> It's also extremely addictive to engineers.
Quite the understatement. Pretty much every engineer that I've introduced to the game has played for at least 40 hours.
Quite the understatement. Pretty much every engineer that I've introduced to the game has played for at least 40 hours.
I love making stuff as a hobby, and reading all the good reviews this game had it seemed like a great way to kill a few spare hours. But I just couldn't gell with the game.It just seemed like I was back at work but now not getting paid for my time.
For me, Rimworld is where it's at.
Everyone tells me I'd love factorio. Every time I load up the intro tutorial I have the intention of finally diving in and just.... nothing. I can't get into it. I don't feel an incentive to learn the building and crafting UI's. It just feels like work. I'm not even sure why I'm building the things I'm building, or what the aim of the game is.
Maybe rimworld sucks me in because I can immediately empathize with the plight of the survivor, whereas factorio seems to be all about building efficient machines for the sake of building efficient machines.
But once I got more and more into the details, Rimworld was the one frustrating me. I probably just despise this kind of "Storyteller" aka Event choosen by Wealth & RNG. This ruined the fun for me and is probably the reason I played Factorio easily 10 times as long as Rimworld.
The closest Factory has to that is the pollution mechanic, but that doesn't feel nearly as contrived.
Combat is a useful "problem" to solve/prepare for. But having understood those are just randomly selected, totally interchangeable events (that btw, actually change after reloading a save) made them feel arbitrary to me.
Added to this, the difficulty of those events is fully determined by some arbitrary "value" of all the stuff in your settlement combined together. Build a big wall around the settlement? Value just went up. But not if those were natural mountains. Thus to beat the game, you want an effective defense while keeping that arbitrary value low. And this just kind of killed the immersion for me.
Thing is, I also don't see a good way to avoid such value driven systems when designing a survival-game that is supposed to keep being challenging. There is little risk of "game over" in Factorio or Oxygen Not Included once you got past the initial challenge and it becomes more of a SimCity than survival. Civ becomes a chore. Games like Don't Starve have a high skill floor and the restarts made me loose interest just about when I had learned enough to get through winter. "Go to harder area"-games just incentivize not taking risks. Time-based difficulty is an OK compromise at best...
As a new player, my goal was to explore everything the game had to offer, and that meant researching all the technologies in the game and learning how to use them effectively.
A secondary goal is to make efficient use of space, which is limited by biters, base layout, and resource layout.
Another goal is to automate as much as possible instead of hand-crafting.
Yet another goal you might have is to defend your base against the biters to go after them pre-emptively. If you enjoy the combat in the game there are a wealth of ways to get more of it or increase the difficulty. On the other hand, if you don't like combat you can dial it down or even get rid of it entirely.
Mods increase your options exponentially, and give you much more new stuff to explore and use.
Like any sandbox, what you do with everything you're given is up to you. The limits are: your interest, your skill, and your imagination.
But doing so hardly ever gave me a feeling of closure (excluding the 8h achievement speed-run) I got after finishing some story-based game and the "you won"-screen has a "keep playing" button for a reason... I expect most player use it.
If the core game loop doesn't bring you satisfaction and you don't find motivation in setting your own goals, then this game just isn't the right one for you.
Depending on what you have to fight them with, the default settings of Rampant might be too difficult, in which case the mod has lots of options that'll let you dial that difficulty down. Also, you can get various other mods (like improved weapons, far reach, or tweaked evolution rates) to make fighting them easier.
This is why I'm looking forward to Satisfactory coming to Steam within the next month or so. 3d Factorio with much better graphics.
Factorio is one of them, but other puzzle games such as topological ones (Spacechem, Opus Magnum, Infinifactory, Molek-syntez), programming (Shenzhen IO, TIS-500, Human Resource Machine, Silicon Zeroes) or logic ones (Baba is you) kind of scratch similar itches.
As for doing engineering for fun, some of us are stuck doing rather boring tasks at the office, and the idea of having a game that one can just put away seems less daunting than having a code/hardware project that could potentially sit uncompleted. Designing robots definitely is fun, although it requires a fair bit of working space and tools.
I agree that it's really enjoyable to build physical things. I have one 3D part that I've been meaning to print for a while, but without a 3D printer at home it's a bit trickier to get it done. I wish I had a home workshop, but Silicon Valley prices make that a rather expensive proposition. There's no more TechShop either. :-(
Weren't you afraid that you'll somehow botch the headphones and they'll play an excessively loud sound, which will permanently damage your hearing or give you tinnitus? Or can that risk be ruled out somehow?
Perhaps there should be a wiki or something just about all the different skills a human can have. And each skill would have some description how to get started ("first couple levels") and links to other skills. The links would describe that if you enjoy skill A, here's why you might also enjoy learning related skill B for this and that reason. So you could choose in what direction you want to continue the learning.
Your “engineering for fun” is perhaps not what most engineers do day to day. And certainly our jobs and workplaces generally are not explicitly designed to be enjoyable with satisfying outcomes.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4x38aq/why-do-we-play-vid...