Satisfactory - a Factorio-like First Person game

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https://www.satisfactorygame.com/

Steam page Epic Store Page

Its DNA is Factorio but the execution is 3d and very pretty. I hope they can pull it off, especially with ridiculous factories!

By the developers of Goat Simulator... about that (from the FAQ)

Q: Did you even try on this game or is this another Goat Simulator?
A: Hey we tried on Goat Simulator. But we tried harder on this game.

No release date but there's an Alpha you can sign up for. I think it will be playable this year?

I can't wait to give this one a go!

I was speculating with some folks at work about this game. We realized that Coffee Stain also made the Sanctum series, which has some aesthetic similarities to this as far as machinery and terrain, maybe animation go. They can maybe reuse/recycle some assets from those games to help them along.

One key difference from Factorio looks like instead of having arms pull items off conveyors, you run conveyors directly into the machines that will need the items, and conveyors carry a single item (one lane). I think this will result in pretty straightforward factories. Inputs connect to outputs. That reduces complexity a lot, which probably also reduces how clever players need to be to solve problems and improve efficiency.

That might be to the game's detriment... to armchair game-design a 2 minute trailer on a pre-alpha game.

This interests me. Also the fact that they also made Sanctum which was a great game. Not only that Sanctum was one of the first (maybe the first) kind of FPS tower defense so gives me faith that they will be able to now take factorio and view it from a new angle.

Just got a link to the Alpha Survey for this game, so, if you signed up for a chance to play the alpha, check your email etc.

Not guaranteed to get into the alpha, but obviously without filling it in (it's short), then there's no chance at this stage

Thanks omni, I would have missed that one! Filled it out.

Alpha keys have been going out to some who filled in the survey. I haven't got one yet, but according to that video, they'll be issuing 200 more every Monday.

That was a great video. The game is quite a bit more polished than I expected. Definitely jealous of those with access now! I could have a lot of fun with just these tools, trying to make a nice efficient layout in a sandbox would do me for an evening or two

Seems much simpler than Infinifactory, at least at first glance.

The Factorio influence is obvious, though I also get shades of Space Engineers in there. I never did play Infinifactory...

I signed up for that newsletter, in the probably vain hope of getting an alpha key. It looks interesting!

200 keys every Monday, should *eventually* get to us

While there will be quite a number of people signed up, because free is free, it's not exactly a mainstream genre.

I also never played infinifactory, but have played the hell out of Factorio, both single and multiplayer.

My main concerns with this will be performance in huge fatories.

Early access on March 19th. Sounds like everyone who signed up for alpha, and has not been included yet, may have a chance to test it this weekend.

Can't wait. Will definitely be testing it this weekend once I work out how, and if it looks like it's got any legs, I'll buy it before the weekend is out.

Got my Alpha key this morning. Played for about 90 minutes learning the game. I did not play Factorio so I have nothing to compare it to. With that said, I am enjoying the game so far. Been watching Sl1pg8r's stream and he has built a pretty cool factory so far. Can't wait to get back online tonight to start building.

It's very, very smooth so far. I haven't automated all that much yet, just hand-crafting stuff and the initial mining machines etc. About 100 or so hours in Factorio, so the premise isn't new to me, but changing perspective to first person is a big change. Everything feels pretty huge.

I also played multiplayer, which, while there are no dedicated servers yet, was a pretty hassle-free issue with connecting, and (I was told) only a minor performance impact on the hosting side.

Ok, going back to playing it now

I can't believe how polished it is. Only got in about an hour but just setting up some buildings and running around a bit is so far very satisfying. I got a peek at some later game stuff on Twitch and I'm looking forward to that journey. Im in for Early Access at $30, seems like an overly reasonable price.

Yep, definitely surprised, given how some recent Early Access/Alpha games have performed when they first appeared. Apparently this i alpha is also far from the build that will be pushed out for Early Access in 10 days or so.

I got as far as automated Iron Plates and Copper Wire, and it was... satisfying. Going to have to get used to the difference in scale, however. In Factorio you can cram things into very neat little efficient packages. So far in Satisfactory, I've been spreading things out as you can't get as good an overview of the land from first person.

I'm probably in for launch, too. My concerns at this early stage will be later game progression and content - being as complex as Factorio will be incredibly hard given the work that has gone into that game. Also what impact a huge factory will have on performance.

This game and Factory Towns seem fairly polished. It appears that more Early Access games are getting their marbles together, or at least they decide to enter the EA phase when they have an actual early *game* to sell instead of a pipe dream.

I've played rather a lot of Factorio, and I spent basically all of Friday playing this. Some thoughts, off the cuff and in no particular order:

In terms of implementation, this game is really solid. I recently spent some time obsessing over Astroneer, and the difference is stark. Astroneer's jankiness meant I always felt ten seconds away from the world imploding. Astroneer is a game where a bug can send you dying for no reason (though I gather they've fixed the "launch into the air and die on impact" bug, at least a little), or items can fall through the ground, or other such things. Satisfactory had none of that. The closest thing to a bug I could point out is that occasionally the GUI felt like it would drop a click. Otherwise: Very solid.

I gather some people have been experiencing crashes during startup, but I had none of that. The game's performance was quite reasonable, as well.

The depth of the game's crafting seems much more shallow than Factorio, though admittedly this alpha gives us access only to the first few tiers of items. But, let me be clear: I'm not intending that as a criticism. It's clear that Satisfactory is aiming at a different scale of factory, and I would say it manages to hit what it's aiming at. The difference is very much what I expected from looking at the trailers.

