit around here.)
posted by tobascodagama at 12:16 PM on March 21, 2019 [4 favorites]


Would also love something for terraforming Mars or some other desolate planet.

You may want to check out Waking Mars, which is about seeding native lifeforms to balance the subterrarian ecosystem of Mars. It's mostly a nice peaceful exploration game.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/227200/Waking_Mars/
posted by robot-hugs at 1:23 PM on March 21, 2019 [3 favorites]


I loved Waking Mars -- Mars as a garden.
posted by Francolin at 6:32 PM on March 21, 2019 [1 favorite]


Yeah I would love to play a reverse version of this where you have to introduce plants and animals to a dead world paved over by factories and industry to create increasingly larger and more complex ecosystems.
posted by straight at 6:55 PM on March 21, 2019 [3 favorites]


It could be nice to have a sandbox building game where the industrial apex is not genocide.
posted by ethansr at 11:30 PM on March 21, 2019


(In case the context wasn't clear, that's a plea to not get into that stupid console wars-tier bullshit around here.)

It is worth noting that the game had a coming soon page on Steam before Epic purchased timed exclusivity on the title, something that has now become Epic's modus operandi in the space (with recent major title Metro Exodus as well as upcoming highly anticipated games like The Outer Worlds and Control now being one-year exclusives to the Epic Games Store). In other words, it's not like you even get to pick. You have no choice in the matter. It's not a "blast processing" thing.

Anyways. Back on topic (sort of): I think part of the challenge in developing a game like this that isn't "destroy nature to create industry" is that we as a society have not been great at imagining how the opposite would work, except in post-apocalyptic and hardcore return-to-nature scenarios. Like, either the modern world needs to wreck itself before it checked itself, and we have to put the pieces back together (which often still looks like "destroy nature to create industry"), or we're positing a world where we abandon industry wholesale and go back to surviving on the land in the most basic, subsistence-level fashion possible. Which is fine, but doesn't really capture the way these games work in the same way and arguably doesn't provide a blueprint for society at large in the same way.

It'd be neat to imagine a game where you deconstruct modern industry to create sustainable eco-industry, but I think we're only beginning to really tease out what that second part even MEANS. Maybe someone will be visionary enough to come up with a game that points the way, but chances are we'll need broadly understandable real-world analogues to build those games on, rather than the other way around.
posted by chrominance at 2:40 PM on March 22, 2019


I was thinking something a little more like a god game where you manage a living ecosystem taking back a dead planet, which is not strictly the opposite of this.
posted by straight at 5:28 PM on March 22, 2019


The 1990 game SimEarth is a take on sculpting a working ecosystem. It's an interesting artifact but I can't recommend playing it really.
posted by Nelson at 5:31 PM on March 22, 2019 [2 favorites]


I'm quite interested in playing this, but they did an incredible job with the trailers here. The music nails a certain sort of quirky techy tone perfectly, and the early access trailer seems to be heavily flirting with some sort of Deadpoolesque suit fetishism, for some reason.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 10:23 PM on March 24, 2019


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