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I love this team and their game and have ~1k hours in it. But I hope they soon choose to do a whole new game. Incremental improvements to their masterpiece is a

• xmodem 6y ago
  I like the idea of an expansion. In particular, the current vanilla gameplay seems to lack any concrete goals to work towards once you get your first rocket launched - you're just expanding your base for the sake of it. Which is a lot of fun, sure.
  • vaylian 6y ago
    Launching your first rocket could trigger an alien invasion on the planet. You now have to fight much harder enemies than the biters you have dealt with so far. You and the aliens will fight over resource fields. And you have to stop them from building their base to the maximum level.
    • Cthulhu_ 6y ago
      Or they could introduce a colonization / planet skipping progression (actually I'm pretty sure there's a mod for that already), where you can load some basic resources and your engineer into a rocket to fly off. I mean what little story the game has is that you're an engineer that crashed on a planet, it would make sense that you want to get out again. They could add different planet types (like a water/island world, train world, restricted/small world, variants like that), or increase the difficulty and challenges as you progress to different planets. I'm pretty sure this already exists as a mod though.
• sandworm101 6y ago
  Yes, but one-hit wonders are more common than repeat hits. I'm reminded of Notch's post-minecraft dreams, that space game that never got off the ground. Or KSP. Monkey Squad boiled out into nothing (KSP2 is a different team). I think they should milk the cow they have by launching massive content expansions (Take my money!). Imho Factorio's next step should be into 3d. I don't mean a 3d game render, I mean factories biuld on different planes, or even a spherical planet. There is a game out there (I shall not name) that is claiming to be a multi-planet 3d version of factorio. People do want more.
  • speeder 6y ago
    The actual author of KSP (Squad is an ad agency... the creator made KSP inside Squad as a deal when he tried to quit, they said they would let him create a game with their money if he didn't quit) is now making another game in the same style, also closer to his original goal (he was my classmate, and told me his goal was to make a buildable airplane game, rockets were probably just easier to simulate at first) named Balsa Model Flight Simulator
    • Gene_Parmesan 6y ago
      I am not doubting your story, but saying that KSP is the stepping stone to a balsa model sim would have been opposite to what I would have thought. But if their goal is accurate flight model simming I can see how that's quite a different thing than what Kerbal is. I like Kerbal because of the scale of the systems that are possible, and because of the challenge of planning out the logistics of a cross-solar-system flight. Setting up a scientific "colony" on a far flung planet is just a cool thing. I certainly don't come to Kerbal for its flight mechanics - not saying they're bad for what they are. It's just that the game's physics are built around the requirements of time accel. Also, I've heard the broad strokes of that story about Squad before and always wished I knew the specifics. Getting an ad agency to financially support a video game to get an employee to stay - that's gotta be an interesting story.
      • speeder 6y ago
• fendy3002 6y ago
  As they have stated, it is niche game / segment. It's not easy for the team to make other successful game, either on niche genre again or more broad / casual gameplay. Additionally, the assets, algorithms, experiences and engine are optimized for factorio-like genre, it's logical that they want to utilize them more or less. If they start into 3d like Satisfactory or Dyson Space, I won't be that optimist. Even if they can do it, it'll take much time. It'll be amazing if they can pull it though. I think big expansion pack will be the best course for them, bonus point if they can really expand the gameplay.
• jbob2000 6y ago
  I'd love to see their take on a City builder. Skylines and Sim City are fun, but not challenging. Programmatically, it's not that different from what Factorio is - isometric, moving stuff on conveyors = moving cars on roads, etc. They have the talent to make this genre more than "balance residential, commercial, and industry".