The "on-ramp" at the start of the game seems more steep than Factorio. Factorio puts an emphasis on automation almost from the word go, and lets you automate more and more things as you progress up the tech tree. In Satisfactory, on the other hand, you spend somewhat longer performing manual steps: Manual mining before you unlock miners, manually shuttling items before you unlock conveyor belts, manually crafting ingots before you can make smelters, and so forth. It's not until you unlock tier 3 (which is as high as this open alpha goes) that you can fully automate power production.

I very much like the 3D factory design. The ability to run belts at multiple elevations means that there is very little of the "puzzle" aspect that Factorio offers. You don't need to worry about arranging belts on a flat 2D plane; nearly any problem can just be solved by going up.

Add it all up, and it seems clear that Satisfactory has a somewhat different focus than Factorio. It's a much less "crunchy" game. The underlying mathematics are considerably simpler (no equivalent of Factorio's oil recipes in sight, for instance). The scale of the thing is much smaller, but the perspective makes everything bigger.

I'm not sure what the end-game here feels like. Factorio is a game that I've put literally thousands of hours into. I'm not sure if Satisfactory will have the same sort of staying power. It probably won't: Factory designs are much simpler, the map is handmade (and thus probably offers a lower reward for multiple playthroughs), and I'm not sure what sorts of alternate strategies the game will support. One factory may end up functioning very much like another, just at different scales.

That said, it's a good game, and I'm down for shelling out the $30 they're asking for. I'll note that this is roughly the same price as Factorio, but in terms of dollars-per-hour, that game is ludicrously underpriced. Satisfactory seems like a much more "normal" scale of game, and I'm excited to see more of it.

Thanks for the detailed write-up.

Yeah, excellent write-up MMQ!

I don't have anything to add but I did put in about 5 hours yesterday and I really enjoyed what I played. I'm torn right now, whether I'll put more time in or wait for early access and the extra tiers to dive in again. I've already purchased it.

It's tough for me to commit to MP games any more, but this looks like it would be a good time with a few folks(capped at 4 right now.)

I hope they go for Linux dedicated servers from the off. I'm sick of running extra hungry Windows servers for games. Whenever they get to dedicated servers, that is.

While I'm in no doubt that it won't end up *as* complex as Factorio, keep in mind that the content in the alpha isn't even reflective of the content in the Early Access else, never mind what the final product will become. That may depend on how successful their Early Access is..

You can already see that they're plan is to have 3 maps to choose from, but who knows if they'll eventually get through to some procedural stuff.. also, given the amazing work modders have done on huge maps for other games, there might be enough choice of there in the end that the lack of procedural isn't as big a problem.

Having said that, if I even get closer to half the enjoyment and hours as I have from Factorio, $30 will be a steal.

I agree 99% with everything MMQ said outside of Factorio as I have never played it.

I did crash when trying to analyze the hard drive. Other than that one issue, it has been very smooth for me. A friend and I have played this most of yesterday and pretty much exhausted everything you can do in the game. Here is a list of my pros/cons:

Pros:
1. Expansive world if you want to explore.
2. Progressive play. Have to earn the next level
3. Building mechanics. A big plus here is that others can see what you are trying to place or build so you can communicate in the base design.

Cons:
1. No ability to assign tools or weapons to your hotkey bar. (I hope this gets added)
2. Ability to sort items and have the game remember that setting.

Epic Store only? Sigh. Into the trash it goes, right next to Phoenix Point.

Tamren wrote:

Epic Store only? Sigh. Into the trash it goes, right next to Phoenix Point.

You can brush off all the garbage accumulated on top in a year when the epic exclusivity runs out.

But is that 1 year from Early Access launch, or 1 year from full launch?

Long enough to stop caring about what free platform to buy a game on I realize there are some points out there against Epic, I'm just ignoring them.

I thoroughly enjoyed the free weekend and purchased Early Access with glee. The ~3 hours I put in over the weekend was fun, polished, impressive, and almost flawless. The one bug I had was getting stuck against a tree. A quick suicide and corpse run worked around that. Not bad for an Alpha.

(Im)patiently waiting the 6 days for that to become available!

So, I got a mention (and semi-shot down) in the latest Dev Q&A video Full video below, but you can skip to 6:32 for the exact bit.

Hah, nice. And nice dodge Jace. The first one was important, Im glad he answered (1 year exclusivity starts tomorrow, not some unknown release date in the future)

Edit: I'd bet (small amounts of money) that they use a headless server in-house. Engineers tend towards easy command line stuff as a starting point.

I dunno, I've come up against a good many games that just run the 'server' in a Windows instance, seeing as that's what the base game does anyway. That makes it greatly more demanding to run something 24/7. We shall wait and see, though. Steam has the whole steamcmd set up so you can get things going without a GUI, but I doubt Epic Launcher has anything like that, so it would rely on them producing server files themselves somewhere. I hope it's not a case of they suggest trying to run it under Mono, because that's just a cop out..

It's been my experience that most adult gamers need a dedicated server otherwise making any progress on a shared world is practically impossible (co-ordinating 'online' times, etc). I know Dedicated server is in the Roadmap on their site, but i'm eager for more details.

I think i'm going to go ahead and pick it up tomorrow anyway.

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