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As with life, you get out what you put in. If you dont know how to enjoy yourself in an open world, then play something with more structure, like pacman.
While I understand the sentiment, games, whether they be card, board, physical, or digital, are far from pointless, even if you put nothing into them. Games can educate, reduce stress and anxiety, allow for community and socialization, and bridge language barriers. The bingo nights and bridge tournaments of your elders aren’t done to just kill time. They are the dungeon runs and guild raids of a different generation.
The truth is that there needs to have a compelling reason to play the game, and most people are unsatisfied with min/maxing as a primary goal. This is why so many devs abandon original scope and planning for games just to sell out by calling it a "physics sandbox" and moving on to other projects.
Games do not always need stories to motivate the player, but they do need challenges and Satisfactory has the foundation for a great one - so much so that I can come up with something compelling within the 1 minute of sitting here typing this out:
The planet is dying and in order to build the necessary technology to save the home world, corporate employees have been sent all over the place in a rapid, desperate attempt to use otherworldly resources in order to mine, refine, fabricate and ship back home. You are just one of thousands of employees dropped onto hostile worlds - most of which did not survive the process. Get to work!
(Post-Tutorial, the player is rewarded with a giant antenna coming down from space and spiking into the ground near the players home base. This antenna has a timer on it in which, if it reaches zero, humanity is lost and the player fails. Allow for the timer to be adjusted based on difficulty settings during the game creation)
As the player progresses and is sending more and more products into space, the player is rewarded by the AI with various reward items, ranging from incredibly (almost insultingly) simple corporate swag (Think A Ficsyt toaster) to blueprints for aesthetic items (Suit variations, colors, jukebox music, mini-game cartridges, consumable buffs).
Twist - Humanity is already dead and has been for a long time. You were in cryo-sleep for an extended period of time and really the AI has been taking all the items you've been sending it in order to repair/improve itself to exist without humanity. If you perform exceedingly well, you are rewarded a place on the AI ship to live out the remainder of your life in moderate luxury until extinction... (Cut Scene of the planet as you are rocketed into Orbit ending up at a truly massive AI ship that you essentially helped build). If you failed to meet expectations, the ship will appear briefly in planetary orbit (you can see it from the ground) before the AI informs you that you are being abandoned and will be lost to time, as it warps out. The player is left on the surface to do whatever. A final item is deposited - a poison pill that, if consumed, kills the player and ends the game.
See? It's not hard, but the devs get stuck in the weeds. Make that game and I guarantee you that it will sell.
I myself have encountered that in many forms over the years. Sometimes it's because I've completed all the content in the game and all that's left is to grind for shinier things. Other times I've played the game too much over too short a period of time. Yet other times I've come to realize that I've made some bad choices and undoing them would require a lot of work, perhaps even starting over.
None of these are the game's fault, and the solution usually is to move on and play some other game, or spend time on non-game activities. Sometimes I return to the game later, sometimes not.
Oh really? I couldn't find any sales figures more recent than January 2022, perhaps you could point me at them? It seems development is going strong at least, with the most recent update currently on experimental.
I suppose, then, that you have insider information about the story the devs are going to release in 1.0 when the game leaves early access, since you seem so sure that your idea is better? And you've also had some in-depth discussions with them about their development processes since you can assert that they get "stuck in the weeds"?
For Example, while Fallout 4 was released in 2015, and announced in 2014, it began development in 2009, planning and pre-alpha development began up till 2011 where they diverted staff who just finished Elder Scrolls Skyrim to the project, 3 years later the game released.
If there's anything to note here that there's things like Star Citizen who has had millions dumped into it and even 12 years later has not left Early Alpha Access, this game is in Alpha state, which after Alpha moves to Beta (Or the Bug stomping stage) but as far as I know Coffee Stain works with its players to pull an Early Access (Alpha and Beta) together at the same time, crushing bugs thanks to their online bug report website and updating the game to its end.
The game was started in 2019, thats only 4 years. The game still has 3 years total till it steps over the "delayed release" line, which frankly the fact their 3 years out and still have so many players and the game is nearing its finish is worth its weight in gold.
Seriously the number of games with delayed releases because of some conflict of interest or even twitter feuds or..even worse things, is so bad these days that every time I have to remind people that there are games that have had delayed releases like Battlefield 1 because the CEO of DICE though his 5 year old daughter had a rather solid point in why there were only men in WW1 and not girls, the dude decided to add girls at first which broke the realism factor of WW1 that Battlefield said it was going for, the game was delayed because the guy quit his job so he didnt upset his 5 year old daughter on...gender related issues inside of a battlefield shooter...
Just remember people, we could have a studio that does not give a ♥♥♥♥ about us, one that could be like EA's mess, a gacha studio or even worse, Blizzards staff but we dont, be freaking thankful we have a development team that gives a damn to start with and thus far has kept their hands clean.
Do you not see the part where it says "early access?"
Coffee Stain is one of the better ones. They will finish this game. Maybe give Goat Simulator 3 a try while you're waiting! It's hilariously stupid.
yeah, that's the crux of it. There are several fairly easy options to add some inherent goals/motivators in-between the big extrinsic rewards... but the devs are so lost in the "the factory must be Bigger and More AWESOME!" mindset that they're forgetting the way that for most of the game, the factory is not going to be awesome. It's not going to have a self-sustaining reason for players to keep progressing and unlocking stuff -- progressing and unlocking stuff is the whole reason to keep playing, and the moment that the player loses interest in the next unlock, they've lost interest in the whole game. In the 'post-game', when you have All Teh Things!, sure you can start making it awesome... but by that point you're tens of hours deep (and that's IF you're familiar with the progression -- if it's your first factory, it's more like a hundred hours to get everything unlocked); and there's only so many times you can wow the player with "here's a cool new thing... HAHAHA gotcha, it comes with a bunch of new chores before you can even use it!" before they learn to spot that coming.
Narrative cohesion would be one way to help keep the player motivated. Some unpredictable goals (e.g. short-term "production quests" with a limited window to fulfil them, randomly asking for items that you either already produce or which are within your reach) could be another, playing up the 'puzzle' side of things and encouraging flexible designs. Having the game world react to your choices is another -- which is why so many people keep asking for combat/raids -- although it could be as simple as having certain parts of the map contain scripted "do X task, and Y thing changes/opens up"; like blowing up rocks but on a grand scale (build a dam, change the local balance of predator and prey animals, destroy a boss/hive to shut off the gas vents in an area, or go to a geologically active area and throw a few tons of Nobelisk into a crevice to open up new geothermal sites.) Anything that gives the player motivation to engage with the game beyond just placing buildings and linking them together... because once you start to grasp the underlying logic and ratios that underpin not just the individual production lines but the whole damn game, that gets real old real fast. It stops being an interesting puzzle the moment that you can spot the underlying logic, because so much of it is just copy/pasting the same strategies (and there are certain strategies that just always work better than any alternative.)
It really doesn't help that their current way of motivating the player to progress is to give them a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ version of the thing they actually want, and dangle the good version just far enough out of reach (and behind a couple of unrelated or tangentially-related chores) that it's not something they can directly and immediately work towards. Add that on top of the limited novelty available, and the fact that the game bills itself as something that it clearly isn't, and yeah it's very easy to reach a situation where you have run out of things to keep you interested in the game and have no reason to trust that it'll get better.