Short Review After Completing Satisfactory Early Release

[ricwhite]

I like building games. Satisfactory is well done with ample building of structures and machines for manufacturing components. The early access game has very little plot or characterization. In fact, the entire plot can be summarized in one sentence as follows: You are a “pioneer” on an alien plane tasked with constructing resources to send back to Earth to help lessen the chaos and crisis there. That’s it. You never interact with anyone and there is no additional twists to the plot. All you do is spend hours constructing factories and manufacturing components that get progressively more complex. The construction is well done and satisfying.

The building mechanics are excellent. The factories can get quite complex. Toward the end of the game in the phase four upload, the materials and resources required are substantial. It took me many days of constructing factories and manufacturing the materials for that last upload. I like the building so much that I departed from the objectives and built a community of houses, businesses and skyscrapers nestled among desert cliffs and waterfalls. They serve no function, but I enjoy just looking at the small city I built.

The graphics are adequate. Even though I have the maximum draw distance, the textures are poor on distant areas and will snap into clarity as you get close. There is some stuttering, clipping, and floating assets. In fact, as I added more and more assets (factories) to the game, just the auto saving took several seconds – completely stopping game play during the save. I had auto-save set to every 5 minutes and so the pauses in play were many. That didn’t occur early in the game so I attribute it to the amount of assets functioning in the game toward the end.

The game is obviously early build because there is no function for several resources you must collect – such as alien artifacts. They currently have no use. So, it got annoying to hear the "your contract compels you to collect" when you get close to one. The same is true of some ore you can collect. So, there is certainly room to add content that includes those.

If you enjoy building as I do, then this game is excellent. If you like a story and characterization, this game offers nothing. There really is no story or characters at all. Personally, I would have preferred a combination of building with a story and characters. Maybe that is still in the works for the finished product. Overall, I give the game a solid 8/10.

[joe_schmoe_gamer]

The story line will be revealed with 1.0 release.

[Gelfan_Dothea]

I have a feeling that even with the story this game will still be pointless. I don't foresee them suddenly saying "okay, do all this stuff and this amazing thing will happen at the end making the whole tedious thing worth it." This game is for people who like to do monotonous things for no reason. I don't see that changing.

IMO, the game is mostly solid. Aside from being frustrating and utterly boring, the mechanics are the best I've seen in a game of this type. I think the whole math aspect to the game is asinine and adds unnecessary complexity with no value, but maybe it's something others enjoy (for some reason). Again, it's only my opinion, but I wish someone would take this game away from the developers and do something meaningful with it. It has too much going for it to be wasted on a niche group of players.

(says the lamb in the lions den lol)

[NZ.Zero]

I think lamb is stretching it a bit, Gelfan, youre kinda trolling at this point.

Anyway, 'point' is a matter of perspective, for people who enjoy building/ exploring, it's great. Min-maxers, linear progressionsits, PVPers, yeah you're gonna want more structure. That's fine, just accept it and move on.

[Gelfan_Dothea]

Not a troll. Paying customer. Which means I paid for the right to say this game sucks. These threads aren't limited to those who think the game is amazing. There will always be two sides of a coin. That's what you need to accept.

[DerFinneAT]

Originally posted by Gelfan_Dothea:

I don't foresee them suddenly saying "okay, do all this stuff and this amazing thing will happen at the end making the whole tedious thing worth it."

Genuine question:

What would be a great thing, making it all worth it?

I personally have some issues, with (mostly) story-based games where the player always achieves something, that is so over the top, that I have to wonder, whether story-writerss only ever read children-books in their live.
(basically all Bethesda titles for example)

And even beyond: If the game would be mediocre, no reveal at the end would make my time "worth".
The only thing that makes my time worth is a gameplay that I personally enjoy.

But I have encountered this argument, that a game needs a bombastic end quite often in various of the more grounded games.

So I'd love to get more insight on why and how a game becomes worth it just by an providing an elaborate ending.

