4 ms·

Definitely. The article is pretty subjective; I'd say there are lots of glaring flaws in Factorio. I played it for a while, stopped when I hit a major problem,

Definitely. The article is pretty subjective; I'd say there are lots of glaring flaws in Factorio. I played it for a while, stopped when I hit a major problem, but when I came back the game had changed quite a bit and I couldn't get back into it. Flaws of Factorio in no specific order: • The car has maddeningly terrible physics. The OP claims this yields "comic fun". It doesn't. It just means you're constantly crashing into trees and needing to repair the car. • At some point I hit a biter nest I couldn't beat, couldn't go around (some sort of story based misson). There was NO way past this obstacle. No way to make the game easier, no way to beat them, I was even reduced to looking for cheat codes or ways to hack the game files (there weren't any). So I just dropped the game. The sudden cliff-edge in difficulty made no sense and felt like they hadn't play-tested their own game properly. • The GUI is terrible. I have no idea why he thinks it's good. 1. Placing rails is an exercise in frustration because it's so easy to mis-align things and end up with two pieces of rail that don't quite line up, forcing you to then dig it all up and try again. 2. Placing signals and stations is an equally frustrating exercise in finicky nitpicking. There are lots of ways to set up a railway line such that it simply doesn't work, with no hints about why or what you did wrong. It feels like debugging an embedded system. 3. The article cites "TIL I learned a shortcut" being a meme - that's because the GUI doesn't help you learn any shortcuts. 4. The icons are very small yet high detail, making them difficult to distinguish sometimes. There's no way to zoom anything to make this better. The colour schemes are washed out. The art is just unattractive. • Randomly generated maps mean you may often end up with an unusual shortage of resources, or things in weird locations. • The core mechanic is extremely hard to actually improve at. Although I enjoyed making factories at first, I pretty quickly realised this was too much like programming to actually be enjoyable long term. Factories quickly end up drowning in 'tech debt' if you aren't experienced, so you're constantly tempted to restart levels and try again to make a more sustainable factory, but then you end up stuck again later when you obtain some new bit of tech and realise your factory is wrongly structured for the next part of the game again. The article hints at this last problem. He says "As tempting as it is, don't restart a new factory when you want to rebuild. Just learn how to use bots to deconstruct, and fix it. It'll be more fun that way." Er, great. And how do I learn how to use bots to do that? The game did eventually get a few half-hearted tutorials that I found actually more confusing than the game itself, but I don't recall any about bots. You quickly realise that most of the information you need to learn the game is on random user-written wikis. Factorio has managed to get some market success despite being pretty badly built in many ways. I'd definitely recommend checking it out for the novel conveyer-belt mechanic, but if you like building games Cities: Skylines will be much more satisfying and a far more professionally built product.

Vvector 7y ago
>> At some point I hit a biter nest I couldn't beat, couldn't go around (some sort of story based misson). There was NO way past this obstacle...... The research tree gives you many different ways to kill a biter nest: * Flame Throwers * Turrets / Laser Turrets * Personal Laser Defense * Combat Robots * Tank * Artillery * Atomic Bomb >> Factorio has managed to get some market success despite being pretty badly built in many ways. Maybe the game is not for you. But you are way off base here. The Factorio team has built a very solid product here.
- mden 7y ago
  Just want to second how solidly built the game feels. There's definitely a learning curve which keeps on going for many hours (and I think that's a big part of the appeal) and there's some missing in-game information that I've found myself having to look up online - that much is true. But the UX has incredible amounts of well-thought out polish. Different sized hitboxes for different components, often really favoring playability makes navigating bases really handy. Live map view with the ability to zoom into a location you're not currently near to get a real view of the factory at that point. Unrealistic long reach. Smart notifications on events happening in the base. Graphs diagramming pollution generation and electricity use by factory component type spanning the whole game period. Map layers showing which zones are protected by your defenses, or the extent of spread of pollution, or the routes and locations of your automated trains. And dozens of really useful shortcuts as mentioned. The game would be perfectly playable without any of these and still be really fun but the love and attention put in by the devs is very clear. And the most amazing thing is seeing all of these things happening all at the same time with thousands of moving pieces updating at 60hz and the game still runs smooth as butter. As a developer I've been very impressed by how smoothly this game runs. And as a gamer I have seen much much simpler games put computers to the test to achieve much less.
  - pmoriarty 7y ago
    "the UX has incredible amounts of well-thought out polish" I agree so much with this. The UX seems so incredibly well thought out.. much more than virtually any game I've ever played. There are some wrinkles and annoyances here and there, but virtually everything I've had complaints about while playing the vanilla game I found mods for later that solved it. The only major complaint I still have about the UX of the game is the circuit network and combinators, which are a very clunky attempt at visual programming that don't provide enough feedback to keep from descending in to spaghetti code when doing something of even moderate complexity, and debugging these things is an absolute nightmare.

Vvector 7y ago

>> At some point I hit a biter nest I couldn't beat, couldn't go around (some sort of story based misson). There was NO way past this obstacle...... The research tree gives you many different ways to kill a biter nest: * Flame Throwers * Turrets / Laser Turrets * Personal Laser Defense * Combat Robots * Tank * Artillery * Atomic Bomb >> Factorio has managed to get some market success despite being pretty badly built in many ways. Maybe the game is not for you. But you are way off base here. The Factorio team has built a very solid product here.

mden 7y ago
Just want to second how solidly built the game feels. There's definitely a learning curve which keeps on going for many hours (and I think that's a big part of the appeal) and there's some missing in-game information that I've found myself having to look up online - that much is true. But the UX has incredible amounts of well-thought out polish. Different sized hitboxes for different components, often really favoring playability makes navigating bases really handy. Live map view with the ability to zoom into a location you're not currently near to get a real view of the factory at that point. Unrealistic long reach. Smart notifications on events happening in the base. Graphs diagramming pollution generation and electricity use by factory component type spanning the whole game period. Map layers showing which zones are protected by your defenses, or the extent of spread of pollution, or the routes and locations of your automated trains. And dozens of really useful shortcuts as mentioned. The game would be perfectly playable without any of these and still be really fun but the love and attention put in by the devs is very clear. And the most amazing thing is seeing all of these things happening all at the same time with thousands of moving pieces updating at 60hz and the game still runs smooth as butter. As a developer I've been very impressed by how smoothly this game runs. And as a gamer I have seen much much simpler games put computers to the test to achieve much less.
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  "the UX has incredible amounts of well-thought out polish" I agree so much with this. The UX seems so incredibly well thought out.. much more than virtually any game I've ever played. There are some wrinkles and annoyances here and there, but virtually everything I've had complaints about while playing the vanilla game I found mods for later that solved it. The only major complaint I still have about the UX of the game is the circuit network and combinators, which are a very clunky attempt at visual programming that don't provide enough feedback to keep from descending in to spaghetti code when doing something of even moderate complexity, and debugging these things is an absolute nightmare.