  • notjustanymike 6y ago
    I agree they'd do a great city simulator. There are a couple of games that do toy with this already: Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic Transport Fever 2
• Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Given the sheer amount of work that went into Factorio, it feels like a waste to just park it and move onto something else; it has a solid base to work off of. Its performance and the amount of Stuff it simulates is amazing. I'm thinking they may get inspired by some of the mods out there; there's a mod to go into space (build a factory inside of a spaceship) and land on other planets, for example. They could reach out to those and buy it, iirc that's what happened with some of the KSP features and addons as well. I wouldn't mind if they'd do something big with the enemies / monsters. Maybe introduce a new antagonist entirely. Or a whole new class of sea and/or undersea base buildings, with unique resources that have to be launched up to the surface for your main base to process. Or satellite bases too far away for even trains and the like, where you need long-term transports (container ships, ICBM's) to get stuff.
  • sandworm101 6y ago
    >> where you need long-term transports I've always thought that factorio should have bulk transports, things that arrive after multi-hour trips. There are a handful of mods that tie the character into an external economy. Rather than the survival scenario, I think Factorio 2.0 could be based on taskings surrounding the arrival/departure of transports. Rather than "build the rocket" the task could be "have 200k of blue circuits ready for the arrival of a transport in X days." Changing up the tasking would allow for truly different factories to be developed. I'd love it if the game suddenly told me that I needed to switch from one end product to another, any excuse to delete an entire factory and build a new one optimized for a different goal.
    • freeone3000 6y ago
      This is currently actually available as a scenario! External delivery using a very small area. Check it out if you haven't!
  • leetcrew 6y ago
    > Or satellite bases too far away for even trains and the like, where you need long-term transports (container ships, ICBM's) to get stuff. I like this idea. imo the core of factorio is conquering scale. the base game is already very polished. at this point I just want more stuff to do post launch. taking the scale up another order of magnitude (huge ships, point to point air transport for latency sensitive goods, etc.). would also provide the opportunity to expand combat a bit to provide automated defenses for far away shipments. I want my robot navy, now shut up and take my money!
• mpettitt 6y ago
  I would like to see simulation games which work together. For example, combining a transport simulator, a city simulator, a production simulator and a theme park simulator. You build a quarry which digs up clay, and another which produces coal, create bricks, use the bricks to build houses in a village, expand the village, find you need a glassworks, connect your villages together and handle trading between them with a transport system... An idea I've had bouncing around for 20+ years was a variation on Transport Tycoon where you could "zoom in" on towns/farms and play them as if you were in Sim City/Sim Farm, or "zoom out" to connect to other regions run by other players, with trading or even combat. A universal format for "simulation stuff" would mean you could have it extensible, so you could have a dedicated farming simulator if you wanted, else it would be treated as a box with an average output, with the same logic applying to sub-elements, so if someone wants to micro-optimise a plowing algorithm, they can have a "plow management" simulator which plugs into the farming simulator, which plugs into the transport simulator. At the other extreme, someone who was only interested in country level trading could have the country outputs boxed based on an average level of output. Might be too complex for any one player to handle everything, but even so!
  • ranger207 6y ago
    There was a mod once that after you launched your rocket in Factorio you could fly it in Kerbal Space Program, then you'd get science packs in Factorio when you landed it.
  • disambiguation 6y ago
    > You build a quarry which digs up clay, and another which produces coal, create bricks, use the bricks to build houses in a village, expand the village, find you need a glassworks, connect your villages together and handle trading between them with a transport system... I fully endorse this idea. Like a blend of factorio + sim city + Civ VI -- though the complexity might make it unplayable, i would absolutely buy it and try anyway!
  • InitialLastName 6y ago
    I feel like this similar to what Spore promised, but only achieved a sliver of. I think the challenge is that there's a tension that comes from having lots of optional, interacting systems that the player both a) can make meaningful improvements to a system that contribute to the rest of their game experience ("If i make farming better, my town will have less food") and b) can ignore systems they aren't interested in without crippling their gameplay (or, conversely, improving one system making the rest of the game too easy). The tension is almost tangible in games like the Paradox grand strategy games: if you pick up something like EUIV as a novice now, it's very difficult to figure out which systems are actually important to moving the game forward in a meaningful way. Edit to add: this does sound like an awesome idea though