[Gelfan_Dothea]

Originally posted by DerFinneAT:

Originally posted by Gelfan_Dothea:

I don't foresee them suddenly saying "okay, do all this stuff and this amazing thing will happen at the end making the whole tedious thing worth it."

Genuine question:

What would be a great thing, making it all worth it? ... So I'd love to get more insight on why and how a game becomes worth it just by an providing an elaborate ending.

You're absolutely right. You're all absolutely right. Why does anything even have a point or an ending or a consequence? Why do movies even bother with plots? Like we care about what happens to the main characters at the end, right? They should cut football or soccer games off at half time, because who really cares which side wins? They don't even need to keep score. They should just take turns running back and fourth with the ball. And after they do it enough times they'll get a new ball to run back and fourth with. That sounds fun, right? And why do we even need paychecks? According you guys the enjoyment is all in the work. It's the hard labor that's fun, so our jobs are their own reward yeah?

Say, why don't we all get together and make some bricks out of sand. We'll stack them up in piles of 1000 and then move them all to a different location. Then we can make thousands of trusses and move them to the same location as well. We won't actually build anything with them, because... why would we? That sounds like fun right?

[YetiChow]

Originally posted by Gelfan_Dothea:

I have a feeling that even with the story this game will still be pointless. I don't foresee them suddenly saying "okay, do all this stuff and this amazing thing will happen at the end making the whole tedious thing worth it." This game is for people who like to do monotonous things for no reason. I don't see that changing.

IMO, the game is mostly solid. Aside from being frustrating and utterly boring, the mechanics are the best I've seen in a game of this type. I think the whole math aspect to the game is asinine and adds unnecessary complexity with no value, but maybe it's something others enjoy (for some reason). Again, it's only my opinion, but I wish someone would take this game away from the developers and do something meaningful with it. It has too much going for it to be wasted on a niche group of players.

(says the lamb in the lions den lol)

You may want to check out some of the newer entries coming up then -- because I'm keenly waiting on a couple of games that learn from Satisfactory's failure to provide anything in the way of intrinsic motivators. Dawn Apart is the one I'm most excited for because it actually uses 3D space in an interesting way (and yes it has destructible factories... but more importantly it also seems to have freeform conveyors and physically simulated items, meaning that we can make actual machines of our own design, not just "connect this appliance to that appliance in a closed circuit.")

Speaking as someone who enjoys engineering challenges, I really wouldn't say that Satisfactory has the "best" anything -- its mechanics are shallow; lots of stringing together the same few machines in slightly different ratios to repeat the same 3 tasks ad infinitum. And that's the thing, because everything happens on scales of infinity (resources are infinite, so you make an infinite number of bricks as you say; and then what is there to do with all those bricks but throw them away?), all of the challenges are always going to boil down to "make a chain of appliances that counts to infinity as quickly as possible." There's no designing different machines for different jobs, it's always the same machine (a really basic adding machine) built in slightly configurations. Some of them are going to count 1-2-3, some are going to count 2-4-8, and some might even do weird patterns like 2-5-4-9 or whatever, but ultimately they're going to all be the same cyclic adding machine that counts upwards to infinity, and has a sink (either the space elevator or the literal AWESOME SINK) at the end.

A couple of years ago Satisfactory won hands-down for graphics, but those days are gone -- there's plenty of other pretty looking entries in the genre now, but they also have some interesting challenges available; and haven't (or at least haven't yet) sanded down all of their corners and wrinkles in pursuit of arbitrary engagement metrics. Hell, there are Minecraft mods and modpacks that focus on automation which, with a couple of shaders and the right texturepack, can give Satisfactory a run for its money in the aesthetics department these days. And while Minecraft is being mentioned... it actually has a few interesting automation mechanics of its own these days! I wouldn't recommend it purely as a factory-building game; but it goes to show how much the premise of the factory-builder has stopped being a niche and hit the mainstream.

For pure zen, there's a bunch of low-stakes factory games popping up. For complexity and huge factories, DSP or ShenzenI/O or Factorio all still have Satisfactory beat (and again, new titles are popping up all the time.) For the experience of seeing everything work, there's games like Hydroneer or Core Keeper or Infinifactory (which is Ooooooold by Satisfactory's standards, and yet, still holds up -- hell I'd say it does better at what Satisfactory was claiming to try to do!); and for sheer "exploit the environment and strip-mine everything!" it's hard to beat something like the Tekkit modpack where you can watch the machines physically dismantle the world... and once again, new games are coming (Dawn Apart comes to mind) which explore that specific twist on the genre/experience in more depth and having already learned lessons from Satisfactory and its fellow genre forerunners.

It was easy for Satisfactory to be the 'best' at stuff when there were like 2 games (that anyone had heard of, at least) in the genre; but IMHO the devs absolutely wasted that frontrunner position by listening too much to the people who were invested in their large early-access era factories, rather than listening to the people who wanted to explore what the game could do and push the horizons. So, instead of letting the most creative players drive the feedback loop, they let the most overly-invested-in-repetition players take the lead instead -- and now the game is just Number Go Up simulator, rather than an interesting sandbox.

I mean look at the most recent devlog video talking about update 8 -- most of the run-time of the video is just reassurances that the map changes won't ruin existing factories. It's an early access game! Whatever happened to "expect changes, this isn't the final product" and all that? A 20 minute video where like 12 minutes is just talking about where rocks and trees are gonna be moved to/from so that players have a chance to move their machines around... it would be different if this was like some kind of pay-to-earn blockchain game where those machines had a "value" assignment; but they're literally just made up of parts that players have presumably already automated the construction of! It's a tacit admission from the devs that the real value of building things in Satisfactory is just being able to point at all the copy/pasted machines and go "look how big my junk factory is!"

You're not the only one who recognises it; but alas the Satisfactory community at this point is basically made up entirely of people who don't want to admit the fact that they'd prefer to compare the size of their imaginary factories than anything else; and when you look at anything more interesting (like how said factories work) it becomes obvious that all the interesting stuff was long ago sacrificed into the lake of Number go Up.

[Dreadlow]

Depending on one's approach, the game as is can be done in far less than 800 hours. The story can't be released already if it's content dependent and the content is still WIP.

It's a matter of taste, but the point right now is in the name of the game. It's satisfaction at overcoming the hurdles, solving the puzzle, the enjoyment of building and crafting, the challenge of doing it better. Isn't the point of most video games overcoming obstacles, gaining power and acquiring stuff, preferably loads of it?

[Stress Tensor]

Originally posted by Gelfan_Dothea:

Originally posted by DerFinneAT:

Genuine question:

What would be a great thing, making it all worth it? ... So I'd love to get more insight on why and how a game becomes worth it just by an providing an elaborate ending.

You're absolutely right. You're all absolutely right. Why does anything even have a point or an ending or a consequence? Why do movies even bother with plots? Like we care about what happens to the main characters at the end, right? They should cut football or soccer games off at half time, because who really cares which side wins? They don't even need to keep score. They should just take turns running back and fourth with the ball. And after they do it enough times they'll get a new ball to run back and fourth with. That sounds fun, right? And why do we even need paychecks? According you guys the enjoyment is all in the work. It's the hard labor that's fun, so our jobs are their own reward yeah?

Say, why don't we all get together and make some bricks out of sand. We'll stack them up in piles of 1000 and then move them all to a different location. Then we can make thousands of trusses and move them to the same location as well. We won't actually build anything with them, because... why would we? That sounds like fun right?

Your answer was very sarcastic, but you cherry-picked and conveniently left out much of the context of his question:

Originally posted by DerFinneAT:

And even beyond: If the game would be mediocre, no reveal at the end would make my time "worth".
The only thing that makes my time worth is a gameplay that I personally enjoy.

[Dragonmaster]

The game at its core is a sandbox factory builder. Story isn't going to really change that fact to much. The goal is essentially whatever you make it to be. Sure there are "end" goals for the game but the game don't just "end" there.

Factorio, you progress towards building a rocket
Dyson Sphere Program, You progress towards building a Dyson Sphere to generate the last science cube for the "mission complete" research
Satisfacotry, you progress towards fulfilling the project assembly.

How you get there and also what you do AFTER achieving the end goal is still up to the player on if they want to set their own goals or challenges.

[Remnar]

If any one has ever played Subnautica, you know the ending was very good and satisfying. Not just the ending but the whole game was enjoyable and excellent. Satisfactory is excellent in a few areas; but, seriously lacking in others. For CF to wait until 1.0 to add any story or meaning to the game; and for them to state it won't be a AAA experience, tells me it is going to suck or won't be worth it. If you want meaning in a factory game, go play Factorio which had a goal from their early access days, to build a rocket. Or Dyson Sphere Program to build Dyson Spheres around stars to feed the mother brain.

[Gelfan_Dothea]

Originally posted by Stress Tensor:

Your answer was very sarcastic, but you cherry-picked and conveniently left out much of the context of his question:

Originally posted by DerFinneAT:

And even beyond: If the game would be mediocre, no reveal at the end would make my time "worth".
The only thing that makes my time worth is a gameplay that I personally enjoy.

I didn't cherry-pick his answer. He said he enjoyed the game even without a point or an ending, and he was fine without one. Hence my sarcasm regarding getting together and building bricks for no reason. Apparently that's fun.

[Stress Tensor]

Originally posted by Remnar:

If any one has ever played Subnautica, you know the ending was very good and satisfying. Not just the ending but the whole game was enjoyable and excellent. Satisfactory is excellent in a few areas; but, seriously lacking in others. For CF to wait until 1.0 to add any story or meaning to the game; and for them to state it won't be a AAA experience, tells me it is going to suck or won't be worth it. If you want meaning in a factory game, go play Factorio which had a goal from their early access days, to build a rocket. Or Dyson Sphere Program to build Dyson Spheres around stars to feed the mother brain.

I really loved Subnautica -- it's one of my all-time favorites. But to be honest, I found the ending itself to be a let-down (anticlimactic). I loved everything else about the game, including building the rocket, but when you get in the rocket and go at the end, for me it was a big "meh".

So I think this gets at what some people here are saying, i.e. that the gameplay itself is what makes many games great, not the ending (or "point", as some people put it). One can debate whether the gameplay is great, but this is distinct from the idea that a game needs a captivating story/ending to be good or "worth it".

[Stress Tensor]

Originally posted by Gelfan_Dothea:

Originally posted by Stress Tensor:

Your answer was very sarcastic, but you cherry-picked and conveniently left out much of the context of his question:

I didn't cherry-pick his answer. He said he enjoyed the game even without a point or an ending, and he was fine without one. Hence my sarcasm regarding getting together and building bricks for no reason. Apparently that's fun.

Yes, it certainly can be for people with imagination.

What's the "reason" for an artist to create a work of art? What's the reason for a composer to write a symphony? What's the "point" for a kid to take a set of Legos or a model kit and build something? These are all examples of using tools and instruments which allow creativity and creating something which you find beautiful or interesting, or which satisfies whatever goal you set with it.

Satisfactory is mostly a sandbox-type game for which this is precisely the "point". Sure, a good story will be most welcome, and I too look forward to one, but until then many people get a great deal of enjoyment out of it as-is.

[Senrezu]

Does this thread really discuss the "failures" of the "badly made" game that is Satisfactory?

Allow me to remind everyone that this game is regularly on Steam's Top 100 and has 97% positive for more than 100k reviews.

That's The Witcher 3- Level of success. A game just does not get more successful than this.